Jaci Dawn

It is the late 1970’s, the “disco” era, but I have moved to a small town in eastern Oregon that is full in the grips of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. I’m single, and husband hunting. I’ve already been discarded by several, and have discarded several. This relationship stuff sucks big time. Most of my friends are married, but I have a few single ones who fall into two classes: strict Christian/no dating and crazy/drink a lot of alcohol. I’m somewhere in the middle: church on Sunday, but the bars on “Ladies’ Night” (Thursdays). Still, the prospects are sometimes dicey and I have to think up lies to slip out of a tryst or I go home alone, wondering how I am ever going to find love?

(Answer: wait for it. Those who strive for it are forever doomed to be disappointed. But I was in my 20s, and you couldn’t tell me that. It had to happen. NOW.)

There are a lot of songs that resonate in my soul. I love music. I can’t sing and I am pretty sad at playing any instrument (my band teacher once told me I was better than I thought I was, but I think he was just being nice). Heck, my 5-year old daughter told me, “Mom! Please! You’re off-key. Don’t sing.”

Still, I surround myself with music. LPs and 45s were my first introduction into the world of music, along with the folk music lessons of public school. I saved my pennies and bought records once I passed the model horse phase. I joined Columbia Records and then left them so I could sign up again, just to get the 13 free albums or whatever they were offering. I immersed myself in the folk culture of the 1960’s, the hard rock of the early 1970’s, and there was always – always! – the contemporary country music of the time: Buck Owens, Tammy Lynnette, George Jones, Loretta Lynn, Lynn Anderson, Charlie Pride, and (my mother’s favorite) The Statler Brothers.

In 1978, there were possibly three dance bars in the small Oregon town I moved to: Scotty’s, “The Snake Pit” ( a bar that was underneath the Shanghai Restaurant), and the Shang (the Shanghai Restaurant after restaurant hours). I avoided the latter. If I was drunk enough, and in the company of Carol (who was crazy), I’d go to the Snake Pit (not the real name of the bar, but the name I remember it by forty years later).

On the Snake Pit – I once danced several rounds with this elderly cowboy who absolutely rocked the “country swing”. He made bad dance partner look good. He was probably 70 and I was 22. He was looking for nothing more than a girl to dance with.

There was no dancing at Scotty’s, so the rest had to be done at The Shang. They hired a local cover band. The music was generic: anything from “Tupelo Honey” to “My Sharona” – if it had a beat and you could dance to it, they played it.

I realize I should be writing about my first dance with my future husband or the song that I felt (at age 23) should define our marriage (Tupelo Honey, by the way), but that isn’t the song that I have chosen to write about tonight (there are so many!). It isn’t even about the man I picked up on a Thursday night on the dance floor of The Shang: this is about a man who was never more than a casual friend, and a song that reminds me of him when I hear it play. Not a romantic interest, just someone I really liked as a friend.

His name was Alan. And, inevitably, we’d both be single at closing time, with no prospects for the night. So we’d choose each other and we’d close the bar to “Good Night, Irene”, and we’d go our separate ways. It was never about romance with Alan, it was just about that one song and that one closing dance.

I was introduced to the song when I was around the tender age of 12, flat-chested, and camping with the “Sage Stompers” – a square dancing group my folks belonged to. I remember the where: the Ranger Station at Hinckey Summit. My dad (a USFS District Ranger) opened the gates, and everyone camped down among the aspens. We kids were sent to bed with the crickets, but our elders drank and sang into the very late hours. I couldn’t sleep and listened while the adults grew louder, and my father got bolder.

He sang all the bawdy choruses of “Roll Me Over In The Clover” (to my mother’s protests that “some child might over hear”). Then he turned to the family friend, Irene, and sang (out of tune, of course) “Good Night, Irene.”

When I danced the last dance with Alan, and we slow danced to that well known number, it was never Alan that I was thinking about, but my father. And after the song was over, Alan & I exchanged hugs and went our ways. It was always platonic with him.

Now, when I hear “Good Night Irene”, it is not my father I think of, but Alan. I wonder where he is, did he marry, is he happy, did he have kids? He was a good friend. I hope he found the happiness I found.

(No one sings Roll Me Over in the Clover. That’s just embarrassing.)