Apr 14: "The road goes ever on..."

Songs about roads are featured today.

The first that occurred to me was Telegraph Road from Dire Straits. I remember hearing this for the first time, and also playing it a number of times. I remember being at a snowy party in Huddersfield in the early 80s when this was played.

The opening notes set a wonderful atmosphere.

Take a listen now:

Via Wikipedia

Telegraph Road is a major north-south 70-mile (110 km) thoroughfare in Michigan, USA, and Mark Knopfler was inspired to write the song while riding in the front of the tour bus, which made the journey down Telegraph Road. At the same time, Knopfler was reading the novel Growth of the Soil by the Nobel Prize winning Norwegian author Knut Hamsun and he was inspired to put the two together and write a song about the beginning of the development along Telegraph Road and the changes over the ensuing decades.

The song is about the rise and fall of Detroit.

In the piece we are told:

Knopfler understands that we all have these rich inner worlds — kaleidoscopes of obsession, wonder and feeling. There are things that we love and keep to ourselves, pleasures that we have to escape crowds to enjoy, private lives that we all live. His music works, because it brings us to those places.

On the genesis of the song:

The road in question is Telegraph Road, a stretch of pavement spanning almost 80 miles from Toledo, Ohio, to Detroit, Michigan. It was little more than a modest dirt path since it was beaten in the mid-19th century, growing and widening as it became the backbone for infrastructure such as telegraph poles and roadways as the decades rolled onward. In the 1910s, it exploded in usage with the booming auto industry in Detroit, and towns grew off of it as people sought to capitalise on this influx of wealth into the region. But at this point, the story grows achingly familiar. The communities dependent on the road still bear the deep scars of the exodus of the automobile industry. The road has become the scar of progress that the community now bears. Its history is a drama played over a century.

Another road is The Valley Road.

This is from Bruce Hornsby and the Range.

And to finish, here's John Shuttleworth with the A1111 in Lincolnshire.

Can you suggest some other 'road' related songs?