The One & Only Bill Davis

The official home of music and projects by The One & Only Bill Davis

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My Music Story Part 2: Finding Nashville

Living in the Vail Valley is a little too much fun. Ski every morning, work every evening, and go out after work. Some nights I played a gig somewhere. I started to replace work days with music gigs, but I was growing restless.

I was thinking about homeownership and I wanted more than a condo, which I could barely afford in the valley. I was bored working at a country club and I was ready for something different. Two weeks before my brother George's wedding, I put my things into temporary storage in Denver. From there I took what I needed and made my way from Edwards, CO to Cumberland Gap, TN via New Orleans, LA.

Toward the end of my fourteen-day trip, I stayed the night in Nashville. I walked up and down Lower Broadway looking for the bar with the oldest crowd because I knew they would be playing the kind of music that I wanted to hear. One step into Robert's and I was pretty sure I was moving to Nashville. 

Song History: Act

Sometimes a melody comes and goes. Act was written in parts and basically backwards over a period of roughly 5 years.

It first crossed my radar while I was still living in Edwards, CO. It was just a partial melody (the chord progression after "anguish") back then; a loop that I would whistle or hum while I was in transit or at work.

A few years later I decided to try my hand at jingles. I attempted to write a 30 second song about pizza. The opening melody of the song was originally worded "Pizza's really good and that is understood by everyone". This was obviously terrible (unlike pizza!) and, as a result, it was shelved. I laughed it off, but never forgot the melody. 

A year or so later when I was unemployed and feeling particularly down on myself, I gave myself the pep talk that I could have used from just about anyone else. But like they say, "If you want something done right do it yourself". The second (pizza) melody rolled right into a new third melody and that fed into the first. It came together rather quickly, in the way that Thanksgiving dinner takes hours and hours to prepare but travels from the kitchen to the table in minutes.

Song History: Davenport

I was visiting my brother and his wife in Cumberland Gap for the weekend when I ended the trip on a bad note. We were working on something that required a computer. Their office doubled as a scrap-booking and craft area. While it occurred to me to keep liquids away from the computer, it did not occur to me to treat the craft table in a like manner.

Just before I left, I knocked my nearly empty coffee cup over. Though a small amount, the coffee traveled everywhere fast. Needless to say, I messed up some of his wife's scrap-booking materials. We did our best cleanup/salvage job, but the damage was done. She was busy at work and I wasn't able to apologize to her before leaving.

As I made the 3 hour drive back to Nashville I contemplated my clumsiness and lamented my mistake. The phrases "we can't take you anywhere" and "this is why we can't have nice things" came to mind. I started thinking about how maybe everyone I come into contact with should have plastic covers on their furniture. I also thought about how covering your furniture in plastic was a grandmotherly thing to do. My Grandma did not do that (because she was super classy and totally awesome), but she did call her couch a davenport. Davenport rolls off the tongue much better than scrap-booking table, (or any other word with a P next to a B) and so the substitution was made. Suddenly, just before Knoxville, the song came out as a stream of consciousness. Oddly enough, I was able to repeat it. I sang it over and over until I made it to Nashville, where I anxiously put pen to paper upon my arrival.

To this day, Davenport is the only song I've ever written that takes as long to play as it did to write.

Bill Davis