Such as I am, over you.  You taught me how to love and now you say that we are through.

I first heard this Hank Snow song in July, 1987.  It was in (by gentle irony) Snow’s native Canada, as I was driving from Michigan to Newport, Rhode Island.  On June 13, 1987, Garrison Keillor broadcast what he represented to be the last show of A Prairie Home Companion, which has to rank as one of the most magnificent experiments in American popular entertainment, ever.  I’d been at sea, and my mother had recorded it off the radio for me.

For reasons unnecessary to explain fully here, this song really sank in, all the way up the shaft to the feathers.  It still does, although for not quite the same reasons.

Hank Snow died on December 20, 1999.  May he live on, in his songs and music.