There’s a voice that keeps on calling me

Down the road is where I’ll always be

Every stop I make, I’ll make a new friend

Can’t stay for long, just turn around and I’m gone again.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll want to settle down,

Until tomorrow, I’ll just keep moving on.

Knechtel loves to amble and ramble. He doesn’t plan an itinerary. He doesn’t call up a travel agent. A GPS unit would be a waste of dashboard space because he prefers getting lost. And not being a big city type guy, you’ll usually find him travelling the blue highways. He is definitely one of those “it’s not the destination it’s the journey” kinda people. At any given moment, he and the wife will jump into their ’88 Dodge camper van named Georgia and just head off. On a recent expedition, they found themselves wandering the southern United States and decided to check out a couple of important music and cultural places of worship.

You can’t be a singer/songwriter without owing some debt to Hank Williams. He wrote maybe a hundred songs before he was 29. Died in the back of a Cadillac. On the way to a show. And they found a lyric he had been working on at the time on his death in the back seat of the Caddy. Legendary. Even if he had just written “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” he would be a giant. So, the Knechtel’s checked out the Hank Williams Museum in Montgomery Alabama to pay their respects.

And then after some time spent making repairs to Georgia in the driveway of new-found friends Dwayne Delmont Jones Jr. and his son Dale Earnhardt Jones….

….they eased on down the road to 3614 Jackson Highway home of Muscle Shoals Studios.

Behind Richard in that unassuming building that once was a coffin factory the Stones cut Wild Horses, The Staple Singers recorded “I’ll Take You There” and Dylan laid down “Gotta Serve Somebody”. And there was Skynyrd and Paul Simon and Rod Stewart and Wilson Pickett and if you want the whole list – go look it up.

Keep your eyes on the road. Your hands upon the wheel.