Audio Clips

If your browser supports listening to MP3 audio files, you can listen to clips from the audiobook Natchez Trace: A Road Through the Wilderness and the companion cassette The Journey.

You can read descriptions, hear sound clips and read song lyrics by selecting from the following Audio Clip Index. When you get to your audio clip selection, click on the Sound Icons throughout this file to hear the times for these audio clips are placed along side the icons.

Audio Clip INDEX

INTRODUCTION & HISTORY (F. Thomas) -- |Description and Clip|
DID YOU KNOW (E. Thomas) -- |Description and Clip| -- | Lyrics|
BlueGray -- |Description and Clip|
LOESS (E. Thomas) -- |Description and Clip| -- | Lyrics|
CROOKED ROAD BLUES (E. Thomas) -- |Description and Clip| -- | Lyrics|
HEMONA KA ONAHLÍ TÖK (E. Thomas) -- |Description and Clip| -- | Lyrics|
A LONG RIDE ALONG THE RESERVOIR (F. Thomas) -- |Description and Clip|
GONE ABOUT AS FAR AS I CAN GO (E. Thomas) -- |Description and Clip| -- | Lyrics|
AWAKENING (F. Thomas) -- |Description and Clip|
PALE MOON RIDER (E. Thomas) -- |Description and Clip| -- | Lyrics|
NO YESTERDAY (E. Thomas) -- |Description and Clip| -- | Lyrics|
WHEN I GET BACK HOME (E. Thomas) -- |Description and Clip| -- | Lyrics|
THE JOURNEY (F. Thomas) -- |Description and Clip|

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INTRODUCTION & HISTORY

(F. Thomas)

This clip is taken from the introduction and history tape of Natchez Trace: A Road Through the Wilderness. The tape tells the story of the Natchez Trace and the parkway that has been built to commemorate it -- Narrated by Frank Thomas.

3 minutes 45 seconds

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DID YOU KNOW

(E. Thomas)

Andrew Jackson, who would one day become President of the United States, was a young lawyer living in Nashville. He fell in love with Rachel Donelson Robards, daughter of John Donelson, co-founder of Nashville. Her first marriage to Lewis Robards was an unhappy one, and Jackson escorted Rachel down the Mississippi River to Natchez where she lived with friends of her family. The two lovers lived at opposite ends of the 500 mile long Natchez Trace awaiting Rachel's divorce. This song speaks to the hearts of all those who have ever loved while separated by time and great distance. It begins with the hopeful question, "Did you know, I am always with you?"

1 minute 27 seconds

[LYRICS]

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BlueGray

(E. Thomas)

Shiloh, Vicksburg, Brices Cross Roads... Mention certain small southern communities and only one thought comes to mind. Thousands of young men dressed in Blue and Gray died as the American Civil War ravaged this entire nation in the mid-nineteenth century. BlueGray may be that simple tune played quietly by the heart strings of a young sentry poised atop a moonlit ridge; or it may be screaming through the mind of another, drowning out cannon and musket fire in the heat of battle; or it may be the wind, heard today as still another stands looking across a field of marble headstones.

37 seconds

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LOESS

(E. Thomas)

Written in the form of a children's tune, this musical allegory tells of the loose soil, LOESS (pronounced LOW-ess). This soil was carried by near endless dust storms at the end of the last ice age, over a hundred thousand years ago. Daily these winds transported huge amounts of soil from the west and deposited it along the eastern bank of the Mississippi River. Beneath the carousel of Life that followed, the loess gave way. Migrating buffaloes, ponies, Indians, hunters, explorers, colonists, boatmen and Kaintucks -- their footsteps, as endless as the winds, carved this soil to form deeply sunken sections of the ancient Natchez Trace. If you travel the Natchez Trace Parkway, you too can ride the carousel.

57 seconds

[LYRICS]

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CROOKED ROAD BLUES

(E. Thomas)

Here is a happy bottleneck slide guitar tune written in the style of the Highway 61 Deep South Delta Blues. The crooked road that inspired this "Happy" blues tune is at Port Gibson, Mississippi, near where Highway 61 crosses the Natchez Trace Parkway. The road will carry you over to the ghostly ruins of Windsor Plantation. If you chance to take this crooked ride, you'll have to travel at a slower pace which the road sets for you. But you're not likely to get the blues. It's an enchanting ride through a canopy of trees whose limbs are draped with Spanish moss.

57 seconds

[LYRICS]

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HEMONA KA ONAHLÍ TÖK

(E. Thomas)

The Indians lived here long before the whiteman ever came to this country. The Natchez tribe was destroyed by the French. The Chickasaw and Choctaw who occupied these lands along the Old Natchez Trace in Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee were witness to American pioneers and armies that began using the old buffalo and Indian trail both for commerce and to maintain a hold on the nation's frontier post at Natchez. The trickle of white skinned people traveling the Old Trace quickly grew into a river that flooded tribal homelands. By the 1830s demands of settlers caused the United States Government to resettle the historic Indians of the Southeast to lands west of the Mississippi River. Many were burned out of their homes and removed at bayonet point by the United States army. Thousands of Indians died along the march of forced exile that has come to be known as the TRAIL OF TEARS. When you drive the Natchez Trace Parkway up into the hills of Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, you will hear the gentle voice of a mighty and proud people. It may call to you in the eagle's cry or whisper in the wind: HEMONA KA ONAHLÍ TÖK (Chickasaw meaning, "Once I was there.") Though the Indians are gone from their homelands now, the land has not forgotten them. The traces of their footsteps linger still.

1 minute 53 seconds

[LYRICS]

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A LONG RIDE ALONG THE RESERVOIR

(F. Thomas)

Heading south along the Natchez Trace Parkway using the Road Through the Wilderness tape series, this tune will accompany your drive along the reservoir that supplies water for the city of Jackson, capitol of the state of Mississippi. During the frontier days the 50 acre reservoir wasn't there, only a section of the Pearl River which paralleled the pioneer's homeward journey. Today the Reservoir is formed by an earthen dam on this section of the Pearl River. The Natchez Trace Parkway carries you along the edge of the water to offer a scenic look at nature and the host of wildlife that comes to be refreshed along the banks of the water.

49 seconds

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GONE ABOUT AS FAR AS I CAN GO

(E. Thomas)

Looking toward home, reaching for loved ones and the comfort and rest that lay at the end of the homeward leg of their journey, many travelers pushed themselves to the limits of their endurance. That has never been a safe way to travel and certainly is not a good way to enjoy your journey. You can imagine weary travelers on foot and horseback, making their way through the wilderness, fighting the dark, the heat and cold, the storms and floods, swimming rivers and streams. At the end of long, hard days they would lie down in the grass beside the trail and hope not to fall prey to wild animals or bandits while they slept. GONE ABOUT AS FAR AS I CAN GO was inspired by tales of weary riders who carried the mail bags on their 12 day journey between Nashville and Natchez.

51 seconds

[LYRICS]

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AWAKENING

(F. Thomas)

Awakening portrays some of the struggles shared by all those who traveled the Natchez Trace without the advantages of the modern world. Over the ages the forces of nature have challenged everyone who set foot upon this path. When you stand at SWAN VALLEY OVERLOOK you can imagine how dark storm clouds swirled up the valley and around the hilltop, how the wind and pounding rain would threaten the exposed travelers and drive them to seek shelter and await the storms passing. Rainbows have more meaning for those who have been through a storm: sunlight has more power somehow, caught in sparkling drops of water, falling like dew from the leaves. These are reasons why the Natchez Trace lingered in people's memories long after the road was abandoned. Those memories and those struggles are reasons the parkway exists today.

1 minute 35 seconds

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PALE MOON RIDER

(E. Thomas)

The temptation was too great. Some lived in caves or deep in the swamps, slipping like vermin through the night and mist. Others, dressed in finely tailored clothes, rode proudly along the Trace on strong stallions. All were the same - thieves and murderers. The jingle of boatman and Kaintuck purses on a 500 mile wilderness road rang like church bells to these Highwaymen. PALE MOON RIDER speaks of a mystery which remains unsolved today. Meriwether Lewis, of the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition, died of gun shots at Grinder's Stand just north of the Buffalo River in October of 1809. He was on his way to Washington, DC to settle some accounts due him. Suicide of a national hero or was Lewis robbed and murdered? As the song says, "You better keep looking over your shoulder... You better keep looking over your shoulder..."

1 minute 21 seconds

[LYRICS]

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NO YESTERDAY

(E. Thomas)

This song reflects an often repeated theme along the Natchez Trace Parkway: the cycle of nature and change. Hauntingly the message of NO YESTERDAY reminds us the cycle of Life is not an endless circle that closes upon itself, but is more like a spiral where one species of tree forces out another, where one race of people displaces another -- each given to its season. When those seasons have come full circle, things have changed, and some things are gone forever. Often times species become victims of their own success. Reveling in their youth and apparent success, they live unrestrained as though there were no tomorrow, when in Truth there is No Yesterday.

1 minute 18 seconds

[LYRICS]

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WHEN I GET BACK HOME

(E. Thomas)

Journeys have many facets. Whether a quest for knowledge and truth, or an adventure of youth and rebellion or the workaday tasks of surviving in a world that's filled with hidden dangers and disappointments, all life's journeys carry us to distant places and involve risks. Each journey instructs the traveler who sets foot upon its path. Travels take us out of our daily routine; they allow us to see our lives more clearly from a distance. This song speaks the thoughts of a traveler with solitude's vision. How often we leave the important things unsaid. Sometimes the most profound journeys of our lives involve no more than a look, a smile, an embrace or a kind word toward those closest to us. "Words that seem so hard to say, they do come easy when you are far away...."

1 minute 53 seconds

[LYRICS]

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THE JOURNEY

(F. Thomas)

The theme music for the Natchez Trace: A Road Through the Wilderness Self-Guided driving tour is a simple piano tune that creates a calm mood of reflection. It's like that peaceful rest which comes at the end of a day filled with strenuous physical labor, or the quiet dawn which follows a long and stormy night. These quiet times mark the beginning as well as the end of all our journeys. Imagine the boatmen and Kaintucks who floated the produce of their farms in the Ohio River Valley, down the mighty Mississippi River to markets in Natchez and New Orleans. Picture their apprehensive footsteps made onto the wild Indian trail beginning in Natchez; a trail that would lead them home. With everything they owned on their backs they braved the heat and cold, the swamps and storms, swollen rivers and streams, insects, snakes, wild animals, thieves and robbers. But if they were fortunate and survived the journey, the day would come when they crossed that final hilltop and could see the land that was their home, that magic place which is both the beginning and end of all life's journeys. Home is a place of peace and calm that offers us time to reflect upon our travels and how those travels have reshaped our lives.

44 seconds

Journey’s End

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"THE JOURNEY"

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