‘I go back so far, I’m in front of me,’ is one of my favorite Paul McCartney lines, and he couldn’t have been any older than me when he wrote it.’

‘How old is that, ol Cap’n Boo Boo?’

‘Frigging ancient, child, but perhaps not so ancient as some may suppose; I began he career in daily journalism at age 17, five years later becoming the youngest full time rock critic on a daily newspaper in the U.S. (after a stint as a congressional press intern on Capitol Hill during the Reagan Administration, a radically clarifying contrast to say the least!) In the 1990s he was churning out articles for the Washington Post and L.A. Times “like the plane was going down.”

“I have a very unusual background,” he claims without discernible arrogance (Well done, Ragged One!). “I grew up just a couple of hours north of Nashville…”

This Ballard person then fixes you with a certain kind of stare and asks, “Do you know what ‘North of Nashville’ even means? No one does. No one!

‘ Never mind, I can’t explain it. No one can. There was only one person who could really ever explain it but they made her stop.’

“That’s terrible!” I interjected. Seriously, you want a person like the old Field Commander to think you’re on their side, for your own safety.

‘I learned to sing from the Queen of Rock and Roll herself, Miss Wanda Jackson, who was the first woman to cut a rock and roll song and ruined Elvis with her legendary French kiss from which he is said never to have recovered and I believe that,’ Ballard continued abruptly.

‘She put her fingers on my throat and rearranged something with my voice. I never figured it out, but Whatever anyone thinks about my singing now, it’s nine yards of top shelf calico better than it was before that.

‘I got my first bottleneck guitar lesson from Merle Watson, son of the legendary Doc Watson, who is many respects left the deepest imprint on the American acoustic guitar of anybody this side of C.F. Martin. That doesn’t mean I learned anything, but he got me started.

‘My first cousin (once removed) was a guitar player who drove down to Nashville sometime in the late 1940s and came home so pissed off that he started robbing banks. Well, they tried locking him up in a frigid prison on an island called Alcatraz. That really pissed him off, even more than Nashville, so he sawed through the bars of the prison tower with a guitar string.

‘I was baptised by the Catholic mystic and internationally acclaimed author Thomas Merton, but raised by an angry southern Baptist — my mother. However, I discovered three years ago that I am apparently a full-on, matrilineal Jew in an unbroken chain of samesaid that extends back to medieval Portugal. I think having to hide this for generations is the real reason my cousins robbed banks.

‘Oh, cousins is intended plural. They were two brothers in bankrobbing. Might have been fraternal twins.

‘I grew up just a county over from where Wendell Berry lives, whom I count as the earliest and most important re-direct in my way of thinking (to the extent that I previously had one) from the age of sixteen, when I started reading his books. It wasn’t until that many years later that I was fortunate to spend a glorious autumn day in conversation with him at his Kentucky farmhouse.

‘I started playing guitar professionally the same year I started writing professionally. I started writing songs to get girls. Other guys used my songs to get girls, usually the one I wrote the song for. This was especially irksome when it happened while I was playing the song, not infrequently by my best friend.’

“You’re making that up,” I protested. “Nobody—”

“LOOK INTO THESE WASTED EYE S AND TELL ME IF YOU THINK I’M LYING!”

“You are scaring me!” I protested.

[To be continued]

Next: How he got hisself punched in the stomach by this feller Hunter S. Thompson.