‘On A Bus To St. Cloud, Minnesota . . .’

 One of my – well, I guess you’d call it a quirk – is that I have a strong affinity for songs with geographical references in their titles: States, cities and towns, rivers. Foreign countries? Not so much. Foreign cities? Again, not so much. I pretty much stay stateside with this quirk. 

It’s kind of difficult to figure out which location is mentioned most often among the 88,000-plus tracks in the RealPlayer. I’d have to make a list of locations to search for and then run through that list one at a time, and it’s entirely possible that I’d overlook the eventual winner while making the search list. 

But I’m pretty sure it’s Memphis. The Tennessee city’s rich musical history attracts me, with its connections to the blues, to early rock & roll, to the jump blues and R&B that were some of the antecedents to rock & roll, and – perhaps less obvious but still significant – to country and gospel. And – as I noted in a post here last year – I have more than ninety tracks that mention Memphis in their titles. 

Songs about places where I’ve lived, though, are pretty rare. There was “Minnesota,” a 1975 single by a group called Northern Light that got itself to No. 88 on the Billboard Hot 100, and there have been a few other songs that mention Minnesota in their titles (although I do not know any of them as well as I know the Northern Light single). I’m sure there are songs out there about North Dakota, Kansas and Missouri, the three other states where I’ve lived, but probably not songs about the actual cities where I lived in those three states (Minot, Conway Springs, and Columbia, respectively). 

But not long after I got online in 2000 and began to seriously collect music, I came upon a tune that mentions my home town of St. Cloud, Minnesota, in its title: “On A Bus To St. Cloud.” Written by Gretchen Peters and first recorded by Trisha Yearwood in 1995, it’s described at Wikipedia as the reaction to a lover’s suicide: 

On a bus to St. Cloud, Minnesota
I thought I saw you there
With the snow falling down
Around like a silent prayer. 

And once on a street in New York City
With the jazz and the sin in the air
And once on a cold LA freeway
Going nowhere. 

And it's strange but it’s true
I was sure it was you
Just a face in the crowd
On a bus to St. Cloud. 

In a church in downtown New Orleans
I got down on my knees and prayed
And I wept in the arms of Jesus
For the choice you made. 

We were just getting’ to the good part
Just getting’ past the mystery
Oh, and it’s just like you
It’s just like you to disagree. 

And it's strange but it’s true
You just slipped out of view
Like a face in the crowd
On a bus to St. Cloud. 

And you chase me like a shadow
And you haunt me like a ghost
And I hate you some and I love you some
But I miss you most. 

On a bus to St. Cloud, Minnesota
I thought I saw you there
With the snow falling down
Around like a silent prayer... 

Yearwood’s “On A Bus To St. Cloud” was released as a single by MCA Nashville in 1995, but it didn’t do much, reaching only No. 59 on the Billboard country chart. (It went to No. 27 in Canada.) There are a few covers of the song out there – the song’s writer, Gretchen Peters, does a pretty good job on her 1996 version, and I very much like the 2001 take on the tune by the late Jimmy LaFave. But just as we most often hold tight to the very first version of a song we hear, I’ll hold to Yearwood’s version.

– whiteray