I grew up in Texas, and I hitchhiked to Tennessee when I was nineteen years old with nothing but a guitar, a change of jeans, and a couple of shirt. I climbed down from the cab on an eighteen-wheeler at I-40 and Broadway a little after midnight on the something-something of November and turned left, spending my first night in town nursing a cup of coffee in an all-night dinner. -Introduction, Steve Earle

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. It was a little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solidly lower middle class, with one or two juts apieces on either side of that. The houses corresponded: middle-sized gracefully fretted wood houses built in the late nineties and early nineteen hundreds, with small front and side and more spacious back yards, and trees in the yards, and porches. These were softwooded trees, populars, tulip trees, cottonwoods. There were fences around one or two of the houses, but mainly the yards ran into each other with only now and then a low hedges that wasn't going very well There were few good friends among the grown people, and they were not poor enough for the other sort of intimate acquaintance, but everyone nodded and spoke, and even might talk short times, trivially, and at the two extremes of the general or the particular, and ordinarily nextdoor neighbors talked quite a bit when they happened to run into each other, and never paid calls. The men were mostly small business men, one or two very modestly executive, one or two worked with their hands, most of them clerical, and most of them between thirty and forty-five. -Knoxville: Summer, 1915