Song of the Day

"You Belong To Me" by Patsy Cline.

The first Patsy Cline album I ever bought was "Heartaches". Here's the track list with a short description of each song:

"Crazy"- She's crazy for loving him and knew all along he'd leave her.

"I Fall To Pieces"- She's doing great but whenever she sees him, or hears about him, she falls apart.

"Heartaches"- Loving him only gave her heartaches and now it's only a burning memory.

"She's Got You"- Patsy's got the pictures, the records, and the ring but the other woman has the actual man.

"Walkin' After Midnight"- She's walking after midnight "for miles along the highway", like she and her man used to do, hoping to run into him.

"Sweet Dreams Of You"- "You don't love me, it's plain." She can't forget him and start her life anew.

"You Belong To Me"- While you're out there in the world, remember that you're mine.

"Strange"- It's strange how the man stopped loving her when the other woman came along.

"Anytime"- Whenever he wants her back again, she'll come on home to him.

"Wayward Wind"- She fell in love with a drifter. And then he left her.

And so it was that "You Belong To Me" became known to me as the happy song on the Heartaches album because the man hadn't left her yet.

In one of the aforementioned books that I began writing and never finished, about a wild woman (for the record, despite what people believe, I'm decidedly unwild and so, no, this isn't about me), I write:

I had, clearly, spent too much of my youth listening to songs about broken hearted women. My favorites were Tracy Chapman, who sang about going to jail for her man, being cheated on, how he can't say 'I love you', and Patsy Cline, a woman who sang of hardly anything but heartbreak. I countered these destroyed women by reading Anais Nin, to whom marriage was a burden and fidelity a difficulty. I read poems about women getting up and leaving after sex, women who had their own lives. In short, I knew which kind of woman I wanted to be and it was not the one singing her heart out about a man that left her.