Heart Lines and Lyrics From Billy Gamble and Friends

Preface

Billy Gamble enjoyed rhymes when he was a small child.  But as he grew up (or tried to grow up), he learned that he should cast away (or try to cast away) his childish ways.  He went to school.  In kindergarten and grade school he recited nursery rhymes.  But later in his high school and his college literature courses he learned that "poetry" just simply does not rhyme.  He was confronted with a knowledge that "true poets" use words that people like Billy Gamble can not understand or comprehended.  And the words somehow didn't rhyme.  Poetry was no longer fun. It was confusing, not enjoyable.  It was "work."  Somehow Billy Gamble "faked" his way through his English courses.  He received passing grades even though he was often not able to follow the lectures or the reading assignments from the first to the last day of classes.  Maybe other students felt the same.  He has to think many did, although they never confessed it to him.  But as he was exercising deception and moving toward his high school diploma and his three college degrees, "Doctor" Billy Gamble found a refuge of sorts in country music lyrics and tunes.  There found the fun of childish rhymes again. 

But alas, again he found that his Sisyphean mountain journey through life--in the eyes of many of his academic colleagues--was not supposed to be fun. These colleagues looked with an utter disdain upon country music much as his English professors had held for rhymes, that is, at least for rhymes that could be understood.  But nevertheless, in the mode of a Sisyphean creature searching for new pathways onward and upward, be they futile or bountiful ones, Billy Gamble persisted.  He even found friends and colleagues that also liked lyrics and simple rhymes.  Although it was a peer group requirement that every person between ages 8 and 30 look down their noses in disgust for country music, he was even able to find friends that actually liked this genre of music. 

Billy Gamble was not alone.  In fact, he and two of his friends even ventured to write some lyrics and tunes and take them to Nashville in the search for fame and fortune.  Alas, the desire for sustenance and some modicum of self esteem, took him and his friends back to other day to day pursuits.  But the love of lyrics and the excitement of writing simple rhymes with simple words and tunes--the essence of the country music mode--has persisted.  Now over 30, at least two times--he moves boldly forward in pathways he walked long ago.  In his Heartlines and Lyrics, Billy Gamble unapologetically, brings together many of his simple rhymes and song words along with those he also wrote with his friends as well as some others written by friends. 

Still confused about what literature is, what poetry is, and what writing should be all about, Billy Gamble offers that he might in the end actually be a poet (though perhaps not a true poet), as he presents the readers at the beginning of this collection with a simple non-rhyming story from which has flowed the ideas for many of the rhymes that follow.  

Like the rest of us, Billy Gamble's journey has been an uphill one often burdened by large boulders on his shoulders.  But climb on he has, and climb on he does, as he often pauses to take the medicine that cures the urge to stop--he takes the medicine of celebration.  The Sisyphean struggle is bearable for many only if they can infuse a healthy and close-to excessive dose of celebration into their rock bearing travails.  Heartlines and Lyrics represents a source of celebration for Billy Gamble's journey with his friends.