"The Road Goes on Forever," Joe Ely

The classic Robert Earl Keen tune about the bad guys winning, performed by Mr. Ely of Lubbock, Texas.

During the first Bush administration, the National Archives invited me to a couple of presidential libraries directors' meetings, even though the Nixon library was then a nongovernmental institution. The Clinton administration put an end to all that.

My second and final opportunity to mingle with the grownups was at the LBJ library in Austin in 1992. On our evening off, I made my way to La Zona Rosa, now closed, where, just as I arrived, Ely and his band swung into this number as the UT students in in the audience held their Lone Star bottles in the air.

I think I was a Texan in a prior life.