Blog

A little updating and a few new/old things….

Well, the Cleveland Guardians came up a little short in the American League pennant race this week, so now I can go ahead and turn my full attention to the madness that is SEC Football.

I say that to say that I’ve been a bit preoccupied lately which has led to some procrastination, but I think I’ve FINALLY wrapped up a delayed ‘reconfiguration’ of my website (I’m not totally sure I really NEED a website at this stage, but I’ve had mine for so long now, and given the possibility that social media and streaming platforms could implode or be eaten alive by A.I., I figured I’d keep it).

[A loving shout out to the original designer of my site, Rose Capanna, aka Webchyk, who departed this life earlier this year after a brave fight with cancer. She loved Jesus and helped me put together the Big Front Porch site in the ‘early days.’]

So here are a few things that have been reconfigured: the primary address for my site is now www.triciawalker.com, BUT you can still get there with the URL www.bigfrontporch.com.

My ‘Music’ page now contains a link to Bandcamp, a platform for hosting music where fans can listen to AND purchase downloads of singles and/or albums. You can also ‘Follow’ me on Bandcamp (and be notified when I post something new on the page). Here’s a direct link to my page:

https://triciawalker.bandcamp.com

Fun fact: there are three EARLY albums on my Bandcamp page that have never been online before. I hope you’ll go check them out. Dig around on the page and you can read the credits, who the players are, where the albums were recorded, and more. Enjoy!

My ‘Media’ page now contains a link to my YouTube channel, which has a bunch of videos from various performances (before my hair turned grey), album releases, and videos from other performers who have covered my songs. Enjoy! Here’s a direct link to my channel (please SUBSCRIBE! Thank you kindly….):

https://www.youtube.com/@TriciaWalker

I’ll continue to upload my blog posts to my website, as well post them on Substack. As always, I welcome and appreciate your thoughts and comments.

I’ve been having a blast playing two hours of ‘piano bar’ music for a local gig once a month. Hard to believe Advent and Christmas season is just around the corner….I just pulled out my ‘Christmas music notebook’ yesterday:) Here’s hoping you’re supporting live local music wherever you live….music just makes life a little brighter, doesn’t it?

Ok…that’s about it for now….pax, y’all:)

September 11, 2026.        Never forget.

If technology works the way it is supposed to, this post arrived in your box at 7:46 am (CST) this morning, a significant moment on the clock 25 years ago, as well as today, and for every year on this day going forward.

Never forget.

Twenty-five years ago, in a time before iPhones, I would be awakened each morning by an alarm sounding from the clock/radio on my bedside table. On that early fall Tuesday morning, my alarm went off at 7:30 am (CST). I rolled over and, as was my habit, I reached out and hit the snooze button which gave me an extra nine minutes to drift in and out of dreamland. The alarm rang again at 7:39, I reached to cut it off, and tuned the dial to WSM-AM 650, the “Air Castle of the South,” for The Waking Crew, a daily show featuring live Nashville studio musicians and a guest artist. I was thinking about a beach trip with lifelong friends a few weeks before and a Labor Day gathering of good friends who had been walking me through a rough patch. I was feeling peaceful and grateful and hopeful and…then…the world changed.

“We interrupt our regular scheduled program to bring you a special news report…”

I got out of bed and went to the den, planted myself on my couch, and stared at my only TV. I was alone in my old rambling farmhouse, and I felt strangely unsettled, so I called a friend and asked if he would stay on the phone with me while we both tried to process the unspeakable, unfathomable horror unfolding before our eyes.

With limited information, the morning show hosts: Couric, Lauer, Gumbel, Sawyer, tried to explain what the entire nation was now tuning in to watch in real time, forever marking the date in our collective memory.

I didn’t leave the house all day. Brokaw, Rather and Jennings got us through the first night, but the magnitude of what had happened had barely begun to set in.

My journal entry from 9.13.01:

“There has been a horrible tragedy for the USA over the past few days. Terrorists hijacked four commercial airlines and crashed two of them into the World Trade Center towers, one into the Pentagon, and one in a field in Pennsylvania. The towers collapsed…unbelievable…thousands have likely perished…hundreds of firemen and policeman…it is Armageddon-like. As a nation, we are wounded and very heartbroken. I am physically and emotionally fatigued from the weight of it all. It is hard to comprehend, it seems surreal. This feels like the Pearl Harbor of the baby boomer generation.”

Twenty-five years later, there are moments when what happened still seems almost unbelievable…but it did.

Never forget.

In the days and weeks and months that followed, we grieved as one nation…under God…indivisible.

Never forget.

We saluted the bravery of heroes, great and small, and celebrated countless random acts of kindness among strangers.

Never forget.

And for those we lost, we say their names every year on this date of sacred remembrance.

NEVER FORGET.

“So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart…” (Billy Collins)

Click to watch/listen to a reading of the poem “The Names.”

August 9, 2026

Go to Memphis…turn left…

Katrina broke my heart in the fall of 2005. The year before I had a difficult departure from the publishing company I was a part of. The music industry was changing, and the ‘small city’ vibe of Nashville was vanishing. I had been in Music City a quarter of a century, having made the move on August 15, 1980, without knowing a soul there. I had a good run in Tennessee, but I started thinking about going home to Mississippi. In fact, in looking back through my journals, I found a couple of entries EIGHT years prior to my move back, wondering what it would be like to ‘go home.’ What would I do when I got there?

Delta State University, my alma mater, was at the beginning of establishing a recording program, and the Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences contacted me about interviewing for the Director’s position. Long story short (I’ll write that one another time), I got the job. So, with the help and blessing of my dearest Nashville friends, I had a big ‘ol yard sale, climbed behind the wheel of a packed 26’ U-Haul truck, and headed home on August 9, 2006…20 years ago today.

I drove west to Memphis on I-40, turned left and headed south on Highway 61. As I crossed that state line into Mississippi, it felt like I had never even been gone. I was home, driving down the same highway I grew up on, albeit a different stretch. This time it was the Mississippi Delta, 100 miles south to the town of Cleveland, originally known as Fontaine.

I brought back everything I had learned about the music business and put it into play developing the Delta Music Institute (DMI) Then when the time felt right, I passed the torch and looked for new ways to be in the ‘crosshairs of my giftings’ within the community.

I don’t think there’s an adequate measurement to express how grateful I am for the love and support that Cleveland, the Delta, and Mississippi has shown me since coming back home 20 years ago, so I figured the best gift I can offer to celebrate the occasion is to return full circle to what I was doing when I left Mississippi so long ago…set up a piano in the corner of a bar and play some favorite songs….which bar? Bar Fontaine, of course.

Here’s a song I wrote that I sometimes refer to as my ‘benediction’ to Nashville…it’s called “I’m Outta This Town.” No, it wasn’t recorded in Music City…it was recorded in the fabulous DMI Fighting Okra Studios at Delta State. What an opportunity…thank you, Cleveland, for such a ‘fountain’ of blessings…(see what I did there?).

July 30, 2026

“…one is silver and the other gold.”

If you were ever in Girl Scouts, like Dianne and Angela were, then you probably remember that old tune and the truth it holds.

In this current age of electronic communication, the practice of exchanging handwritten sent-through-the-post-office Christmas cards seems to have dropped off considerably, but not for Dianne and Angela.

Dianne, from southeast Mississippi, and Angela, from southwest Mississippi, met as first semester freshmen at Belhaven College in Jackson, Mississippi, in the fall of 1963. They were housed in the same dormitory, Helen White Hall, on the small campus of the Presbyterian affiliated school. Even though both had received a strong foundational education from their respective public schools, they found the rigor of freshman English, college algebra, and required Old Testament a bit much, not to mention that the allowed interactions for female student life in 1963 felt more like a convent than college.

The two students bonded over their common homesickness and misery and left Belhaven after only one year, but in the winter of 1964, when the cost of a first-class postage stamp was five cents, they began exchanging Christmas cards. Between them they exchanged news of happy and sad times, deaths and divorces, job relocations, children and pets. Since 1964, there has not been a single year that a holiday card from each of them has not arrived in the other’s mailbox during the sacred season of Christmas.

For Angela, an opportunity recently presented itself for a trip to southeast Mississippi and so she reached out to Dianne (by mail, of course) with an invitation to meet up for a handmade milkshake at an old-time soda fountain at the local drug store in Dianne’s hometown.

After 62 years of Christmas cards, the two young college freshmen, now carrying four scores of years each, hugged each other for the first time since they lived on the same floor of Helen White Hall so long ago.

At a small formica topped table, conversation began to flow while Dianne sipped a vanilla shake, and Angela enjoyed a chocolate one. The ladies in the back of the store came up front to take pictures and revel in the beauty of such a rare sight. Joy filled every heart in the shop, including one of the regulars from the ‘old men’ crew who came in for afternoon coffee and wanted to know where the out-of-town visitors were from.

As sweet as the handmade milkshakes were, they couldn’t match the sweetness of an old friendship that has stood the test of time and distance.

” Make new friends, but keep the old…”

July 14, 2026

It’s time for the Major League Baseball All-Star break, so I thought I would mark the occasion by sharing a song I wrote several years back called “Diamond In The Rough” to honor the memory of Dave “Boo” Ferriss, long-time legendary baseball coach for Delta State University and two-time All-Star for the Boston Red Sox, where he was Rookie of the Year in 1945. During that historic 1945 rookie campaign, the right-handed pitcher from Shaw, Mississippi, posted a 21-10 record, threw five shutouts, and led the American League with 26 complete games.

Boo led the American League with a 25-6 record (.806 winning percentage) in 1946, and was the winning pitcher in the fourth game shutout of the 1946 World Series (4-0) vs the St. Louis Cardinals. His career win-loss percentage was .684, and he held the AL record for most consecutive scoreless innings to start a career (22 1/3), a record that stood for 63 years. He was indeed a gentleman and a ‘diamond in the rough.’

July 4, 2026

I just got back from a toasty walk to our local farmer’s market to purchase a locally grown tomato for my regular summer meal of a tomato sandwich along with a big piece of sweet watermelon. Our little town was quiet, peaceful, and beautiful this morning, and after I returned and cooled off under the ceiling fan, I pulled up the text of the Declaration of Independence on my iPad and read all of it out loud, something I’m not sure I’ve ever done. I highly recommend it…words seem to fall a little differently when read aloud.

As I continue to scratch away at a multi-media storytelling project about my musical journey, I began to review some old journals this week to hunt for stories that might make the cut. So far, it’s been a mostly wonderful trip down memory lane…such as this entry from 42 years ago:

July 4, 1984…”We had only a three hour layover in Los Angels, and a two hour layover in Honolulu. Then a long flight down across the Pacific. We were to change planes in Auckland, but the fog was so thick we got to fly on into Christchurch.”

Christchurch, New Zealand, where I would spend six weeks as a background singer on a television show called, That’s Country! Before cell phones, personal computers, e-mail, streaming…I was halfway around the world on this date 42 years ago, but that’s a story for down the road.

I’m happy to report that the Big Front Porch website is in the process of being ‘refreshed,’ and as mentioned in a previous email blog, I’m going to be moving over to this page on Substack for blog posts. I plan to migrate my MailChimp list over to Substack, so please, do me a favor…if you’d rather not follow along, feel free to unsubscribe to the MailChimp list…hopefully, you’ll stay on board and bring a few friends with you for the occasional, non-regularly scheduled posts:)

Don’t forget to ‘be sweet!’ Enjoy this picture from That’s Country! back in 1984…TW