“Gone fishin’ . . . instead of just a-wishin’ . . .”
I remember like it was just yesterday, hearing the moody, dreamy quality of that tune as it introduced a weekly syndicated television program called The Sportsman’s Friend. Hosted by Harold Ensley, it was broadcast by KCMO-TV in my own home town of Kansas City.
Dad tuned in to that program faithfully every week for most of the twenty years of its run. He was the oldest of fours boys in a family of avid sportsmen and outdoorsmen. Grandad Bowles was the first Athletic Director at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, and he also coached the varsity football, basketball, and track teams. His sons all played varsity sports for him. And when they weren’t all playing team sports, they were most likely off somewhere else outdoors . . . hunting, fishing, golfing, or pursuing some other sporty pastime.
I could not begin to count the number of fishing trips we took, or remember all the different midwestern lakes, rivers, streams, and ponds we fished with Dad.
But this isn’t really about fishing, exactly.
It must have been the summer I turned fourteen, just before my freshman year of high school began in 1967, that I attended a church camp somewhere up in the Rocky Mountains. My musical taste up to that point had pretty much been conditioned by the venerated historical tunes we were to taught to sing in grade school music classes, AM pop radio station programming of the 1950s and early 60s, and the contents of the Baptist Hymnal.
One Rocky Mountain evening, sitting around a campfire under a glittering night sky canopy, I heard Bob Dylan’s 1963 tune “Blowin’ in the Wind” for the first time. It was performed by a youthful camp staff guitarist, and it was my first exposure to the emerging folk music soundtrack of the 1960s counterculture; I was captivated. It wasn’t until years later that I first heard “a-Soulin” by Peter, Paul, and Mary, but by then I had already been well assimilated.
In the fall of 1971, I dropped out of college and went a-soulin’ myself . . . at least in spirit. First a tour of duty in the U.S. Navy was required, courtesy of the Vietnam War era draft which was still in effect at the time. After that, I literally went ‘on the road’ . . . this time in the deliberate spirit of Kerouac and Cassady: three years of hitchhiking across North America and Europe and back again, on an aspirational quest for the esoteric states of ‘higher’ consciousness. I won’t dwell on that story any further now, but if you’re interested in learning more about it, you can check out this essay: Autobiography of an American Yogi (D. H. Bowles 2018).
I eventually learned to play a little bit of guitar, but I had to work at learning to carry a tune as well, so that I could both play and sing that 1960s and early 70s soundtrack that had so captured my imagination around a long-ago Rocky Mountain campfire. Today, fifty years down the road, Peter, Paul, and Mary’s a-Soulin, is still featured on Page 1 of my personal songbook. Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind appears on Page 32.
“Gone soulin’ . . . we’re down the road a-rollin’ . . .”