LOCATION: Tennessee; Texas
PERIOD: 1754-1868
DRAMATIS PERSONAE: Owen McLemore (1791-1868); Anabel March (1796-1832)
The memory of his wife, Anabel, is kindled by an old friend’s letter that Owen McLemore has kept all these years. Alone and peering into the West Texas prairie he relives the grief of his wife’s passing, and friends and a life lost to time.
Owen McLemore was born in Tennessee, but his family originally came from Ulster Ireland, Scots-Irish, landing in North Carolina in the mid-18th century. Owen’s grandfather, Allen McLemore came to North Carolina as a young boy in 1754, he stayed there acquiring some land not far from his father’s farm and also lived as a sustenance farmer. His son, Jason was the McLemore who left North Carolina , crossing the Appalachian mountains and making his way to middle Tennessee by 1788.
Owen McLemore was born in 1791, the second child to Jason and wife Lucy; a girl had been born in 1789, but only lived a few months. Owen grew up on his father farm and learned everything he needed to become a farmer himself before marrying Anabel March in 1812. Together they worked a sustenance farm in Tennessee and began to build seeing their first son Allen McLemore come into the world on Christmas Day 1812.
Anabel gave birth to six other sons: Jason (1813-1876); twins Edward (1815-1861) and Leeland (1815-1887); Jacob (1818-1863); Donald (1824-1884) and Arthur (1832-1834), before dying in 1832. After Donald’s death in 1834 the family migrated to West Texas where Owen died in 1868 at the age of 77 (see songs “Blinkin’ Back a Tear”).
MY ANABEL
(F. D. Leone, Jr.)
It’s a cold December day
The light is slowly sinkin’ away
What I feel I can’t hardly tell
Oh Anabel, my Anabel
Holdin’ a letter from an old friend
Golden leaves dance in the wind
Somethin’ broke in me, aw hell
Oh Anabel, my Anabel
Piece of paper creased and soft
Watery lines almost worn off
Raindrops spittin’ in an empty well
Oh Anabel, my Anabel
That dusty road is still the same
The prairie wind still carries a name
The tolling of a distant steeple’s knell
Oh Anabel, my Anabel
© 2018 Frank David Leone, Jr./Highway 80 Music (ASCAP). The songs and stories on the Highway 80 Stories website are works of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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