The Alchemy of Memory and Longing: A Wistful Ode to a Vanished Past
“That Old Time Feeling” is the quintessential Texas Troubadour ballad—a stark, poetic meditation on the passing of time, the bittersweet ache of memory, and the longing for simpler, vanished days.
To speak of Guy Clark is to speak of the purest form of American songwriting—the kind of craft honed with a scalpel, where every word is essential and every image rings with the ammonia clarity of a truth you didn’t know you needed to hear. Unlike the pop sheen of the previous entry, this song is deeply rooted in the soil of the Outlaw Country and Progressive Country movements of the 1970s, a period when a group of Texas poets and musicians descended upon Nashville, demanding that their songs be heard on their own, unvarnished terms.
“That Old Time Feeling” is one of the pillars of Clark’s monumental and highly influential 1975 debut album, Old No. 1, released on RCA Records. While this era of music was driven by album sales and critical acclaim rather than hit-parade singles, the song’s impact was profound. It wasn’t designed to climb the Billboard Hot 100; it was built to last, a foundational piece of the songwriter’s songwriter canon. The album itself, Old No. 1, was an immediate critical success that established Clark as a master craftsman, a storyteller whose observational eye was as sharp as the acoustic guitar he played. It is a work that belongs not on a chart, but on a shelf next to the best American literature.
The story of the song is inextricably linked to the vibrant, smoky, and collaborative songwriting scene that Clark forged in Nashville alongside friends like Townes Van Zandt and Mickey Newbury. It was during this intensely creative period in the early 1970s, shortly after Clark moved to Nashville from Texas, that he composed this timeless piece, along with other classics like “Desperados Waiting for a Train” and “L.A. Freeway.” The “feeling” he describes isn’t just about a time or a place; it’s the raw, undeniable emotional weight of history on a person’s soul—the ghost of a past love or a lost way of life that you carry with you like a well-worn pocketknife.
The brilliance of “That Old Time Feeling” lies in its deceptively simple, folk-inflected melody and its masterful use of evocative, concrete detail. The narrative unfolds with the laconic, weathered voice of a man reflecting on a time when music felt more honest, when life was less complicated, and perhaps when a certain love was still within reach. It’s an elegy for the present, a yearning for the integrity and passion of the past—the old time feeling of authenticity in art and life. The song’s meaning resonates deeply with older listeners because it speaks to the shared human experience of realizing that the world you grew up in is irrevocably gone, yet the memory of its feeling is what sustains you.
As beautifully captured in the iconic 1975 documentary Heartworn Highways, a film that showcases the raw talent of Clark, Van Zandt, and others, this song is often performed in a stripped-down, intimate setting. It’s music meant for a workshop filled with heavy smoke and old photographs, or a dimly lit kitchen where guitars are pulled out to share “half songs.” The performance is not a spectacle; it’s an act of communion, a shared moment of profound, simple truth. This is a song that honors the simple joys and the quiet tragedies of the working class and the rambling soul, embodying the universal truth that the most powerful feelings are often the oldest ones. It’s Guy Clark at his most essential: a poet digging into the bedrock of memory to find the pure gold of human emotion.