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The bar at Drifters Wife.

New York City is a place I been / I was there one time with a travellin' band

So reads the second line of JJ Cale’s “Drifters Wife,” a rolling, deftly fingerpicked cut from his 1982 album, Grasshopper. “Drifters life is a drifters wife,” he posits, romanticizing in just six words a Kerouac-esque mindset which spawned a generation of trail songs and helped launch the Beats of the 1950s.