Country. I’m a fan. Not of all of it, and sometimes of that which is barely it. As Kris Kristofferson once said, it’s country music if it sounds like it. I like that definition, not that I quite understand it. My affection for three chords and the truth came slowly then arrived suddenly, like so many moments that seem to come full grown, only later revealing the long formation that prepared their way.
Look at it this way. That is how many come to the Christian faith: the slow ingress of grace which, in our fallen state, we so often try to sweep away. Then, in the mix, a gathering awareness of dust and decay, which no broom of our own can ever quite clear. And finally, in the seeming cadence of a day, the surprising clarity that it — faith in the Lord — is part of us.
As affection for country music deepened, I tended toward a branch of country that feels most familiar: outlaw country. Like our “outlaw” God, it refuses to play by our expectations. It carries an edge both devastating and freeing, with a pick sometimes pining, sometimes playful. The living God, too, is one whom we cannot keep put in schemes, and who, by his divine freedom, is faithful to his promises in the scandal of Christ crucified (1 Cor. 1:23).
In the genre of outlaw country — Waylon and Willie and the boys — the dust settles and scatters. The characters are flawed but loved, traversing long roads that reverberate with promises. Like reverb from a Fender, those promises may echo on our fallen ears like half-remembered scripture. They may recall to us the imago Dei, though now beneath a diamond-crease hat in the heat, both sinner and saint. And the more I listened, the more I realized these songs are doing something theological.
The other day, one of my playlists looped back to a song that always hits me like a psalm disguised as a highwayman tune: Guy Clark’s “L.A. Freeway.” It’s one of those rare pieces of music that reflects and refracts into multiple songs at once: it’s wounded and liberated, weary but suddenly unburdened by a burst of grace. Written more than 50 years ago, when Clark left California for Tennessee, it has become, for lovers of outlaw country, something of an oldie but goodie. And perhaps there is another reason to listen: in his introduction to another oldie — Athanasius’ On the Incarnation — C. S. Lewis argued for the value of returning to old books rather than being captive to the newest thing. Clark might not be Athanasius, but old songs, too, are full of wisdom and surprises when we hear them again. Clark, perhaps with less eloquence but more earthiness, extends the case, too, in the song itself with the line: “Play it for me one more time now.”
So … I cued it up one more time — and on that morning’s drive, both fretful and familiar, it had a way of lifting the weight of the world for a moment.
And much like the psalms, it also lets you breathe again. Not because anything has really changed but because you remember you’re not alone in it. When Clark sings “If I can just get off of this L.A. Freeway,” he is not naming something simply geographical. What he’s doing is touching a universal longing to leave behind — or change — what is broken and to step into something promised but not yet fully visible. “If I can just get off of this L.A. freeway / Without gettin’ killed or caught” pipes through the speakers, followed later by: “Love’s a gift that’s surely handmade / We got somethin’ to believe in.”
And as I listened, I realized I wasn’t merely hearing a country song. It’s a song poised at a cusp: “In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me” (Ps. 120:1). That verse opens the Songs of Ascents — a pilgrim sequence whose movement of departure, danger, trust, and arrival resonates with the ambling roads of country music itself.
Now, if — as Waylon Jennings asks in “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” — you ain’t sure Hank done it this way, the Christian tradition has a longstanding conviction that scripture interprets life, and life pushes us back into scripture. Augustine of Hippo models this beautifully in the Confessions, treating his own memories and yearnings as a lens for reading scripture and then allowing it to illuminate those experiences in return. Augustine, then, done it that way — bringing from the storehouse of his life treasures both new and old (Mt. 13:52).
Now, without flattening scripture or elevating human experience into revelation, let’s place Guy Clark’s song alongside the Psalter. Something happens. Something clarifying. Not perfect alignment but resonance. The psalms retain interpretive priority, yet through the tumbled texture of Guy Clark’s song, we may further grasp what the psalmist means by “going out,” “crying out,” or “dwelling secure.”
Let’s try this through three psalms: first, by continuing along the road of the Songs of Ascents with Psalm 121, then by bending back to two earlier psalms. Together, these three psalms may help us interpret Guy Clark’s song. And the song of a rambler — as we move, too, in a retrograde Texas shuffle in the Psalter — may likewise help us hear the psalms more fully.
And what’s more outlaw than shuffling backward while still journeying forward?
Psalm 121
Psalm 121 is a pilgrim psalm of departure, one with misted eyes lifted toward a journey bounded by hope and surrounded by concern. It is a song for the traveler embarked on unpredictable terrain. The psalmist looks at the hills, less in wondering awe than in sober recognition: this will not be easy. This may undo me were it not for faith — even faith but a seed.
Guy Clark captures the same truth in his opening line: “Pack up all your dishes, make note of all good wishes.” This is not a jaunty springtime road trip with a picnic basket. This is a reckoning with the cost of leaving a place — or changing a way — that can no longer sustain life.
If we let Psalm 121 interpret the song, we may see that the psalm names what Clark leaves underspoken: a yearning to share the road and, in sharing it, not to be alone. “I can hear that old bass singing / Sweet and low, like a gift you’re bringing,” Clark sings. Another voice on the road is received as a gift. But Psalm 121 presses the longing deeper: the traveler is not merely accompanied; he is kept. “The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore” (Ps. 121:8).
What we may hear is this: travel may be treacherous, and obedience to the Lord may be laden with danger in a fallen world. But we are kept. We are kept in and through Christ — the one who doesn’t bypass the judgment named at the outset of the Songs of Ascents but who bears it and gives us feet that will not be moved, even while moving.
Psalm 107
Led by our quick step, let’s move back to an earlier point in the Psalter. Psalm 107 is about people who have been through something. Something awful. They have known hunger, exile, wandering, loss. It is a psalm of those who have hit bottom and found the bottom was not the end. It is an exhale after an overwhelming stretch, one renewed by hope as the psalm repeats four times over eight breaths:
“Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress” (Ps. 107:6, 13, 19, 28).
They have found deliverance. Clark’s lyric echoes the same cry: “If I can just get off of this L.A. Freeway without getting killed or caught …” This is not desperado swagger. Whether east or west, north or south, this is goose-pimpled desperation itself. It is someone admitting that deliverance must come from outside. And Psalm 107 names that truth with theological clarity: we cry out, God delivers.
Deliverance is not earned. It is received. And Christ himself is the steadfast love of God made flesh. God’s steadfast love endures forever, and in Christ he shatters the doors of bronze and cuts through the iron bars that held us fast (Ps. 107:16), so that the way forward becomes a way of hope. And, letting the earlier Psalm 121 catch the thread forward, Christ is the shade from the hard, parching sun as we continue (Ps. 121:5).
In the next psalm we learn more about the gift.
Psalm 16
Another step back, Psalm 16 is a psalm of trust. The psalm sets us in a steady place between lament and praise, in the space where longing and contentment coexist. Still carrying forward the troubled thread of Psalm 107, we find a rootedness in thanksgiving to the Lord (Ps. 107:1). Yet a life rooted in trust can sometimes feel like the wagon-wheel effect: the seeming backward crawl of wheels on a highway that nevertheless are moving forward.
Psalm 16’s central line of trust is this: “The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance” (Ps. 16:6). And Guy Clark gives us this line: “Give me a land that I ain’t bought.”
Resonance. Both the psalmist and Clark proclaim a profoundly Christian truth: home is a gift. Inheritance is grace, and belonging is bestowed. Together they teach us that our identity is rooted not in acquisition but in gift. For now, in the already-and-not-yet kingdom, we live grateful even while still on the road between the leaving and the arriving, on which we are asked to “set up road markers for yourself; make yourself guideposts; consider well the highway, the road by which you went” (Jer. 31:21).
Unpurchased Land
Taken together, these psalms form a journey: departure, deliverance, gift. Guy Clark’s “L.A. Freeway” becomes an unexpected guidepost along that journey, naming the challenges of life in a fallen world, the difficulty of patience, and the vulnerability of hope. The land we “ain’t bought” is given in Christ, who goes ahead of us and keeps our going out and our coming in (Ps 121:8). Simply, he is the joyful treasure hidden in the field of that land (Mt. 13:44). Guy Clark — an outlaw truth teller — sensed, perhaps without naming it explicitly, that life is sometimes lived on the thin line between sorrow and joy, burden and freedom.
The psalmists said that truth long before him. They still sing it over us now: we have a beautiful inheritance. And y’all — the Lord is good.
