Jerry’s Song performed by Running With Sally | July 2, 2021
When I watch this 2021 footage, with Chris Field on violin and Travis finally making it through North Boulder traffic thanks to Xander pushing him to get there, the sound is too raw to be anything but honest. The tents are flapping in the heat, and everyone is playing like there is something at stake. The ethos I tried to capture in Zuvuya did not end in 2003. It did not disappear with the warehouses or the bands that dissolved or the friendships that bent and broke along the way. It carried forward into moments like this, unrehearsed and imperfect, held together by love and urgency rather than polish.
We played “Jerry’s Song” that day. Bill Fenger and I wrote it decades earlier, when we believed life would always give us another verse, and hopeful lyrics came more easily. In the novel, the song marks the era of youth and myth-making, the time when we tried to turn confusion into meaning. But playing it again in 2021, believing Chris had six months to live, the song shifted. It was not nostalgia or reenactment. It was our ritual. A reminder of the promises we made when we were young and the cost of trying to keep them. Chris passed away in 2025.
That day in North Boulder shows what Zuvuya is really about. The loop between myth and memory. The distance between who we were and who we still hope to be. The novel captures the turbulence, the transcendence, the self-deception, and the brotherhood of those early years. But in the heat of that afternoon, with Travis stepping in at the last second and Chris playing like time was something you could negotiate, the truth was plain to see. The story did not end. It simply grew older.
When I began writing Zuvuya, I thought I was memorializing a past life. Watching this video now, I understand I was describing a current one. The ethos was never about bravado, psychedelia, or chasing transcendence. It was the simple act of showing up for each other when it mattered. It was the willingness to play the old songs, not because they are perfect, but because they still mean something.
That is what the book is for me. An attempt to honor the people who shaped me, the ones who survived and the ones who did not, and the fleeting moments when music made us believe the world could lift us out of ourselves. That gig in 2021 is the real-world echo of the novel’s central truth. We spend our lives trying to touch something eternal, even if all we manage to hold is each other.
Jerry’s Song
Lyrics by Bill “Kind Bill” Fenger and Trevor Clendenin
Smiling words of wisdom make a simple man’s life
At day’s end, all that’s left is to dance through the night
Sharing our dreams and flying high
That’s what gets me through this life
Ain’t got nothin’ but time,
A quarter tank of gas, and a fat sack of grass
And I’ll break my bread
Down by the riverside
I will go out into the world
I will not be afraid of the girls
I will experiment with my mind
I’ll try some Copenhagen by the riverside
Written by : Trevor A. Clendenin
Trevor A. Clendenin is an African-American writer and lifelong musician whose work blends lived experience with a clear-eyed, literary sensibility. Raised in a military family and shaped by years spent in Boulder, St. Croix, and on the road, he’s moved through the worlds of jam bands, digital media, and small-town creative communities with the same curiosity that drives his fiction. His debut novel, Zuvuya, draws on decades spent in America’s improvisational music orbit, where transcendence, failure, ambition, and myth often collide.
Before turning to creative writing, Trevor earned a BA in Philosophy from Rollins College, a Master in Visual Media from IE in Madrid, served in the Peace Corps in Jamaica, worked as the Director of New Media for a PBS affiliate in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and later co-founded a digital marketing agency. He has played guitar in bars, basements, festivals, and renegade fireside jams across the country, and still believes that music communities are one of the last places where people strive for truth.
He lives in Savannah, Georgia, with his wife and daughter, and is at work on new fiction and essays about aspiration, identity, and the strange pilgrimage of American life.
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