Cherrylog Road

When Dickey read “Cherrylog Road” at poetry readings, he would often introduce the poem at length, saying that it was entirely autobiographical, although there are many reasons to doubt this. A recording of one such reading has survived from around 1980 and is available on YouTube. In his amusing talk, Dickey describes “Cherrylog Road” as a “love poem,” his variation on the Romeo and Juliet theme. According to his telling, there really was a Cherrylog Road in a town called Crabapple in North Georgia, where he attended high school and met a girl named Doris Holbrook. She was a cheerleader who had the locker next to his, and they became friends. Her father, however, exercised a stern control over the girl and also took a dislike to Dickey, in part because, Dickey supposed, he did not like Dickey’s noisy red Harley Davidson motorcycle. Dickey was scared of Doris’s father, since it was rumored that he had killed several people. The young couple found a way around the father’s restrictions, however, by meeting in a nearby junkyard. This was in the early days of stock car racing (it must have been in the late 1930s) and there were many discarded stock cars in the junkyard.