One summer afternoon in 2017, I pulled into Long Prairie (pop. 3500) in the central part of Minnesota, having spent the previous hours driving up there from my own small Minnesota town some distance farther to the south and west. I was to speak at an area conference, devoted to a shared non-musical interest, that a local woman had put together.

After registering at a motel, I drove downtown in search of a meal. Somewhat unexpectedly, I spotted a Chinese restaurant, a rare sight in a municipality of Long Prairie's size even today. A Chinese-American family ran the establishment. The food was decent. This was all a pleasant surprise. As I was leaving, however, something like an unpleasant non-surprise awaited me: a jolt of good old-fashioned American bigotry.

Not, however, directed against the owners of the restaurant, at least explicitly. The building next door housed a bar apparently under the management of the local Lester Maddox. (Look up that name if you don't recognize it.) The bar housed a front window on which was taped a sign covered with a paragraph's worth of complaint, concerning a border over which some undesirable people were said to be crossing. This made the writer, presumably also the owner, unhappy. Head-exploding unhappy. Those border-crossers were not welcome, apparently, even to spend money to help keep his business afloat. This struck me as remarkably, um, short-sighted (OK, stupid), but that wasn't the first thought to race through my rattled, but not mischief-deficient, brain. The colloquial phrase "chain-yanking" leaped to mind. What if I entered the bar and commiserated with the guy about all the problems Canadians cause when they trespass south of the border?

Persons as sourly disposed as this guy are not celebrated for their rich sense of humor, and it's never a good idea to set them off. And soon enough it would come out that we had not voted for the same presidential candidate in the previous election, which would only inflame him more. So I did not probe further. But I did take a stroll around the downtown. A noticeable part of it seemed to consist, so I inferred from scattered clues, of enterprises put in place by those incoming residents whom Long Prairie Lester held in opprobrium -- the darker-shaded folks, in other words, who were doing their share to ensure that the city had a downtown.

I mention this episode because ever since it has defined what I think of when I see or hear "Long Prairie," which is an America declining into self-destructive hatreds and nativist resentments. The unlovely sentiments that have stuck in memory are, of course, hardly confined to an encounter in a single town. I've heard similarly tiresome obsessions where I live, too, though frankly I find it hard to imagine that our local drinking establishment would follow this sorry example, whether out of financial self-protection, simple courtesy, or better stuff to do.

As it happens -- and, given the town's obscurity, how could it happen any other way? -- the Texas singer-songwriter known only as Long Prairie grew up not far from said location. Rural Minnesota is mentioned in at least a couple of her songs on By Sunrise, set inside the familiar country and folk realm that has dominated a strain of the Lone Star State school since the early 1970s and given birth to the likes of Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt and their many acolytes. Maybe if this woman had been visiting Long Prairie when I was, we -- I am a retired co-composer of material recorded by some prominent artists -- could have made up a song about Long Prairie Lester. There is, by the way, a wholly separate town in Minnesota named, for some reason, Lester Prairie.