A homesick Tom Ross looked out his living room window at the Pacific Ocean. The words "just kind of flowed."

In about 15 minutes, Ross wrote "Albuquerque," one of 12 songs on his only album, called "Thirst."

"And I'm coming home, Albuquerque," the lyrics say.



On Friday, 41-year-old Ross comes home, this time for an exhibit that features his 1998 song and seven others celebrating the Duke City.

The Center for Southwest Research searched its archives and asked for suggestions for this portion of its tricentennial exhibit, which continues through mid-May.

IF YOU GO What: The Center for Southwest Research exhibit on Albuquerque's tricentennial. "When: 5-6 p.m. Friday, tour the exhibit with staff; 6 p.m., presentation on "Albuquerque: A Musical Overview." (The exhibit continues through mid-May.) "Where: The center's gallery in Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico campus "Information: 277-6451

Located in the center's gallery inside Zimmerman Library, the exhibit asks visitors to use two of the five senses.

They'll see 300 years of history as told through movie posters, newspaper clippings and the handwritten diary of 1850s-era businessman Franz Huning.

And they'll hear eight songs. They can't buy the CD; without paying royalties, the center has one-time use of the music for this exhibit. But the collection plays continuously - as in, over and over - from a portable CD player in the center of the gallery.

The songs have one thing in common: They're about Albuquerque.

They paint images ranging from the poetic (Eddie Gallegos crooning about "the land of romance, where gay se?oritas sing love songs and dance" in 1952) to the silly ("Weird Al" Yankovic's 1999 ballad about traveling to a place "where the sun is always shining and the air smells like warm root beer/And the towels are oh so fluffy").

On Friday, Enrique Lamadrid, director of UNM's Chicano Hispano Mexicano studies department, will tell the story of music in Albuquerque through the centuries.

"We have a reasonable idea of what people were singing and what instruments were being used (through time) and how music evolved," Lamadrid said.

Four hundred years ago, ballads imported from Europe and dating back to the 10th and 11th centuries would have been part of everyday life here. The subject matter: historic events and mythology.

Those evolved into corrido ballads, songs about interesting or significant events, performed at social gatherings such as dances, weddings or baptisms.

String instruments, here from the beginning, became popular by the 19th century, Lamadrid said. An Albuquerquean would have danced to the same waltzes and polkas that made the scene overseas.

A distinctive "Albuquerque sound" developed in the 1960s and 1970s, characterized by trumpets, saxophones and electric guitars and familiar to fans of local musician Al Hurricane.

"It was a big sound," Lamadrid said.

YOUR SONG What song about Albuquerque should be on your "to listen to" list? Here are two suggestions: "Riding Down the Trail to Albuquerque." It was the theme song to Dick Bills' local Saturday morning children's TV show, said Enrique Lamadrid, director of the Chicano Hispano Mexicano studies program at the University of New Mexico. "Everybody in Albuquerque who's over 50 will remember that song," Lamadrid said. Good luck finding it, though. "Albuquerque" by Tom Ross. "It's a very picturesque song. It invokes the feeling I have for the city - looking at the Sandia Mountains, the volcanoes, the thunderstorms, the beauty I see every day," said Katherine McCully, a UNM student and part-time librarian who helped compile the Center for Southwest Research's exhibit on Albuquerque's tricentennial.

Exhibit curator Nancy Brown Martinez said two of the eight songs came from the center's collection. Both ingeniously titled "Albuquerque," they're among the oldest in the collection. The Gallegos song is one. The other, from the John Donald Robb Collection, was recorded in 1964 in Spanish by Vicente Saucedo.

Katherine McCully, a UNM student and part-time librarian who compiled the collection, found inspiration from other sources.

"I worked at a truck stop in Moriarty before I was a librarian. I heard that song all the time," McCully said of "Lights of Albuquerque" from Jim Glaser's 1985 album.

But don't expect to hear Neil Young's "Albuquerque." "Too melancholy," McCully said.

While Ross recalled being homesick when he wrote "Albuquerque," McCully enjoyed its imagery of the city's lights snaking down the mountains.

Ross knows the lights well. He lived in Albuquerque from third grade through high school, where he learned to play the guitar.

After graduating from Manzano High School, he attended various colleges and then headed to Europe. In 1998, he was living in Los Angeles when he decided to produce an album to "get it out of my system."

He made a "couple of thousand" copies of "Thirst," most of which, he said, his father gave to family friends.

Today, he lives south of Denver and works in marketing for a radio group. He has another album "in my head," but he's also focusing on helping his 20-year-old musician son break into the business.

He's not sure what he'll do at Friday's event, but he's excited to come home.

"I guess I should practice the song," he said.