MOUNT AIRY, N.C. - Doug Reeves parked his station wagon at the meterless curb on Main Street, leaving it open and unlocked - you can do that here - and walked through the door of Floyd's Barber Shop.

There, like an old black and white television rerun come to life, the customers looked up, put down their magazines and joined in friendly banter: How's the family ... Good to see ya ... Yer lookin' well ... Thank you, kindly.

Back home after eight years in Nashville, Tenn., Reeves wasn't looking to get his well-moussed silvery mane touched up; nor was he looking for Floyd the barber - for he knows no Floyd exists.

Instead, he was checking on sales of his new CD, a collection of songs about Mayberry, the fictional North Carolina town in The Andy Griffith Show - modeled after Mount Airy, some maintain - where the pace was slow, the people friendly, and the problems, well, never so serious they couldn't be solved in 30 minutes.

As Reeves sees it, Americans, especially since Sept. 11, 2001, are aching for the simple and secure, wholesome and worry-free life that Mayberry epitomized.

So, taking a couple of songs from other writers and writing or co-writing eight more himself - songs like, "Ernest T., Don't Throw That Rock at Me," "It's Sunday (Aunt Bee), Fry That Chicken," and "One Bullet Man," an ode to Barney Fife - he assembled his first CD, Searching the Map for Mayberry.

It starts off with a narrative, backed by the mournful strains of a dobro: "In today's world, more so than ever before, people are searching for a Mayberry," Reeves says. "Is Mayberry a fictitious town? Well I don't think so, because I'm from there."

Reeves released the CD, under his own label, a few weeks ago and commenced to marketing it - taking it to the local AM radio station and talking local merchants, like the owner of Floyd's, into selling it.

There, on a recent weekday, the barber who is not Floyd, shop owner Russell Hiatt, left a customer in mid-haircut to share small talk with Reeves, and report that sales were brisk: Three of the five copies Reeves had left had already sold. "Word's getting out," Hiatt told him.

Could Reeves - a country songwriter who has never sold a song; a local boy who worked as an equipment technician for Ronnie Milsap and as a backup musician for Dolly Parton's sister, Stella; a 50-year-old man who packed up his horse, Joe, and left Nashville this year after he and the "missus" had a falling out - have the beginnings of a hit on his hands?

He does, at least, in Mount Airy, the town of 8,500 that lays claim to being (and has increasingly marketed itself to tourists as) the inspiration for Mayberry.

Celebrating the past

While the creators and writers of the television show always insisted Mayberry was made up, the show's references to local establishments and nearby towns and the fact that Griffith grew up in Mount Airy - though he hasn't returned for a public appearance since 1957 - were evidence enough.

A push began in the late 1980s to make the most of the connection. Floyd's City Barber Shop, for instance, was just the City Barber Shop up until 1989, when the town started its annual Mayberry Days festival.

"The arts council kept coming to me and trying to get me to change the name. They kept telling me, 'You know this is Floyd's,'" said Hiatt, who has been cutting hair there for 56 years. He said he was still considering the name change when he went to dinner one day, and returned to find a "Floyd's" sign on his barbershop.

Whether art had originally imitated life in Mount Airy, life in Mount Airy began imitating Mayberry. Local businesses mentioned in the show, like Snappy Lunch, touted the link. The Mayberry Days festival was launched. The Mount Airy Motor Inn became the Mayberry Motor Inn. And Griffith's childhood home, long just another house, became the Andy Griffith Homeplace, a bed and breakfast (though, for the breakfast part, you are sent to Snappy Lunch).

Which is where Reeves, touring around town on a lazy Monday afternoon, opts to go for "dinner."

"Down here we eat breakfast, then dinner, then supper," he explains, ordering Snappy's Famous Pork Chop sandwich - a huge battered and deep-fried pork chop served on a bun with dressing, chili, tomatoes and cole slaw. Andy Griffith is pictured on one side of the menu, saying, "Mmm ... m Good;" TV son Opie is on the other, saying, "Sure is, Pa!"

Whether Reeves is gaining local attention was hard to tell. A steady stream of well-wishers approached while he ate, but he says that's normal here.

Reeves and his band, the Carolina Eagles, performed recently at the Mayberry Days festival - at, where else, the Andy Griffith Playhouse. The weekend also featured appearances by Andy Griffith Show supporting cast members Betty Lynn (Thelma Lou), Howard Morris (Ernest T. Bass) and Maggie Peterson Mancuso (Charlene Darling).

But not Griffith. His much anticipated return will be Oct. 16, when a 10-mile stretch of state Highway 52, from Mount Airy north to the Virginia line, is renamed "Andy Griffith Parkway."

Reeves hasn't found that kind of fame. On the other hand, unlike Griffith, who now lives in Manteo, in eastern North Carolina, Reeves did move back.

"I love this area. I can't think of anywhere I'd rather be," says Reeves, adding that he returned after splitting up with a Nashville attorney he had lived with for seven years. "When your head's out of kilter, where else you gonna go but home?"

For now, Reeves is working at Zeke's Music Shop in nearby Dobson. It is down the road from Mount Airy, over the Chang and Eng Bunker Memorial Bridge, named after the famed Siamese twins, who, never separated, made their home, got married to two sisters and, between them, had 22 children here.

At the Mount Airy Visitor Center, where Reeves stops for a quick look, there is one room dedicated to Mount Airy's history, one to Chang and Eng and three to Andy Griffith, who played Mayberry's kindly sheriff, Andy Taylor.

When Reeves tells the receptionist the name of his CD, Searching the Map for Mayberry, she responds the same way she does to dozens of visitors and callers each day: "Well, you won't find it, but this is as close to it as you will find."

Noteworthy experience

Reeves, who grew up watching the program - it originally aired from 1960 to 1968 - describes his own youth as, all in all, Mayberryesque.

His father, who picked some guitar at barn dances, was a tobacco farmer who later drove a Greyhound bus. His mother played the piano at church.

"My mother was a lot like Aunt Bee," he says, referring to the show's matronly aunt. "She had the cotton dresses, the little sing to her voice, and no matter who came to the house, stranger or not, they always had to come in and sit at the table and get something to eat."

Reeves harvested tobacco to make money to buy his first guitar, and worked a variety of jobs before heading to Nashville to learn how to write songs.

While Reeves sings all the songs on the album, the title track was written by Los Angeles songwriter Phil Swan. Reeves heard about the song from a friend, who had recorded it on a demo tape.

"He told me I should have written that song, and I said, 'You're right, I wished I had.' "

In the song, a wife comes downstairs to find her husband crying and looking at maps. He explains that he's trying to find that place:

Where Andy and Opie go fishin'

Whistlin' down that old dirt road

Where Aunt Bee's busy in the kitchen

Supper's cookin' on the stove

Where Main Street still is safe to stroll

For another song, Reeves turned to his aunt, Margaret Barker.

"She's 80 years old, and while I was in Nashville every month she'd write me a note about the goings-on at home. She just had a real cute way of writing. Aunt Margaret, I says, you're such a good writer, I want you to do something for me. Write me a poem."

The result was "Growing Up On The Farm," the chorus of which goes like this:

We grew tobacco

And the work was hard

At night we were hungry

And very tired

Tobacco was made

With a mule and plow

We had six chickens

And one old milk cow

Most of the rest were penned by Reeves, or Reeves and his brother, Tom, a commercial airline pilot, including:

It's Sunday, Aunt Bee, fry that chicken

You know it will be finger lickin'

We'll be on the front porch pickin'

It's Sunday, Aunt Bee, fry that chicken

While Reeves was able to make a living in Nashville, as a technician and by playing in studio bands (bass, guitar and drums), none of the songs he wrote were sold or recorded.

"It got a little bit like beating your head on a wall, and not knowing which was gonna break first, the wall or your head," he said.

Reeves said the Mayberry songs flowed right out of him. "I wrote most of them on the seat of my pickup truck. I'd just get a pad and pen and start driving and making notes on the paper. ... I've never written songs that fell out of the pen so easily."

Money's on Mayberry

Marketing the CD, on the other hand, is new ground for Reeves - though he does have some ideas. He is thinking, for instance, about having his band dress up as Mayberry characters ("I could be Andy, and my brother looks a whole lot like Gomer Pyle") and seeking gigs before fans at Mayberry revivals that are held around the country.

"A major label picking it up, that's my greatest expectation," he said. "But that doesn't really matter because this was really more a labor of love than anything else. When people come up and say they listened to it and they laughed out loud, well, that's what I want. The way things have been since 9/11, people need that in their lives."

He's not alone in thinking Mayberry might be the stuff that music, or at least country music, is made of. Rascal Flatts, a country music group, also has a song called "Mayberry" on its new CD.

If profiting off a place as pure as Mayberry seems crass, you might want to get over it, as they already have at the Mayberry Five and Dime, Snappy's, Floyd's, Wally's Filling Station and Mayberrygifts.com, where, if you act now, you can purchase a throw emblazoned with Deputy Barney Fife's likeness for $45.

If not, well, you can just sing the "Mayberry Blues," which, of course, Reeves does:

Things were going so good

Til her boyfriend walked in

I lost my Thelma Lou

I got the Mayberry blues