Country Music

A comment from Blogger Pam reminded me that I wrote this last year for our newspaper.

The Picture is of my sister and You Know Who.


I watched the Country Music Award Show Sunday night. I always look forward to the CMA’s because I listen to country music and the show is always entertaining. At one time, to my knowledge, there were only two categories of music that gave out awards during long glitzy award shows. They were Country and Rock and Roll.
Rock and Roll meant the kind of music my daddy hated, (He called it African music. I drove him crazy one summer playing Be Bop-a-Lula over and over.) Country meant twangy, yee-haw songs about making moonshine and having chickens in the yard. I never listened to it when I was young.
However, now it seems that Country has become rock and roll. When did this happen?
They just put the word “ain’t,” in the song, place a cowboy hat on someone in the band, and call the violin a fiddle. Abracadabra, we’ve gone country!

If you don’t believe me check out some of the hair-dos on the performers. There was a Mohawk on a guy in Miranda Lambert’s band! Buck Owens must be spinning in his grave. Also check out a band called “Big and Rich.” I rest my case. (Didn’t they have a superfluous dancing midget in their band at one time?)

I’m not even sure the genre called rock and roll still exists. If it does, it is now divided into sub categories, such as head-banging heavy metal, pop, rap, and alternative. It makes no difference what the words say because they are often indistinguishable.
On the other hand, country music’s words matter.

Oh, do they matter!

I think the songwriters come up with a clever phrase and then write a song around it.
I can just see it now. A bunch of good old boys are sitting around drinking beer and a pretty girl walks by and one of the boys says, “Woo-ee! I’d sure like to check her for ticks!” Then one of them whips out his Scholastic Rhyming Book and looks up all the words that rhyme with ticks and a song is born.

What I can’t really figure out is what sort of woman would fall for this particular type of sweet talk?
Never the less, I feel certain that there is not a country song that has ever been written without beer being involved.

Buckets of beer.

How else could someone think up lines such as;
“She’s got a drinking problem and it’s me.”
And
“I sobered up and I got to thinking, you ain’t much fun since I quit drinking.”

One award night a few years ago, I tuned in a bit late, but just in time to hear someone singing the last line of a song,
“I met God’s will on Saturday night. He was dressed as a bag of leaves.”

What?

I decided I had better listen for some more entertaining lines. Here are some that I heard;
“He put the bottle to his head and pulled the trigger.”
“When I said ‘I Do,’ I did, but I don’t any more.”
“When she sees a deer she sees Bambi, and I see antlers on the wall.”
If I was Jesus, I’d walk on water just to mess with your head. (The song is just full of things this guy would do if he were Jesus.)
“I broke your heart in our double wide paradise.”
“It ain’t cheatin’ if you don’t get caught.”
“I’m gonna hire a wino to decorate our home.”
“Call it what you want to. I call it quits.”

A country song will now and then make me laugh out loud.
Take that one about a guy who is an overweight nerd with asthma, who still lives with his mama, with a My Space page that says he’s a tall, handsome, studly lady-killer.

Or that one about all the wonderful things alcohol can do including helping white people dance better.

I like the song about the girl committing several felonies involving a knife and a baseball bat and a guy’s fancy truck. Too bad there isn’t a final verse about what it’s like being a sweet young thing locked up in a jail cell with a big old gal named Bertha Faye Jones.
But just when you think country lyrics are classifiable along comes a song that says,

“I read you once in a Faulkner novel,
Met you once in a Williams play.”

Practically Shakespeare!