Last night before bed, I was looking at the guide on the TV and stumbled across ‘Johnny Cash’ followed by ‘Grand Ole Opry’. Hm. Might be fun to have a look. I watch Cash’s variety show when I was a kid. It turns out the ‘Johnny Cash’ show was an infomercial for Time-Life’s Golden Age of Country CDs. I watched it anyway.
I’m not a fan of Country music. As a child I listened to Top 40 rock, and as a teen I listened to the Hair/Arena bands before discovering Punk and New Wave. But I remember some of those old Country classics. After seeing (and working as an extra on) The Right Stuff, I started appreciating Patsy Cline. Of course Johnny Cash had always been cool. (Well, his protesty, non-gospel stuff anyway.) And it occurred to me that I actually liked many of the 1950s and 1960s Country songs they were playing on the commercial. (This was accentuated by my laughing at the ludicrous hair everyone had! )
I’ve always tended to think of Country music as a ‘My poor dog died and my pick-up broke down/My wife done left me for a new guy in town’ style of thing. Really dumb stuff. And it’s true that I’ve heard a lot of Country music (new, classic, and in the middle) in that vein, and I hate it. I have to admit though, that there are a lot of songs in that compilation that I wouldn’t mind listening to at all. (But I’m not going to spend $120 bucks on it. Anyone wanna buy me a day-late birthday present? )
Willie Nelson’s Crazy is one of the great songs of the second half of the 20th Century and Patsy Cline’s understated but passionate vocalization is classic in itself.
This, for me, too. I was born in 1960 in a part of upper Appalachia where we could get only one music station: WWVA Big Country.
Since then, I’ve lived in major cities around the country and in other countries. Obviously I’ve lived through “other periods…” Nonetheless, I created myself a Pandora Station (I suddenly find myself talking in dialect again) that plays “Old Classic Country.” It’s full of Jim Ed Brown, and Johnny and the Carter Family ,and Loretta Lynn, Ferlin Husky, Sammi Smith, Dolly, Dusty Springfield, etc., etc.
“Counting flowers on the wall, that don’t bother me at all…”
Playin’ solitaire till dawn
With a deck of fifty-one…
(One of the sad things about the computer age (I would say if I were the sort to bemoan this sort of thing) is that in modern America no one ever needs to be playing solitaire with less than fifty-two, or making do with a marked up two of clubs from another deck to take the place of a missing seven of diamonds…
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