The frightening Dennis Kucinich rendition of "Sixteen Tons" got me thinking about coal mining songs in general and about "Sixteen Tons" and "Dark as a Dungeon" in particular.

Merle Travis, who wrote both songs, is more highly regarded as a guitarist than as a singer and songwriter; he was a major influence on, among others, Chet Atkins. He wrote the songs on assignment; he had a contract with a song publisher that required him to write a set number of songs per week. A native of the Kentucky mining country, Travis saw close up abuses of miners and their families by mine owners. He invested the songs with enormous anger, but that anger is not noticeable in his recordings of them, both of which are relatively sedate.

Two other men, one a bandleader/arranger and the other a singer with a voice as deep as the mines, got hold of the songs and did dramatic arrangements of them that elevated both to classic status. The bandleader was Jack Fortunato; the singer was the legendary Tennessee Ernie Ford.

I don't know much about Jack Fortunato, other than that he was Ford's bandleader when Ford hosted his own network TV show. About Ford, I'm on a bit more solid ground. Born in Bristol, TN, in l9l9, Ol' Ern (who also called himself the Ol' Peapicker) inherited his wall-rattling bass from his father. Ford was an oddity in country music for another reason; he was one of a handful of country singers who had formal musical training.

The arrangements that Fortunato did of "Sixteen Tons" and "Dark as a Dungeon" are deceptively simple, consisting mostly of fingersnaps, snare drum and upright bass. "Dark as a Dungeon" also features minimal brass and a remarkably ominous clarinet fill. What brings them both to blazing life is the power of Ford's all-but-operatic cavernous voice. When Ern roared, at the end of "Sixteen Tons," "St. Peter, doncha call me cause I can't go/I owe my soul to the company store" you could almost hear St. Peter murmur "not today."

Ford used a different vocal technique to achieve a similar effect on "Dark as a Dungeon." By dropping his voice to its lowest possible note on "rain" in the lines "where the rain never falls and the sun never shines/it's dark as a dungeon way down in the mines" he made it feel like the bottom had literally dropped out of your gut.

Hey, just my opinion--and if you don't believe me, you can probably download the songs from somewhere. Check 'em out. Till next time, fair thee well.

Willard and I have been depressed over our lack of success at attracting new members for the Ornery as Hellfire Club. In a fit of desperation we decided we’d check in with our local psychic, Madame Sadie, to see if the spirits could give us any advice.
Mme. Sadie lives in a pink house that always smells of Clorox, talcum powder, and some faint perfume I can’t quite place. She was, I regret to report, not exactly on form. She ushered us into her parlor, where she sat for some moments grumbling over her crystal ball. "The crystal is dark," she complained.
Fortunately, Willard had just come from cleaning a house. She whipped out a swiffer cloth and briskly dusted the crystal ball, removing a layer of talcum powder. Unfortunately, some of it stirred around in the air, and we had a round robin of sneezes before Mme. Sadie announced the crystal was now clear.
She waved her hands over the crystal for a moment, then fixed a bloodshot eye on Willard. "Beware the dark-haired man, " she said impressively.
At the moment Willard is carrying on mild flirtations with three dark-haired men, so she asked brightly, "Which one?"
Mme. Sadie wailed, "AAH!" and spent a couple of minutes murmuring to herself. She was apparently channeling a spirit who may have been speaking in tongues. After a bit she roused up and intoned, "Harpo tells me you will get what you seek from a red-haired man."
That surprised us. Harpo Marx TALKS in the afterlife? He doesn’t whistle and beep his horn? Damn.
I asked Willard sotto voce, "Do we know a red-headed man?"
By now Mme. Sadie was showing signs of exhaustion, hinting broadly that the crystal was fading in and out and would be completely dark before long. We rose to go, but Mme. Sadie grabbed my arm. "There is a tall man sending me a message for you."
"Yeah? What’s the message?"
"He wants his turnstile token back, without restrictions." With that she sank back into her chair and began to snore.
I barked before I thought, "When hell freezes!" Mme. Sadie opened one eye and shut it again, and Willard hustled me out with a growl of "Down, girl."
(I should say that I refer to my –ahem—active fantasy life as a turnstile, and the tall man, who shall remain nameless, has had his turnstile token revoked because he keeps hurting my feelings over my beloved classic country. And no, he is not getting it back.)
On the way back to my house, Willard and I puzzled over the red-headed man. Eventually we decided that Mme. Sadie had been referring to our favorite goofball TV producer, Willie Geist of MSNBC. Willard was deputized on the spot to ask Mr. Geist for an endorsement for the Ornery Club—redheads make great Orneries—and, after she went home, I wrote up these notes for presentation at our next Ornery meeting. One last note: as we left Mme. Sadie’s we caught the unidentifiable perfume from her garbage can. It’s a mid-priced scent called Bud Lite.
Respectfully submitted by recording secretary Fairweather Lewis, and until next time, Fair thee well.

Hey guys, Fairweather here. Another musical anniversary this year: the release of U2's THE JOSHUA TREE. My brother is a pain in the ass to get Christmas presents for, but that year he told me something specific he wanted: a tape called THE JOSHUA TREE by an Irish rock band called U2. When I asked, pray tell, exactly why he'd suddenly abandoned fifties rockabilly for an Irish rock band, he said that they had a guitar player called The Edge who was really something. Coming from my ornery brother, that was high praise indeed.

Needless to say, I gave the tape a test run before I wrapped it and put it under the Christmas tree, and I was hooked from the get-go. I was actually more fascinated with the vocal gymnastics raspy-voiced lead singer Bono attempted--sometimes with more success than other times--than with Edge. A few years later, I found great comfort in one particular song on the album, "One Tree Hill," when I lost a workmate to AIDS. Bono had written the song for his Maori roadie, Greg Carroll, who died in a l986 motorcycle crash.

Time flies, and in the school year just past my niece Miss A had an assignment to write a column about l980s music for the school paper. Her dad and I, who actually lived through that generally embarassing musical decade, told her about the three biggest sellers of the 80s, all of them legendary even now: Michael Jackson's THRILLER, Bruce Springsteen's BORN IN THE U.S.A., and U2's THE JOSHUA TREE. We told her how The Boss's title song figured into the l984 presidential campaign, when both Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale mistook that incendiary song for a patriotic ditty, how the video of THRILLER influenced all videos made since, how U2 proved with that CD that they were brilliant rockers as well as social and political critics. We fondly expected she would do us proud by writing a brilliant piece about musical history.

A few weeks later, our fond hopes were dashed when she proudly showed us her newspaper column. She wrote that, in her estimation, the most significant event in l980s rock was the Metallica split that resulted in the formation of Megadeth.

Oh well. She comes of ornery stock. Remember our dead of all wars, particularly this one, on this Memorial Day weekend. Till next time, fair thee well.

Hey, guys, Fairweather again. At present here in the knobs we're in the midst of one of our late-spring cold snaps. We refer to them as winters, and they're usually linked to some specific event that has nothing to do with weather.

This particular winter is linked to the call of a funky little brown bird called a whippoorwill (Caprimulgus vociferus), a member of the nightjar family. They take their name from their call, which sounds exactly like the words "whip poor Will." They winter in the Deep South and northern Mexico, returning to their summer range around the first of May, and are mostly nocturnal. My sister, who leaves for work between six and six-thirty AM, is usually the first one in the family to report hearing them, in the dark just before dawn; I usually hear them in the evening, out a back window, right at black dark.

Their call has been described as lonesome, melancholy, wistful, spooky and just plain eerie. Myself, I certainly wouldn't call it spooky or eerie; my adjective of choice would be plaintive. That call has, however, inspired any number of country songwriters, most notably Hank Williams Sr., who mentions it in at least two of his songs.

The more famous reference is in the opening lines of "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry": "Hear that lonesome whippoorwill/He sounds too blue to fly." Those lines have a peculiar power; they got my niece, the metal maniac Miss A, into Ol' Hank's music.

My favorite whippoorwill reference comes from "Alone and Forsaken." It's sung in D minor--and hillbillies do love our minor keys--and comes at the end of a series of austere couplets in which images from nature mirror his loneliness: "The grass in the valley is starting to die/And out in the darkness the whippoorwills cry." That couplet does sort of spook me; Ol' Hank's voice is full of despair when he sings it.

As always, just my opinion, strange though it may be. Till next time, fair thee well.

Or, to be scrupulously fair, thy name is the COUNTDOWN crew.

Any of you who are regular viewers of COUNTDOWN know that this week KO and company ran an AMERICAN IDOL parody called DC IDOL. They put five Washington heavyweights up for a vote based on their--uh--musical abilities. General Powell's "YMCA" performance was just pitiful. Former AG Ashcroft's singing reminded me of Pat Boone, whom I do not admire; I cannot help but weigh Boone (and, by extension, Ashcroft) against his late father-in-law, the incomparable Red Foley. Karl Rove's sidesplitting and infamous turn as MC Rove at a DC press shindig was INN-teresting: Peter Lorre resurrected as a rapper. Bill Clinton does sing better than Hill, but that's not saying much.

And then there was the clip of Ohio congressman and Democratic presidential wannabe Dennis Kucinich, who in the midst of a speech about the working poor broke into an excruciating impromptu chorus of Merle Travis's immortal "Sixteen Tons."

The last thing I remember when that clip aired is rolling up in a ball, putting my hands over my ears, and howling, "MAKE IT STOP!"

Oh, yes. Yet another sideswipe at a great country song. I can only wonder how long it took those sadistic Noo Yawk bastards to dredge up that misshapen pearl of great price.

Here's the deal: I watch KO because A) he's kinda cute and kinda funny, and B) his competition in that 8 PM time slot--i.e., Paula Zahn, Nancy Grace, and Bill O'Reilly--ain't. I'm moronically loyal but I'm not masochistically loyal. Keep up the bad jokes and classic country gags and I'll move permanently to Willie's Place, where, to paraphrase Lord Peter Wimsey, nobody minds coarseness, but they draw the line at cruelty.

Till next time, fair thee well.