Hey guys--down here in the Volunteer State it's still hot, sticky, and not enough rain to raise the creek to normal levels. I've been playing and singing Billy Joe Duncan's "Give Us Rain"--recorded on Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder's 1999 CD ANCIENT TONES--a lot lately. It starts out about a grandfather praying for rain on his cotton fields, then talks about other kinds of drought--spiritual, emotional. It's a gorgeous piece.

Other than that, life goes on. Willard's still cleaning houses, Bubba's getting ready to go to college (mine and Willard's alma mater--we're so thrilled), Miss A is writing about crop circles and hunting a prom dress (she'll probably be the first punk ever to attend a local prom, and more power to her) and the Princess has been singing Merle Haggard songs and then pretending she's not--like she could fool Aunt Fairweather.

Other than that I've spent a very little time wondering about Tucker Carlson's intelligence. I've watched him as far back as the CNN days, and even that strange interlude at PBS, where his major achievement was an excellent interview with Phil Lesh of The Grateful Dead. I even voted for him on DANCING WITH THE STARS because as I've said before southerners are suckers for lost causes. But of late he's been so far over the top that I'd call him the male counterpart of Ann Coulter--I hesitate to say male though because last I heard Coulter was having a gender identity crisis.

His latest is about Democrats/liberals refusing to use the term Islamic terrorists. Okay, I realize that his take is that all Muslims are terrorists, but he can't seem to grasp the corollary, that not all terrorists are Muslims. Last time I checked, the badass Tamil Tigers were atheists, and the Chechens, who are Muslim in the main, identify themselves by their ethnicity, as do the Basques. And God only knows what our most infamous homegrown one--the late Timothy McVeigh-was.

Have to wonder if Tucker is really as big a bigoted jerk as he seems, or if that's a persona he puts on and takes off the way he does those ill-matched shirts and ties he wears. Not anything I expect I'll ever get an answer to, but I wonder.

Nuff said--and Lord, we sure could use a little rain. Till next time, fair thee well.

Some might say you don't have to be drunk to read this blog, but it helps. Me, I sing the songs and occasionally signal myself for another round of CF diet Pepsi.

Anyway, in reverse order, top five second tier great drinking songs:

"Drivin' Nails in My Coffin" recorded by Ernest Tubb. Uptempo for an ET song, closer to western swing than country, another that spans lost love and drinking; he "started drinkin' for pastime" to forget a departed lover and can't stop.

"No Reason to Quit" recorded by Merle Haggard. A real downer, similar in theme to Jim Reeves's "Bottle, Take Effect," this one's about a guy who defiantly says "I could sober up tomorrow" (yep, the "I can quit anytime" excuse)". . .but I've got no reason to quit." Basically a note on an extended suicide.

"This Drinkin' Will Kill Me" recorded by Dwight Yoakam. A gem from Yoakam's 1987 CD, HILLBILLY DELUXE, this one's actually bluegrass played on country instruments. As usual, there's a woman to blame, and, given the choice between death by broken heart or by the bottle, he's drinking to speed up the process.

"She's Lookin' Better by the Minute" recorded by the Wilburn Brothers. Thematically similar to Mickey Gilley's "Don't the Girls All Get Prettier at Closin' Time," this one's earlier, cheekier, sexist, ageist, and roll in the floor funny. A guy in a bar is checking out a woman: "She's not much to look at/A little old and a little fat" but he allows that she looks better as he gets drunker. By the end of the song "she looks like a movie star" and he decides he'd "better pick her up before I start to sober up." Teddy's irrepressibly droll solo cracks me up. (Willard points out that, by the next AM, this will turn out to be Mel Tillis's "What Did I Promise Her Last Night," but that's a whole nother blog.)

"There Stands the Glass" recorded by Webb Pierce. . .and Billy Walker. . .and ad infinitum. Same theme as "Pop a Top" except this guy's not getting off his barstool. Sung half to the bartender and half to a woman who's not coming back, it's a drinking song par excellence, perfectly suited to Pierce's nasal tenor.

And I STILL didn't get to "Stomp Them Grapes" and "Little Ol' Wine Drinker Me" and "Jose Cuervo" and. . .Ah well. Maybe sometime when I'm feeling low again--the blues, as Ol' Hank sapiently observed, come around. Till next time, fair thee well.

Yes, I’ve been following the media outcry over Secretary Chertoff’s "gut feeling" that we could be facing a terrorist attack in American soil in the near future up to and including Keith Olbermann’s special comment about same.
I was temporarily distracted when KO showed off his expensive education by quoting Shakespeare—wow! Culture with a side order of flatulence!-- but once I recovered, my Scots -Irish blood boiled.
Given that comment on that special comment was disabled (temporarily they said) at The Newshole Countdowns message board, I have a gut feeling that KO has been savaged by irate mothers, soldiers, firefighters, police officers, long distance truckers, coal miners, students of the paranormal, and fans of the late Winston Churchill, whose massive gut saved his life more than once. I’m not in any of these categories but I’m peeved nonetheless.
I might be able to defend Olbermann’s argument had he stopped once he made what was apparently his point: that there was a curious coincidence between Chertoff’s gut feeling and the latest clumsy attempts of the Bush administration to use fear as a means of convincing an increasingly exasperated and fractious American public that there is a legitimate front of the war on terror in the quicksand of Iraq. Unfortunately, Olbermann didn’t stop there. After a mischievous litany of euphemisms suggestions that the best cure for Chertoff’s grumbling gut would be a colonic irrigation, he went out of his way toinsult anyone who’s ever been unenlightened enough to follow a hunch.
Guess that includes me (and Willard adds herself too). I will not bore you with a recital of my presentiments but I have had my share and many have played out to the bitter end. A cranky colon will never restore the administrations credibility unless it provides specifics, like names, dates, places, I.Q. scores and shoe sizes and the timing of its revelation is sadly political but while I reject the present application, would never the phenomenon itself. I know first hand it works.
Oh well, Olbermann is a supercilious sophisticate with a cable "views" show, and I’m a dumb hillbilly with a blog, but I can express my opinion of his opinion in a more meaningful way than merely blogging about it.
next time he decides to do his Don Rickles impression, I’ll switch channels. After all, in the words of the late Whitey Ford—the comedian known as the Duke of Paducah, not the baseball great—I was born in a barn, and every time I hear a jackass bray, I get homesick.
Till next time, fair the well.

I got the blues bad today. The time-sanctioned honky tonk solution, of course, is to go on a bender. Unfortunately I'm a Type 1 diabetic. Then there's my hillbilly gothic ancestry. Everybody on both sides of the family is either TT, a lush or a binge drinker. (True story: I had a cousin who passed out sitting on a barstool. He woke up hours later to the smell of gunpowder and blood on the bar. He got up and went home, and I don't think it ever truly registered with him that while he was away, so to speak, two men killed one another within a couple of feet of him. He eventually died so well-preserved they skipped the embalming process.)

Since I can't get a decent buzz from my tipple of choice--CF diet Pepsi today, with a tap water chaser--I guess I'll have to do it with music. Kindly (please?) refer to my previous blogs on drinking songs, and allow me to add ten more to the list.

In reverse order they are:

"Chug a Lug" recorded by Roger Miller. I think Eddy Arnold may also have recorded this cheerfully choppy little ditty about drinking moonshine, but Roger Miller did his own songs better than anyone. He was one of a whole generation of songwriters, including Mel Tillis and Willie Nelson, who used to drink together at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge in Nashville. I've often wondered if he got the inspiration for this song while they were all getting companionably paralytic.

"Sweet Honky Tonk Wine" recorded by Wayne Kemp. Kemp, a songwriter who never quite made it as a singer, struck gold with this one from around l970, about a guy whose woman leaves him, taking everything except "some of that sweet honky tonk wine." Which, of course, he drinks.

"Party Time" recorded by T.G. Shepherd. This one from around 1980 successfully spans both the lost love and drinking song categories. Loud honkin' guitar, thumping whorehouse piano. Great stuff.

"I Gotta Get Drunk" recorded by Willie Nelson. I love this one for nothing better than this sage observation: advised by his doctor to give up the booze, he opines, "there's more old drunks than there are old doctors, so I guess I better have another round."

"Set 'Em Up, Joe" recorded by Vern Gosdin, whom peers and fans alike call The Voice. Part drinking song, part lost love song, part tribute to Ernest Tubb (he instructs the bartender, "set 'em up Joe and play 'Walkin' the Floor'"), this one's a compulsive singalong--but only Vern Gosdin can hit the low note at the end.

Tune in next time when the world's orneriest Wurlitzer cranks out the top five, second tier. Till then, fair thee well.

I cannot claim credit for that title: it's a 1960s tearjerker written by Curly Putman, who gave us another six-hanky weeper in "He Stopped Lovin' Her Today" and an unanswerable conundrum in "The Green Green Grass of Home": why the hell is the guy being hanged?

"My Elusive Dreams," recorded first by David Houston, is about a fiddlefooted man and his long-suffering but loyal wife. Also recorded as a duet by George Jones and Tammy Wynette during their tumultuous marriage, and by Charlie Rich as a filler on a 1970s album, the song per se has no relevance to me; only its title does.

To explain that we've got to go back some twenty odd years, to the days when I was a pompous, humorless, self-important college sophomore of the worst sort. Oh, I had dreams then! I wanted to be a published poet by the age of thirty; I wanted to travel; I wanted a sexy, handsome, intellectual husband; and I wanted to write about country music.

Country music, despite the best efforts of historians, critics and performers, has always been considered the least sophisticated of mediums, literally the country bumpkin of the entertainment world. At the time I was majoring in communications, and my advisor was a wonderful man named Bill Gribben, who had worked in the media for many years. He was wise, witty, kind, self-deprecating and observant, and I miss him to this day. (He died near the end of my senior year.) I could tell Mr. Gribben literally anything, and when I confided that I wanted to write about country music, he had one dumbfounded reaction: "WHY?"

Didn't know; just knew I did.

In any case, my dreams proved elusive. My father had two strokes my senior year; they were for him the beginning of a nine-year spiral of declining health and increasing mental illness. I never left home; I worked to help Mom pay his medical expenses. My siblings both married; I stopped looking for Mr. Right when I realized I was only attracted to abusive men like my father. And the poetry went from a stream to a trickle to a dry creek bed.

Fast forward to the present: one of my elusive dreams has come true, probably in retrospect the one that was meant to be. I'm writing about country music. I'm doing it on a borrowed computer (thanks Willard), but I have people reading what I write, and for that I'm profoundly grateful. Guess I'm living proof that not all dreams are fleeting things.

Till next time, fair thee well.