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.

This year is an anniversary of sorts: twenty years since I first heard Steve Earle’s breakthrough CD, GUITAR TOWN. It was released in l986, but I didn’t hear it until a year later, when my younger sister began playing the tape in her car.

Much has been made in the thirty-odd years since his death of how Gram Parsons was the father of a curious hybrid called country rock. I have to say that I agree with a critic who once referred to Parsons as "a very sincere kid with a great record collection." True, Parsons knew and loved traditional country music, and he hung out with such legendary rockers as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, but to my ears Gram never quite succeeded in melding the two styles. Possibly because his talent fell short of his ambition, and possibly because his drug and alcohol abuse short-circuited such talent as he did possess, Parsons’s country rock experiment remains to me an interesting but incoherent failure. Miss Emmylou and I will never agree about his accomplishments.

Steve Earle got to where Gram Parsons wanted to go. He managed to invest the traditional themes of country music with the hard beat and unsentimental edge of rock in a series of bravura performances that began with GUITAR TOWN. I remember being transfixed that first time I heard the lines from the title track, "everybody told me you can’t get far /on thirty-seven dollars and a Jap guitar." By the end of the song I was singing along enthusiastically, and my enthusiasm only grew over his next few CDs: EXIT O, COPPERHEAD ROAD, and the most hard-rocking of all his early work, THE HARD WAY.

Then, like Hank Williams Sr. and Gram Parsons before him, Steve Earle slammed into a wall. His wall was heroin addiction. Unlike Ol’ Hank and Gram, Earle survived, but only after a five-year hell that ended in a prison sentence. When he came out, his career momentum was gone. He formed his own recording company and began recording again, but he has never quite recaptured—at least to my ear—the energy, passion and edginess of those early recordings.

He still has my vote, though, for giving us such great songs as "Angry Young Man" and "The Rain Came Down" from EXIT O, the title track and the Irish-influenced "Johnny Come Lately" from COPPERHEAD ROAD, "Esmeralda" and "Justice in Ontario" from THE HARD WAY, and a whole slew of great ones from GUITAR TOWN. My favorite from that CD is a jaunty joyous celebration of how hillbillies, who "didn’t have much, just a beatup truck and a dream about a better life" hit "that ol’ hillbilly highway" and wound up all over the country—generation after generation..

Thanks, Earle, And for the rest of y’all, till next time, fair thee well.

Unless we were born to monsters, we all have a mushy spot for our moms, and I'm no exception. I somehow got the luck of the draw. My mom wasn't so lucky. She was born to a mentally unstable, violently abusive mother and a gentle, loving but passive father.

Worse yet, Mom was abused in her marriage. My paternal grandmother, who lived with us for seven agonizing years before her death, was also mentally unstable. The one legacy she left to her only son, my father, was that same instability. It was horrific to watch my sweet, compassionate mother endure thirty-two years with a man who was by turns stingy, jealous, sarcastic, belittling; a jailer rather than a companion; a rapist rather than a lover; a man whom her own family actively discouraged her from leaving to his own devices for fear of what people would think. He gave her nothing in the end but three children who adore her and a barely adequate pension.

For the past ten years my mother has suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, and over the last four, COPD. Her hands are crooked at angles no hands should make; her knees and ankles will scarcely support her. She is tethered to an oxygen concentrator, or, when she must go out, to supplemental tanks, 24/7/365. In humid weather, her joints and breathing are both affected.

Yet I'm in awe of her, for inside that round crippled little body is a heart the size of the Rock of Gibraltar and a soul whose faith in its Maker is the pure faith of a child. She watches her grandchildren, all of whom are beautiful, bright, engaging and loving, grow; she laughs at the cat's antics; she shakes her head over the follies of the world at large, and she says that these are the happiest days of her life--the most infuriating, heartbreaking words I ever have heard.

In classic country, Mama has long been a standard theme. Mama songs are always nauseatingly sentimental, and my unsentimental mom loathes them. But there's one, written by Betty Sue Perry and recorded by the Wilburn Brothers, that encapsulates all I want to say about Mom in its chorus:

If there's medals for mothers,
For all of the deeds they have done,
If there's medals for mothers,
Mama, you'll win every one.

Happy Mother's Day.

Hey guys, Fairweather back from the far horizons. It was NOT pretty out there. I couldn't watch the GOP debate; I had my butt on the commode and my head in the trashcan, and that is all I got to say about that. Willard, meanwhile, got soaked while out caring for some of her relatives, and for her pains got fever, chills and a sinus infection, proof of the axiom that no good deed goes unpunished.

Anyway I got to thinking about trucking songs while I was hors de combat. I guess you could stretch a point and say my papaw on Mom's side was a trucker. Back in the l950s he hauled feed and fertilizer on a flatbed for a local general store, usually from Knoxville but sometimes from Georgia.

Not until the l960s, though, did semis begin to take serious freight business from the railroads. It was also in that decade that country music added trucks to the standard themes of Mama, trains, prison, lost love, drinkin' and cheatin'.

"Six Days on the Road," recorded by Dave Dudley, has a claim to be the granddaddy of all truckin' songs. Trucking also spawned a mercifully brief crop of songs celebrating the CB radio, immortalized by C.W. McCall--yeah, the guy to whom I'm grateful for the name Fairweather Lewis--in "Convoy."

(Willard, on the other hand, is less grateful to McCall for the name Willard Clark. She wants to change it to the more euphonious Willow.)

As a major theme, trucking songs had peaked by about l980, as air freight became more common and the neo-traditional movement returned to the old standbys, lost love, drinkin' and cheatin'. Here are five of my favorite trucking songs, in reverse order:

"East Bound and Down (Theme from SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT)," recorded by Jerry Reed. I like this one because in one line of the chorus it sums up life as a trucker: "we got a long way to go and a short time to get there."

"Give Me Forty Acres" recorded by the Willis Brothers. Oklahomans Guy, Skeeter and Vic Willis were never major country stars, but they were great musicians (especially accordionist Vic), sang brilliant harmony and gave us this cockeyed charmer about a trucker who's lost and yelling "give me forty acres and I'll turn this rig around." I've never known a trucker to get lost or to need forty acres to turn around in, either, but that's just me.

"Girl on the Billboard" recorded by the late great Del Reeves. Early truckin' songs emphasized that truckers were always in a hurry to get back to the little honeys waiting at home, but not this one. It's about a trucker who's obsessed with "the girl wearin' nothin' but a smile and a towel in the picture on the billboard in the field near the big ol' highway." He winds ups heartbroken when the picture is painted over. For trivia buffs, the song says the billboard is located near the legendary Route 66.

"Phantom 309" recorded by Red Sovine. I love a good ghost story, and this one's a goody. It's not really a song; it's a recitation with backing music, a form at which Red Sovine, a weak singer, excelled. Big Joe swung offroad to avoid hitting a schoolbus full of kids; he died in the crash and his beloved truck was destroyed. Ten years later, Big Joe's still picking up hitchhikers and dropping them off at a roadside diner. He always gives them a dime for coffee (this ain't no Starbucks!) and the owner always tells them the story, then lets them keep the dime as a souvenir of Big Joe and the Phantom 309.

"The Diesel and the UFO" recorded by Brush Arbor. An obscure group from the l970s, Brush Arbor recorded this oddity in the midst of the great UFO flaps of that decade. The trucker's zooming along an otherwise deserted highway when he spots a UFO hovering nearby. The UFO's pilot is the proverbial little green man, and the trucker intuits that the little dude wants to race. AND THEY'RE OFF! Hey, of course the trucker wins. It's a truckin' song after all.

As the slang was for CBers back then--at least on the records--keep the pedal to the metal and the hammer down. Till next time, fair thee well.