New Country Song
If I could write a country song –
say all red, white and’ blue –
you know the stuff – ‘bout love and loss
and I been done wrong too,”
I’d bring my darling up on stage
and light up her bright gold hair
that she had doctored up for me,
in case I’d call her there,
where I’d be singing some old song
and save a verse for her
where she sings “I may cook your beans,
but that’s all you get, good sir.
Let’s slip on off to home instead,”
she whispers above the noise,
and so we do – as the sun comes up –
to life and to wild applause.
– Charles Brady
Will Rogers is supposed to have said, “God gave us all these senses but forgot to give us any sense.”
I was watching this TV Country Music Show not long ago that was about as Country as the Empire State Building. While I was staring at the Goodwill Straw hats, tight jeans and pink hair, I was reminded of what a kindly (aren’t they always kindly) old gentleman said to me. We had been watching an amateur hour type music program where the winner was to get a new Chevrolet. When a particular young lady in high boots, short, short skirt and plunging neckline type white shirt (and that obligatory straw hat) took the stage, the old gentleman turned to me and said, “If she has to get up there half naked, she can’t be too sure of her musical talent.”
Now, if he had not seen her and instead had heard her perform on radio, he may have judged her differently. But back in the day when musical acts were planned and re-hearsed to be carried live around to the people. and later to be broadcast from a radio studio, things were different.
Back when I was very young, and at the infrequent times when my family had an old car-battery radio and a high antenna, we would listen to the Grand Old Opry on Saturday nights. Lots of static, and lots of fading in and out, but we knew nothing better and we enjoyed it a lot.
Sitting around the fireplace trying without success to stay warm, I listened and admired the music, instruments and singing, and would imagine what the stage of the Ryman Auditorium looked like with all those people up there! I could picture each of the performers and groups. I liked Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys and Girls (I never knew what that “Great Speckled Bird” was about, but liked the song. ) the Carter Family, and just about everybody who came on stage.
As you might guess, when I finally got to see some of those good people at the Ryman (in the summer of 1955) the scene on stage did not exactly merge with the picture long held in my head! The church pews were hard, I had to go something awful, but I wouldn’t have budged for a million dollars.
I saw just about all the top dollar country music stars and bands you could find at the time. And that guy up there who came to the microphone every once in a while couldn’t sing a lick but he sure could sell flour and Purina Hog Chow? He was entertaining also.
And I wasn’t disappointed, by either radio or attending in person…..I liked both of the Grand Old Oprys – the one I saw that day on stage and the one I had created in my mind.
And that brings me to a point I’d like to make. The events in the poem up there at the top of this column was created in someone’s head and yet is, in a way, more real than real, .It never happened anywhere for real, just in one guys head, and he wrote it down. One can picture that imagined speaker in the poem and the scene in the bar where his love was watching and where he reached out his hand and welcomed her up there with him to share something.
And that something to me is good, but you can make up your own story.
It became something more real than real, and that is a plug for radio and the imagination!
Maybe I see this a little differently because I was raised in an era of no music anywhere, then the music over the air through the rare magic of radio, then seeing AND hearing at the same time.
All of this was fed to my folks of my era through radio. Listening to the old programs, I could see clearly Jack Benny’s dungeon where he allegedly had hidden every dollar ever earned. I could fully experience Dodge City and the shootouts. I could see Buck Rodgers on his way to Mars. Things imagined are often more real than real.
Now, back to the poem. Some questions:
How is the lady dressed? What was the title of the song he was singing and why wasn’t she up there at the beginning? How good was she at this singing business? What kind of bar was it? How noisy was the joint? How old were they and how long have they been at the business? Are they coming back tomorow?
Be sure to use that Imagination God gifted you.
Imagine
If you know but one thing true
and hold to it
like glue to paper dolls,
you may only be
one princess.
But, if a summer storm
summons cumulus
shaped like a swan,
and if your mind is open
to grace resting in water,
and though you know it is not
a swan,
because it spits rain sideways
and can funnel you away to Joplin
or southwest Oklahoma,
it will be,
for the while you imagine,
a swan.
– Charles Brady
