Sunday, September 4, 2016

A note on barbershop music

Eric Loomis has a post at Lawyers Guns and Money mostly bout country music.  In the course of it, he writes:
None of this is to say that modern country radio-friendly country music is good, or at least I don’t think most of it is. I was getting my hair cut this week and country radio was on. One song was literally a namecheck list of all the nostalgic points of the genre (pickup trucks, summer days, the lake, mom and dad, the dog, etc). It was utterly awful.
And I wondered if the song he heard was this Steve Good man song--"You Never Even Call Me By My Name"-- about which Wikipedia had this to say:

In a spoken epilogue preceding the song's iconic closing verse, Coe explains that "a friend of mine named Steve Goodman" wrote the song and considered it "the perfect country and western song". Coe, upon receiving the song, explained to Goodman that he was wrong; there was no way a song could be "the perfect country and western song" without mentioning a laundry list of clichés: “mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting drunk.” Goodman then proceeded to add the final verse, incorporating all five of Coe's facetious "requirements," whereupon Coe agreed that now it was "the perfect country-and-western song" and felt obliged to add it to the end of the record:
I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison
And I went to pick'er up in the rain
But before I could get to the station in my pickup truck
She got runned over by a damned ol' train

(Not that it's relevant, but I would have posted this as a comment at LGM, except that I can't seem to get registered there,)

2 comments:

  1. This isn't an awful song. It's a great song.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well, I agree with you. I think it's nicely done, and the final verse is a very nice tongue-in-cheek poke at truly bad songe.

    ReplyDelete