country-music

Nashville has always been competitive. My granddaddy called it the Hillbilly Babylon.

Country music was the most segregated kind of music in America, where even whites played jazz and even blacks sang in the opera. Something like country music was what lynch mobs must have enjoyed while stringing up their black victims. Country music was not necessarily lynching music, but no other music could be imagined as lynching__ accompaniment. Beethoven__ Ninth was the opus for Nazis, concentration camp commanders, and possibly President Truman as he contemplated atomizing Hiroshima, classical music the refined score for the high-minded extermination of brutish hordes. Country music was set to the more humble beat of the red-blooded, bloodthirsty American heartland.

They only want to be there while you__e on top, and when you haven__ gotten a gig in a while and you don__ know how you__e going to pay your rent at the end of the month and the glamor they thought they signed up for is gone, they__e walking out the door, leaving you to pick up the pieces.

Sometimes I am two people. Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble. They fight.

If you talk bad about country music, it's like saying bad things about my momma. Them's fightin' words

I continued toward Atlanta with a Merle Haggard C.D. playing on the stereo. They weren't great hosts, but those guys in The Ted Kaczynski Fan Club had great taste in music. It was all classic country music- none of that sissy, boy-band country that they played on the radio all the time. I drove down the road while Merle preferred to just stay where he was and drink.

Funny how a melody sounds like a memory.

Cause I am strong and I can prove itAnd I got my dreams to see me throughIt's just a mountain, I can move itAnd with faith enough there's nothing I can't doAnd I can see the light of a clear blue morningAnd I can see the light of brand new dayI can see the light of a clear blue morningAnd everything's gonna be all rightIt's gonna be okay [lyrics from "Light of a Clear Blue Morning"]

And we'll let the world dance around us while you lie here in my arms. The beat of your heart is all the music I need to hear. I spent my whole life searching for this melody, so I'll listen while I hold you near.

Okay... well... learning the two-step is like learning to ride a bull. It ain't easy. You gotta feel the bull's rhythm and move with it. Let the bull lead you. Alright... put your weight on your left foot." I do as he says, knowing without him needing to further illustrate, that I'm the bull rider and he's the bull.

Apparently, I'm a sucker for a man with belt buckles the size of Texas.

Because I seeA rainstorm in JuneJust before the sunThe black of nightJust before the starsAnd, girl, I see your ghostJust before our dawn