blues | Beans on the Grill

I was born in the Deep South. It’s so deep a fart will fly over your head. The Deep South is about five trillion miles closer to the sun, too. If you stand on the roof of the Walmart in Meridian, Mississippi, you can light your cigarette off it. This proximity to the sun makes it harder to think, too. That’s why Southerners speak slower than their Yankee neighbors. Words tend to melt before they get out of the mouth. Even the words that DO manage to survive end up like Velveeta in the microwave. Southerners usually speak their minds, too, because thoughts evaporate quicker than cotton candy in a fish tank. I could go on like this forever, but because I live in the Deep South, my attention span doesn’t make it past the medulla oblongata.

One of the consequences of the Southerner’s brain being deep fat fried is the existence of country music. Most of the stuff that’s labeled country music today isn’t. I’m not just stating my opinion. It’s a straight up fact. Let me give you an example: listen to “This Is How We Roll” by a group called the Florida Georgia Line. After you shower away all that Okefenokee swamp rock, sit back and let your soul feast on “Hello Darling” by Conway Twitty. The furthest real country music gets from it’s roots is “I’ve Got a Tiger By The Tail” by Buck Owens & His Buckaroos. Country music has drifted so far away from country music that it’s barely if at all recognizable. Kid Rock even fashions himself a country music artist. Listen to “Born Free” and tell me if it’s country or not. Now listen to the original “Born Free” as sung by Andy Williams, who, while not a country music artist, was a durn sight closer to one than some of today’s groups. The song doesn’t even sound as if it came from the same galaxy!

Believe or not (I would prefer you don’t believe me just so you can return later to apologize), I’m not here to disparage the state of country music today. That would require my writing a ten volume series. I can’t sit that long without my sciatica kicking in. I want to share with you this strange quirk in my creative nature. If you’ve followed my writing, you would know that I’ve wanted to be a writer as long as I can remember. I practiced the alphabet on the wall of my mother’s uterus. As soon as I was old enough to hold a pencil I wrote whatever came to mind. I quickly developed a fascination with rhyme, and among the reams of poetry I cranked out came a natural inclination for lyrics. It’s always been a fantasy of mine that a famous musician would someday put my words to music, and then soon the whole world would sing along, and I’d end up more well known than Burt Bacharach. I would be the embodiment of Barry Manilow‘s 1975 smash hit “I Write The Songs.” The only problem was and still that even though I don’t really care for country music (I’m a classic rock kinda guy), it’s the only lyrics that comes out of me. No matter how hard I try to write rock n roll, it always comes out with a piece of straw poking out between it’s teeth. I’ve even tried my hand with Reggae, Pop, Opera, Grunge, Lullabies, Dubstep, Gospel and Hip Hop, to name a few, but my lyrics without fail end up wearing overalls and chewing tobacco. Here, let me show you an example:

I come home tired from work each day,

I want to rest my bones without delay.

Your friends hang out the whole night through,