Is it Always in the Blood?

This song expresses something lodged in my heart and more so as I'm looking toward the end of my life. Friends and family are going to their rest right and left as I get older. Many I look forward to seeing again when Jesus comes. At the same time I worry that the dust and wear and tear of life has left some old wounds in my family that stubbornly refuse to heal. I have a son and brother who have gone on ahead to their rest. Both I'm sure I will see again. Both of them were close and I knew their hearts. We'll all do a little happy dance when we find ourselves together again looking up to see Him coming in the clouds.

Like the song talks about, the difficulties we run into in life can distance us from those we love. With family, you hope these things can "wash out in the water." At the same time you fear that what will wash out is the bond of blood that once held you close together. 

Things sadly can happen, hurts deliberate or inadvertent push us apart. We don't talk for years. We stop getting together at Thanksgiving or Christmas. Sometimes that's because of distance. Sometimes it's ruffled feathers or old offenses. It might be politics. It might that someone can't stand your religion.

It's heartbreaking that people who loved each other once can find themselves standing off to avoid stirring up old hurts. Myself, I can't think of anyone I share blood with that I could not throw my arms around and be thrilled to see. I fear that it's not shared. Perhaps I'm such an awful person I can't be forgiven. If so, God forgive me. I've tried to be kind and fair and decent to everyone I come into contact with. I certainly hope that love and forgiveness is "In the Blood".

Someone once said that family is the place you can go for refuge and they can never turn you away. I hope that's true. It's certainly true for Sheila and I. Each day I pray that God leads us all home. I have big plans for family get-togethers in The Earth Made New. I plan to build a schooner and take everybody sailing. Then we'll have a big potluck and a jam session. We'll drag out guitars, banjos, harmonicas, flutes, drums, mandolins and a washtub bass and sing wonderful old songs we remember and new ones we've made up.

Forgive me guys if I've offended. I never meant any harm.

© 2022 by Tom King

You Can't Rollerskate in a Buffalo Herd (for various reasons)

Roger Miller wrote a whole bunch of songs I really enjoy. This quirky songwriter did some really happy stuff including stuff for the soundtrack of Disney's animated  "Robin Hood". His hits were a perky lot including, King of the Road, England Swings, Chug-a-Lug, Walkin'' in the Sunshine, Dang Me, Do Whack a Do, and Ooh Da Lally,

Well you get the idea. 

Roger's wry take on country music was unique back in the 60s when everybody seemed desperate to take themselves sooooooo seriously.

So, enjoy this gentle, light and funny musical voice singing in the midst of riots, upheavals, assassinations, and pointless wars the ruling power didn't really want to win.

Tom King

 

 

 

 

 

Theme from Rawhide - Blues Brothers

 

The Blues Brothers came out of Saturday Night Live - a retro blues band featuring Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi. In this sequence from the movie, Jake and Elwood and the boys wind up at a cowboy bar trying to make a few bucks to keep gas in the car by replacing the band that had been originally booked. When the set went south, they switch seemlessly to the first cowboy song they can think of - the theme to the TV show Rawhide. They pull it off too and end the set singing Tammy Wynette's "Stand by Your Man." I love that the stage is screened in with chicken wire and there's a bullwhip hanging on the wall. The owner says they have both kinds of music, country AND western. I love it. Kinda highlights the advantages of a musician being versatile............or any independent entrepreneur for that matter. Give the customer what he wants, that's my motto.

Tom

Cripple Creek Masterfully Done

 

Cripple Creek is a lovely little song that's in virtually everyone's banjo repertoire. It's almost a right of passage to do that little slide thing on the third string that Earl does and the rest of us make pathetic attempts to copy.

I love this Billy Conolly version Cripple Creek. It's interesting that in the past few decades we've had some comedians show up as closet banjo players. It's not that banjo players haven't always been odd ducks and would-be humorists, but these three kind of stand out for me.  First Billy:

  

Of course Steve Martin had to have given Cripple Creek a whirl along with 5 others including the great Glen Campbell.  .

No list of comedian/banjo players playing Cripple Creek would be complete without the inimitable Stringbean picking up his instrument.

I hope you found this enjoyable. I love banjo players. They're so wonderfully subversive.

Tom

     

Copenhagen (not in Denmark)

I never really understood the romance behind snuff and/or chewin' tobacco. I suppose you have to have some sort of adversarial relationship with your own teeth to take up the habit for serious. I discovered this Robert Earl Keen song some years back. He and Lyle Lovett went to school together at A&M (I think) or some Texas school or other. They both came out of academia writing strange song. Lovett's "If I Had a Boat" has been featured on this blog before - a stranger song you've never heard even in country music. 

Anyway, it's about a funny incident involving, Copenhagen chewin' tobacco, a date with a girl to the movies, a Coca Cola cup, popcorn and and a terrible mistake. To wit, here's "Copenhagen" in all its stomach churning beauty!

Tom

Rollin', Rollin', Rollin'

I used to watch the Rawhide TV show - Gil Favor, Rowdy Yates. The show kicked off Clint Eastwood's career. This version by the Blues Brothers is classic. The Brothers picked up a gig at a Country Western bar and after their regular stuff failed, they decided to try singing Rawhide. What follows is funny. Later they sing "Stand by Your Man."  The beer bottles never stop flying.

Ripplin' Waters

Lovely little song from Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.  Makes me feel happy.

Tom

Love is a Verb

This unusual song by John Mayer flies in the face of the romantic poets. Love to Mayer is something you do, not something you can hold on to or something that just magically pop up in your heart. It's not a feeling that you can capture like you could scoop up a butterfly with a net.

CS Lewis captured this idea in his book Mere Christianity. “Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”

About the only iteration of love as a "thang," that I think is accurate, is something the apostle John pointed out in one of his letters. "God," he said, "is love". All love springs from the author of love and is the wellspring of all love in the universe. There are some preachers and romantics who will argue with you that love is a "thang," but I think they miss the point. Love it seems springs from an act. It's not some magical thing that occurs when a pretty girl in a skimpy bathing suit walks by on the beach or a muscled up young man removes his shirt while repairing your porch. I think they're thinking of another "L" word besides love.

Tom King

The Mississippi Squirrel Revival

This one is one of my favorite Ray Stevens songs and that's saying something given that he also wrote the hilarious Shriner's Convention.  We've all known a Sister-Bertha-Better'n-You in our time and the spectacle of her standing up in meetin' and confessing about her "love life" and "namin' names" is just too appealing an image. This thing is funny right here, I don't care who you are. This is also on my phone.



Tom

Looking Out My Back Door

I've always been fond of porches. This Creedence Clearwater Revival song is kind of my "sittin' on the back porch" theme song.  Meanwhile, I "...got to sit down, take a rest on the porch." Now what happens next is somewhat ambiguous. It could be a straightforward reverie or something more chemically induced, but I prefer to think of the tambourines and elephants bit as a daydream. So here's CCR front man, John Fogarty, live with some back porch music for a Monday morning....

Now wasn't that fun?

Tom 

You Done Stomped on My Heart

Here's one from the inimitable Mason Williams of "Classical Gas" fame.  We used to sit around on the boat dock and sing this when some gal had stomped on our hearts. Only John Denver could deliver a line as great as "You know you just sorta, stomped on my aorta" with a straight face.

I thought this time out, I'd throw out one of those "she done you wrong" songs as a kind of throwback to my days of being dumped with stunning regularity by a stable of attractive women (including the one I married who also dumped me but felt so sorry for me she couldn't make it stick).

It was a tossup choosing between "Stomped" or "Homemade Dummy" the folk version of Louis Armstrong's "Dumb Dumb Dummy".  I need to make a video of that one because I can't find the campfire version anywhere.

Here's John singing Mason's monumentally pitiful "You Done Stomped on My Heart."

Benson, Arizona - Theme to Dark Star

Okay back to the odd we go. There was an odd little Sci-Fi movie made in 1974 during the pre Star Wars era by John Carpenter, who later made some really disturbing horror and sci-fi movies. This low-budget gem is a quirky mess, but the opening theme song is unique. It's a C&W space sailor's lament about a love lost to the theory of relativity.  He left home a few years back and left his girl behind. Now he's still a young man and back on Earth, she's an old lady and there's no going back. Meanwhile the crew of the spaceship Dark Star is going a little nuts blowing up planets and talking to their dead captain and a self-destructive bomb. I included a clip of the whole opening sequence. Best Sci-Fi Country Western song ever.

Weird I know.

Tom

I'm My Own Grandparent - A Tragic Story of Misdirected Mountain Romance

I love this song for it's fascinating take on Appalachian dating customs.  You have to listen to this song very carefully on you'll get lost. The thing is, it could actually happen legally. In fact, as I've examined the places where my own family tree branches up into the European aristocracy, I find that some of the branches at the top do tend to grow together. In fact I have one multiple great grandmother whose maternal and paternal grandmothers were the same woman, but that's another story altogether and no longer legal in the United States. The unique thing about this song is that no one violates any U.S. laws in this song.

A lot of old-time bluegrass and country singers have picked up this song, originally written by Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe.  Their group, the Jesters, did it in 1947 after it was first performed by country humor duo, Lonzo and Oscar. Lonzo and Oscar were a kind of 40s version of the 50s duo Homer and Jethro. A lot of famous people took a run at the song. Guy Lombardo and his trio did it in 1948, followed by Phil Harris (who later was the voice of Baloo the Bear in Disney's Jungle Book), Jo Stafford who reversed the sexes and made her her own grandmaw, Kimball Coburn (whoever that is),  Jon Mark and Alun Davies in the 60s as well as Willie Nelson, Grandpa Jones and the inimitable Ray Stevens. The Muppets even took a swing at the song.  Others, too numerous to enumerate, also took a whack at the song and there was even a Robert Heinlein science fiction short story, All You Zombies in which the deed was done with considerably greater genetic and legal ambiguity by a hermaphrodite time traveler. Tom Arnold even did a version of the story in his movie The Stupids.

Here is the Lonzo and Oscar version from a 50s country TV show my grandmother likely watched religiously.

And wouldn't you know it? The whole thing got started thanks to an anecdote told by American humorist extraordinaire, Mark Twain. Click the links above if you want to hear the other versions of this classic bit of American humor. It's not so popular among the Europe nobility, for some reason. Apparently, the royals don't see what's so danged funny about it.

2017 by Tom King

If I Had a Boat (Again)

Drawing by Corrie Chiswell

I stumbled upon this song, If I Had a Boat by Lyle Lovett, about the same time I discovered The Superman Song and the odd works of Robert Earl Keen whom you will meet later. Lyle Lovett is a strange little man who was, even more strangely, married for a time to actress Julia Roberts. The demands of careers ended the marriage after two years, but the two remain friends, however that works. I like this song because it combines two of my favorite things - boats and horses. It also mentions Roy Rogers, Tonto and the Lone Ranger and posits what it would be like to be lightning, which makes this song doubly unique. As you will soon become aware, I like songs which are unique - even odd if truth be known.

I spent two years of my life starting and running an equestrian program for emotionally disturbed youth and kids with disabilities. I spent 5 to 7 hours a day riding and caring for 20 oatburners. I taught fifty some-odd kids how to feed them, brush them, saddle them and ride them.  I also learned a bit of the farrier's art (hoof maintenance on that job.  The most valuable lesson I learned from trimming horse's hooves was that if you pick up a horse's foot and start trimming the hoof, after a time the horse decides you are such a nice guy for doing this that you won't mind them leaning a quarter ton or so of their horsey selves against your back. It says something about something, I'm not sure what - possibly dependency. I'm not sure. This is why professional farriers are such big burly guys, though, and possibly why my knees are in the shape they are currently in.

I took a Red Cross Aquatic School course to become a canoeing instructor back when I was a younger man and working summers at Lone Star Camp. It confirmed me in my other passion of all things "boat". By the time I was 54 I owned a catamaran, six canoes, and a motorboat. Then life took a wrong turn and I lost them all and my transportation to get to an actual lake.

I miss my horses and my boats. I dream about horses and boats, but, for now, I don't get to enjoy either. Perhaps God wants me to long for heaven where I can spend an eternity building boats that will carry me, my dogs and my horses (and the wife if she wants to go) out on the ocean. 

All that said, here's Lyle Lovett and the oddly beautiful "If I Had a Boat".    - Tom