How Garth Brooks Concerts, Shania Twain Videos, And Line Dancing Killed Country Music: A Satire

For the better part of the 1990’s I knew exactly where my daddy would be at 4:00 pm every weekday....stretched out on the couch in the living room of our home on Jackson Drive with our fifty-inch big screen rear projection television tuned in to The Nashville Network. For the next half hour he would be glued to The Wildhorse Saloon Dance Show, thirty minutes of country music and line dancing, hosted by Katie Haas. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my daddy dance a step in his life, much less line dance, but he did love country music, and I have a feeling he had a crush on Katie Haas. On occasion, though very rarely, I would watch it with him, and little did I know then, but I was bearing witness to the dawning of the country music apocalypse, soundtracked and choreographed in 2/4 time. I can’t completely blame the demise of country music on line dancing, but it was most certainly one-third of an unholy trinity that ushered in the country music Armageddon.

Those who believe the Bible foretells of the rise of the Antichrist, believe that one day a man will rise to power and prominence in the world, the likes of which haven’t been seen before. The masses will love him. Muslims, Jews, Christians, and unbelievers alike will be lured in by his eloquent words and near miraculous performances, only to have him turn away from everything he promised and unleash misery upon the world. The country music world has already witnessed the rise of such a man, and his name was Garth Brooks.

Garth Brooks brought country music back to the forefront of American music, a place it hadn’t held since a Gospel singing kid from Tupelo, Mississippi ventured into Rockabilly and became the King of Rock and Roll. By the eighties pop, rock and hip hop ruled the music scene, with country music, a once proud genre that was synonymous with American culture, now relegated to a niche demographic. But not for long. 

Garth’s earliest albums were straight, pure, cowboy country music, and they were popular enough to elevate him to the top of the country charts. On the strength of hits like the sing-along friendly “Friends In Low Places”, the every man relatable ballad “Unanswered Prayers”, and the bold, risk taking, socially conscious “The Thunder Rolls”, his second album would go on to sell seventeen million copies in the United States alone. His third album, “Ropin’ The Wind” made the Billboard Top 200 just on pre sales, a first for country music, and then debuted at number one on the Billboard pop charts, also a country music first. This album wasn’t just straight country, or better yet, (George) Strait country, like his previous two releases. “Ropin’ The Wind” incorporated elements of pop and rock into this noticeably new breed of country music. It wasn’t just his music that changed the landscape, it was also the performance at his shows that truly “changed the game.”

A Garth Brooks concert looked more like a rock and roll performance than the typical “man with a guitar stands behind a microphone at center stage” country music show. Garth used a massive stage that came to life with pyrotechnics and a sophisticated light show that could rival anything in the pop/rock world, and the crowds loved it. Bear in mind this is the same genre of music where fans once gasped with repulsion and issued a ban when Johnny Cash stomped on the stage lights at the Grand Ole Opry. Now they were devouring tickets, 50,000 at a time, selling out sports stadiums almost instantly, just to watch a man in a cowboy hat and head set mic be fired out of a floor canon and run from one end of the stage to another amid fireworks and laser lights while singing songs about a Rodeo!?

Garth Brooks wasn’t just the biggest country music star in the world, he was arguably the biggest star in all of music, even performing before an estimated one million people in Central Park. He achieved the type of celebrity supernova that needs only one name. Elvis. Michael. Prince. Madonna. Garth. And then, at the peak of his fame, he turned on us. Country music living legend Garth Brooks became rock and roll singer Chris Gaines. The man we thought was the savior of country music, was really the Anti-Chris. Country music fans didn’t know what to make of this, they felt betrayed and just as he turned on them, they turned on him and a year later he retired from recording and performing. Something had happened in country music that had never been seen before and once the corporate vultures roosting in the rafters of the record labels got a taste of global commercial country success, they only wanted more. Enter the harlot of Babylon.

When you think of the home of country music what places come to mind? Tennessee. Kentucky. Texas. Alabama. Maybe even Bakersfield, California. Would you ever once, in a million years, think....Canada?!? And yet, the next biggest star, not just in country, but in all of music, would come from, not the south, but the north. Jeremiah, the “weeping prophet” foretold, “From the north disaster will be poured out on all who live in the land” (Jeremiah 1:14). Chris Gaines killed the career of the biggest star in the world, but the second coming of Garth was a Canadian woman named Shania Twain.

I vividly remember where I was the first time I heard the name Shania Twain. I was nineteen, newly married, and sitting on the blue leather couch in my father’s “man cave” located at 1025 Jackson Drive. I was busy reading a paper when the video for “Who’s Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?” came on Country Music Television. I stopped what I was doing, looked up and asked to no one in particular, “Who is that?” To which my now pregnant bride replied, “Don’t worry about it.” Not since Elly May Clampett and Daisy Duke had a “country” girl created such a fuss. No offense to Loretta Lynn, but this was not your momma’s country music star. Country music fans quickly traded in their coal miner’s daughter frocks and fringe for a belly bearing pop country princess whose name was an Ojibwa word that meant “on my way.” And she certainly was on her way, but at the same time country music was on its way to an early grave. We were on a dirt road to hell.

On the strength of this single alone, or perhaps, the video for this single, her self titled debut album had moderate success, but it was only when she teamed up with the hound of hell that is producer “Mutt” Lange, that she became the twenty million album selling heir apparent to the rhinestone throne vacated by Garth Brooks. Crowned with a newly awarded Grammy, Shania expanded her empire to encompass the entire musical realm by releasing a third album which sold forty million copies, becoming the biggest selling album by a female artist in any genre in history, and the biggest selling country album of all time. It was all too good to be true. How could we have been so blind? Was it not obvious when, at the 1999 CMA Award’s, Shania donned a Pepto Bismal colored crop top cowgirl costume complete with Lloyd Christmas cowboy hat, that we had been seduced by her siren songs? Seriously, Google it.

After collecting four more Grammy’s and releasing another album that sold over ten million copies, perhaps she, like Alexander the Great who “wept when there were no more worlds to conquer.” In 2004 she too retired from performing, but the damage was already done, country music was dead, and we all lined up to dance on its grave.

We should have known better, but we just couldn’t help ourselves, we’d come to like our neon moon with a side of electric guitar. Honky tonk patrons had been led astray like this once before by John Travolta, so perhaps God was punishing us for not learning our lesson from the Texas two step trauma of the seventies that was Urban Cowboy. The country equivalent to disco. 

In the wake of Garth and Shania cowboy couture came back with a vengeance in the form of ten gallon hats, painted on wranglers, snakeskin boots and bolo ties. I grew up country and no one I knew dressed like that....until it was Saturday night and they were on their way to Denim and Diamonds or Cotton Eyed Joe’s or some other country cliche club. Even I was converted from the stage diving, mosh pit dwelling, slam dancing world of grunge that defined my teens, to the irresistible communion of line dancing with friends and family. Led astray by the false prophets that were Brooks and Dunn, we did the Boot Scoot Boogie and they played the fiddle while Nashville burned.

“And I saw a star fallen from heaven to the earth. To him was given the key to the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit, and smoke arose out of the pit like the smoke of a great furnace. So the sun and the air were darkened because of the smoke of the pit. Then out of the smoke locusts came upon the earth. And to them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power” (Revelation 9:1-3). Out of the ashes rose more and more “artists” willing to sell their souls to capitalize on the mass marketed, carefully sculpted, choreographed and crossover conscious pop country genre, brought to you by Clear Channel. I’ll admit, for a while even I, a Tennessee boy raised on George Jones and Conway Twitty, was led astray by the mesmerizing and hypnotic rhythms that were Big & Rich and Cowboy Troy. Eventually I saw the light, and this is where I have to draw the (Florida Georgia) line. I repented in sackcloth and ashes. 

I don’t blame the kids today for liking Jason Aldean, or Brantley Gilbert, or Blake Shelton. They didn’t have a choice. They were born in Babylon, and that’s precisely why I have written this psalm of lament, to illustrate to them how we got here.

“By the rivers of Babylon, where we sat down,

And there we wept, when we remembered the Ryman.

When the wicked carried us away in captivity,

Required from us a song,

But how can we sing a Hank Williams song in a strange land?”

I know you may think I’m a little crazy, like the guy on the street corner holding the sign that says, “The End Is Near.” That’s fine. But all I’m saying is, if you add up the number of letters in Garth’s first name (Troyal), his last name (Brooks) and the original Taylor Swift (Shania), you get 6-6-6. 

My Russian Mail Order Bride

To my Russian mail order bride (<— insert inside joke here),

A couple of weeks ago I asked a room full of our married friends to tell us about the first time they met and when “they knew.” I was moderating the evening and wasn’t planning on, or even thinking about, participating. So, when the question was posed to me my answer was unworthy of the full story about when “I knew.” So today I decided to take the time to tell the story properly.

I “knew” when you jumped in Richland Creek with me to help lift Jennifer Bryant out of the water, so she wouldn’t drown, that you would be someone who would always be right beside me, even “If...”, as the proverbial mom question goes, “...I jumped off a cliff.”

I “knew” when you showed up that night with Purplesaurus Rex colored hair, because I told you that day you could dye your hair with Kool Aid, that you would be someone who would listen to me when I spoke, even if what I said was ridiculous.

I “knew” when you let me be your personal tour guide for all of Giles County (Fall River, Moonlight Ridge, Hannah Ward Bridge, Pennycuff, Mount Zion) that you would be someone who cared about the places I love so dearly that I call home.

I “knew” when you followed me over a fence, through a graveyard, into the woods, to a antebellum cemetery at night that you would always trust me, even when things didn’t look so good.

I “knew” when you laid on the hood of a car with me, staring up at the stars, listening to me explain that the shooting stars we were seeing were actually the Perseid meteors, just debris from the tail of the Swift-Tuttle comet passing through the Perseus constellation, that just being beside me was all that you wanted.

I “knew” when you took my vanilla ice cream cone out of my hand in McDonald’s and ate it, that I would always give you anything and everything you wanted.

I “knew” when you walked up to me in my cousin Greg’s grandmother’s kitchen and kissed me that I would never recover from that kiss.

I “knew” when you snuck out the next night to come see me (sorry Janet) that nothing would ever keep us apart.

I “knew” when you wrote me notes everyday, in every class, telling me every thought that popped into your head, that you trusted me with all your feelings, faults, and fears.

I “knew” when you went back to Tupelo for Thanksgiving break that I never wanted to spend another day apart from you.

I “knew” when you were willing to spend your eighteenth birthday listening to me sing George Jones and Elvis songs to you that you obviously “knew” too.

I “knew” when you forgave me for lying to you that I never wanted to hurt you again.

I “knew” when you fell to pieces because my little cousin Drew brought you a ring from my bedroom that I hadn’t given you yet, that the only thing in this world that you wanted was to know that we would be together forever.

I guess I’ve always known, and I still know, and everyday I want to know you more, and everyday I know another reason why.

I know because you are so cool that you sleep with your sunglasses on.

I know because you evolved from “fighting with” to “fighting for.”

I know because you notice and reach out to the outcast, the downtrodden, the neglected, and the ignored, and you always have.

I know because the sound of your voice, or sometimes just a glance, can make me, not just willing, but glad to do anything you want.

I know because you can make “Big Stupid Head” or just “B” sound like a royal title.

I know because you are unapologetically honest, real, and transparent.

I know because you act as if I can cook like a James Beard chef.

I know because you still look perfect with no makeup and a pony tail.

I know because your laugh is a symphony to me.

I know because you sing and dance with me to Phil Collins while we fold clothes.

I know things like this may seem random to you, but trust me, they aren't random, they are the harvest of a love and devotion to you that was planted twenty-five years ago, and that I have tended to, sometimes diligently and sometimes just dutifully, but always sincerely, every day since.

I know that I am thankful to know you.

My First Love Was A Princess

My first venture into the digital domain that is video games was a home version of Pong that used a controller with a dial. Today’s Fortnite obsessed generation would likely have a hard time believing that two rectangles ricocheting a small square between them could be fun, but it was life changing. Soon after I began to notice the arcade games that were making appearances in gas stations and restaurants and stores around my town. For just the cost of a single quarter you were invited into a pixelated playground promising princesses and points. While my parents waited for our table at Pizza Hut on Friday nights, I would beg for a few quarters to be able to sit and play PAC Man or Frogger, and then when they opened their game room, Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, and Pole Position. While my mother was in line checking out at Wal Mart I would rush out to the entryway and wait in line with the other kids hoping for a chance to play Asteroids or Galaga before she was ready to leave. A trip to the skating ring opened a whole new world with games like Galaxa and Joust and Ms. PAC Man, but nothing could prepare me for the digital deluge that awaited me.

Within a few years I was able to persuade Santa that my seven year old self needed an Atari for Christmas. Sitting in the darkness of the early morning hours of Christmas day, wearing only my Star Wars Underoos underwear, and playing The Empire Strikes Back, I fell in love for the very first time. A few years later I would advance from my puppy love for the Atari to the full blown obsession with my Nintendo. I got the NES and Super Mario Brothers on Christmas morning and played it non-stop until my mother made me walk away to go to my Big Mamma’s house for our Christmas night family gathering. The minute we walked back in the door that night I was glued to the television screen and did not move away until I rescued the princess sometime after midnight. The first of my friends to accomplish this feat I might add. Unlike today, you couldn’t take video games with you whenever you left home, but I soon discovered there were these things called arcades that could satiate my computer compulsion.

The arcade was to the pre-teen what Target is to a mom...the place to be that you can’t get enough of. Any allowance I was given, yard cutting money I earned, or spare change I dug out of the couch or found in a parking lot was hoarded like squirrels gathering acorns for the winter, just in case I got to go to the arcade. A trip to the Shady Brook mall in Columbia, Tennessee meant a chance to spend time at the Fun Tunnel arcade. If it was the Madison Square Mall in Huntsville, Alabama it was the Time Out arcade. It was in these electronic cathedrals that I was first exposed to Q-Bert, Track & Field, Zaxxon, Paperboy, Burger Time, and Rampage. Games we didn’t have in my hometown. If you stacked up the number of quarters I dropped into those games it would likely reach to the stars. 

Speaking of stars, in those days my favorite tv show was an arcade game show on TBS called Starcade. This show essentially served as a “coming soon” commercial for arcades. I would watch this show to get a first look, and “how to” tips for games yet to be released in the arcades I frequented. Games like Super PAC Man. I can still remember how excited I was the first time I got to play this game where a “power pill” would “super-size” PAC Man. It had other games like Congo Bongo, Crystal Castles, Krull, Elevator Action, Popeye, Sinistar, Zoo Keeper, and the only video game that still fascinates me to this day...Dragon’s Lair. I still can’t comprehend how, in the days of eight, sixteen, and thirty-two bit video games, they were able to create a game that looked like a Saturday morning cartoon that you could play. 

In the days prior to hyper-realistic home video game consoles, the arcade was the place where you got to flex your nerd muscles by demonstrating your skills against strangers. In those days it was all about the player versus player fighting games. Street Fighter, and later Mortal Kombat, would be so popular there would be a line ten deep with kids from eight to eighteen waiting for their chance to exercise their electronic excellence publicly. You might be a scrawny little victim of bullying in your local middle school, but if you possessed acumen with a joystick and buttons, you could be a legend whose name, or at least initials, would be immortalized on an electronic high score screen. You didn’t have to brag on yourself because everyone who walked up to that game came face to face with your supremacy in glowing lights. Nothing felt better than listening to the whispers, “Who is BAB?” and knowing it was you. You might cower in the cafeteria on Monday, but on Friday night you could be a king.

On the heels of the fighting game’s popularity came the exaggerated competitive sports games like NBA Jams and NFL Blitz. Suddenly a boy who couldn’t even make the fifth grade basketball team could dunk on Shaquille O’Neal from the half court line. Amazingly, in the days before internet chat rooms and message boards, sheerly by the word of mouth, arcade by arcade from state to state, you would learn about “cheat codes” that could be entered to unlock secret characters and nearly unstoppable skills. If you possessed those and were competing against someone who did not know them, you were essentially immortal.

There aren’t many arcades still in operation these days, and the ones that remain are mostly novelties that don’t draw the crowds like they used to. I blame it on the introduction of that abomination of a “game” Dance, Dance Revolution, but it’s possible it was the result of ultra-realistic home consoles and the ability to play games on your phone for free. Either way, sadly, the arcade has gone the way of the rotary phone and the typewriter. Game Over.

Requiem For Madison Square Mall

Of all the ridiculous things that have made me go all sentimentally nostalgic and cry, this is perhaps the most ridiculous. I’m tearing up over them tearing up a mall. I don’t even like malls, and I honestly can’t recall the last time I actually went to a mall, and yet, here I am. Today I was scrolling through Facebook and came across a video, drone footage, of the now demolished Madison Square Mall in Huntsville, Alabama.

For a child of the 80’s, the mall was a significant part of your adolescence, and for me that mall was the Madison Square Mall. I was just shy of nine years old when this mall opened in August of 1984. This was where my mamma brought me to get cool school clothes that the other kids, whose moms only bought their clothes in town, wouldn’t have. Bugle Boy, Duck Head, British Knights, Body Glove, Members Only, brands they didn’t carry at Morris Harwell & Sons or Wal Mart.

A lot of my culinary firsts took place in that food court located between the arcade and the KayBee Toys, just outside of the Sears (I use the definite article “the” as an homage to the way my elders spoke in those days when referring to corporate “box” stores, “I need to stop by THE Wal Mart” or “THE Belk” or “THE Sears”). At that time in Pulaski our eating choices pretty much consisted of: home, McDonald’s, Hardees, Pizza Hut, and Chew-n-Chat. But at the Madison Square Mall I was exposed to Chik-Fil-A, Sbarro’s Pizza, Arby’s, and the Japanese place that served Terriyaki Chicken. To this day Sbarro’s is still my favorite pizza. Once, when I was sixteen, me and my friends Rok and Brad got a large Sbarro’s pizza to go and were able to sneak it into the theater to watch the movie Singles. But that’s a story for another day. On a Friday night or Saturday afternoon, the food court would be so packed that it was hard to find an empty table, so we developed a technique where one person would wait in line for the food while another roamed the room looking for a place to sit.

Until I was around sixteen I rarely went deeper into the mall than the food court and the Timeout Arcade. Between the two of them they had almost everything I needed. Back in those days the hardest decisions I had to make were where I was going to eat and what video game I was going to play first. In many ways the arcade was the heart of the mall because it kept otherwise impatient children occupied and content so moms could spend hours shopping (the benches and cushioned chairs and couches did the same to placate the dads).

Living in Pulaski you really only had one option for books, magazines, and music...Wal Mart, and in those days their selection wouldn’t be described as a section, but more like a few shelves. But at the Waldenbooks in the mall I had access to magazines I’d never even heard of, like Hit Parader, Rolling Stone, Circus, Fangoria, Sports Illustrated, and Beckett Baseball Card Monthly. As a budding reader I became enthralled by rack after rack of books in every imaginable genre, though, admittedly, I rarely ventured beyond Sci-Fi and Horror.

As I grew older my time hanging out with my mamma on the weekends diminished, but my trips to the mall actually became more frequent as my interests began to expand. Upon turning sixteen and getting a drivers license and being entrusted by my parents to leave town for the first time, there was really only one place to go....the Madison Square Mall. It was only an hour away, it was easy to get to, and, because of regular trips through the years, I was familiar with the area. Not to mention it had everything I was interested in: food, video games, books, music, and girls...but mainly girls.

Most weekends from 1992 to 1994 I would make the fifty-three mile drive from my house in Pulaski to the Madison Square Mall with any number of combinations of my friends: Brandon, Bryan, Caleb, Rob, Herbie, Brad, Rok, Geoff, John, Sims. Our routine was pretty consistent: find a place to park, eat at the food court, make a lap through the mall looking for girls, go to the arcade without having spoken to any girls, make another lap around the mall, go back to the food court and then go to the movie theater behind the mall with some girls that we met, if we were lucky. I think we were lucky maybe one time.

Halfway through our mall lap was a record store. I probably single handedly paid the salary of a couple of employees with the number of CD’s I purchased on a near weekly basis. I would buy a CD, play it nonstop for a week or two, and then return to buy another and repeat. This is how I ended up with hundreds of CD’s by the time I got married. At the far end of the mall was a fascinating and unique little store called Frank’s Imports. The store was so packed with merchandise that you could barely move, but you didn’t care because virtually everything they carried was interesting. They had African drums, Samuri swords, ninja throwing stars, Rastafarian knitted caps, strange glass “tobacco” pipes, black light posters, and the thing that brought me in, imported t-shirts. In those days my standard uniform was baggy skater pants, Airwalk sneakers, a long sleeve t-shirt topped with a short sleeved t-shirt, and a flannel shirt on top of all of that. This ensemble required me to purchase a great many t-shirts, so, like the CD’s, I’d pick up a t-shirt most weeks as well. Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails, Alice In Chains, Nirvana, Dr. Dre, Ministry. If I owned the CD, I likely also owned the bands t-shirt too. I might have even owned a Chronic hat or two. It would be many years later that I would learn the incense scented store was what they call a “head shop.” Oh to be naive again. Of course a visit to the slightly, and sometimes not so slightly naughty novelty store Spencer’s, was always good for a few laughs.

By the time I met my future wife at age seventeen (whom I first saw in this mall in a dream, and then saw in this mall in person, again, another story for another day), and stopped going to the mall as frequently, I had started to notice that a lot of people had stopped going to the mall as frequently. Where once you couldn’t even find a parking spot from Black Friday to New Year’s Day, now you could find a good parking spot at any time. You could also find a number of empty stores or stores that had been abandoned by their original tenants and were now filled with non-chain stores. Sports memorabilia shops, cheap imported novelty toy stores, niche clothing stores, glow in the dark mini golf, and the like began to populate the slowly dying mall. It was a bad omen when the once thriving movie theater behind the mall was relegated to a dollar discount cinema, showing movies that were months past their original run. In time the mall faced stiff competition from the newly renovated Parkway City Mall across town, and from the brand new, reinvented version of the mall that was Bridgestreet Town Center, an outdoor mall. It became apparent that Madison Square Mall was showing it’s age. Efforts were made to keep it relevant (a climbing wall was added, Buffalo Wild Wings opened a location there, the record store was replaced with a multi media store that sold DVD’s as well as music), but the world was changing in ways the mall couldn’t. Huge corporate box stores like Best Buy and Toys R Us and Books A Million and Kohl’s began to choke the life out of the smaller Radio Shacks, KB Toys, and Waldenbooks, that resided in the mall. Ultimately online shopping would bring all of the above to the brink of extinction. 

Inevitably the death knell for malls began to ring at Madison Square.....they started opening early for “mall walkers.” Once your mall’s primary demographic is octogenarians who are looking for a place to get out of the weather to get their exercise without having to pay for a gym membership, my friend, your days are numbered. And for Madison Square Mall that number was January 29, 2017, the day the mall officially closed forever. On February 6th demolition began. The mall that was once such a big deal that Miss America attended it’s grand opening, was now lost to history and memories. I haven’t been to Huntsville since I moved to Florida several years ago, so I haven’t seen the empty space that was the sight of so many of my happiest memories growing up. I honestly don’t know if I ever want to. I haven’t seen the empty space with my own eyes, but tonight, I’m feeling it in my heart.

Southern Culture On The Skids

There's a fine line between celebration and caricature, between exaltation and exploitation, and although I can't define it, like Justice Potter Stewart said of pornography, “I know it when I see it.” Most every music video I’ve seen on CMT in the 21st century crosses, or more accurately, Water Melon Crawls across that line. I confess, for the longest time I could not understand what “cultural appropriation” was, but then I saw the sayings and utensils of my childhood on magazine covers, dish towels, coffee mugs, music videos and t shirts. Lord help us, those awful t-shirts. You know the ones: G.R.I.T.S. (Girls Raised In The South), Southern Girlz, Simply Southern and the like. 

Yes I have drank sweet tea out of a mason jar at my Big Mamma’s dinner table, but never from a turquoise one that cost $8 a piece, and so help me, never from one on a wine stem! I about half expect to go into one of those cultural brothels, I mean, stores, and find replicas of the Cool Whip and butter tubs my Big Mamma used as free Tupperware for her leftovers, selling for $7.99 each. Maybe they'll even be embossed with bona fide country nomenclature like "finer than frog hair" or "how's your momma'n'em?"  Or better yet, "git'r done." "Bless your heart" should be a part of your vocabulary, not your wardrobe. 

What made guys cool in the 50's was rolling up the sleeves of their white t shirts, not buying a pre rolled Calvin Klein t-shirt off the rack at a downtown boutique for $45. Somewhere between my childhood and now southern went from a culture to a trend. It's as if the south collectively hired a pr firm, a promoter, an agent, and a stylist. You know, people who don't really care anything about you other than making a profit off of you. People who view you as a product, not a person. The great musical prophet Alan Jackson tried to warn us. “I hear down there it’s changed, you see, well they’re not as backwards as they used to be...Lord it sounds so easy, this shouldn’t take long,  be back in the money in no time at all...he’s gone country, look at them boots, he’s gone country, back to his roots, he’s gone country, a new kind of suit, he’s gone country, here he comes...the whole world’s gone country.” 

Maybe I’m just overreacting or hyper-sensitive. They say “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” so maybe I should be flattered. But here’s the thing, it’s not the folks in California or Wisconsin or New Jersey who are imitating us that rubs me the wrong way. It’s the carpetbaggers who are exploiting our heritage and those of us who are being lured into a sort of minstrel show performance of who we are.

Historically we were different “down here” and that was a good thing, but it wasn't an act and we certainly didn't export it or even talk about it. It was just our way of life. It was how we were raised, not something we were sold. Admittedly I'm conflicted at best and hypocritical at worst. I celebrate being southern. My favorite things to write about pertain to my southern heritage. When I travel and people say "what kind of accent is that!" I proudly respond “Tennessee.” I love sweet tea and biscuits and gravy and riding on a dirt road, but I don't like seeing it printed on a coffee mug or sold in a catalog. Culture shouldn’t be a commercialized commodity. I appreciate a good meal at Cracker Barrel as much as the next guy, but any self respecting southerner will readily admit that it can’t compare with breakfast or supper at any one of your mother, grandmother or aunt’s houses. It’s a just a theme park version of my heritage and more often than not I leave with a full belly but an empty heart because I know I’ll never eat at my Big Mamma’s kitchen table again. I guess what I’m trying to say is I love the real thing. Authenticity.

Too many of us southerners are content with a replica. A music video version of our heritage instead of the real thing. Things like spending time with family or preparing a home cooked meal from scratch. We don’t really want to go for a ride on a backroad with someone we love and sing along with the radio or go swimming in a creek with our friends. We want to be “up in the club” dancing to a song about these things, written by someone who’s never actually done any of those things. We just want the Instagram, #southernlife, Hollywood produced version starring Reese Witherspoon. But that’s not me.

I want to watch my uncles play horseshoes and my cousins play softball in the field by the house, not girls in cut offs and bikini tops wearing trucker hats dancing in the bed of a ridiculously jacked up and tricked out “pickup truck.” I want to go for a ride in an old 1978 F-150, with torn seats and rust spots and talk about real life with my oldest friends. I want to eat fried chicken that was cut up from a whole chicken and fried in lard in a cast iron skillet, not bought in a red and white bucket and labeled “Nashville Hot Chicken.” I want to be around folks who love to eat watermelon on a hot day, not take watermelon vodka shots off a hot body. I want to listen to an impromptu concert in the backyard from people who’ve played mandolins, guitars, fiddles and banjos since they were little, not “hick-hop” with 808 drum machines from guys who spend more time fixing their hair than practicing their instrument. 

Most of the southerners I see on television or online are just characters. Larry The Cable Guy is really Dan Whitney, a nice guy, and a funny guy, but his public persona is just a character. The people I grew up around were certainly “characters” but they were never caricatures. I don’t have a problem with the Dan Whitney’s of the world. It’s not the characters on television that bother me so much as the “life imitating art” that I see on Wal Mart racks and in fast food parking lots. It’s the real southerners who are buying this cultural fool’s gold and parading it around in the real world that grieve me. I’ve got news for you, if you have to put “Country Boy” across your windshield, you ain’t country, boy.

But I won’t lose heart, there are still authentic southern voices out there that haven’t been “auto-tuned” by the consumer concerned machine. Authors like Rick Bragg, musicians like Jason Isbell, The Drive By Truckers, and Elizabeth Cook (and Paul Thorn, and Grant Peeples, and Joshua Hedley and Erin Rae.....), websites like The Bitter Southerner, and bloggers like Sean Of The South, remain fully immersed in southern heritage from a contemporary, and even progressive perspective. Small town squares with home owned retail shops are slowly making a comeback. Homegrown “farm to label” clothing makers like Alabama Chanin are revitalizing long abandoned industrial parks with a foot in the past and an eye on the future, yet remaining passionately committed to their communities in the present. A new wave of southern chef’s are going back home and going back to their roots, bringing grannie’s recipes to life using locally sourced ingredients and adding their own twist in the process. That is what southern heritage is really about. Hanging on to the best parts of your people’s past, taking care of the people around you in the present, and adding a little bit of yourself that you will pass along to the next generation....not just posterizing cliches and covering them in sequins. It’s in living out the values of our elders that make us who we are, not just having them hanging on our walls.

I see the evidence everywhere that we are learning from the mistakes of our past and even making an effort to atone for the sins of our fathers. Perhaps one day we are all going to look back on the last couple of decades in southern culture, and especially this era of “country” music, much like we look back on the disco era. I believe the South’s gonna rise again....better than ever....and you can put that on a t-shirt.

A Good Cry

“Sometimes you just need a good cry.” Most all of the women in my life have said this to me at one time or another. Mothers, aunts, girlfriends, cousins, grandmothers, friends, my wife, Oprah. All of them. They all have tried to impart the wisdom that a “good cry” can really do wonders for your psyche. Truth be told my psyche has been the problem. Or maybe it’s my ego. Either way I was raised in the storied male tradition of “boys don’t cry” so I would never give it a chance. My theme song could have been, “Raindrops keep falling on my head, but that doesn’t mean my eyes will soon be turning red, crying’s not for me.”

Speaking of raindrops. Growing up in the south you learn there are all different kinds of storms. There are angry, violent, deadly ones that spawn tornados, but those are usually from somewhere else, out west mostly. Then there are the soakers. They have very little thunder, and what they have is gentle and quiet and actually quite soothing. It will rain steady, but not too hard, for hours. This is the best kind to sleep to and if you are lucky they come on Saturday mornings or Sunday afternoons and go on into the night, periodically breaking long enough for you to run to the grocery store or grill some hamburgers for supper. These rains are welcomed by all (except maybe Little Leaguers wanting to “get their game in”), because they replenish the water table, refill the ponds, and get the creeks flowing steadily again.

The crazy uncle to the soaker is the gully washer. Whereas the soaker comes on slow and easy and leaves quietly like a polite houseguest, the gully washer shows up unexpectedly, is loud and leaves abruptly with nothing but a mess in its wake. A gully washer will give you a lot of water in just a few minutes and then return the sun just as quickly, producing an environment best compared to a sauna. On a positive note the culverts and drainage ditches (gully’s) have been cleaned out, although most of their flotsam and jetsam is now strewn about your front yard or neighborhood streets.

Summer storms are flashy and loud and fun to watch. They are great to sit out in and feel the spray of rain and the cool of the wind. They are like teenage boys or spring time turkeys, which really are just different breeds of the same species, at least as judged by their behavior around females. These storms strut across the county like they are showing off for Mother Nature, not realizing she has seen it all and just rolls her eyes and keeps busy doing what she does and lets him have his fun. 

My daddy always hated the dreaded “misting rain.” Just enough precipitation to need to use your windshield wipers (although you can’t ever seem to get them set to the right speed), but not enough for them to do anything more than smear up the windshield so that you can’t see. Getting caught out in it just gets you aggravated, like trying to get ready in a bathroom where someone is showering. The humidity making the air just moist enough to mess up the hair on your head and stick to the hair on your arms.

One good thing that all storms have in common is the intoxicating aroma of rain coming on, something they also share with a good cry. Before the first tear falls you can sense its arrival, feeling it in your bones the way old timers talk about how they know from their knees before they know from the weatherman that it’s going to rain. When the levee finally breaks and the streams runs down your face and drip off the tip of your nose you catch a brief hint of salt and water, not unlike standing on the shore. There’s a lot of similarities in a tear drop and a rain drop.

My heart has experienced a little of all of these storms, the literal and the emotional. The ones where I shout and shake my fists at the heavens, demanding answers that I already know like a thunderstorm raging. The ones where I quickly cry myself out and collapse in a heap and mess on the floor like a gully washer. The ones where the tears flow so freely you wonder if you will dehydrate before you stop like a soaker. I’ve even weathered the ones where the tears linger on the rim of my eyes as I ache for them to fall, but they just won’t come, leaving me with an unfulfilled frustration that turns sadness to anger, like a misting rain.

“Crying’s not for me.” That was then, this is now. Sometimes I wonder why I do it to myself. Perhaps its a form of emotional sadism. It could be a song, a story, a movie or a memory that makes the conditions favorable for precipitation, but I can always feel it coming, building in my chest the way you can feel a summer storm building in the afternoon. At first it's just blistering heat and then the air gets heavy as it begins to soak up all the atmospheric moisture. The wind begins to stir the hot, syrup thick air and you catch the first whiff of rain just before the drops begin to fall. Within minutes the wind howls, the thunder shakes the walls and the rain gushes from the sky like a waterfall. Once those storms rain themselves out the air is left sweet and soft and cool and everything has been refreshed and cleansed. The pollen and dust has been washed away and the storm drains flushed out. It's amazing how a good cry can do the same for your soul. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I hear thunder.

Southern Knights

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. “In days of old when knights were bold and journeyed from their castles...” Thus began the live version of Jimmy Buffett’s “Gypsies In The Palace,” giving his own twist on the often ad libbed limerick. It’s a funny song, and the poem makes for some good laughs, but chances are you only picture a man when you think of the knights of old. Maybe that was true in Camelot, but not here in the South. Our knights tend to be female. Grandmothers, aunts, mothers, these are our nobles, our trustworthy and brave warriors who are willing to fight for us or feed us with equal fervency. 

In my heritage it is women who are the keepers of wisdom and virtue, and secret recipes that are only passed down to those whom they deem worthy. They don’t gather around a round table, but picnic tables, kitchen counters, coffee tables, gazebos, patio furniture, and pools. They convene informal conclaves to discuss hairstyles, cleaning products, high school crushes and bible verses. They dispense wisdom about relationships, dealing with PTA divas, removing pesky stains and good-for-nothing men.

I grew up playing with G.I. Joes in kitchen floors near groups of women like this. Their wit and wisdom wove itself into my DNA without me even realizing it was happening. To this very day their words will make an unexpected appearance on my tongue in a moment when they are needed the most. They could mix a bowl of potato salad, while simultaneously carrying on a conversation and fixing one of my broken toys. They moved with an effortless grace as elegant as any knight dodging a joust while delivering a victorious shot, and all of this on horseback. I can’t help but smile and think of them every time I hear the quote, “Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels.” 

I not only grew up around women like this, I continue to be surrounded with a great many of them in my life, like an order of knights sworn to protect the virtues of all that is sacred in our culture. When you get a group of southern women together in the same room phrases like, “What can I do?” and “Do you need me to stir the beans?” fill the air with a melody like so many hymns. These are women who don’t just wear their heritage like a badge of honor, but embody it as if it were an ancient religion, washing dishes as an oblation and packing up leftovers like they were sacraments. Even the dishes themselves take on an air of holy relics as they speak of their “granny’s cast iron skillet” or “mamma’s butter dish.” This isn’t just cookware, they are sacred instruments used to summon ancient spirits of love and wisdom and strength. Memories of strong women who could run a household, nurse children, ring a chicken’s neck, strip tobacco, and influence the decision making of the men in their lives at a time when society denied them any semblance of authority. Is this not what the knights did? The knights had no real authority in the realm and yet they were the defenders and protectors of the kingdom. They carried out the will of their king, fulfilling the tasks he was incapable of or unwilling to enact on his own. And these southern knights do the same today for the people in their lives.

Like their ancient predecessors, these women are well armored because they have to be. Their skin is thick but their hearts are as soft as a nannie’s lap. When they stand up for what or who they believe in they get stung with words labeling them “bossy” or “assertive” or worse. Their crusades are seldom bloody, but they are nonetheless just as brutal. Today they fight for their sisters to be taken seriously when they come forward with stories of abuse at the hands of males. Some have to fight to be taken seriously, or for their marriages, their children, and anything else they love.

Although the time of the knights has largely come and gone, even today when a man is honored by the English crown we say he is “knighted.” When we think of those knights today we still tend to picture men and soldiers, but the word actually comes from an Old English word for “servant.” I can think of no better description for the women who have populated my life, and can imagine no greater reward and honor for them than to be “knighted” by their King. “And Jesus called them to him and said to them, ‘You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’....where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the Father will honor them” (Mark 10:42-45; John 12:26).

What Doesn’t Kill You...

My first encounter with medicine, at least the first I can remember, was liquid penicillin flavored with a bubble gum additive to make it “palatable” (a word I came to learn meant, “It won’t kill you, but it will make you wish you were”). If I close my eyes and go back to that moment in my memory I can still smell it and it still activates the gag reflex in the back of my throat. 

“Drink this, it will make you feel better,” my mother persuaded me with a deceptive assurance that I’m certain was rivaled only by the serpent himself as he whispered in the Garden, “Eat this and you will be like gods.” To this day I think this is the only time she ever lied to me. Three times a day she would coax me into choking down this elixir, each time promising it was necessary to cure the strep throat that was keeping me from school. Convincing an already reluctant six year old boy to repeatedly drink awful liquid so he can return to school is a testament to her persuasive powers.

Not long after I would be introduced to the equally dreadful and magical Robitussin and Vicks Formula 44 cough syrups, both of which tasted like a black licorice and cherry flavored Kool Aid, but they did wonders for a cough (likely because they were essentially cherry flavored ninety proof whiskey). Then there was the eye dropper administered liquid Tylenol for fevers and Vick’s VapoRub for chest colds, which simultaneously burned and was cold. 
      Perhaps my favorite medicines were Chloraseptic and Luden’s Wild Cherry Flavored Cough Drops (only surpassed by the rare treat that was Sucrets). Chloraseptic tasted good and eased the pain of a raw throat instantly, although its effects were short lived, while Luden’s were basically candy that you were allowed to eat during school and church because they were cleverly called “lozenges”, making them highly coveted contraband in the elementary school black market.

Not all of my ailments were internal and eventually I would learn how my mother could magically transform painful “boo-boos” into really cool scars with things like Isopropyl Alcohol and Camphophenique. Those cool scars came at a painful price. As she explained the antiseptic properties while pouring (a technique I later learned was a clever way to distract a nervous boy) I imagined there were microscopic soldiers setting fire to the germs in my cuts and abrasions, because that is exactly what it felt like. Later she would introduce me to the chemistry experiment worthy effervescent power of Hydrogen Peroxide, which had the same benefits as alcohol without the horrible burning (I’ll always wonder why she didn’t just start with that). Speaking of burning, my first sunburns were soothed by rubbing Aloe Vera on my back and shoulders or spraying Bactine or Solarcaine if the burn was too painful to touch. The first time my mother broke off an aloe branch and squeezed out the soothing gel onto my raw shoulders I was convinced she was secretly a witch or shaman using earth magic, a fact that was later confirmed by her introducing “monkey blood” (iodine) as a treatment plan.

It was at this early age that I began to learn that medicine is meant to make you better, although it seems like it might half kill you in the process. That’s just the price of admission. When I grew up and had to begin taking prescription drugs it sometimes seemed like medicine was just intended to kill you. When I see the commercials on television or read the paperwork that comes with my prescriptions, the list of possible side effects reads like a Stephen King novel, except Stephen King novels are fiction and the side effects of these medicines are frighteningly real.

Now, as an adult, I have learned there are some medicines that aren’t designed to make you better at all, but simply to ease the pain as disease kills you. Morphine and benzodiazepines aren’t really about making you better as much as they are about making not getting better bearable.

Nearly a year ago our family crowded into a small room in Sanctuary Hospice House in my wife’s hometown of Tupelo, Mississippi. We were gathered in the same room we occupied eight years earlier as we sat with her dying mamaw, only this time it was her papaw slowly  dying as regularly administered morphine kept the pain at bay. Brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins, in-laws, friends and grandchildren all sat together as the hours turned into days. For a long time we sat in the awkward silence that only impending death can create, with only the hum of the air conditioner making a sound, but eventually the pangs of  grief and exhaustion gave birth to laughter.

Somewhere in the late night hours, between the nurses routine checks, someone started a sentence with, “Do you remember that time....”, and off we went, all of us embarking on a trip down memory lane. Long held secrets between cousins were revealed to shocked parents and in turn some were told by parents that stunned their naive children. Stories were retold that had been shared so many times through generational tellings they had become polished, refined, and perfected like so many smooth stones resting in flowing water for decades. A sort of greatest hits of our family history. 

Sitting in the dark, in the middle of the night, everyone in that room was struggling to catch their breath. Papaw was struggling to take his final breaths, and the rest of us were laughing until we hyperventilated, trying our best to go on living in the face of his certain death. The Bible tells us that “a merry heart doeth good like medicine” and although the hurt we were feeling in that room was killing us, laughter truly was the best medicine. The reality of his death hurt. Eventually it was because we hurt that we laughed, but ultimately we laughed until it hurt, and we continued laughing until he didn’t hurt anymore.