Brightest Young Things

For Part One: click here

We'll just cut the BS and play a song, okay? Loretta Lynn: Everybody's Somebody's Fool:

Now one or two of you may wish to argue that Eva Cassidy isn't country and Autumn Leaves is more jazz progression than country. Guess how much I'll care? Go on. Guess. DC's own Cassidy rips your heart out:

Way back to 1968 with Bobby Goldsboro and his song about Honey:

Now everyone's heard of the biggest faker in Countrydom: Dolly Parton, and bless her for it. As she's said: "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap." And she makes simple, cheap, songs, too, but somehow that soprano overcomes the very simple lyrics. She's come quite a long way from a one-room cabin in Tennessee.

Hard Candy Christmas:

Someone you've never heard of singing a song about Nobody:

I seriously need to dude it up a bit after that. Merle Haggard If We Make It Through December

If Drinkin' Don't Kill Me. George Jones:

I don't understand why people upload videos that are nothing but a static image, or a series of images and aren't, you know, videos. And I really tried not to include any of those but I had to for this song: Willie Nelson's Blue Eyes Cryin' In The Rain. The vocal version they used is absolutely perfect.

Patsy Cline. I Fall To Pieces.

Now time for a Christmas memory:

For a brief (brief) time I lived with my mother and the dude she married. I was around 12 then. I'm hoping more stories than this one don't creep in as the week progresses, for your sake. But this one is fairly innocuous. Mom's dude actually bought my brother and I pellet rifles for Christmas our first year there. We'd been there maybe a month. I got a Crossman .760 pump pellet/bb rifle, being I was older, and my brother got a lever action Daisy Red Rider (yes, like in the movie).

Christmas day after opening presents we went for a drive to Stone Mountain, GA. For some reason we were allowed to bring our bb guns with us (this was Georgia, in the 1980s: digression: much later when back up in the mountains I can remember carrying rifles to school in cars to go hunting after class, or walking through the middle of town to meet up with your buddies to go hunting, carrying a fully loaded 30-06 or shotgun or whatever). So anyway we get to Stone Mountain and my brother and I beg to carry our guns the short hike up to the top. We are allowed as long as we don't shoot anything. Of course we don't.

So we spend a bit up there and then it's time to go to some other relative's house for some other Christmas function. My brother and I are sitting in the back of their Buick Riviera. For some unknown reason (other than I'm, uh, 12?) I decide to quietly pump the pellet rifle a few times and pull the trigger, which would make a loud blast of air (since I was sure there was no bb in it) and scare my mom.

Except there was a bb in it and it whizzed past my face. My mom turns and screams: "What in the hell was that?" I play stupid. "Nothing. I was just messing around." Suddenly the rear window cracks into a million pieces. The cracks creep across the back like a spiderweb, then the pieces fall into the rear of the car.

I'm bawling. My brother's bawling. Mom says it's ok, it was an accident, no one was hurt. Her husband stops the car, removes the rest of the pieces of glass and quietly takes the bb guns and puts them in the trunk. We go on to his brother's house for Christmas and play with our cousins. Everyone makes fun of what happened. Ha Ha Funny Ha. We're even allowed to play with the bb guns again that afternoon in the back yard, shooting into the woods.

Evening we get home and we rush inside. Her husband calls me onto the back deck (the house was built on a slope so even though the house was one-story ranch style, the deck was actually 2 stories off the ground due to the sloping rear yard). He has the pellet rifle with him. He says to me "How are you going to pay for that window?" Suddenly I'm scared. I mumble something about not knowing how but I will, maybe cutting the grass. He's silent for awhile. Then the throws the gun into the yard. I'm starting to cry a bit (come on, I wasn't always a hardass, I was 12).

By now Mom's in her robe in the kitchen drinking what will be the first of a six pack of Miller Lite.

"Well I ain't going to hit you, not yet, you little shit," he says, "But ain't my fault if you fall off the porch is is?" and with that grabs me and heaves me over the deck railing, two stories down into the yard. "Now find that fucking gun and get in the goddamned house."

Ok, one more song.

Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash: Sunday Morning Coming Down.

See you tomorrow.