Willie, Waylon & Me

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

I’ve always listened to all different genres of music. I guess I get it from my Mom, who had one of those giant console stereo systems children of the 1970s will no doubt remember, with the huge cabinet speakers. She would jam out and clean the house and she listened to just about everything, from Billy Joel to Lynyrd Skynyrd to The Eagles to Earth, Wind & Fire.

I remember rock and country and R& B blaring out of those speakers, along with whatever the Top 40 stations were playing back then, like FM100… R.I.P. (sad trombone noise).

One of the greatest things about 21st century technology is the virtually unlimited access to music of any type and of any era, thanks to a half-dozen music streaming services and sites like YouTube where I can relive the days of my youth when MTV actually played music videos instead of 30 back-to-back episodes of “Ridiculousness” or “Teen Moms” or whatever.

I recently got really into a country music groove thanks to rewatching the wonderful Ken Burns documentary “Country Music” on PBS. I love history and music and there’s no style of American music that has more history than country music, so it’s just great. It’s funny, I didn’t really listen to a lot of country

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music back in the day unless it was something that crossed over onto pop radio, like smash hits along the lilnes of Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” or Kenny and Dolly’s “Islands in the Stream” or John Anderson’s “Just a Swingin’” (that song was literally everywhere in 1984 or so).

But over the years, I have really taken a lilking to the “Outlaw” era, when Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Charlie Daniels and Hank Williams Jr. were at the top of the charts. I heard all the big hits of that time period when they were new, but there’s a lot of their music that wasn’t really on the radio, so I’m getting to hear Merle Haggard and George Jones songs I’m completely unfamiliar with for the first time… Maybe I’m the last person to hear it, but there’s a song called “The King Is Gone (and So Are You)” by Jones about a man whose wife has left him so he gets drunk by breaking the seal on an Elvis-shaped whiskey decanter and pouring it into a Fred Flintstone collecter’s jar to drink that is a funny but awesomely written tune (and I remember my friend’s dad having the Elvis decanter and we definitely converted our cartoon-themed glass jelly jars into drinking glasses when we were kids, so I got it…

This kind of music definitely takes you back to the 1970s when the “Outlaw” style and the slicker style of country, called the “Nashville” style (think Statler Brothers, Barbare Mandrell, Conway Twitty) were competing for airplay, but I found an Amazon music station specifically called “Outlaw Country” and it turns out that there are still artists doing this kind of music today. Singers like Whitey Ford and Shooter Jennings (Waylon’s son) are cranking out modern-day songs with that classic sound. Did you know Willie Nelson is still putting out new music? He and his son Lukas did a duet of a Pearl Jamn song (yes, as in the ‘90s grunge band) a few years ago. Willie’s even got a duet out featuring Snoop Dogg of all people (I’ll give you three guesses what that song is about).

I love that the few of those old outlaws that are still around are still doing their thing. I also love that there are new artists keeping the tradition going (although Hank Williams III is putting out music, I can’t really peg his particular style to a genre… is “country punk” a thing?). Of the newer acts, I think Sturgill Simpson and Robert Earl Keen have really nailed the Outlaw Spirit or whatever you want to call it.

So, if you’d rather not get bogged down in the controversy of “Try That in a Small Town” or whatever we’re mad about this week, you can get to thinking about the good old days, or the bad old days or just the way back when and find yourself some classic country music and drift away on the memories.