Friday, November 02, 2007

Music that matters . . . on the Big Show

Hi, my name's Mighty Favog, and I'm a redneck. Pretty much.

Hi, Favog!

I can't deny it. I am what I am, and I grew up where I grew up . . . blue collar to the core.

On New Year's Eve, I used to go out in the back yard and fire my shotgun into the air at midnight.


No lie.


And I never got arrested. Nobody ever even called the cops.


There you go.


Being that I am who I am, and grew up where I grew up -- in the bottom half of the Deep South -- it's no surprise that country music is embedded in a chromosome somewhere . . . X, Y and CMT, no doubt.

WHICH BRINGS ME to Porter Wagoner, who died last Sunday and who we salute this week on the
Revolution 21 podcast. Yeah, it's a bit of a departure from the Big Show's format, such as it is, but the Wagonmaster's departure from this vale of tears leaves those of us who remain all the poorer.

If you love good writing and gripping storytelling, you admire classic country music, and you revere Porter Wagoner, the Thin Man from West Plains, Mo.


At his best, Wagoner was like reading The Complete Stories of Flannery O'Connor in two minutes and 47 seconds. With steel guitar. And the legendary Buck Trent on electric banjo.

To hear the opening
twang und whine of a Porter Wagoner classic is to receive an electric shock to one's Southern soul and be transported back to a Saturday afternoon in front of a 1962 Magnavox console TV, watching the Pantheon of country music parade past you, week by week, in 525 lines of glorious monochrome on Channel 2 in Baton Rouge, WBRZ.

BACK THEN, I tended to regard this as I did my vegetables and red beans and rice. By the time I was an adult, though, I realized not only did I like vegetables and a big plate of red beans and rice, but that they were good for me.
And so was Porter . . . and Buck . . . and pretty Miss Norma Jean . . . and Dolly, too.

Those legends of country music, I now know, had become part of the soundtrack of my life . . . had shaped my musical sensibility . . . had wormed their way into who I would become.
Their songs were masterpieces of storytelling, exemplars of the craft of writing, paragons of wit and pithiness.

If you want to learn how to write with style, authenticity and a sense of humor, listen to classic country music.
Become acquainted with Porter Wagoner.

IF YOU'RE UNDER 25, you have grown up in a world almost totally devoid of the authentic. You have been surrounded by the calculating and the cynical. By panderers and the prurient.


You have been put into a narrow little box and removed from communion with those unlike yourself.

It's a big world out there, and there are giants walking among you, giants now aged and shunted aside. Legends of whom you know next to nothing, all because somebody in a corner office in a corporate headquarters far away has decided there's no more money to be made off of them.

But those forgotten giants know you. They have written about you -- and about someone you know -- because, though their artistic heyday was decades before you came into this world, human nature doesn't really change much as years go by.


Listen to the podcast. Go to a used record store. Step outside your consumer-culture comfort zone.

I dare you.

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