Going Country

The miseducation of....

A photo
First Light is always the most welcome.


So today I’m going Country.
A while back I used to do an evening surgery every Wednesday, there would be just me, Val on reception and the patients. Val loved her music and especially the Everly Brothers who she’d seen recently, “I thought they were dead, killed in a plane crash”, I said, seems I was confusing the lyrics of Ebony Eyes with reality. I suggested to Val that instead of the bland musak, she could play her tunes to the waiting room to wile the evening away. This pleased her, all seemed good. A few weeks later things started to feel a bit strange, surgery was taking longer, things seemed heavy, I was drinking more(coffee), the patients were crying more, and then one chap came to see me, “I was feeling ok when I came but I’m now feeling so bleak and sad”...the penny dropped, Val was playing her catalogue of Country, endless songs of desperate broken hearts that would never mend. You know the kind, “ I lost my heart in Tusson, I won’t get it back again, I’m so lonesome I could die, which would be no relief, so I’ll just cry” - (I could so develop another career as a Country lyricist don’t you think?) Anyways her number was up, I had to break it to her that the musak needed to return or some bleak terrible thing was going to happen in the village.
“If music be the food of love, play on, give me surfeit of it, that I may sicken and also die”. Opening line of Twelfth Night

A tune
I’m loving the BBC 4 series on Country Music, it’s not my usual choice (though I confess to a brief thing about Olivia Newton John during my puberty - take me home....) and Johnny Cash will appear on these pages soon, but todays tune will be from Willie Nelson - outlaw, crooner, artist, 200 years old. I love a story song too, which reminds me as I type this of Hurricane by Dylan...

Pancho and Lefty - Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard


Quote for the day
You can do anything, but not everything - David Allen