When I came up on the farm I
can remember milking cows by hand with the light of a kerosene lantern. In 1948 my father broke down and ran
electricity to the farm. Bindweed County
had run the wires out to Sowthistle
Township in 1935. Apparently my father, a true Nineteenth
Century man, wanted to wait and see if it worked and was not a passing fad before
undergoing the investment.
Ironically the house caught
fire the following February. The fire
was caused by a faulty brick chimney, the bane of very old rural homes. The house was saved, one of few which took
fire at that time. Soythistle
Township did not have their own fire
department and they had to contract to Jimson City
for fire protection. By the time it took
to get a pumper out into the rural areas it was usually a lost cause. The common humor ran that they had never lost
a cellar.
What did this have to do with
music, you ask? Some time after installing
electric lights, we came up with a small table radio with a brown bakelite
case. It didn’t have much power nor did
it have an antenna. The case had
acquired a crack and it had a loose wire.
Every so often the signal would wander off into the ozone and one had to
bitch-slap it back into consciousness.
We could only pull in two
stations. A 600 watt Polish station out
of South Bend which played a constant stream of
Polka music and WLS out of Chicago. WLS beamed out 50,000 watts of country
music. Country music at that time,
around 1950, was just pulling away from the hillbilly music image and morphing
into classic country. So I came up exposed
only to Eddie Arnold, Hank Snow, Ernest Tubbs, Kitty Wells and, of course, the
tortured genius of Hank Williams.
I still listen to Hank on
nights that are so godawful lonely that I want to ratchet right into self
pity. This is as close as I come to
drinking. And I submit to you that
nothing of any worth has taken place in country music since Patsy Cline flew
into the side of a mountain in 1963.
THE SHADOW
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