The Two Creepiest Songs in Country Music History

Country music has long featured illicit themes, sometimes violent ones, to sell its songs.  Those that are familiar only with Johnny Cash’s brag about shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die in “Folsom Prison Blues” might be surprised at the lengths some artists went to sell a redemption story.  Today, of course, country music is about tailgating, drinking and flag-waving, with little of the darkness from the genre’s ancestors.

I mention redemption because it was a constant in the old country songs…when the protagonist went bad, there were dire consequences.  A last verse most always spoke of imprisonment, or a need to “get right” with God.  Cash’s character in “Folsom…” suffers every day when he sees a train go by, knowing he will never be free from his cell.

Yet there were those songs that spoke of unseemly (or unthinkable) deeds that simply skipped that last verse and settled for plain ol’ sinful or, in some cases, creepy.  I nominate two songs for the highest honors in that category…

1)      “You’ve Never Been This Far Before” Written and performed by Conway Twitty

A #1 hit in 1973, when Twitty was already forty years old, sporting a middle-aged paunch along with a jet-black pompadour and snow-white sideburns, the song details the taking of a girl’s virginity.  His internal narrative includes lovely sentiments like… 

I don’t know and I don’t care, what made you tell him you don’t love him anymore

But even as he pledges his love to a girl, he won’t tell her.

You have no way of knowing, but tonight will only make me love you more

Yeah, who hasn’t heard that one before?

Sure, in today’s music, you’ve heard worse.  But for sheer creepiness, have you ever heard a line like…

As my trembling fingers touch forbidden places…

You threw up in your mouth a little bit, didn’t you? 

Not surprisingly, when Twitty’s frequent duet partner, Loretta Lynn, released a single about the joys of an oral contraceptive in 1975, Lynn, a mother of six, was banned by hundreds of radio stations because of the controversial content of the record.  She did not mention fingers, or anything else, touching forbidden places in her song, “The Pill”.  Nevertheless, the blackout kept the single out of the number one spot, docking at #5 before becoming a footnote in the battle of the sexes.

2)      “Fancy” Written by Bobby Gentry, performed by Reba McIntyre

Written in the sixties and previously recorded by Lynn “Top of the World” Anderson, Reba took the song to #8 on the country charts.  Gentry saw the song as “her strongest statement on women’s lib”, but it’s hard to glimpse that through the murk of poverty and prostitution and…yes, redemption, in the McIntyre version.

“Fancy” opens up on a “rickety shack” where a teen-aged girl is being dressed by her mother in a dancing dress.  The girl is in awe of her new attire, though she shivers as a roach crawls across the toe of her new shoes.  The child is saddled with the knowledge that her father is gone, never to return, her mother is gravely ill and Fancy’s younger sibling, sex undetermined, is destined to starve to death.  Realizing that her mother has pinned all of her hopes on her hopelessly naïve child, Fancy asks, “Mama, what do I do?” 

Mama answers with the age-old reply of, “Just be nice to the gentlemen, Fancy, they’ll be nice to you.”

Before Fancy tells us about her first assignation, she shares that she never went home, her sibling was taken by the welfare people and that her mother died.  Now, THAT’s country.  But she doesn’t stop there, responding to her mother’s admonition about being nice to gentlemen, “It wasn’t very long ‘til I knew exactly what Mama was talkin’ about.”

So Pimp Mama has turned her child out and that’s time for the last verse, right?  What did Fancy do?  Did she catch a bus and head for another town, a fresh start?  Did Fancy kill her mother, in a surprise twist ending?  Unfortunately, no.  The last verse, excised from the version played on the radio, Fancy remains a prostitute until hired by a “benevolent man”…a wealthy man, apparently…who ensconces her in a penthouse as some sort of servant/mistress, serving him and other giants in industry and politics.  A tea set is not mentioned, she merely says that she “charmed” the occasional aristocrat.  The song cautions us not to judge Fancy for her choices (as if she had any), while seemingly telling the listener, “Hey, if your life is shit, prostitution just might get you out of it.”

For many years, “Fancy” was among the most popular karaoke songs in the world, close to, but never eclipsing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy”.  I don’t know what was going through the minds of those young ladies as they chose that song, other than, perhaps, the chance to match the vocal histrionics offered by Reba McIntyre.  If that was the case, I guess I say more power to you.

But if you are a virgin, I would caution, don’t go anywhere near a man with a black pompadour and white side-burns.

Settling Down

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say relationships are easy.  In my own experience, even the best, long-lasting ones were a lot of work.  Seeing the picture of an old flame on social media under the heading “People you might know” brought back some memories in September, as I celebrated my 24^th wedding anniversary with my wife, Miss Kitty.

No, I didn’t suddenly have a desire to kindle an old fire.  It wasn’t because we had some terrible break-up, either.  To be completely truthful, we never made it to the boiling point at all, settling for a low simmer for the entirety of the relationship.  The key word in that last sentence is settling, and it’s what I will write about today.

Long before I was an old married man with a house, two cars, a house and children, I was a twenty-four year old who’d moved home after college and wondered when the good times were going to begin.  Moving from dead-end job to dead-end job, I started to wonder why I had gone to college at all.  Bumming around between theatre groups, picking up parts here and there, was what passed for a life.  The relationships I had ranged between weeks-long and hours-long, a not unusual development for someone who’d recently been dumped HARD. It’s even less unusual for people involved in community theatre.  Ask one of your actor friends to explain it if you don’t understand…there’s only so much space on my page.

In late ’88, I wound up in a bedroom farce, playing the ne’er-do-well, the second lead who would inevitably make every carnal mistake our virtuous lead did not.  This, fortuitously, resulted in jumping in and out of bed with a sad-eyed young actress who had no qualms with performing in a costume that was, for most of the play, black bikini underwear.  Eventually, what we were pretending to do on-stage became a rehearsal for what we were doing for real off-stage.

I’ll call her Ann Marie. Like me, she had just been through a bad break-up.  We were both a little jaded, careful about who we allowed to get close to us emotionally.  When the show ended and our relationship didn’t, we saw each other in another light.  Most “show romances” cooled with the heat of the stage lights, going from boiling-hot to tepid in a couple of hours.

Yet we continued to see each other, our close residential proximity a great help.  We ate out sometimes, but just as often, ate at home.  She didn’t cook much, I was still learning, but when dinner was over, we’d both had our fill.  Christmas of ’88, my gift was a cast-iron frying pan that I had picked out.  Though we never set up housekeeping together, I had a drawer at the house she owned.  We were, succinctly put, constant companions.

As we celebrated her 33^rd birthday, the age gap didn’t bother me.  I can’t go so far as to say we were in love.  The words were never spoken.  We were happy with each other.  It was enough for us at the time.  We were ideologically compatible on most issues, though she was more conservative than I.  We shared a bed at least a couple of times a week and could pronounce ourselves satisfied.  We both wanted, in general, the same things for our lives.  A home, a family, comfort that comes from a long-term relationship.  The past couplings that had started, as Johnny Cash sang, “Hotter than a pepper sprout” had diminished too rapidly.  Could it not be fate that we had met?

I was still toiling in entry-level jobs, while Ann Marie had reached middle-management, making sixty grand a year (in 1988 dollars).  As I said before, she owned her dwelling.  She doted on me and I returned her affection.  We could make it work.  With all of the financial stuff out of the way, knowing that we could see eye-to-eye on most issues, we knew we could make a go of a marriage.  Though we both wanted children, it was something neither of us wanted to rush into, which should have told us something.  Still, though, I thought we were settled.

1989 was a different beast entirely, with a frenzy upon my writing partner (Mike Davis) and me.  We were writing a script for spec for a fellow who was looking to produce a play as his Master’s project at Eastern Michigan University, as well another project for a group wanting a radio play to perform at the yearly “Fall Festival” in our hometown of Plymouth, Michigan.  Shortly after a well-received performance of the latter, we got a green light for the former.  When I told Ann Marie, her usual ready smile crumpled into a frown of sorts.   

“They’re going to produce our musical!” I exalted.  “Isn’t that great?”

The frown lines went deeper as she stroked my face.  “Aw, honey, I think that’s great.  But I just don’t want you to get your hopes up.”

It was at that moment I knew that we were over.  I couldn’t go forward without getting my hopes up.  I couldn’t LIVE without my hopes up.  It was everything I had ever wanted, wrapped up in a neat little package.  When I laid it at her feet, it felt like she’d said, “Meh…”

I’ll spare you the details of the break-up, as I don’t particularly want to recount them.  I didn’t see her again until the summer of ’89.  I was clearing the stage after a second production of that nascent musical, the house lights up, the audience long gone.  The sad look in her eyes had returned and we tried to talk, but couldn’t find a topic that would keep us engaged.  I came down from the stage and kissed her cheek as she left.  The woman who had replaced her in my heart, the woman I would marry, had already cleared the table where they sold screen-printed aprons that advertised the show.  She was waiting for me in the parking lot so we could get some post-show food and libations.

In a lot of ways, that long ago romance seems like a dream, something I was part of, but not really.  The life I wanted, as a writer and performer, was the same.  Yet, even though I never cracked the big-time, the climb was exhilarating.  There were heart-stopping highs and lows.  Not becoming as famous or well-known as my heroes was okay, because we, Miss Kitty and I, did it together.  We gave it all we had for as long as we could.

My wife and I have afternoons like I used to have with Ann Marie.  We will look at each other, curled up at opposite ends of the sofa on a serene afternoon and smile at each other.  Yet, in each wink, in each twinkling eye, there is the story of what we did, of what we tried to do, what we dared to do.  We believed in each other every day and did our best.

I sincerely hope Ann Marie found the person she was looking for. I found the one for me.  I know I’m not the wild man I was way back then, the one that gave Ann Marie happiness.  I am another man now, with a woman next to me that believes in the dream. 

We accomplished as much as we could, Ann Marie, Miss Kitty and I.  I am grateful to both of these ladies, who showed me the difference between hoping and trying.  You can say many things are settled.  “Settling down” is another issue.

Picking Up A Hitchhiker

On a warm summer morning, driving to work down a tree-lined residential street, something landed on the hood of my car.  The windshield was dewy, so I hit the wipers to improve the view.  It wasn’t a leaf after all, it was a tree frog, a little smaller than a half-dollar.  He managed to hold on when I stopped at the corner. 

A mile down the road, he was still hanging on.  When I stopped at a light, he inched toward the windshield and then leapt into the well where the defrost vents are.  I’m no car guy, but I figured whatever was down there wouldn’t be good for his world view.  Oh, well, I thought, we’re not exactly short of tree frogs on my street.

A couple of blocks later, he jumped out of the wiper well onto the windshield.  I quickly turned off the wipers so I wouldn’t smear him across the glass or fling him into traffic.  We stared at each other as he continued his high-risk maneuvers, attempting to climb the still-wet glass to the top of the car at twenty-five miles an hour, leaving little frog-shaped dry spots where he landed.  He made it to the top and I turned my attention back to the road just in time to avoid running a red light.

When I arrived at work, some eight miles away, I hopped out of the car and immediately searched the top of the car for any sign of him.  He was gone.  I’m choosing to believe that we reached his stop and he hopped off and went his froggy way.

But my mind kept going back to that nearly-missed traffic signal.  Can you imagine the cynical look on the policeman’s face when I roll down the window and explain, “Well, you see, there was this frog…” 

It Doesn't Take ESP To Figure Out the Espys

Some people might think it’s brave for me to post this blog.  Me, I think my wife, headed down to the Ann Arbor Art Fair, armed only with a water bottle and a Visa card, is downright heroic.  It’s a judgment call.

That’s why I’m so amused by those who felt the need to vent their spleen about Caitlyn Jenner’s acceptance of the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the Espy Awards last night.  To begin with, they watched it live last night or clicked on a link to see on-line highlights today KNOWING that Jenner was to be honored.

How do you quantify bravery?  Combat soldiers are being held up as the gold standard, as they should be, but is that the only example we can use?  We see bravery every day, in every race and social class.  Consider a young mother who stands up to a snarling dog to protect her children.  Is that brave?  It would seem to be.  You could also say what she did was instinct and that fear never entered her mind until the conflict was over.  I’m not in that mother’s head. Additionally, I’ve never served in the armed forces, so how am I to know what is bravery and what is efficient military training?

I’ve worked with hundreds of actors over the years, all of whom were willing to do what is most Americans greatest fear…speaking in front of an audience.  Knowing what awaits them, they walk out on a stage knowing that the result could be an astounding success or a humiliating defeat.  Most actors have experienced both and keep doing it.  It is not a life-and-death experience, but it is brave.  I know most people would not slot acting as one of the most daring things you could do, but I’ve had police officers (people who go into uncertain situations against unseen and possibly armed opponents) say to me after a show, “I could never do that.”

To me, it’s all bravery.  The woman that is wheeled into a delivery room is brave.  Who didn’t feel brave applying for their first home loan?  Did it take guts to ask your boss for a raise?  If you didn’t get the bump in pay, did you make the brave move and start your own business?  Another brave act.  Speaking up to our parents for the first time requires guts.  Asking a girl out on a date takes a certain amount of bravado.  Depending on who you are and what you are after, millions of Americans have had a moment worthy of Arthur Ashe’s Courage Award.

Which brings us back to Caitlyn Jenner, who was a gold-medal-winning American hero as a decathlete in the Olympics when she lived as Bruce, a man.  Even forty years after that triumph, she had to know that the blowback would be brutal.  A person once known as the World’s Greatest (male) Athlete was saying that she wanted the freedom to live out her life in a manner that was in keeping with the image she had always had of herself.  Folks, that took guts.

This brings us to my final point, which is…this was an award show.  No different than the Emmys, the Oscars, the Grammys, the Tonys and any number of others…a subjective decision on the behalf of a small voting body.  Marisa Tomei won a performing Oscar and Peter O’Toole never did.  Daniel Day-Lewis had to contort his body and speak in a halting brogue to win the Best Actor award for “My Left Foot” while Jack Nicholson won two for basically playing a caricature of himself (“Terms of Endearment” and “As Good As It Gets”).  I will grant you, the criteria wasn’t about bravest, it was about the best, which is also impossible to quantify.

ESPN has lost 3.2 million viewers since Americans began purging their connection to cable television in favor of antenna, Hulu or Netflix.  I am one of those who jettisoned subscription television in favor of the alternatives.  Yet, by giving the Arthur Ashe award to Caitlyn Jenner, the entire country is talking about ESPN today.  I didn’t watch the award ceremony (obviously) and I didn’t click on the highlight clips.  I will say that the person who green-lighted giving the Ashe award to Jenner exhibited bravery.  It paid off, though.  People watched and people are talking. (Late update: This year’s ESPY ratings were up 253% from their previous highest mark).

I’ve never seen the Kardashian reality shows and I don’t have any plans to watch the coming Caitlyn Jenner offering.  I know a bit about acting awards, having received a few over the years.  While I know that you can’t compare performances, I never turned down an honor.  I never missed a chance to say what I wanted to say and I didn’t put the trophy in a closet.  It was proof of what I had gone through to reach another point.  None of them rank with a Silver Star Medal, of course.  An ESPY doesn’t either.  

One of the bravest things I’ve ever seen is my father facing down a group of punks who were harassing a street-corner preacher.  They don’t give awards for that as far as I know, and if they do, they aren’t on TV.  All I know is that stepping into a situation where the outcome is uncertain takes bravery.  I have it and you do, too.  Let’s all be brave enough to tip our hats to anyone willing to take that chance.