Since my childhood, listening to my dad belt out The Wabash Cannonball every Sunday morning while getting ready for church, or to the Johnny Cash 8-track tapes he played on camping trips, or watching Hee Haw every week, Country Music has always been a part of the background of my life. Then came my teens along with a certain TV show that brought Country into the very forefront of my life on the wheels of a bright orange Dodge charger.
Dukes of Hazzard brought me a visual representation, albeit not necessarily an accurate one, of something I’d always wanted - a rural life on a farm, surrounded by animals and wildlife, far from the bustling of an urban or even suburban environment. And this idyllic vision of country life came naturally ensconced in Country Music. In my teen years, when I discovered that to the governing influences around me, music was a slightly more acceptable pursuit than art, I surrounded and filled my life with this music, to the point of temporarily redirecting my Disney-flavored dreams toward Nashville, and becoming a singer/songwriter who, perhaps one day, might play the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.
I recently received the thunderbolt of a revelation of a deeper purpose to the influence born unto me upon the harmonic melodies and chords of this special music that resonated so intimately with whom I was at the time. As the songs spoke to me, I in turn spoke to them, hiding parts and pieces of myself, as if planting seeds, between the notes to be harvested at a future time when I’d acquired the skills and know-how to do so. I am now reaping the rewards of my Teenage Urban Cowboy Blues - the title of the first song I ever wrote.
