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This week’s track will be a quick one. Not only because I’m clearly behind and too busy to catch up if I keep writing epic tomes about obvious themes in hokey country music long past its prime. But also because this week’s track is simple, doesn’t really require much exposition. It’s “The Blackwood Brothers by The Statler Brothers,” still by The Statlers Brothers, and it’s a very simple (but not poorly-built) paean to the traveling, evolving, ever-changing vocal group (no, not Menudo) up to which members of The Statler brothers, evidently, looked. The Blackwoods are still around in some configuration (look for them on the internet in the soft focus Christian entertainers use to suggest angelicism), have been around a very long time in various other configurations, so don’t expect anything about them to be said here. Plus…why would I give a shit about them? The Statlers fill my quota for spiritual-but-secretly-sorta-dirty-country-vocal-harmony-acts-from-the-mid-20th-century and I don’t need a bunch of no-name, state-fair gigging blue hairs to muss up the works.

The only thing of interest here is, again, the way The Statlers use small town or country livin’ (no ‘g’) as a marker of goodness and value. Yes, these are your recently re-christened “family values,” which apparently didn’t need qualification back in the day that everybody shared them. I guess? Anyway, in “The Blackwood Brothers,” The Statlers recall the days their entire “small, Virginia country town” would gather at the National Guard Armory or “the old schoolhouse” [blech! gurkle-gurkle, blech!] to hear the Blackwoods sell “Jesus and good singin’.” So the only thing that really needs to be said (again?) is this: if you grew up in a small town, can you recall what it looked like when the entire town turned up for something? Like carnivale, but all of the costumes and masks were really just the ruddy, drunken faces of your friends’ parents and local retailers. And forget about the reason for the congregation. Suffice it to say that The Blackwoods probably wasted their time on the “good singin’” part. Small towns will flock to almost anything (well, okay, no gay rights parades, please), so R.W. and the other Blackwoods could have pulled up lame and just sold “Jesus” and they would have done juuuust fine.

Anyway it’s“The Blackwood Brothers by The Statler Brothers,” from 1974′s Thank You, World. Dropped right down in that small Virginia country town’s current National Guard Armory, which I’ll just presume is still the same one.

And the geoRSS and kml for all mp3s of the week.