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Guess what: this week’s track is both A) recorded by The Statler Brothers and B) about some nasty and rather un-Christian goings-on in small town U.S.A. But I guess I could have stopped at A), couldn’t I? I referenced it last week when the track was “A Letter from Shirley Miller,” but really it should have come first (it didn’t because I hadn’t bothered to find out if there really was a Lincoln Park Inn*). Why? It’s such a classic country song that I think it tips the country-to-other-music-scale all the way over and spills into opera. It’s so full of failure and desire and ethos and sadness and disappointment it makes you want to become a loser dirtbag skeev just so you can turn it around and write a song this simple and compelling.

Listen to the way they (well, T.T. Hall) sets up these two spaces:

My name’s in the paper where I took the boy scouts to hike
My hands are all dirty from working on my little boy’s bike
The preacher came by and I talked for a minute with him
My wife’s in the kitchen and Margie’s at the Lincoln Park Inn
And I know why she’s there I’ve been there before
But I made her a promise that I wouldn’t cheat anymore
I tried to ignore it but I know she’s in there, my friend
My mind’s on a number and Margie’s at the Lincoln Park Inn

Next Sunday it’s my turn to speak to the young people’s class
And they expect answers to all of the questions they ask
What would they say if I spoke on a modern day sin
And all of the Margies at all of the Lincoln Park Inns
The bike is all fixed and my little boy’s in bed asleep
His little old puppy is curled in a ball at my feet
My wife’s baking cookies to serve to the Bridge Club again
And I’m almost out of cigarettes and Margie’s at the Lincoln Park Inn
I’m almost out of cigarettes and Margie’s at the Lincoln Park Inn

That’s the entire song. And, yeah, okay, the boy scouts and kid bike stuff is strong even for classic country, but “my wife’s in the kitchen and Margie’s at the Lincoln Park Inn” is more of a geography lesson than you’ll ever get in school or decades of GIS work. And my guess is that Tom T. Hall was no GIScientist. And with the possible exception of Jimmy Fortune, about whom I know nothing and intend to stay as such, I also know none of the Statlers were really contributing code to GRASS back in the day.

* There is a Lincoln Park Inn, it turns out. Bobby Bare, who had a hit with this Tom T. Hall song in 1969, evidently spilled the beans that Tom T. Hall wrote this song about the Capital Park Inn in Nashville. If he hadn’t, I still would have used this track and placed it at the location of a hotel in my home town that was abso-fucking-lutely the kind of deep-carpeted, Shasta-vending skankhole Hall had in mind when he penned this little molecule of genius.