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I wish this wouldn’t happen, but it’s pretty common — one of the least interesting or even just melodic songs on an album is the one that happens to be about a place and therefore a candidate for this geoMp3 of the week feature. It happened just last week with Bob Dylan’s “If You Ever go to Houston” and I think I can recall it happening a number of other times as well. This week it happens with Ike & Tina Turner’s “Nutbush City Limits,” which is a pretty standard rocker from an album that has a lot more to offer (like girl-group soul, kick-ass Tina Turner soul, and even an [okay, admittedly forgettable] rendition of Stagger Lee).

On “Nutbush City Limits,” the Turners drive a nondescript guitar riff all the way to the unfortunately-named Nutbush, TN, a place where…

You go to the fields on weekdays
And have a picnic on Labor Day
You go to town on Saturday
And go to church every Sunday

“They call it Nutbush,” and not only does it sound like a horribly boring and unbearably rural locale — any place that even knows what “salt pork and molasses” is will probably be on the list of places to avoid, right? — it’s also Tina Turner’s hometown. And that makes this song much more interesting. Stanza after stanza describes a simple rural highway town, but the last one…

A little old town in Tennessee
A quiet little community
A one-horse town
You have to watch what you’re putting down
In old Nutbush, oh Nutbush

…suggests there was shit of which to beware in ole’ Nutbush. I don’t really know enough about Tina Turner to know for sure what needed to be watched when put down (I only know one thing — the lady who warbled out “What’s Love Got to Do With It” had a lot more in her than that stupid ballad might suggest), but I think I can guess.

(By the way, you should pick up a copy of this record if you can. “Come Together” and “Stagger Lee” might be by rote, but there’s otherwise great stuff here.)

This week it’s still not a Statler Brothers track. Instead, it’s a bunch of upstate NY kids who sorta recreate the kinds of harsh rusticism that The Statlers glossed over musically (but not always lyrically). It’s The Felice Brothers and “Penn Station” from their recent Yonder is the Clock release. So obviously this one will pin to Penn Station, but not just because it mentions it. It’s truly (albeit allegorically) about Penn Station. Protagonist (P) has, in fact, died in Penn Station and as he lays there on the cold tile of one of the restroom floors [~shudder~], with five dollars and a dead cell phone, he ponders how peaceful it is when a man’s past can no longer torture him. And no doubt if you’re knocked out flat on the floor of a train station john you’ve got some torture in your past.

Anyway, while it’s peaceful now, P faces a crossroads, of sorts (is, in fact, in a crossroads, both literally and figuratively). On track #7 there’s a train to heaven. Nice, right? Flatlined on the tile in a train station tank, tongue probably rolled out onto the dank, moldy grout, the guy hasn’t been so bad that he hasn’t lost his shot at that northbound train. The problem is that there’s another train a-comin’ (n apostrophe because it’s more country or more soulful):

But a faster train’s coming near
That the devil engineers, oh lord
That the devil engineers

And that’s…a problem.

The good news is…no more Statler Brothers for a while. The bad news is that I’m officially disappointed by Bob Dylan’s Togther Through Life. I had heard David Hidalgo played accordion pretty much throughout. He does. I had heard it had a kind of Mexican cantina feel. It does, at times. I had heard it was made to sound like a Chess Records recording. It does (they could have done better with the percussion, but yeah, it does). So how all those elements added up to just a really good record and not a killer landmark album I just don’t know. There are of course standouts — “Beyond Here Lies Nothing,” “Forgetful Heart,” “Shake Shake Mama” — but none of those are Dylan good. They’re just good.

So unfortunately one of my least favorites is geographic. “If You Ever Go to Houston” is a quite traditional cowboy brag that warns of all the dangerous places out West (places, of course, the protagonist frequents). Like so:

If you’re ever down there on Bagby and Lamar
You better watch out for the man with the shining star
Better know where you’re going or stay where you are
If you’re ever down there on Bagby and Lamar

Eh. One could argue it gets more interesting when we find this cowboy (Dylan himself, if you believe the bullshit he spews in recent interviews) is really just trying to squelch a “restless fever burning in [his] brain.”

If you ever go to Dallas
Say hello to Mary Ann
Say I’m still pulling on the trigger
Hanging on the best I can

If you see her sister Lucy
Say I’m sorry I’m not there
Tell her other sister Betsy
To pray the sinner’s prayer

Ah, so that’s it, is it? Anyway, I’ve been to Houston once and it wasn’t great. No Mary Anns, no Lucys, no dudes with shining stars, either. Interstates, concrete, and homeless people, one of whom (not terribly far from Bagby and Lamar, come to think of it) asked my wife and I for some spare change due to help pay for “formula for my wife and baby.” To which we deftly replied, “tell her to breastfeed and you can stay home.” So I suppose we could have been laid low with a knife twisting in our guts like in Bob Dylan’s dusty old cowpoke version of Houston after all. Still, there’s something disingenuous about Dylan’s new cowboy persona, isn’t there (or maybe it’s just the mustache that bothers me)? Obviously songs can be places of fantasy and Dylan has historically populated his works with characters of many kinds — and granted I wasn’t in Houston very long — but I have to wonder how much Houston was ever really like this, how much this track really represents a real place. Anyway, it just seems to me that a person like Dylan could probably write a great song about Houston as it is now and it would be more compelling than a tepid cowbody brag.

This has gotten ridiculous. I have at least five more Statler albums to comb through before I can say I’ve more or less exhausted their catalog for this geomp3 feature. So with no regret whatsoever I’m announcing that with the posting of this week’s track I am discontinuing this Statler Brothers series. It’s just too much. I can’t…take it. I’m sure Harold, Phil, Don, and Lew will reappear one day in these hallowed, hollowed pages, but for now I’m too fucking sick of lush string arrangements over mild, plodding acoustic guitars to continue with this. I mean, how could anybody post Statler Brothers week after week after week for four months? It’s impossible!

My fourth month of Statlers-only geomp3s continues this week with “A Special Song for Wanda.” And it’s…sorta not that different from pretty much every Statler Brothers recording ever produced except that it’s a little bit dirtier and actually doesn’t get into the religious stuff. But to keep track, a checklist:

I hear you — we’ll skip right to the double entendres: 3rd verse, fourth line. It seems Wanda was “a Navy wife with too much spare time on her hands,” because her husband was deployed somewhere. I’m sure you can guess what goes down. In fact, the lyrics are pretty sparse so here they are in full:

Wanda was alone at night while he was somewhere servin’
A Navy wife with too much spare time on her hands
His letters were a comfort and I think she really loved him
But paper words don’t fill the space when someone needs a man.

I hope Wanda hears my song and plays it one more time…

It’s brutal, right? “Somewhere makin’ up his bed in Newport News, Virginia…”? That’s brutal, and exactly what I have come to expect from these fine Christan fellows. But the real highlight is 3rd verse, 4th line. And am I a jerk-off and/or a prude for practically gasping when I heard this? “She went down in history and probably will again”? I mean, come on!

(Dropped down in residential Newport News)

Another salvo in this war of attrition between me and The Statler Brothers. (Actually, the war must be between me and whomever reads these entries, because that’s who sustains the abuse in this situation. The Statlers themselves (excepting Lew) are fine and unawares — living out their Christian lives with feathered gray hair and gold necklaces.

Anyway, on we go. This week’s track is “I Wish I Could Be,” and it’s a song I don’t need to rant about like most of the others. Why? Because it doesn’t muck with that old Statler small town/big city dichotomy (here or here) or the hypocrisy of Christianity (every other Statlers post). This one is actually a very sweet lullaby, devoid of gimmickry. It goes like this:

I wish I could be in Knoxville tonight
so I wouldn’t worry if you were all right
And you wouldn’t wonder where I spent the night
If I could only be in Knoxville tonight

How do you like that? Instantly it puts a distance between the protagonist (P) and his lady, both at the scale of geography and obviously emotionally as well. That’s some country music for you. And, okay, the song isn’t completely devoid of gimmickry, as it continues with each member of the group taking a turn, naming a different city and some differently-expressed sentiment:

I wish I could be in St Paul today
and watch you get dressed and ready for your day
And tell you some things I know you’ve been told
If I could get to St Paul before it gets cold

I’d give everything I have if things had just begun
And you were lying there in North Carolina sun
Every thing we had was still yet to be
Carolina you sure got the best of me

And that was a mistake, because if you don’t do that round-robin thing it’s even sadder — imagine if there aren’t 4 different dudes singing about 4 different ladies in 4 different cities today, but rather one dude singing about one lady in 4 different cities at 4 different periods of their life together. Better, right? He’s wishing he could make it back to those times and places when their lives were happier and more ripe with promise. Today, promise spent, she’s in Knoxville and he’s not. Ouch. Before that they were in St. Paul, together, and he wishes he could get back there “before it gets cold.” Oof. The Little Rock verse is harder to bend into this reading (e.g. “if I could fly a plane”), so let’s skip it. This leaves that time, in North Carolina, when “everything we had was still yet to be.” And what better way to make you want to blow your brains out? (i.e. isn’t that good, solid country music?)

And while this all makes it harder for me (never having been to North Carolina and therefore unable to choose a perfect spot to set this one down), it’s still my favored reading. And because I don’t think these two kids were the types to be living it up oceanside, I found a lake way, way inland in North Carolina that seems perfect. It even features an address of which The Statlers would approve, and that’s where this track goes — the intersection of “Burnt Schoolhouse Rd” and “Old Highway 64 E.” out by Chatuge Lake.

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.

Two things are wrong with this idea of doing all of the Statler Brothers geomp3s at once.

Okay, four things (at least). But I’ve fallen behind and need to catch up, so let’s just tighten our rhinestoned rainbow belts and roll up our corded leisure suit sleeves and get through this.

This week’s track is “Eight More Miles to Louisville,” and it’s about how now matter how much they (I’ll just presume The Statlers themselves are the protagonists here) travel the country, they knew they would always return to their beloved Louisville (replace that with Virgina to make it factually biographical). “It’s an okay song,” says geoLibro, punting on a decent analysis. It does seem to blush with excitement, for what that’s worth. And they at least give us a couple of easy themes and images (girl waiting for us at home, the picture of your home town appearing into your view as the road crests). Plus it’s a rarer geomp3 because it cites a relative location this time (eight miles away from a named place). As for which way they’re approaching Louisville? I’ll presume they’re coming in on Indiana State Hwy 64 from the west somewhere since it’s farther and therefore more dramatic. That will put them a little east of Georgetown, IN

This week’s track will invigorate my commitment to doing this Statler Brothers series. Because it’s one of the most frank, adult, almost dastardly songs they ever recorded. I came late to this one (it wasn’t on any of the LPs my parents had), and while it definitely has relatives in the Statlers canon, it’s a standout.

It’s “A Letter from Shirly Miller,” and it is not the only recorded work by this group about a titular character with the name of Shirley (the ball is in your court, Red Hot Chili Peppers). It is also most definitely fucking not the only one of their songs that mixes “Jesus and good singin’” with dirty, down-home, small-town adultury into a filthy, writhing mass of bell-bottomed, star-spangled jumpsuited deviltry. But this one twists the knife, so to speak.

It seems poor Shirley Miller got herself married to a preacher and now she’s living in a “Presbytarian home” in The Cleve. To which you’re saying, “awesome!” I know. But despite what we all know to be true about how great Cleveland is from watching 30 Rock, there are signs that Ms. Miller is feeling squirrely. For one thing, she’s writing letters to former lovers. And while her stationery evidently did not spontaneously combust in an explosion of Jesus tears and purple silk,* it’s still a letter that communicates plenty. She writes**:

1. she was too scared to phone
2. she still remembers “things she said she wouldn’t”
3. she asked about the protagonist’s travels and if Cleveland was on his route (hey-oh!)
4. she’s “chilly” in her cold Ohio weather
5. she’s happy and hopes P is, too
6. she didn’t expect P to answer, just wanted to get a few things off her chest

*Gulp*

I guess that’s what your proverbial booty call looks like in Presbyterian religiousville, 1974. But guess what — P isn’t having it. He’s leaving Margie at the Lincoln Park Inn again!*** In fact, in a remarkable twist from typical hypocritical sculduggery, P not only throws back the fish that jumped into his boat, he says a little prayer for…hm, the metaphor breaks down. Anyway, here’s how he replies:

1. [on Shirley's chilliness in Ohio winters] P thinks she’s “warmer than the hell her husband talks about”
2. [on her being happy] “but I could read between the lines knowing Shirly like I do”
3. P can tell her hand was shaking as she wrote the letter
4. P “tore up the letter” then “said a prayer for the preacher”
5. he intends to let the preacher and the good lord “take care of the rest” (good luck, fellaz)
6. finally, P’s glad Shirley “never wrote what she sat down to write”

Good guy, right? To be fair, there are lots of good guys in the Statler song book (okay, 96% of them are carpenters named Jesus, but that’s still a large population). But here again those goofy looking, key change-lovin’ muthaz are at their best when they’re acknowledging how sad and desparate adults can get. And it happens whether they drink the Jesus juice or not, evidently.

* not knowing, my guess is Presbyterians don’t indulge in the purple silk so much

** Actually, “she” doesn’t write. Or rather what she wrote is conveyed second hand. I just wanted to say “she writes” as an introduction to a fictional letter because Tom Waits once introduced “A Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” that way and it seemed a clever little tip-off to the conceit of the song.

*** That one is for the harder-core Statlervians among you.

Eesh. I’m not sure how much more of this all-Statlers nonsense I can do. The problem isn’t listening to Statler Brothers records. I actually do, unironically, enjoy it (despite how critical I am of them). The problem is that their geospatial catalog, it were, is shallow. Musically they never do anything that really evokes a sense of place. And lyrically they tend to just set songs in geography, which means they mention a lot of places but don’t really craft anything that are about place (ostensibly the point of these geomp3 posts).

So that’s my excuse for some of these tracks that have very frail geographic elements in them. And that sentence is my segue to this week’s track, “The Baptism of Jesse Taylor,” by The Statler Brothers.

Let’s use shorthand, eh? Franklin County had itself a prick on the roster, named Jesse Taylor. Taylor boozed, fought, gambled, and of course ignored his wife and kids. They dunked his ass in Cedar Creek and — voila! — everything’s okay. This song fits very well into The Statlers’ catalog, of course, in that it’s about true, unadulturated dirtbaggery amidst a community of otherwise-exhalted souls. This is so common I won’t even bother to go into it with these posts. And although the boys’ band does a cute little thing with a gospel bridge (uh, that’s white gospel), it’s otherwise not that interesting.

In fact it’s so nondescript that it’s hard to tell where Franklin County is. The guys often sing about Virginia, but this one is probably supposed to be generically rural. However! I wanted to put this one on the map, so I did a search for all “Cedar” features, type “stream,” in county named “Franklin” at geonames.usgs.gov. There are “Cedar Creek” features in “Franklin” counties in Arkansas and North Carolina. But there’s also a “Little Cedar Creek” in Franklin County, Indi-fucking-ana, and you can be sure that — given what I’ve seen since moving to this state, which is lots and lots of Jesse Taylors milling around and just as many blue-eyed Christian spooks who would love, love to get that dirty fucker to pick up the way of the cross — I’ll be excusing the ‘little’ qualifier and dropping this track down there.

And for that reason, it’s“The Baptism of Jesse Taylor,” also from 1974’s Thank You World. Put down in the location for “Little Cedar Creek” recorded at GNIS.

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

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.