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.

This week’s track is a quick detour from Statlersville (also known, evidently, as “urban areas are the devil’s playgroundville”). Last week’s cut from Los Hermanos Statler was “Streets of Baltimore,” and a little trivia for the zero point zero of you follow these posts has it that this was not the first track to find its way to the Baltimore area. Because this week’s track is also about Baltimore. It’s Nina Simone’s “Baltimore” (written by Randy Newman, sans the animated cowboy who cracks wise).

It may or may not surprise you to find that Ms. Simone sees Baltimore in much the same way that poor dope in The Statlers’ song does — a bleak, cold, grey wasteland. Give or take. But in truth The Statlers’ protagonist (P) was indifferent until he lost out romantically to the city and moped his way back to the farm in Tennessee. The Newman/Simone track takes a different approach, one could say.

The song eases in cold and moody and Simone wastes little time before she socks Baltimore right in the nose:

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Beat-up little seagull
On a marble stair
Tryin’ to find the ocean
Lookin’ everywhere

Hard times in the city
In a hard town by the sea
Ain’t nowhere to run to
There ain’t nothin’ here for free

Eesh. It’s like a postcard. And it essentially just gets less and less poetic from there, so I won’t bother to…oh, okay, here’s a little more:

And they hide their faces
And they hide their eyes
‘Cause the city’s dyin’
And they don’t know why

Oh, Baltimore
Man, it’s hard just to live
Oh, Baltimore
Man, it’s hard just to live, just to live

Meanwhile the music itself ebbs and sways with a string arrangement that never, ever gets hopeful and in fact is rather theatrically morose, meaning it sounds like the stuff you’ll hear at the end of a tragedy. Which is fitting, because if this song is anything, it’s a tragedy. I don’t know what Baltimore ever did to Randy Newman (is that what turned him into an quasi-adult-contemporary novelty song writer?), but Baltimore got theirs in this sneering anti-paean. Do note that it’s interesting that in Simone’s, P’s sister Sand and little brother Ray, like The Statlers’ P, seems to thin everything will be much better on some farmstead upstate. Maybe. Maybe not.

So it’s“Baltimore,” from 1978’s Baltimore. Dropped right down in — why not — Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

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

In this [especially late] installment of a recent Staler Brothers-only run here we again find the boys waxing ruefully about the big, bad center of population. This time it’s Baltimore that incurs the wrath of these clean-livin’ country boys, in a song called “The Streets of Baltimore.” It’s about a couple that moves to Baltimore and splits up. Ostensibly, anyway. Because as usual for The Statlers it’s much more about the cultural geography of urban v. rural (Oh, by the way — please interpret that as a direct equation to sin v. salvation, respectively). Let’s walk through it:

The intro eases in as a lot of Statler tracks do. There’s gentle, loping, harmonized single lead line, and nothing else. Then the narrative begins and – oh, christ, seriously? In the first stanza? Alright, fine — the first stanza lays it out starkly:

I sold the farm to take my woman
Where she longed to be
We left our kin and all our friends
Back there in Tennessee.

First of all, using the word “kin” establishes a lot. You don’t even need the bit about the farm. We can infer.

Nonetheless, there it is and it’s helping to tell the story of a poor, poor slob who sold his farm in order to move with his bride to Baltimore, evidently a life-long dream of hers. And before I get into this a little myself, let me stop you right there and say that, yes, when you grow up in small towns, you grow up with seclusion and exclusion (both ways!) and your perspective on life is limited by default. One has to read or find other ways into engaging other cultures and worlds if one cannot travel to do so. But having said that…Baltimore? I’ve been. It’s ah-ite. Not sure about the stuff of dreams.

But the protagonist’s (P) lady friend seemed to love it. Oh, did she love it. And while P worked his factory job running “an old machine” (could none of the Statlers name a single type of factory machine that rhymed with any synonym of ’serene’? — actually, scratch that remark. ‘Old machine’ makes more sense — it contrasts well that the wife is out shopping and this dude mans some old, apparently indescribable heap of industrial machinery), his lady was living her dream.

You can see where this is heading, so let’s jump there:

I did my best to bring her back
To what she used to be
But soon I learned she loved
Those bright lights more than me.

Now, I’m a going back on that same train
That brought me here before
While my baby walks
The streets of Baltimore.

So, yeah. The dude becomes a drip in order to pay for the lifestyle (his excuse, not mine — my guess is that he wasn’t a barrel of monkeys back in Tennessee, either). Meanwhile the lady isn’t so interested in a drip and pretty soon he’s back on that train going the other way. Yep, that’s it. There isn’t that much going on in this song, is the thing. They don’t try to Baltimore up the music, for example, and in fact the arrangement and instrumentation is very uniform throughout (suggesting that, in fact, P has learned nothing?)

So it’s“Streets of Baltimore,” from 1974’s Thank You World. Dropped right down in — why not — Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

And the geoRSS for all mp3s of the week.

If you spend any time in The Statlers’ canon you’ll quickly see their predominant sense of geography and place. It’s so adorably simple it almost hurts: cities are corruptive dens of iniquity and anything not urban is fertile, fecund, almost sacred ground where upright and proper values are sewn and reaped — you know, stuff like “do unto others,” “honor they mother and father,” “hate gays and foreigners.” Good, American fabric stuff. To The Statlers’, cities are Sodoms to the Gomorrahs that are any rural area yet untouched by the march of progress and modernity. Done. Except scratch “almost hurts” and replace it with “hurts.” Because this is the kind of reflexive, old-timey junk that oozes out of our dark, scared hearts in times of hyper xenophobia and jingoism (that just happened to coincide with the last eight years and just happened to cameo at Sarah Palin rallies last year). It’s just so obviously bullshit, is my problem. To think that rural America is somehow more American, or more pure, or more moral is egregiously ludicrous (a phrase I keep trying to insert into my personal conversations but seems too strong every time I think of it). Rural living isn’t more anything. Well, “anything” positive, I mean. It’s probably more on-its-way-out. It’s certainly more meth-addled.

But not according to The Statler Brothers. They’ve harmonized to tale after tale of big city livin’ gone wrong, and this week’s track is a doozy. It’s “Streets of San Francisco,” and unlike about ten other songs is not in any way related to “Streets of Laredo.” No, this one isn’t about insane asylums or cowboys. It’s about an upstanding young Tampa High student who goes out west, changes her “Christian name,” and all hell breaks loose. To wit:

She thumbed her way for seven days
And way too many nights
And hit the Streets of San Francisco
Runnin’ for her life

Okay, so no real explanation as to why she had to leave Tampa. There’s something later about her “mama’s disgrace,” but it’s unclear to me if this is the protagonist’s mother or if the disgrace belongs to her as the protagonist. Nonetheless, here she is in San Francisco “runnin’ for her life,” and already there’s a problem. Do The Statlers not realize there are thousands and thousands of prostitutes who practice in small communities across this great land? Granted, most of those “communities” are truck stops and filling stations on frontage roads outside of late-shift factories, but still. You can be a whore anywhere there are dirtbag johns who will pay. It’s not a function of concrete and infrastructure, is my point. But I digress already.

A week in cosmetology two weeks in airline school
Seven days of shorthand in a secretarial pool
But now desk clerks and bell hops all know her by her face
And the folks of Tampa know her by her mama’s disgrace

All through the day she sits alone and dreams of Tampa High
Wonders what the other kids are doin’ then she cries.
Then with the California sun she goes down every night
And hits the Streets of San Francisco walkin’ for her life

And there you have your options for women in Statler land. Never mind how ribald and dirty that “California sun” line really is, let me just tell you what the other kids are “doin’” fresh out of Tampa High.

It gets worse.

In her mind she plays a make believe game of her own
She pretends she’s window shopping, furnishing a home
For a husband who will come along and take her from this life
For now a John will come along and take her for the night
(repeat chorus)

Ours is a sexist, patriarchal world. No question. Just recently I was privy to a particularly gut-twisting tale in real life, in fact, which I am not at liberty to tell. And it’s very possible that a San Franciscan prostitute might very well wish for a less chaotic, less damaged life that features — even centers around — a loving husband. But in art (well, lyrics), having your protagonist wander the streets yearning for a man to rescue her from her prostitutin’ (I’m tryin’ to drop all of my Gs to siphon some gravel street cred) means more, means in this case that the woman is clearly helpless, talentless, listless, and passive. Like all women are, right? (Never mind that I’m sure we all know some kick-ass lady bitches and some of us might be lucky enough to have married them.)

Still, I guess I’ll still excuse The Statler Brothers here because they’re telling prostitute stories pretty far in advance of the time it became a putrid and dishonest cliché. At least they were ahead of the curve, you know? (I’m talking to you, Garry Marshall). I mean, I excuse a lot of Statler Brothers sins already (and if I keep up with more and more Statler tracks you’ll see — there’s no end to their sinnin’ ways). What’s one more when you have a CD — a compact disc! — of Lester “Roadhog” Moran and The Cadillac Cowboys laying around?

This one goes down in the Union Square/Tenderloin area of San Francisco, a likely candidate for where our poor Tampa High dropout may have done her window shopping.

“Streets of San Francisco,” from 1973’s Carry Me Back.

And the geoRSS for all mp3s of the week.

So last week a friend unleashed a blizzard of hell on those of you who read these geoMp3 posts. Yes, both of you. It was the annual dust-up of my love for The Statler Brothers, and the first track was a pathetic little tale of some ethically questionable bloke who absconded to New York City to fulfill his dreams and left his lady back in Clay, Kentucky. Presumably to just rot there. Well, some night he gets a little whistful and calls her up with a bunch of weepy business and that’s the song. But I hinted then of things to come when I drew attention to the odd appearance of Jesus in this tale, and — guess what — Jesus is back muthafuckaz. He’s back in this week’s Statler Brothers track, “New York City,” an even more sordid little threnody, of sorts, that tries to portray New York City as a lair of amorality and evil. Okay, that happens a lot, right? But this song actually has the stones to blame the city while making it very, very clear that the protagonist himself (and very possibly his lady friend) is the blazing dirtbag.

You’ll quickly see how this week’s track is the inverse of last week’s. It starts with an unwelcome visit to the protagonist from his former lady friend around Christmas time:

She came to me shortly after Christmas,
Said she hated spoiling New Year’s Eve.
But the truth doesn’t wait to come in season
And what we had feared was now believed
She said she’d leave come Monday morning,
Catch a plane if I’d split the fair.
She had friends who lived in New York City.
She’d look them up and have the baby there.

Of course the girl feels apologetic (for spoiling the New Year’s fun of her short-lived friend). I mean, it’s her fault, right? But, okay, so they’re a couple of kids and they weren’t careful. It happens to the least careful and responsible of us. But what the fuck did New York City do? Nothing so far except house some friends and have good hospitals. That’s it so far, but nonetheless here comes the chorus:

And now she’s alone in New York City (New York City),
Living like … Lord, I wonder how.
An angel in hell in New York City (New York City),
But I can’t think about that now.

The implication is that somehow New York City’s, what, bigness is contributing to this girl’s hell? Why else mention it? And repeat it? New York can be pretty seedy, but what gall to suggest that the girl you knocked up and then didn’t help or bother to help support is having a rough go of it because she’s living with friends in New York City. Rather than, say, Clay, Kentucky or Old Timey Values County, Virginia.

But I’ll get off the New York City thing, because I quite frankly don’t care to defend it. There are other great cities in this country, and any one of them will have many fewer roving, ferile hipsters taking ironicartistic (it’s one word to them, see) pictures of each other puking at night clubs. NYC isn’t that great, is my point, and anyway there’s way more interesting stuff going on in this song.

Such as the last stanza:

Honey, will you tell him Bible stories
And give him all the love I never could?
And never tell him too much ’bout his daddy
‘Cause there’s not too much to say that’s good.
He’ll have to learn it all from his mother:
How to count and say his A-B-Cs.
But when you teach him prayers to say at bedtime,
Leave off “God bless Daddy,” won’t you please?

This is why The Statlers are so interesting to me. The first reaction here — especially from someone like me — is to rail about the hypocrity of even thinking The Bible should be pushed on this poor bastard when it was clearly not helping the adults in its life keep their shit together. Deadbeat dad is clearly a fuck up, mother a clearly subservient (”if I’d split the fair”? “If“?!) and passive slob who will be taken by countless father figures to come. In other words, The Bible ain’t nowhere to be found in these lives except in their evidently meaningless night-time prayers and this is a very, very common complaint among those who don’t just think religion is an amusingly pointless and fussy hobby but is actually bad for us.

But The Statlers — for all of their constant Jesus this and Jesus that — clearly expect the human condition to be only occasionally triumphant and transcendent. The rest of the time, they seem to argue, it’s nothing but struggle and regret and the gruelling process of reconciling the moral standard you shoot for and the one you actually attain. They clearly see a continuum from bad (Satan, big city values) to good (anything rural and old?), but their catalog is very full of people all along that spectrum. I should research and see how they treat true atheists (or are those “New Yorkers”?), but otherwise they seem to be fully aware and accepting of the fact that adults are weak, troubled, and sad. No matter how much they pray, no matter how many of those little foam wafers they choke down, and no matter how many gay marriages they disallow, adults are weak, troubled, and sad. And obviously I’m okay with that, because I feel the exact same way.

“New York City,” from 1970’s Bed of Rose’s.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Hoh, oh, oh. Watch the fuck out. I’m going to try really hard to keep this in check, but there’s so much to say. Recently, a friend of ours happened to mention The Statler Brothers. It went something like “Hey, I saw an old newspaper the other day and one of the ads was for a Statler Brothers gig at a prison rodeo. I thought of you guys.”

Well, that was plenty. Never mind the hilarity of the prison rodeo gig, it instantly triggered my complex and possibly Oedipal fascination with The Statler Brothers that exists in me constantly, just below the surface. Hm, actually my hatred for Charlie Sheen’s comedic persona exists just below the surface, so my love of the Statlers is probably just under that. Except — what about my hatred for Ray Romano? That has got to be right in there, too. And there must be room for my hatred of the forceful mentally-challenged know-it-all blowhard from down the street. I’m not sure where my Statler Brothers thing really resides, I guess.

Nonetheless, this week it springs to the surface, and I doubt I’ll be able to contain it. I will try, but I find them fascinating.

I am not posting their greatest track, which is, of course, “Every Time I Trust a Gal.” (Just kidding — but when’s the last time somebody rocked a chorus of kazoos like that?) I am posting instead “How Are Things in Clay, Kentucky.” And while it’s not their best musically, it’s still almost perfectly indicative of what Harold, Phil, Don, and Lew were all about (I’ll get to you in due order, Jimmy). To wit:

How are things in Clay, Kentucky?
Bet you thought I’d never care
There was a time when I felt lucky
Just to be away from there.

So first of all, this one obviously goes down in Clay, Kentucky. Does that mean something? Absolutely. And…not really. Clay, Kentucky means nothing. It’s a ~2,000-person burg in western Kentucky, for one thing. Which is bleak any way you slice it. There might be a reason The Statlers called it out, but maybe not. The point is that the protagonist is pining for a former lover who chose to live there. Chose to live there! The protag is in New York City making clandestine telephone calls to a married former flame in Clay! It’s ludicrous, right?

Maybe, maybe not. The thing is, The Statler Brothers will often appear to be ludicrous — preachy, old timey throwbacks to a time that to have seemed old-timey even when it was modern. But there’s something you need to understand about what The Statlers have always understood in full: the horrible regret and unavoidable sadness of having lived. So let’s stick with this, move past some stuff about the protag thinking NYC would offer everything he wanted, but finding that “how things are in Clay, Kentucky, has been lately on my mind,” and get to the stuff that’s classic Statlers (yes, I’m willing to write things like “classic Statlers” unironically — that kind of irony is for tight-pantsed hipster douchebags, and we’re all weathered adults here):

I hear kids back there playin’;
I hope he don’t know it’s me
Jesus knows I still love you,
But I just had to call and see.

How things are in Clay, Kentucky.
Bet you thought I’d never care
There was a time when I felt lucky
Just to be away from there.

Aw, man. Can you hear that? That’s the sound of some poor slob’s heart creaking and groaning through the rest of his life. Those fucking genius Statlers chose New York City for a reason, see. They chose stupid, dumpy, Clay, Kentucky for the same reason — to make it hurt.

Oh, and let the fact that “Jesus” shows up in a stanza in which he otherwise doesn’t belong serve as a harbinger of strange things to come. The Statlers are super religious, see, but that somehow doesn’t stop them from cheating on wives, breaking up marriages, and engaging in all manner of country music shenanigans. Evidently the abhorrent crimes required to produce country music trump any real effort to follow the teachings of Jesus after all.

“How Are Things in Clay, Kentucky?” taken from the 1980 10th Anniversary collection.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Even though nobody has agreed to it (or knows it), I have a running deal with the people in my life that says if they mention The Statler Brothers, I get to post some Statler tracks. Even though it hasn’t happened in recent memory, it did today!

So this goes out to my Laredo All-Star Compatriot who ran across a Statler Brothers mention from a gig they did at a Texas prison rodeo (literal sarcasm, which is rare: good gig!) and told me about it. You’ve made a huge mistake.

Selections from The Statler Brothers’ 30th Anniversary Celebration (not their best stuff, by the way)

I considered doing some kind of Super Bowl-themed track this week, but it’s just too hard to care about a herd of rich man-boys who all, somehow, think God has an interest in whether they win a game or not. On the other hand, I guess there’s a chance God is interested in whether Ben Roethlisberger or Kurt Warner go home on Sunday nights feeling good about themselves. Because he doesn’t seem to give two shits about the rest of us (just kidding, he does not exist). Although if I had to put money on it, If he did exist I would have to say that Warner would have the edge over the other dude, given the amount of time he devotes to depicting his godhead. (Didn’t that used to be blasphemous? Did Catholicism make that okay? I wonder if I should bother to look into that.)

Anyway, who cares? This week’s track is Roger Miller’s “Kansas City Star,” and it’s going down in Kansas City. Which one? Well, it sort of doesn’t matter. Pick one, because the point of the song — if there is one (Roger Miller records don’t always bother with such things) — is that your choices should serve you best. I mean, the protagonist is eschewing a better job with higher wages in Omaha just to stay in K.C. where he’s happy. Hm, possibly it’s that humility is important — that one shouldn’t just follow stardom and money anywhere it leads. Except that he seems to get off on being a star, no matter the fact that it’s a local market.

You know what? I think this song really doesn’t have a meaning and is yet another in a decently-long line of Roger Miller novelties. Which I happen to love, by the way, including “Big Harlan Taylor,” “One Dyin’ and a-Buryin’,” and “Lou’s Got the Flu.” If you like country music at all (although why would you, given what hat-sniffing double-skulls like Toby Keith have done to the genre?), do yourself a favor and buy King of the Road: The Genius of Roger Miller.

And I’ve only driven through Kansas City, maybe 6-7 times right along I-35, but I think I understand how a pistol-shooting local TV clown might be able to scrape together a carer. It reminds me of a larger Lafayette, IN, meaning it also reminds me of about 150 other cities of that ilk where kind and wholesome (read:worthless) entertainment can cut it.

So that’s my Super Bowl week. If you really want it to be footbally, go from one team with red jerseys, Arizona, to another team, the Kansas City Chiefs, and then you’re right there in Kansas City where you need to be. But why would you care?

“Kansas City Star,” taken from the King of the Road: The Genius of Roger Miller box set.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Soundcheck recently did a Smackdown! segment on whether Springsteen is still relevant or is essentially an oldies act. He’s definitely still relevant, spitting out great and at least interesting projects here and there (The Rising, Seeger Sessions, respectively), but Freeman shares my breathless surprise at how bad it is.

I didn’t really care whether anybody agreed (though I pretty much regret using it as a geoMp3 of the Week, given there really isn’t anything spatial about it), but it is good to hear it.