Braying in a cornfield transports me back to a wonderful time that made no sense.
If only sixteen year old me could see me now, out in the corn jumping up and down and caterwauling to twangy backwoods hillbilly music. He’d be horrified!
I was raised on country music and I hated it. My parents started listening to it in earnest in the mid 1980s. An Alabama song here, an Oak Ridge Boys song there. Sprinkled in with the standard adult contemporary pop and rock music of the time, it didn’t really register with me, and I was too young to understand musical genre anyway.
Things changed, intensified, devolved in the 1990s. Country music stopped being a component of my parents’ taste and became the whole darned thing. It wasn’t merely a casual listening phenomenon, either. They took line dancing lessons. They went to concerts at the Medina Ballroom on Saturday nights, dad duded up in a cowboy hat, boots, and a bolo tie, mom in a dress that could have come mail order from an ad on Hee-Haw. Sometimes my friends witnessed this behavior. It was humiliating.
Weekends and car trips had a soundtrack that was neither of my choosing nor of my liking. I avoided those sounds as best I could the rest of the time. This was my attitude toward country music through the first twenty years of my life.
The day it changed
My attitude began to shift on a ten minute drive midway through the summer preceding my sophomore year in college. I was headed to my day job at the neighborhood convenience store in my old Blazer. Same vehicle, same route I drove every day, but to different music, courtesy of my dad, who had driven it the day before and messed with the radio because he always messed with the radio.
For whatever reason I didn’t clean up dad’s mess that morning. I guess I didn’t see any sense in fiddling with a radio that was destined to fiddle itself right back the next day. Détente. I let his music hitch a ride with me that morning and it ended up staying on board for thirty years.
Somewhere along that four mile route a song tapped me on the shoulder and spoke to me exactly as I needed to be spoken to at that moment in my life.
Your blue might be gray, your less might be more
Your window to the world might be your own front door
Your shiniest day might come in the middle of the night
That’s just about right
Thing was, I wasn’t only working as a clerk in a convenience store at that time. That was my day job. By night I was an accidental entrepreneur, building a software business that was yet insignificant, a long string of late nights writing Pascal code and tech support emails from my parents’ basement in exchange for an occasional $10 check. It was a lot of toil in the middle of the night for little reward.
I was feeling a little isolated, anonymous, and I needed encouragement. I got it from an unexpected place.
That damned corncob song with a fiddle in it gave me the pat on the back I needed. “That thing you’re doing in the middle of the night? The world may not see it, it may never amount to anything. But it‘s your thing right now. Keep at it. It’ll succeed or it’ll fail. Reassess as you go. Everything will work out one way or another.”
I won’t go into it here, I try to keep these journal entries under a thousand words, but that business ultimately had a microscopic effect on most anyone who purchased music in the intervening thirty years. Millions and millions of people are downstream of something I built in my parents’ basement and they don’t know it and they never will. It’s magic to think about.
That single moment of encouragement did two things: it wrapped the whole adventure around a song that lets me relive it anytime I want, and it thawed my relationship with country music, my parents’ music, and I eventually came to love it. George Strait was next song up that morning. Blue Clear Sky. Just a snappy, fun song. Pedal steel, fiddle and all–all the things I thought I hated.
I realized that morning: this music is far more uplifting and life affirming than anything I listen to. That’s why it stayed with me.
Into the corn
I decided this spring that I was going to wander off into a cornfield once every summer for the rest of my natural life to see BlackHawk play what is now my favorite song. I saw them a couple times in the past but it was never a stated goal. From here forward it is a goal.
The plan for 2025 was to fly out to see them at Hodag Country Festival in Rhinelander, but the weather didn’t cooperate. It would’ve been a great opportunity to log some soft actual instrument time, but it would’ve left me watching in the rain.
As luck would have it, they ended up playing at Country Jam in Eau Claire eight days later. I got to watch with Allie from three rows back. Best show I’ve seen so far, all things considered.
I sang poorly and danced poorly and was reminded in unmistakable terms, once again, how incredibly lucky I am to have had the experiences I’ve had in this life, and to have shared them with the people with whom I’ve had the lifelong pleasure of sharing them.
Weird how something you hated as a kid can become so intertwined in everything you love as an adult.
Here’s to our shiniest days, whether it’s light or dark outside when they happen.
