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Pony Payroll Bones Talkin Red Foley Mediocrity
Matthew PonY Bones Proctor

Who is Red Foley?

The "Red" came from the fact he had real red hair!


He was called Mr. Country Music!


He was one of the major purveyors of making the country music style popular for the masses after World War II.


Red Foley's second wife, Judy Martin, committed suicide.


He was also mediocre a good deal of his career, yet always punching the existential wall.


Mediocrity--So mediocre that brilliance manifests yet which cannot be sustained.


Red Foley--mediocre much of the time--yet brilliance sounded and gleamed. Glinted from the trappings of wet human biology. Yes, the testament of the artificialities wrought forth from 20th century BUSINESS tomfoolery and mass production. The vinyl sound wretches and demonstrates corrosive disheveled grievous existential grief through the years cascaded gone.


Red Foley was on tour with a very young Hank Williams Jr. when he suffered a heart attack one late night after a concert. Adolescent Bocephus memorialized this tragedy in a song he wrote him damn self. One of his first songs!


Well, this is how they pitched and roll the gold word sold in the bowling alley of capitalism way back then.


I quote from the "persuasive" notes on the back of Foley's LP Beyond The Sunset:


"The reputation of Red Foley has grown steadily. It continues to grow with every appearance and every record produced."


Mediocrity describing mediocrity I dare say! The profound buffoonery of the maybe cloaked in the disguise of the obvious.


I continue:


"Here, in a new series, Red Foley will win undoubtedly a new audience and an enlarging response. Many of the songs are famous."


Obviously, the writer is a talented hack at non inspiration.


Foley is a little hack eyed too on this certain release. By the way, this is a religious/gospel country music LP. Do not confuse this with country gospel.


Foley on this release demonstrates mediocrity that briefly manifests a brilliance, if morose and confusing. Two of the "spiritual" selections are catholic religious centric religious songs, unusual for a country music LP.


You see, country music as a whole is heavily dominated by the Baptist denomination spectrum. Occasionally the strangely strange serpentine of more obscure protestant manifestations loiter in the prism light of reality.


These catholic songs are the morosely half sung "Our Lady of Fatima" and "The Rosary."


Foley must have been a big deal at one point. He has three different back up singer groups on the recordings. These include the Anita Kerr Singers, The Sunshine Boys Quartet and most famously the Jordanaires (of Patsy Cline fame)."


The cover depicts an unsettling hilltop view (or is it a charred winter field?) where either dawn or dusk are occurring. Foreboding tombstone grey meshes uneasily with a washed out stew of crimson red and blood orange sky, splashed and stained with the blood of Jesus Christ.


"and that's Red Foley, the country boy who made good."


Red Foley has a very unique style. He sing talks very serious songs about yearning, salvation and/or/all despair alternating with impressionistic realisms concerning disconcerting emotional despondencies, emotional flat affect post traumatic reactives and the accidental saltiness of emotional boredoms.


Don't suffer the contemplation if he is sincere or not. One gets confused shouting bare ass naked knee deep stuck in the muck of maudlin swamps.


Tom foolery and FOLLY and makin money off straight laced hillbillies. All the liquor got watered down. There are criminals that abound!