COLUMNS
|
Kountry Korral
with Mr. Midnight
Alan Jackson: Don't Rock The Jukebox
When I's a child, I drownt a boy named Jonah Thornton in Tygart Crick. We was out in the woods with baseball bats lookin to find some animals to hurt like we was hurtin in our ugly hearts. Of a sudden, I felt a kind a meanness in the wounded place that men spend their entire lives tryin ta keep hidden. I started hittin him in the back with the bat; it made a dull thuddin sound on his tiny body and he stumbled and started tryin to scramble away. He crawlt tward the crick and I grabbed him by his hair and held him under that freezin dark water till I kilt him. That was mid fall 19 and 91, the year that Alan Jackson's Don't Rock The Jukebox came out; an album that hollers and yelps 'bout awl the hurt and awful things in ye. “That's All I Need To Know” is a slow, plaintive drone 'bout this aged woman who sets her crotch on fire, dumps two bottles a Old Forrester on her head and runs up and down County Highway 327 screaming bout bein “lonesome” till a car hits our lost heroine and she's called up inta her everlastin' reeward. Another worth mentionin is “Someday” 'bout that farmer by tha name a Fredrickson you knew when you was a boy and how he'd had a heart attack in his front yard when he was stripped to his waist and diggin a ditch fer some reason that remains obscure. He had that one dog that was a Australian Shepherd and Collie mix an that mongrel woodn't let no one near that body. Finally, a fireman shot it with a bee bee gun and it ran off inta the cornfield yowlin'; that a ways that old man could have a Christian burial. “Working Class Hero” sounds to me like ancient church music. It's bout this secretary who poisons her and her bosses cawfee. Then when they's just bout kilt a Merciful God comes down from his white shinin throne and lays His hands on their bodies so's to cure em. “Love's Got A Hold On You” is a crazed piece of Merican storytellin bout a bunch a friends on a real drinkin spree who bust inta a county morgue round Christmas time, cut out all tha intestines from those bloated bodies and run all round town stringing them in the trees like as though they was garland and tinsel. Anyways, you should buy this album, I guess. Lessen you're an idiot. Or worset.
|
