Nostalgia Road
Country Songs Dick Dedrick
“J.D. Benning and the Backroad Riders are on the air!” That’s what I woke up to every morning when I was a teenager. But country music passed Benning by years ago. He’s in a nursing home today—still strums his Gibson on occasion. Benning never made the big time, but he did have a following around these parts back in the 1950s. “Country music started drifting away from us old-timers when the Nashville Sound came along,” he says. “Violins took the place of fiddles; Eddy Arnold stopped singing his ‘Cattle Call,’ and Ray Price gave up ‘Heartaches by the Number’ for ‘The Good Times.’” Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams were the first members of
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the Country Music Hall of Fame, but Benning says they’d have a hard time making it in the business today. “Our kind of country was made for front porches and dance halls, not big arenas.” My view? Times change; so does music. Country music is bigger today than ever. And its fans are younger than ever. That’s how things work when you pass a torch (or guitar) from one generation to the next. I think the first country protest song came along in the 1930s: “I like mountain music, good ol’ mountain music, played by a real hillbilly band.” That’s right, you trendy, armwaving concert fans. They used to call it hillbilly music. Visit NostalgiaRoad.com
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When the Media Gets in on April Fools’ Day If you’re looking for inspiration on April 1, remember one of the all-time great media hoaxes. In 1957, the BBC’s respected news program Panorama ran a story celebrating a bumper spaghetti crop in Switzerland—thanks to a mild winter and the near elimination of the destructive “spaghetti weevil.” The program included footage
of Swiss farm workers pulling strands of spaghetti from trees and laying them in the sun to dry. Although some viewers caught on—and chastised the BBC for playing fast and loose in a news program—others fell hook, line, and pasta ladle. Many even telephoned the network to ask where they could get their own spaghetti trees.
The Last Laugh I’m not the heroic type, really. I was beaten up by Quakers. – Woody Allen I’ve always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific. – Lily Tomlin www.50plusLifePA.com
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