I grew up in the north, in Cleveland. In my musically formative years there wasn't a lot of country music. We had mostly R&B, Motown and rock music here. It was in my post war stateside Army assignment in Oklahoma where I had my first exposure to country music. Now that was the early 70s so today's "new country" artists were either not born yet or just babies, so I am talking Hank Senior, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, etc... I really got to like it. One bar just outside the gate had live local band type music on weekends and most weekends I was there. (Lawton OK was too small for major acts to play.) I took tot he lyrics mainly. When I got back here and looked to get back to my music, I mainly looked for rock bands. I got a call from some guys who lost the use of their guitar player while he, um, went to work for the state for 6 months (DUI). They said it would be an easy gig, playing rhythm guitar and singing harmony, and lead here and there if I felt comfortable singing anything. I rehearsed with them,once, in a "we need you now so we will throw a lot at you" situation. I got tapes and made charts, so we rehearsed just twice and I played a gig. During the next week they offered to come to my house to rehearse to make it equitable as far as doing all that rehearsal driving. When they got to my house and saw all the keyboards and the sax, they said "You play all this stuff too?" and I kind of looked at them weird, like "You guys called ME. Didn't you know what you were getting?" and at that rehearsal I played some piano, some strings, etc.... They immediately moved me from "fill in until Mike is out of the joint" to "When Mike gets out of the joint we are expanding to 5 pieces" status. I played with them for about a whole year so I got a good exposure to country from that band. Then the bass player moved away, the guitar player quit, etc. I moved on to a rock band, then after a few years of that to a Motown band. After 20 years off, I started writing, thanks to PG software, and now almost everything came out country until I forced myself to NOT write county this year. And even at that, 2 of the new ones are country songs. Some with my toe near but not on the country line, but only 2 country songs. Which spawned this post..... That and the experiment that J3 did using Joanne's lyrics. There were what, 10 songs written with those lyrics, all very different, from my country to one I would call somewhat industrial, to David Snyder's hilarious rendition as done by The King. J3 and I disagree a lot but that was a good exercise. (And I think I won the writing "contest"... LOL!)

Last edited by eddie1261; 06/04/18 06:20 AM.