Due to upcoming professional commitments and the imminent (thirteen hours) return of my wife from a long trip overseas, this may be my last guest post at the Agitator. If it is, I’d like to thank Radley Balko for the opportunity to guest blog at this site. Radley is one of the best writers on the web, and as important a journalist as any I can name.

My wife and I went to see George Jones, at the Dorton Arena, a weird semi-geodesic dome in Raleigh, North Carolina, for our first date. I suppose it’s strange for a married couple to consider this “Our song”, but we do.

We met working as DJs at WXYC, a freeform radio station in Chapel Hill, the first radio station ever to broadcast on the internet. Radio is fast becoming obsolete, in no small part due to the internet, which is sort of a shame. I love iPod shuffle as much as the next guy, but it can’t teach me anything, as a top notch radio disc jockey can. When I met my wife, she was playing a cover of the classic moonshiners’ tune “Mountain Dew”, by the Country Rockers, a delightful old pair of geezers who sounded a lot like Grandpa Jones, of Hee-Haw fame. You can’t find it on Youtube, but you can find their cover of Ernest Tubb’s “Drivin’ Nails In My Coffin”, which is almost as good.

Finally, it’s been a pleasure writing at a site where readers, some of them anyway, appreciate the work of Billy Joe Shaver. Shaver is mainly known as the muse for Waylon Jennings’ best songs, but to my knowledge Waylon never covered Shaver’s best song, “Ragged Old Truck”.

It’s possible that I’ll be able to post again before The Man returns, but if not, enjoy your summer vacation.

– Patrick at Popehat

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2012 at 9:36 pm by Patrick from Popehat and is filed under Five-Star Fridays/Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.