Yelling at Dumb Country Songs, Again: Toby Keith Edition

Ever a burr under my saddle, this time because of "I Shoulda Been a Cowboy"

I’ve mentioned elsewhere my renewed acquaintance with KKYX, the once-great, now-mediocre classic country station out of San Antonio. Circa 20 years back, when I’d fallen in love with it, it had immaculate playlists of true, real country legends — Waylon, Strait, Dolly, Jones, Loretta, Merle, Tammy, Paycheck, and Charlie Pride and the like. There would be occasional nods to elders like Wills, ET, and Hank Sr., and Glen Campbell was about as pop as they’d get. Modernity was Charlie Daniels and Hank Jr.; Randy Travis and Reba; Dwight and Clint Black. You’d also hear the best classics of the second-tier artists: “Harper Valley PTA,” “Ode to Billy Joe,” and “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” for example.

Human thought went into it; Texan thought at that. Acknowledgment of the world outside the station’s window: more than once while running errands on high Hill Country backroads, right at the apex of glorious golden-purple sunsets, I’d hear “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain,” and the world’s palimpsest would kind of stop and resolve itself into pictures and feelings burning into your soul. And as this was a San Antonio station, you’d hear Strait probably twice an hour, every hour, and it would be the primo stuff from pre-1990.

Oddly, now they play at least that much Ronnie Milsap, who…was fine, I guess, but he ain’t George Strait, especially not in San An-fuckin’-tonio. And speaking of right now…ugh. Ack. Fah. Some computer is spitting out the selection based on algorithms and it’s the same ol’ crap over and over, Eddie Rabbit and Alabama; Bellamy Bros and the Oak Ridge Boys; and way, way, way too much Judds, Garth, and Brooks & Dunn, along with Milsap by the metric tonne.

Now when they drift into pop you get Kenny’s wretched duets like “We've Got Tonight” and “Islands in the Stream” or his even worse bombastic schmaltz like “You Decorated My Life.” As for Willie, they lean heavily on his sappiest ballads and silliest ditties: “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before,” “Seven Spanish Angels,” “On the Road Again,” and “Always on My Mind”, instead of “Blue Eyes Cryin’,” “Angel Falling Too Close to the Ground,” or even “Whiskey River.” As for deeper cuts like “Me and Paul,” “Funny How Time Slips Away, or “Night Life,” forget it.

Your as apt to hear “9 to 5” or “I Will Always Love You” from Dolly as you once were “Jolene” or “Coat of Many Colors,” and the one fucking goddamn Waylon Jennings song they play into the ground is the Dukes of Hazzard theme. I am not even kidding. That’s the one you hear the most.

So not only have the choices among the ‘70s and ‘80s hit parade worsened, but now it’s open season on the ‘90s and even the early 2000s.

Not just Kenny Chesney, Montgomery Gentry and late-period Faith and Tim: Night before last I heard Pat Green’s blatant “In the Living Years” rip-off “Wave on Wave” on there, which sucked for it’s own sake and also because it made me feel old: here is a “classic” that didn’t even exist back when I first became aware of the station now playing it. So, there’s that, and a whole mess of ‘80s and ‘90s non-entities like Collin Raye, Restless Heart, Diamond Rio, and Boy Howdy, who I think I’ve never even heard of.

But worst of all is that now, in the fullness of time, Toby Keith has become classic country.

Lord how I hate Toby Keith. It’s not because he can’t sing — he really does have a nice baritone and he knows how to use it. It’s just his music I can’t stand: the whiny petulance and shitty rapping on “I Wanna Talk About Me,” the pettiness of “How Do You Like Me Now?,” the misbegotten, cravenly pandering patriotism of “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.”

Maybe the day will come when I will be able to put words to my chaotic hatreds for “I Love this Bar” and “Beer for my Horses” but arriving at that state might require vision quests.

And perhaps on some yet other days I will find the time to savage each of these songs individually, but right now, it’s mainly “I Shoulda Been a Cowboy” lodged in my craw, primarily because I just heard it, in the very shadow of a replica of the first capitol of Texas.

And so giddy-up, pard, as I eviscerate what is reckoned to officially be the most-played song on country radio of the 1990s….

I bet you've never heard ol' Marshal Dillon say

“Miss Kitty, have you ever thought of runnin' away?

Settlin' down, would you marry me

If I asked you twice and begged you, pretty please?”

She'd have said, "Yes", in a New York minute

They never tied the knot, his heart wasn't in it

He just stole a kiss as he rode away

He never hung his hat up at Kitty's place

Toby wrote this one solo; I guess he has watched more Gunsmoke, and that more recently, than I have, because I seem to remember them enjoying their relationship exactly as it was, right there on the edge of the chains of marriage.

Come on, people — they had to at least be friends with benefits. And look how happy they were with that arrangement.

Setting that aside, let’s say Miss Kitty got her wish. What then? What form would this “settlin’ down” take? Kitty would be bored out of her red-headed skull sitting at home all respectable-like, the music and laughter of her saloon only a memory, and as much as he protested to the contrary, especially as the series progressed into a more enlightened era, Matt Dillon loved crackin’ skulls and pluggin’ outlaws.

And there is no reason to believe that Matt Dillon had ever been an actual cowboy. Yes, he wore the duds, but he never mentioned trail rides or chuckwagons having been a part of his pre-Dodge City existence. He did mention army service, and once joked that he’d been a preacher, “but I didn’t make enough money to pay my gambling debts.” But never a cowboy.

Which is a recurring theme in this stupid song… One the verse above is grafted on to with no rhyme or reason, as we shall see.

I should've been a cowboy
I should've learned to rope and ride
Wearin' my six-shooter, ridin' my pony on a cattle drive
Stealin' the young girls' hearts
Just like Gene and Roy
Singin' those campfire songs
Woah, I should've been a cowboy

When he sings “just like Gene and Roy,” invariably I hear it as “just like Dean & Rog,” which is yet another micro-irritation this drivel inflicts upon me.

Anyway, about Gene and Roy….

Yes, Gene Autry grew up on a ranch, but his first job out of school was as a telegraph operator for the St. Louis-San Francisco Railroad. When he made his first movies, he was barely an adequate horseman and no kinda roper.

Did young Gene Autry ever wear a six-shooter atop a pony while on a cattle drive? No, no he did not; that was only in the movies. Late in life, after he’d become a very wealthy man, Autry purchased a 120-acre ranch in the dry California hills. Did he want to harken back to his rugged childhood back in Oklahoma and Texas, punchin’ cattle and breaking broncs? No, he sold off all but 12 of those acres, and on the remainder, he built a Western-themed “movie ranch” of adobe buildings, a version of that same town that’s in every Western, and ranch cabins.

Roy Rogers was even more of a fake cowboy than Autry. Born Leonard Franklin Slye in a Cincinnati slum tenement, Rogers should more rightly have been known as “the Buckeye Buckaroo,” for he spent his first 20 years within the confines of southern Ohio, much of that time in cities and small towns, where he worked in factories. Eventually he did make his way to California for a hardscrabble Grapes of Wrath-type existence as a driver of gravel trucks and as a peach-picker for one harvest: he choked on enough Tulare dust of Merle Haggard’s bitter memories to earn his stripes as a country singer. But…where are the ponies and six-shooters and cattle drives?

Every real cowpoke wore fringed, satin shirts on the trail.

For that matter, where are all these young girls with stolen hearts? Roy Rogers and Gene Autry movies were geared as much to ten-year-old boys as anyone else, and ten-year-old boys, then as now, thought girls were icky. There’s nary a skirt in sight around those macho campfires; compared to these two chaste cowpokes, Matt Dillon was Rudy Valentino.

So, Toby, you want to be a cowboy, and you’ve cited as example a United States Marshal and two of the fakest cowboys to ever complain of saddlesores after 15 minutes on the trail. Even in their fictional incarnations, one of them mainly sat around a saloon waxing philosophical and tolerating eccentric deputies when not beating up or shooting ne’er-do-wells.

And the other two rode around yodeling.

Which is another thing real cowboys never did. Yes, real cowboys sang, and sang plenty, but you were as apt to find a yodeling cowboy as you were to find one beatboxing in the saddle and breakdancing around the campfire. If yodeling had been a thing back then, my great-grandfather would have mentioned it. Or if not him, somebody else.

I might of had a sidekick with a funny name

Runnin' wild through the hills chasin' Jesse James

Ending up on the brink of danger

Ridin' shotgun for the Texas Rangers

Go west young man, haven't you been told?

California's full of whiskey, women and gold

Sleepin' out all night beneath the desert stars

With a dream in my eye and a prayer in my heart

Ol’ Tobe saved the worst verse for last, and then rides off into the sunset with not one but two rounds of the chorus.

Okay, if you are riding shotgun for the Texas Rangers, you are the sidekick with the funny name, Toby. If it were me handing out the monikers, you’d be “Lunk.”

As for riding shotgun…did you ever see Woodrow Call and Gus McRae sitting side-by-side in a stagecoach, Conestoga, buckboard or any other form of wagon? No you did not, because that is not what Texas Rangers did, ever.

As for Jesse James — he robbed banks and trains, not cowboys, and if you actually knew a damn thing about actual history and not the fictions of Hollywood, you’d know that he was more a Southern partisan / guerrilla than any sort of truly Western figure at all. Most of his depredations took place in states like Missouri, eastern Kansas, Iowa, and (memorably badly for his gang) Minnesota: areas we don’t really much consider as properly the West today. (The James Gang ever strayed west of the midwestern cornfields.)

And no, Jesse James was never a cowboy, either. A borderline psychotic calvaryman-turned-outlaw, sure, but not a cowpoke. And neither were the men who chased him around, over hills or flatlands or in the cities like Nashville where he’d hide out or anywhere else.

Moving on, back in 1849, long before all the gold in California was in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills under somebody else’s name, two things they didn’t have much of were

A) women;

and

B) whiskey.

What small quantities of both that were available in Gold Rush California were both A) extremely expensive;

and

B) Of very dubious quality; often even perilous to health.

And hey Lunk, with this misinformed foray into the California Gold Rush, you’ve lost the plot, again. This song is not called “I Shoulda Been a Miner.”

And what real cattle drive ever crossed a desert? You ever see cattle grazing in a non-irrigated desert, Toby? Where would these steers be coming from, where would they be going to, if they had to cross a desert?

Once more, you only see that in the movies.

Lunk, this thing you once longed to be, this dream deferred of yours, is to have been something other than a cowboy…You wanted to be a fake cowboy and become as rich and famous as Roy, and especially Gene, who owned the California Angels at the time of his death. Rumor even has it that the name of the “somebody else” with the gold-filled bank account in Beverly Hills was in actual fact Gene Autry. And Lunk — You’ve done it — I read that your net worth is $365 million.

Now I wanna be a cowboy too.