For you to agree with me and what I’m about to say, and believe it as much as I do, I believe you have to have some country roots.

Now, by “country roots,” I’m not talking about country music, even though country music is a very important part of what having country roots is about.

I don’t know if country people think of themselves as being country people. To them, I believe they just think of themselves as being people. Who are poor.

The people who talk about country people are city people. Most of them were country people at one time. My mother talked about country people when I was a kid, growing up, and this was how I first learned that there were country people. And, as I said, my mother’s family were country people, and that’s why my mother always talked about them. She talked about them in a disparaging way, and it was clear to me, from what she said, that we, not being country people, were much better than them. This was an important part of my early upbringing. I learned at a very early age that it was very important to be better than someone else. Country people don’t talk the same way city people do. I found this out at a very earl age. This was what made me realize that my mother was really a country person because everyone in her family, except her, talked like they were country people. Many years later, I learned that when my mother was a young child, her family lived in a little country village that was about 40 miles from Lexington, Kentucky, where we lived. They were farmers. That’s what country people are. At some point, my mother’s family moved to Lexington. She went to Henry Clay High School, and that’s where, I’m certain, she first encountered city people. That’s how she became one of them. I’m sure that her name was what caused her to do this. She had to live up to it. She was named after one of her mother’s sisters, who was rich. She’d become rich by marrying a rich city man. Back then, this was how poor country girls could become rich. My mother figured this out, and I’m certain this was why she married my father. Who was from Cincinnati.

Up until I was 12, we lived on a 10 acre tract of land that was on the outskirts of Lexington. In Kentucky, anytime you owned some land that wasn’t in town, you had a tobacco base. What this meant was that you had an allotment for growing a certain amount of tobacco. Which was very valuable. Behind our house, there was a tobacco barn. My father was no farmer. He was a city slicker. So, he had tenant farmers grow the tobacco. They got half the proceeds when the tobacco was sold. Growing up, I watched this entire process. From the time the plants were put in the ground until the tobacco was hauled on wagons to the warehouse to be sold. I knew it from start to finish. The last leg of the process involved stripping the tobacco leaves off the stalks and putting them in hands, and then bundles, you might say. There was more to this than I’m going to tell you. All of this took place in what was known as a “stripping room.” It was a long building, probably 40 feet long, that had the outside wall of the tobacco barn as its inside wall. It was a kind of shack. In the center of it, there was a coal stove. This part of the process took place at the end of the year, and by that time, it was pretty cold. The stripping room had no insulation. So, it stayed pretty chilly. There were windows on the outside wall, and they weren’t thermo pane. Five or six men did the stripping, standing in front of a rack where the tobacco was pilled. The stripping process took at least a week.

This was going on in what was essentially my back yard. It all greatly intrigued me. I imagine that I was about eight years old when I first encountered this process, and that would be in 1952. I just checked Wikipedia, and I was right about this. One of the most important pieces of equipment in the stripping room was a radio. It was there that I first heard country music. One of the songs that was played over and over on the radio was “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” I remember this well. Country music was never played in my home. My mother loved music, and she had a pretty extensive record collection. Her stuff was what I’d call “highbrow.” She had all of the most popular Broadway play albums, and this was the kind of music that I grew up on. There was one album, by Oscar Levant playing “Rhapsody In Blue,” that she played incessantly. Which I have permanently tattooed on my brain.





I’m sure that you can well imagine what it might have been like for me to fist hear Hank Williams singing “Your Cheatin’ Heart” for the first time after a steady diet of the likes of “South Pacific” and “Oklahoma” (The Farmer And the Cowman Should Be Friends).

` Now…………fast forward to 1991 and the video of the interview by Bob Costas with Glen Campbell where he tells of his early beginnings and picking cotton in Arkansas.

I indicated at the outset of this that you probably wouldn’t feel as strongly about what I’m about to say if you didn’t have some country blood running through your veins…..

If you do, then you will have a better chance of agreeing with me that Glen Campbell’s TV show in the 1970s was the height of ….. a critical part of your life, and so were his hit songs.
I really didn’t realize this until I saw that Glen would be doing his last shows and would be doing one in Louisville, which we attended.
When you play his hits, which I did a number of times before we went to his show, it hit me. There was something about it all that really resonated with me.
These were darn good songs and Glen sang them perfectly (which takes in a lot of territory—particularly his arrangement and his phrasing, and of course his guitar playing).

There’s that old saying …. “You can take the gal out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the gal!” Well, this saying didn’t hold true with my mother, but it sure did with Glen.

The timing of Glen’s show was perfect for me. The Trio was gone….nothing would ever take its place. But……… on TV…Glen was a welcome relief to much of the music that was popular then…that I didn’t like.

At the time, I had graduated from college, had started law school, and had been drafted. For me, the Army was a day job. I continued to live in our apartment with Jackee. I was taking law school classes a night and going to Ft. Knox every day to do legal work. My Army pay, and what Jackee was making as a school teacher allowed us to live a very comfortable life the first few years we were married. Friday was the only bad day. That’s when they posted the Vietnam levy. If you got past Friday without having your name on this list…. Life could be good stateside.

We were young and we were hopeful….

That’s how I remember it … every time I hear one of Glen’s hits.

I also remember meeting him in 1990 at a celebrity golf tournament.

We talked for about five minutes….about The Kingston Trio …

And, Bob Shane….

When I mentioned Bob’s name … time stopped.
For several seconds….

Glen shook his head…but, didn’t say anything…..
He didn’t have to….

I could tell what he was thinking…What a singer! What a guy!

In this interview… Glen tells about many of the people he met.

He says that John Wayne was who impressed him the most…….

I’ve kicked myself a million times for not spending more time with Glen that day… I could have easily done so …..
But, heck … he was just Glen Campbell….a country boy…….










Max