Shades of Shel Silverstein

“A Boy Named Sue,” “The Winner,” “Hey Loretta” — when it came to poking fun at country music’s foibles and conventions, no one could match Shel Silverstein. Befriended by such Music Row colossi as Johnny Cash, Bobby Bare and Waylon Jennings, this Chicago-born original (who got his start as a cartoonist for Playboy) never had to pull his lyrical punches to fit in with the country crowd. Thus he fearlessly dashed off potentially offensive lines like “I’m going back to Texas and be one more horse’s ass,” “Nashville is rough on the living, but she really speaks well of the dead,” “She’s ready for animals, women or men/She’s doin’ Quaaludes again,” and this faux good ol’ boy contribution to feminist literature, “[Y]ou can fill my pipe and then go fetch my slippers/And boil me up another pot of tea/Then put another log on the fire/And come and tell me why you’re leaving me.” Silverstein continued to tickle and elbow country in the ribs until his sudden death in 1999 at the age of 68. He had, of course, anticipated his passing in a song that observed: “You can quit smokin’ but you’re still gonna die/Cut down cokin’, but you’re still gonna die.”

The other day, a friend and fellow Silverstein zealot invited me to drop by a club on Music Row to sample a few comic songs from JR & The Roadkill Choir, a band that’s already developed a following in the mustier honky tonks of Nashville’s Lower Broadway. JR is John Russell, a handsome and affable chap whose swipes at country stereotypes are just as irreverent as those of his famous predecessor. In one ditty, he moans to his erring girlfriend, “You’re too ugly to be cheatin’ on me,” then adds the clincher, “I settled on you ‘cause I thought you’d be true.” Elsewhere, he ruminates about the burdens of parenthood: “Girls go from dolls to derelicts quicker than a wink / That’s why sometimes daddies need to drink.” On matters of domestic harmony, he concludes, “No man was ever shot washing the dirty dishes.” In yet another song, when a guy’s wife catches him sneaking out of the Holiday Inn with a Waffle House waitress, he attempts to disarm her with a simple question, “How can it be cheating if I was thinking of you?” So maybe Shel ain’t gonna die after all.

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