Pickin' and grinnin'

So I was watching TV in the bedroom Friday night, after a lovely meal at Longhorn’s, wearing only my boxer shorts and my special shirt with a print of dogs playing poker (patterned after the famous painting you can find at many convenience stores), eating a pack of Saltines and watching an old rerun of The Porter Wagoner Show on RFD-TV.

Yes, my wife is a lucky woman.

I was delighted to come across this program. Porter was wearing a resplendent red and gold Nudie suit that can’t be appropriately described in the English language. A young Dolly Parton appeared and sang Jolene, which is about as good as it gets. Then she and Porter dueted on a song called Her In the Car and the Mobile Home Gone. I can’t tell you how happy this made me.

I sort of remember watching The Porter Wagoner Show as a kid, but not that much. He must not have been one of my parents’ favorites, but I do remember the Saturday night ritual of watching Hee Haw.

It didn’t matter where we were – at home, at a neighbor’s house, at my grandmother’s house – we stopped when Hee Haw came on and watched it. Even though as a kid I thought it was corny and I didn’t care for the music, I watched it because I thought it was funny and it had a lot of good-looking women. I’m referring to Nurse Goodbody and the gals lounging around the barnyard, not Minnie Pearl.

Most people I know around my age who grew up in the South recall watching Hee Haw. I don’t know if Yankees watched it. If they did, they probably thought it was a documentary. They can be ignorant about the South.

The show probably didn’t help the South’s image in those parts of the country where they don’t drink sweet tea. There were a lot of people in overalls telling corny jokes and pretending to drink moonshine. But those of us who lived here realized it was just a parody, even though we all have at least one cousin who reminds us a lot of Junior Samples.

At the time, I thought Buck Owens and Roy Clark were just a couple of clowns. I didn’t realize that they were giants of country music, especially Buck. Every great country music star of the day appeared on Hee Haw – George Jones and Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash and Conway Twitty.

This was at a time when country music was good, unlike the river of manure that flows out of Nashville these days. Instead of Waylon and Willie and Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain, you get stuff like Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw and Keith Urban. Keith Urban’s CDs sound like Phil Collins with a banjo.

You don’t really hear good country songs about drinking and cheating and d-i-v-o-r-c-e anymore. Now it’s either a sappy love song or one of those phony, down-home “I’m from a small town” songs, with lines like:
“Me and Jenny May were sitting on the front porch,
Kissing by the light of the citronella torch.”

OK, I just made that up, but I bet it’s an actual line in a song somewhere, or soon will be.

I guess the real reason I have fond memories of watching Hee Haw is it always made my parents laugh, and that’s a good thing for kids to see. If you’re a parent now, like me, you’ve probably been horrified more than once when you walked in the room and your kid was watching something on MTV.

I don’t mean to sound like a Bluebell ice cream commercial, but that seemed to be a simpler time. I wonder whatever happened to Nurse Goodbody?