“Music really isn't supposed to be perfect.”
- Tom Petty
Who's going to argue with Tom Petty? It seems that with the advances in technology and things such as Autotune and AI, we're dangerously close to squeezing every ounce of humanity out of music. That's a shame. I can't think of anything more boring than perfection..
The song that's featured at the top of the site currently is called Six-Miles East of Town. I wrote it as a love song to the place where I grew up, on our family farm six-miles east of Kirksville, MO. There's a reference in the chorus that I know means nothing to anyone but me - “dead flies in a gunnysack” and “dead flies in a soybean sack.”
Here's where that comes from: My dad and his dad, my grandfather, farmed together for 30-plus years on land that had been in the family for four generations. When I was growing up, we lived a mile from my grandparents, and since I was a farm kid, I was expected to help out…a lot. So, I was around my grandfather often, most days, I would say. One summer, when I was about twelve or thirteen, there came an infestation of black flies in our area. I'm talking an Old Testament plague-like level of pestilence. They were everywhere, especially in the barns and around the cattle. It was fierce. My dad found a way to combat them, which was this product, a powder if I remember right, that you put out in areas where they were concentrated. The flies would be drawn to it, consume it, and then die. It killed them by the millions, but then you had dead flies everywhere. It was particularly bad in our big barn, flies covering the floors and surfaces of everything.
My grandfather was a taciturn German who believed that the primary focus in life was work. Work, work, work. He was the kind of man, I came to believe, that if every confronted with the fact that there was no actual work to be done, would grab a spade, dig a hole, and fill it back up, just so there would be no idle time. Every day during the plague, when there was nothing else going on, Grandpa would be in the barn sweeping up flies and shoveling them into sacks of one kind or another, feed sacks, usually. I have vivid memories of walking into the barn and seeing his silhouette down at the far end of the breezeway, stoically sweeping away. He'd get it all swept clean and the next morning everything would covered again and he'd start over. That's how that reference ended up in the song. Grandpa was one hard-workin' man. I don't think they make 'em like that anymore.
On this day in music, Jackie DeShannon was born (1941). She sang “What the World Needs Now is Love.” She also co-wrote “Betty Davis Eyes.” I mean, seriously, a song for the ages.
Also, Kacey Musgraves was born (1988). That girl…GOOD!
RP