SONG OF THE DAY: Riding Home (kudzu'd)

The road I live on turns gravel not long after going one east from my mailbox. I go that back way when I'm cutting down to Southside, and did so this past Saturday, to go visit the graves of kin. I made a big batch of cornbread, using old buttermilk that I'd saved for a long ass time for just this purpose, and went down and visited kinfolk and left them cornbread offerings. One cemetery in Amelia is full of all my hillbilly ancestors who moved there from Carroll County around the time of the depression, so in that little church cemetery lacking a church these days, there's a row with my paternal grandpa, his parents next to him, a great uncle that died at age 5, and then my great great grandparents (the folks of the great grandmother just to the left). There's another great uncle over in the other corner, but that little stretch is all ancestors, with a scrubby little bush swallowing up the marker of my great uncle who died in childhood. Then that paternal great grandfather's parents are in the town of Amelia, so my great great grandparents paternally, even though the man spells his name slightly differently than I do. I guess there were some twins of his who went by Fonzo and Lonzo who had a falling out, and one of them switched a vowel, creating a new branch. At least that's how my dad used to tell it, but he was a natural born shit talker, like me and most of my ancestors I'm aware of. Then I road back through Rice to the other family cemetery where my dad and uncle are buried, and my paternal grandma and step-grandpa Bob, who was as much a grandpa to me as anyone. Good loving dude, and my grandmother's trailer was always a sanctuary of love, though it could get stressed. There was always some sort of crew of uncles and cousins and other kids running through there. My one sister practically lived in that trailer for a good chunk of her childhood. I also visited a great uncle in that Rice cemetery, who always encouraged my schooling and gave me science magazines and talked me up about being an engineer. He'd probably laugh at me leaving cornbread for ancestors while he was alive, but I still left him a nice chunk, because he more than deserves it.
After all that ancestor homage paying, and asking for their guiding hands to continue to protect me in this off kilter ass world, I made my way back home, and cut through on that gravel road to get home. The leaves were all changed beautifully, and you kinda have to be careful in case someone is coming the other way, because there's not really room to pass. But nobody is ever often coming through there at the same time, so I do have a tendency to push it a little bit coming down the hill, because it feels good to slide through those trees on that gravel, with just a touch of chaotic slip beneath the tires, but nothing two hands on the wheel (plus one from the ancestors) can't keep between the ditches. That's an old feral prayer of my people, ever since we got mechanical wagons that run as fast a field of horses... "keep it between the ditches". And I did, and it was a beautiful day, and I got home, and straddled the ruts in the driveway to creep up to the parking spot by the house out of the way of the dead tree with hubcaps nailed to it as high as I can reach, and it felt more like home than usual.

SONG OF THE DAY: Lonesome, On'ry, and Mean

Classic country for your Sunday. No $14 omelets, no vintage pop-ups, no authentic Nascar t-shirts from 2003 worn by a karaoke king whose parents cover half of his $2500 a month rent. I do not have false nostalgia for the past, because the past was full of as much shit as the present is. But I also do not idolize the mosaic of vintage consumer culture into some sort of camouflage for complicity in the inequities of our times. That’s probably why nobody likes me, beyond the casual. I’m lonesome, on’ry, and mean (dirtgod’s version).

SONG OF THE DAY: Ev'ry Soul Is There

Americana music can be a hit or miss type thing. Wide swaths of it feel more hipster-oriented, like wealth adjacent folks cosplaying as old school country in vintage outfits more than authentic music. Don’t even get me started on my disdain for Sturgill Simpson, and his son-of-an-Appalachian-narcotics-officer bullshit. Whatever credibility anybody out there wants to explain to me he has is automatically negated by the aforementioned familial fact about him and him wearing a goddamn cop mustache. Wack with a capital ack. Usually my personal litmus test for Americana music is whether it would jibe with the longhaired redneck crowd… those country ass dudes who are too outlaw to even bother telling you about it, because honestly, they don’t want anyone bothering them about their shit. They are like 1%ers without motorcycles, nor the means to afford a nice Harley, much less all the material accouterments that go with that. It’s a 1%er outlaw club that drives whatever the fuck is still running and has gas in it, so they might be in an ’87 Dodge Ram one day, then an old Ford Escort stationwagon with a trash bag window on the passenger side the next, and then you see them on Friday night at the liquor store and they’re driving a fairly decent Firebird somehow. This is pretty much my dad and all his closest conspirators of FTW that I saw back in the day growing up. Malcolm Holcombe always felt completely in that crowd, like he’d be totally comfortable sitting at the kitchen table smoking a bowl with those dudes. I have loved his music for a while, and he was that refreshing actual outlaw rural voice that was tolerant of the things you’d hope one was tolerant about (folks’ sexual identity, who they wanted to fuck or how they wanted to be in the world) and intolerant of the shit actual outlaws should be intolerant of (the police state, in fact the whole goddamn militarized pyramid scam from the top down, which too many rural dudes who consider themselves outlaws seem all too intent on mentally fellating every chance they get). I had really hoped to see Holcombe perform live at some point, but I knew he was old, and word of his health problems got online as his performances became fewer and farther between. He passed away last year, but he left behind a large body of work, that if you’re looking for music that is more country than country music, and way more outlaw than the bullshit your local All Lives Matter jack ass is bumping, you should go digging into Holcombe’s discography. This was off the last album released after he died, of the stuff he was working on in the end. That makes this song feel a little more more… didn’t really know what more to put there. It’s just more. I love this dude and I hope he has found peace, and may his memory be a blessing.

Sunday Night Slowdown Chapter 003: Funky Country

FUNKY COUNTRY

Birthday mixtape for Boogie Brown aka Blue Globe Beats. Wandered through my country roots, but with a funky vibe, and hit some guardrail memorial anthems, as we do out here in rural VA. Click the link above to go to the mixcloud and rock the tape.

SONG OF THE DAY: Skunk Funk Go-Go

Where I live is in the country, and there’s a sharp ass hairpin turn that descends pretty steep too, heading down to a bridge that got washed out in a flood in 1969, and being it’s country, it’s always either crazy rural fools flying through here, or rich folks who bought giant houses out in the country because it was cheaper and they’re not California or Northern Virginia rich, just Blue Ridge foothills dilapidated county rich. Anyways, I try to do a good bit of yard loungin’, so I watch the cars fly through, slow down, almost hit each other, sometimes for days on end, just pausing the sun in the sky by shoving a forsythia bush against it and holding it there, and enjoying the vibes. There’s an old tree cross the road in the not clearly owned clump of underbrush full of decades of litter, but some old boy from down the road keeps the grassy part cut. There used to be a birdhouse nailed up to it, but that came down (sadly), and there’s a hole in the tree that you can see now that birdhouse is gone. I got a nice small Bluetooth speaker that I like to charge up on really nice prop the sun up high days, and put the speaker in the tree hole, and load up my iphone 4s that I use as an ipod full of go-go music, and just bump that shit. It makes the hairpin curve even more enjoyable as drunk on life fools are forced to slow down, and their unmuffled machines quiet for a second to coast downhill through the curve, and there’s go-go music blasting from a tree at the edge of nothing. One day, one dude even circled back and looked again, then circled back his first direction again and stopped, looking out the window, trying to figure it out. I was just sitting there watching. I got to be worried he might get out to go find the speaker, but also if he did, I was just gonna yell, “Now, you know that was my speaker!” at him from up in the yard. Years ago, my boy found a nice baseball hat on the ground at a gas station, and picked it up to have, and some dude walked from across the other side of the parking lot and said, “Now, you know what was my hat!” I’ve always filed that one away to use later in life, because that shit was hilarious, but I never got a chance to use it yet. I thought that one snooping ass redneck dude in the Civic was gonna be my chance, but I guess he didn’t feel like climbing all the way up out that seat on deep recline. Anyways, I only play go-go music in the speaker in the tree in that hairpin country curve, because I’m blessed enough to live in the space where the fringes of Appalachia share a Venn diagram with the fringes of the Go-Go Belt.

a freestyle sonnet about sitting outside without no screens other than my eyeballs

Indoctrination causing inside stranglehold, 
been indoors too much lately, four walls closing in 
with clutter and dust, rust never sleeps, and this cold 
world don't give half a fuck how I'm feeling it spin. 

When it gets like this, I revert to country state 
of mind, find time for shade tree recline, practice vice 
of deviseless moments, refuse to suffocate, 
mind roaming, zero bars block views of Paradise 

City above - blue skies full of silver linings 
to feel even if I can't touch... truth can't ever 
be cobra clutched by angry hands. Intertwinings 
of hopes (prayers) and stars (creator) will sever 

feelings of lostness, too long inside square confines. 
Outlaw minds don't do well with domestic guidelines. 

SONG OF THE DAY: Sure Thing

Being online sucks because you think more people care about Elon Musk and think he’s more important than Dolly Parton, but in actual real life, it’s not true at all. Dolly Parton would never dare become a billionaire. She knows better. You gotta be a real piece of shit to end up being a billionaire.

SONG OF THE DAY: Night Fires

Country music back in the day was weird, because it’d be like 100 weeks of shit radio-friendly songs (still is like that), but then you’d get some weird ass Side 2 jam like this where Conway Twitty just wasn’t even fuckin’ around one bit. How the fuck do you make a song like this and not look like Conway Twitty? Impossible. Universal magnetics sneaks into even country ass music more often than folks realize.

C0VNTRY B0Y RVR4L S0VTH3RN...

country boy rural southern 
life teaches callousness - thank 
god for better sense grandmas 

SONG OF THE DAY: Country Boy

This song makes me miss my dad, and think of going to Tom’s Country Store to get hot dogs for lunch with him, then sitting up in the park where he ate and read the paper every day, even though he only had a 7th grade education. I mean, he read the paper every day until he replaced it with a fifth of vodka entirely, not just partially. He also had a little blue Ford Courier pick-up that we painted a grim reaper on the hood of, based off a t-shirt of mine as a delinquent metalhead teenager. That truck was great, classic wheelbarrow truck – so tiny, with the tweeter kick cassette player, but with that grim reaper hand-painted on the hood, it was pretty sick. When I first got my license, I got to drive it to school now and then, blasting some shitty metal, grim reaper on the hood, blowing into school like the misfit I was, living River’s Edge in real life, but nobody got murdered necessarily, just ripped off. Kinda come to realize as much as I hate all those charts where you plot yourself, I’m about as Chaotic Good as it gets when I’m properly synchronized with my ultimate dirtgod raven mack ultramagnetics. I'd rather be Chaotic Good than anything else, but especially Lawful Neutral. Way too much fuckin' Lawful Neutral out here, fucking everything up with its nothingness.

M4K1NG TH31R W4Y, TH3 0NLY...

“making their way, the only 
way they know how…” in extreme 
yelling Waylon Jennings voice 

SONG OF THE DAY: I'd Rather Be With You

Now That’s What I Call Love Songs For Big Women And The Goofy-Assed Men That Love Them, Volume 8, was always in heavy rotation around the time machine parts factory I worked at outside of Kenbridge for a couple months in the spring of 1998. We made kerfufflic coils, and I was managed by a guy who had Rudy on his name patch but everybody called him Toots, and he was chill I guess, so far as managers go, but there was a big rush in people trying to refurbish old time machines in that period before Y2K, and I definitely didn’t have the same grasp on kerfufflic coils back then that I do now, so I kinda hated that job. I mean, I’d still hate it, because all we did was making a tiny coil for old time machines, no time travel involved, in fact, it was really quite boring. I think minimum wage was still around $5, because I know they paid us $9 an hour, which was actually great money for Kenbridge back then, but I’d complain, “Sitting here making shit for a fuckin’ time machine, making $9 an hour,” and Toots would go, “Shit boy, that’s double minimum wage. You way too much college boy sometimes.”
He was probably right. College changed me. I wasn’t Southside Virginia anymore, briefly tricked into having dreams and hopes which replaced getting high at lunch (we all need our delusions). But Toots controlled the boombox, and he kept Now That’s What I Call Love Songs For Big Women And The Goofy-Assed Men That Love Them, Volume 8, bumping regularly. If you’ve ever seen me do my weird, shit-eating grin shuffle dance/creep thing, I learned that from Toots. New guy always had to sweep up at the end of the shift, which meant me the entire couple months I worked there, and Toots would just shuffle dance across the concrete factory warehouse floor with 15 minutes left in the shift, singing, “Time to sweep up, boy… time to sweep up all this shit. Time to sweep up, boy… get that push broom Raven.” That was my favorite part of the day, him dancing and singing, me pushing the thick bristled push broom forward, with a whoosh, then a lifting THUMP to quake the dirt out of it, before pulling back for another big whooshing push, all of it going to the middle, everything moving to the center, then dust panning all the day’s dirt out of existence, like none of it ever happened. We’d all stand around that last couple minutes, boombox still blasting, shooting the shit, waiting for Toots to get up and hit stop on the boombox. Clock on the wall was five minutes slower than him, but we went by Toots watch, even though he didn’t wear one that I ever saw. But he’d hit stop, and the first musical silence of the day meant we all grabbed our coats and started heading to the door. He’d be standing there waiting to lock up.
I didn’t quit officially, just stopped going, because I woke up the next day and didn’t feel like keeping down that particular dead end, hoping for a different dead end to get lost on. I was the last one out that last day I went in though, and as I walked past, and Toots moved to lock the door walking out behind me, he sang sort of so I could hear but also just as much to entertain himself, “Have a good night, motherfuckin’ college boy.”

SONG OF THE DAY: Coat Of Many Colors (chopped & screwed)

Still chopping and screwing country classics, because it's a way I can reconcile where I came from with where I am. That shit is hard for a lot of people. The past becomes too much, and you can't ever leave it behind, or you just run from it over and over. Now is hard as fuck too for people, especially when that past blew so many holes in you. I don't know... sometimes I think I'm doing better, but other times I think I ain't done nearly enough. But I did this much.

SONG OF THE DAY: Country Child

I’m an old fool from the old school, who still downloads full ass albums of mp3s from random ass music blogs which still exist doing such things. I didn’t sit there spending 28 hours downloading a single Metallica mp3 back in the dark digital ages to give up having actual copies of shit, especially considering how often my kids are trying to stream a song in the car, and the song is no longer there or not downloaded to stops in the middle of our shitty cell reception region. You either got it or you don’t, fuck them fake ass clouds.

I got this one because I saw it pop up on a blog I check, and the cover met my aesthetics challenge of “does this look like a butter container design from 1974?” Then I looked up Robert Finley’s story, and dude’s an interesting fucker, definitely, so I copped it, and enjoyed it so much that he entered the realm of “if they got a bandcamp I’m gonna buy their new shit moving forward.” This song was one of my favorites, because he offers a woman that he’s not broke, got $15, and would buy her a hot dog. For some reason this reminded me of some shit my dad would say, because the small engine shop he worked at, he loved to go to Tom’s Country Store a block away and get their hot dog specials. Any time I met him for lunch, that’s what we did. At one point, he had a tiny ass Ford Courier pick-up with a grim reaper painted on the hood (that I painted actually), and he’d run up to Tom’s for hot dogs for lunch, then go eat it in the park, reading the newspaper. Later in life, when alcoholism got him too bad, he went to the liquor store instead, and would drink his Aristocrat at the park instead.

I’m first generation college graduate, not an obvious dumbass (though we all are, to one extent or another), and have exposed myself to a lot of art and creative shit. But I’m still a raggedy ass country boy to my heart, and I don’t even really understand these weird ass digital radicalized suburbanish country boys of nowadays. Nor do I relate to the petty bourgeoisie. (Yes, “petty” not “petit”.) It’s fucked up. But I can still walk in the woods and find an old bottle dump, dig ‘em out, wash ‘em up, spray paint them, and write cryptic warnings about the downfall of our ancient ways. “’Cause I’m a country boy…”

SONG OF THE DAY: Mama He's Crazy (chopped and screwed)

At my patreon (which is like on Only Fans but about weird art shit not nudity), I try to chop and screw an old country classic from time to time. Support my patreon, and enjoy this reworking of The Judds most famous song, under my chopping and screwing name of DJ Honeysuckle Vines Growing Over the Abandoned Factory at the Edge of Town.

SONG OF THE DAY: Mukadzi Wangu Ndomuda

My girlfriend got a whole bunch of chicks two months back, and raised them in her bathroom. I've always just gotten pullets because I don't like dealing with chick death, but she handled the ups and downs of that shit pretty well. Now all of them are pullet-sized and in the pen with her grown hens from last year, plus two goats, and two frilly geese. I was supposed to get some of them, but I don't have a coop, and there's a couple foxes living right behind the house, and fuckin' wood is expensive as fuck, so building the type of coop I'd like to build ain't feasible right now. And if I can't build that type of coop, I'd rather not expensively feed a fox that seems just as happy with my compost pit for a whole lot cheaper.
Nonetheless, there's great joy in taking a small soup pot full of scratch and feed and scattering it in the pen, and watching the chickens all wandering around, tussling, avoiding goat heads and angry geese. I remember reading that watching fish tanks were supposed to be a great meditative act, but I gotta believe watching a bunch of chickens just wander around a pen is some of the same. Back in the day, my favorite shit at the old Bird Tribe Compound was just sitting there watching the flock politics of a bunch of chickens. And now my girlfriend's compound pen has like twenty of those fuckers, bobbing around, each one with their own weird personalities. Pure country shit, sitting there sipping on something, meditating about watching chickens, both you and the chickens (and goats and geese) all clamoring for shade, because the world is hot as fuck, and does not care.

MY GVT 1NTV1T10N G0T...

my gut intuition got 
fermented along back roads, 
where reality is fried 

4B4ND0N3D C0MMVN1TY...

abandoned community 
center with lace curtains left 
behind, exposed to weather 

MY M1ND F33LS L1K3 4N 0LD SH3D...

my mind feels like an old shed - 
cluttered with archaic tools, 
filled up with cobwebs, useless 

Y0V C4N T4K3 TH3 B0Y 0VT 0F...

you can take the boy out of 
the country, but his simple 
ass was still born in Farmville