No! Don’t even start to fight with me, because I am so right. What does it have going for it? 1. It’s awesome. 2. It’s about drinking. 3. It’s about a disgruntled woman. 4. It’s by a Frizzell. 5. “Just as long as you keep tipping, I’ll laugh until you’re broke” is surely one of the best lines in country music. 6. It has a bass singer being all “gonna hire a wino” which improves any damn song. 7. It’s awesome.
In fact, this song is in a rare pantheon of songs I could listen to over and over and over again and still if you showed up at my house, I would sing them to you, from memory and love every second of it and be ready to sing it again (“Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys” being another one).
This was on the radio all the time when I was a kid and for some reason, it was on the radio pretty frequently the summer I spent packing Caterpillar parts, and until very recently, I never owned a copy of it. If I wanted to hear it, I just sang it myself.
And, America, here’s the funny thing–now that I have a copy of it, it’s apparent that I’ve been singing the slightly wrong tune all these years.
And my shameful secret is that I think my tune is better than David’s.
Still, I believe the world is a little smaller place because neither Tanya Tucker nor Gretchen Wilson has covered this.
Filed under: Pop Culture
This was probably my dad’s second-favorite c/w song. The first, no contest, was “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”
Funny stuff. I just finished reading this after Di got finished with it and I had to start singing it out loud to her without even watching the video.
see, now I want to know what wrong version you were singing :D
See, I heard this song first as a young girl, and I always thought it was terribly sad–about a woman giving up her bourgeois lace-curtain dreams for her drunk-ass man. But now that I listen to it again, as a woman of thirty, I note the undercurrent of contempt–that bit about the “soft aluminum cans” that her husband, when he feels “macho,” can crush “like a man.” And now I feel even sadder.