REAL COUNTRY
Grandmother listened to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights. Me, too.
Picture me, and my sisters, snuggled up in a fold-out couch — a couch that made into a bed — at Grandmother’s house in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Now picture us being very, very quiet on Saturday nights; if we didn’t make a fuss, we could stay up late with Grandmother and listen to the Grand Ole Opry on clear-channel radio from Nashville, Tennessee. On Sunday mornings, we woke up to Grandmother “chording” songs on her piano and singing songs we had heard on the Opry the night before.
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Tonight, I got to hear some of those songs again — and I remembered lots of the words; brains are funny that way. I was in a nice, little bar — tucked right behind an “adult toybox” store! The club had Christmas lights strung over the bar, and a revolving disco-ball that threw flashes of multi-colored lights over the ceiling and around the stage; at times, it seemed that the lights flashed in time to the music, but that must have been an illusion. This is not a place that visitors to the city are likely to stumble into. I lived there for over 30 years; and never heard of the place — even had a hard time finding it. And I wanted to find it, because some friends were playing in the band for Hump Day Happy Hour.
The songs were the same from my Stillwater memories, but the music was a little different — pedal steel, electric guitars, and full drum-kit had been added. Those special touches came to country music in 1966, when Buck Owens and his Buckeroos played at Carnegie Hall. In 2014, the recording of that show, Carnegie Hall Concert: Buck Owens and the Buckaroos entered the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress. The man who sat at the drum-kit that night at Carnegie Hall was Willie Cantu.
I thought about Willie Cantu tonight as I watched the band, playing real country music for real country music fans — an eclectic collection of ages, genders, and ethnicities. I felt lucky to be there and lucky to be able to relate so successfully to songs I have not heard in years.
Then a sweet little couple in the back started dancing, cheek-to-cheek. And I felt tears in my eyes and on my cheeks.
