ICON For The People: Good Golly Ms. Dolly!
James Akenson Goodness gracious….as they oft time out in the country…it seems like Dolly Parton is everywhere these days. Yes! Dolly Parton may not constantly be on the Country Music charts or on Country Music radio, but she is constantly in everyone’s Country Music hearts. How strong is Dollymania these days, you ask? Natalie Weiner […]
Proto Billy: Who’s On First
James Akenson In a classic comedy routine, Abbott and Costello bumble and stumble on the question Who’s On First? It’s baseball oriented, not cricket, and involves all sorts of miscommunication about meaning. It’s kind of like another, more serious, dilemma faced by a poor soul trapped in the bureaucracy of the legal system in Franz Kafka’s […]
Morgan Pieri: On The Long and Winding Road
Morgan Pieri: On The Long and Winding Road James Akenson My good mate Malcolm Patterson Quillen (a.k.a. Pat)….a music guru in his own rite….likes to humorous quote former major league baseball pitcher Joaquin Andujar. In an interview, Andjuar responded to a question with I have two words for that. You never know. Andjuar may […]
Talking Black, Nashville, and Country Music
Talking Black, Nashville, and Country Music James Akenson I’m greatly concerned with the issues related to social justice that boiled over with the death of Breonna Taylor and Georgie Floyd. Yet, as I begin this Country Underground Australia piece I’m also thinking about The Killer, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash. Both performed stellar versions […]
O Brother Where Art Thou. Happy Anniversary!
O Brother Where Art Thou. Happy Anniversary! James Akenson August comes and goes. Then it comes and goes again. Since the death of LP (Life Partner) Mickie’s parents in the early 2000s we visited Vicksburg, Mississippi each August through 2018. Couldn’t make it in 2019 and COVID-19 stopped a planned 2020 Vicksburg visit. We cleaned […]
Keith Urban: God Is Dead…NOT!
So…the Death of God might not be as complete and a done deal as Loretta Lynn feared. The Death of God movement in the 1960s upset people. I remember sitting in a laundromat in Janesville, Wisconsin during my 7th grade teaching internship. It was a Saturday morning and I was drying my laundry. I think I was […]
Charlie Daniels Marches On
Death and taxes seem to be agreed upon as two things none of us can escape. The recent death of Charlie Daniels gives one a pause. As long-lived artists pass to their reward their fans express dismay. As icons from their early lives it jolts fans to realize their idols aged, lived long lives, but […]
Webb Pierce and Sam Hunt: Care For A Sample? It’s Hard to Forget
Webb Pierce and Sam Hunt: Care For A Sample? It’s Hard to Forget James Akenson Would you care for a sample? No. We don’t mean a color sample, a Whitmans’s Sampler of candy, a Free Sample of a new product, or even a sample in statistical research! We’re talking about a sample of very traditional […]
COVID-19 Redux…Back Again!
James Akenson Jerry Lee Lewis claimed there’s a Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On. COVID-19 keeps shakin’ on. This COVID-19 mountain railway on which we’re riding bids us to watch for dangers of all sorts that may be just around the flattened curve. So…let’s see what kind of things have been shakin’ since the previous COVID-19 […]
Bayeux Bayou: Weaving a Tapestry to Lila McCann
James Akenson No doubt some Aussies are a bit skeptical of United States foreign policy. Some blokes and blokettes might be leery of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). and other intelligence operations of the U.S. Pentagon. President Trump doesn’t care much for the work of the U.S. intelligence agencies since he, like Johnny Carson’s […]