Chicken Soup for the Soul: Country Music: The Inspirational Stories behind 101 of Your Favorite Country Songs

by Jack Canfield

Story by Michael Anderson

  Song written by Michael Anderson

  Recorded by Pam Tillis

  I grew up in Michigan and moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s and played in a lot of rock and roll bands. Then, in 1983, I signed a publishing deal with a company, Criterion Publishing, which had an office in Nashville. There was a secretary who worked there, and we got to be friends. While I was there one time, she went out of town for a few days, and she let me stay at her apartment and drive her car while she was gone. She also introduced me to her aunt and her cousin. After having lived in Michigan and L.A., I realized that these women were different from anyone I’d ever met. They were very genteel and gracious.

  I would go and visit her cousin, and she and I would sit and talk on the front porch for hours at a time. It was late summer — very hot days and warm, humid nights. The katydids — cicadas — were also out that year and they would make the loudest noises while we were sitting on the front porch having sweet tea and her mother’s key lime pie. All of that detail in the song — the porch swing, the katydids, the willow tree — was true to life, and I used it in the song.

  I finished the first verse and originally thought of the title, “Maybe It Was Nashville.” But I knew that was never going to work. First of all, back then there was an unwritten songwriter rule that you didn’t write songs about Nashville. Second of all, it just didn’t sound right, so I came up with “Maybe It Was Memphis.” Sounded much more atmospheric and romantic. I had never been to Memphis at that time, but I liked the feel.

  I wrote the first verse, last verse, and the chorus, but had a hard time coming up with a second verse. When we were going to make a demo of it I needed to put something down, thinking I could always go back and change the vocal later if I needed to. I had written the song in Nashville, so I wanted to demo it in Nashville, even though it would cost the publisher more, because they would have to pay for Nashville players instead of using the ones we had in L.A. I talked them into doing it in Nashville. And the first thing that came to mind when I tried to finish the second verse was “I read about you in a Faulkner novel, met you once in a Williams play.” The interesting thing was, I don’t think I had read any Faulkner, and was only familiar with a couple of Tennessee Williams plays, but it just sounded so right and so southern. Since then, I’ve become more familiar with both of them, but at the time, I wasn’t thinking of any specific character in any of the novels or plays. The key phrase for me was “country love song.” I didn’t think anyone would know what I was talking about with “Faulkner novel” and “Williams play.”

  When I got back to L.A., the song was pitched for several years, but everyone passed on it. Then Pam Tillis heard it and she put it on her album, Put Yourself in My Place, in 1991. Later, I found out that she had actually recorded the song while she was still on Warner Bros. It was released as a single on that label but nothing ever came of it. Then she signed with Arista and she re-cut it, with Paul Worley producing it. It was the fourth single off her album, and made it to #2 and stayed there for a long time right behind a Garth Brooks hit at the time.

  I’ve heard a couple of different stories about how Pam first heard the song. The folks at Criterion said she just heard it in a pitch session. But there was another secretary at Criterion — a different one from the one who lent me her car and all — who saw me once in a restaurant in Nashville. She was eating there with her boyfriend (an original member of the Eagles). She said that while she was working at Criterion she fell in love with the song and made a cassette for herself that she gave to Pam Tillis with the song on it when Pam was at the publishing office one day. I asked Pam once and I didn’t get the feeling she knew exactly either. A publisher and good friend of mine, Michael Puryear, says he pitched the song to Paul Worley directly around that time also. Sometimes you never really know in Nashville. I’m just happy she decided to cut it.

  After it became a hit, life changed for me. I was at the Bound’ry Restaurant in Nashville one day and was introduced to Tanya Tucker. She dramatically got down on her knees and started begging me, “Please write me song like ‘Maybe It Was Memphis.’ Please!” She said she had passed on it earlier and was acting like she was crying. It was pretty funny.

  I had another interesting encounter while the song was still on the charts. I was at Sunset Grill in Nashville. It was early afternoon and there was hardly anyone there. I walked through the bar area on my way to the restroom and there, all by himself in the bar, drinking a whiskey and smoking a cigarette, was Harlan Howard. I really wanted to meet him, but I also try to respect people’s privacy and don’t usually interrupt them at restaurants. Since there was no one else there, I thought, what the heck, so I went over and said, “Mr. Howard, my name is Michael Anderson and I just wanted to say hello.”

  He cocked his head to one side and said, “Maybe It Was Memphis?” and I said “Yes.”

  He started telling me where the song was on the charts and how many weeks it had been there and how many albums had been sold. He knew more about my song than I did. Then he said something I’ll never forget. He said, “Do you know why that song was such a big hit?” Of course, I wanted to say it was because I’m such a great songwriter, but I said, “No, why?”

  He said, “It’s the only song in country music where a nice girl gets laid and you still like her at the end of the song.” I had never thought about it that way. Then he said, “Every great songwriter has a least one song written in a waltz beat, too.” He said, “Now you’ve had yours, so don’t ever do that again.”

  I moved to Nashville from about 1992 to 1997 and then moved back to L.A., but I still spend a lot of time in the South. Every time I go to Memphis or Atlanta or Nashville, or any city like that, and I meet people and they find out I wrote that song, they nearly always say the same thing. They say they are very appreciative that I wrote that because it’s one of those songs (because of the second verse) that make southerners and the South sound romantic, literate and sophisticated, instead of just a bunch of hicks, like so many songs do.

  Maybe It Was Memphis

  Lookin’ at you through a misty moonlight

  Katydids sing like a symphony

  Porch swing swayin’ like a Tennessee lullaby

  Melody blowing through the willow tree

  What was I supposed to do

  Standin’ there lookin’ at you

  A lonely boy far from home?

  CHORUS:

  Maybe it was Memphis

  Maybe it was southern summer nights

  Maybe it was you, maybe it was me

  But it sure felt right

  Read about you in a Faulkner novel

  Met you once in a Williams play

  Heard about you in a country love song

  Summer nights beauty took my breath away

  What was I supposed to do

  Standin’ there lookin’ at you

  A lonely boy far from home?

  CHORUS

  Every night now once I’ve been back home

  I lie awake at night drifting in my memory

  I think about you on your momma’s front porch swing

  Talking that way so soft to me

  What was I supposed to do

  Standin’ there lookin’ at you

  A lonely boy far from home?

  CHORUS

  Mississippi Squirrel Revival

  Story by Buddy Kalb

  Song written by Buddy and Carlene Kalb

  Recorded by Ray Stevens

  Wendy Bagwell and the Sunliters was a gospel group that I used to listen to. They played churches a lot and did comedy, too. Wendy used to tell a story about a blind man who came to church with a seeing-eye dog. One day, the dog got after a cat in the church and it caused a lot of mayhem. I first heard Wendy tell that story one night on the radio when I was driving to Florida with my family. It was early in the morning, and they were all asleep, and I just thought it was hilarious. It’s a funny concept — something gets loose in
church and it’s happening on the left side and the people on the right side of the church don’t know what it is, and they misinterpret it. So that’s where the idea for “Mississippi Squirrel Revival” got started.

  I kept that in my mind for a while, and later I began working on the song. Back in those days, I had a habit of putting in references to people and places I knew in a song. I actually had a friend named Harv Newlin, who lived in Kansas City. And I had some friends who lived in Pascagoula, too, so that — and the fact that it was the only word I could find that rhymed with hallelujah — made me put them in the song. My wife is down as a co-writer, because I used to bounce ideas off her all the time and she would give me feedback on the songs I was writing.

  I did have a background in things charismatic, so I sort of knew of what I spoke. I’ve never really belonged to many mainline denominations. Everybody always thinks the song says “the First Baptist Church” of Pascagoula, but it’s “the First Self-Righteous Church.”

  I was writing for Ray’s publishing company and some others as well when I came up with this idea and I thought I would write this for him. He was doing some Barry Manilow-ish stuff and I kept telling him he needed to give the people what they wanted, which was more comedy. So one day, he got frustrated with me and said, ‘Well, then why don’t you write me some comedy?” So I decided I would give the squirrel song a shot, and it worked out pretty well for us. Since then, Ray has recorded over 100 of my songs.

  Mississippi Squirrel Revival

  Well, when I was a kid I’d take a trip every summer down to Mississippi

  To visit my granny in her ante-bellum world

  I’d run barefooted all day long, climbin’ trees, free as a song

  And one day I happened to catch myself a squirrel.

  I stuffed him down in an old shoe box, punched a couple of holes in the top

  And when Sunday came I snuck him into church

  I was sittin’ way back in the very last pew showin’ him to my good buddy Hugh

  When that squirrel got loose and went totally berserk

  What happened next is hard to tell

  Some thought it was heaven others thought it was hell

  But the fact that something was among us was plain to see

  As the choir sang “I Surrender All” the squirrel ran up Harv Newlan’s coveralls

  Harv leaped to his feet and said, “Somethin’s got a hold on me! Yeow!”

  CHORUS:

  The day the squirrel went berserk

  In the First Self-Righteous Church

  In the sleepy little town of Pascagoula

  It was a fight for survival that broke out in revival

  They were jumpin’ pews and shoutin’ Hallelujah!

  Harv hit the aisles dancin’ and screamin’

  Some thought he had religion others thought he had a demon

  And Harv thought he had a weed eater loose in his Fruit-Of-The-Looms

  He fell to his knees to plead and beg and the squirrel ran out of his britches leg

  Unobserved to the other side of the room

  All the way down to the amen pew where sat Sister Bertha better-than-you

  Who’d been watchin’ all the commotion with sadistic glee

  But you should’ve seen the look in her eyes

  When that squirrel jumped her garters and crossed her thighs

  She jumped to her feet and said “Lord have mercy on me”

  As the squirrel made laps inside her dress

  She began to cry and then to confess to sins that would make a sailor blush with shame

  She told of gossip and church dissension but the thing that got the most attention

  Was when she talked about her love life, and then she started naming names

  CHORUS

  Well seven deacons and the pastor got saved,

  Twenty-five thousand dollars was raised and fifty volunteered

  For missions in the Congo on the spot

  Even without an invitation there were at least five hundred rededications

  And we all got baptized, whether we needed it or not

  Now you’ve heard the Bible story I guess

  How he parted the waters for Moses to pass

  Oh the miracles God has wrought in this old world

  But the one I’ll remember ’til my dyin’ day

  Is how he put that church back on the narrow way

  With a half-crazed, Mississippi squirrel

  CHORUS

  Mr. Bojangles

  Story by Jerry Jeff Walker

  Song written by Jerry Jeff Walker

  Recorded by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and others

  The song “Mr. Bojangles” is a true story. It happened almost exactly the way I wrote it. I was in the first precinct city jail in New Orleans. The building’s not there anymore. There was a murder in the French Quarter one weekend. Somebody had been stabbed to death. The police wanted to prove that they were really looking for their man and show a better arrest record, so they rounded up all the street people — all the dancers, painters, singers, jugglers, and bums. It resulted in a 60% increase from their normal arrest record.

  I was one of the street characters and we all were thrown in, which made the jail cells quite crowded. It happened to be a holiday weekend, so it was about four days before we could see a judge and then we were either bailed out or let go.

  I was just a young kid, 19 or 20, so I was nervous. This old guy came in and sat down near me. He said, “I’ll just sit over here, kid. I won’t bother you.” He was white, because the jails were segregated then. This was around 1964. He seemed like a nice enough fellow, so I said, “Sure, have a seat.”

  As you can imagine, we got pretty bored over the course of those three or four days and we needed to pass the time. We started singing and telling stories. And this fellow started telling us about his life.

  It turns out he was an old Vaudeville-style entertainer. He had done a lot of dancing and singing for different shows over the years. He said his name was just Bojangles, not “Mr. Bojangles” — just Bojangles. There was a famous black dancer named Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and some people think this was a story about him, but this was someone entirely different.

  He started telling us stories about his life and all of his travels and other things. He told us he had a dog that traveled with him for about twenty years and was his best friend. I changed that to fifteen years in the song because the line, “he spoke in tears of fifteen years how his dog and him, traveled about” just flowed a little better than “twenty years.” He stopped to get gas one day and his dog saw a female dog and started to run after her, maybe because she was in heat. When he did, he ran across the street and was hit by a car. Bojangles really got choked up when he talked about his dog, just like it says in the song.

  When he was done telling his stories, one of the other guys in the cell yelled, “Hey Bojangles, dance!” I remember he hiked up his trousers and started dancing a soft shoe for us. That’s when he told us how he used to dance at minstrel shows and now he danced on the street corners and in honky-tonks for tips, but said he spent a lot of time in the jail when he drank too much.

  When Monday finally rolled around, we got a chance to see a judge and he saw that we were harmless, so he let us go. I don’t know if they solved the murder that week or not, but I didn’t stick around to find out. I got back on the highway, stuck my thumb out and started hitchhiking. I lived like that for several years, just playing my guitar on street corners or in coffee shops or wherever I could. This was at the beginning of the hippie era, so in every major city, there was a coffee shop on just about every corner, where people sang and read poetry or played music and you could make enough money to pay for your meals, and maybe a room and a shower before you got back on the road to the next city.

  Sometimes, if I was having a hard time getting a ride, I would make up a sign that said, “Veteran” or “need ride back to college” or something that would make people t
rust me more, and then I could get a ride easier. I would often head up north during the summer months, where it wasn’t quite as hot.

  Over the next few days after I got out of jail, I started writing the song. I actually added another verse about his several marriages, but the song was getting too long, so I cut that one verse. I’ve always loved stories and characters and this was one character who had a lot of living to share in his stories. I finished it within a few days and then put it away.

  That vagabond life was a pretty interesting way to live for a few years. I wouldn’t trade those experiences for anything. I got a lot of material for songs during those years.

  Mr. Bojangles

  I knew a man Bojangles and he’d dance for you

  In worn out shoes

  With silver hair, a ragged shirt, and baggy pants

  The old soft shoe

  He jumped so high, jumped so high

  Then he lightly touched down

  I met him in a cell in New Orleans I was

  down and out

  He looked to me to be the eyes of age

  as he spoke right out

  He talked of life, talked of life.

  He laughed, clicked his heels and stepped

  He said his name “Bojangles” and he danced a lick

  across the cell

  He grabbed his pants and spread his stance,

  Oh he jumped so high and then he clicked his heels

  He let go a laugh, let go a laugh

  and shook back his clothes all around

  Mr. Bojangles, Mr. Bojangles

  Mr. Bojangles, dance

  He danced for those at minstrel shows and county fairs

  throughout the south

  He spoke through tears of 15 years how his dog and him

  traveled about

  The dog up and died, he up and died

  And after 20 years he still grieves

  He said “I dance now at every chance in honky-tonks

  for drinks and tips

  But most the time I spend behind these county bars

  ’cause I drinks a bit”