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

by Jack Canfield

  I know the song was heaven-sent. It was an answer to my prayer, like it says in the lyrics: “the answer came down from above.” I knew that the chorus was true: “people and places / memories and faces / are just way too heavy it seems / to carry on angel’s wings.” The bridge just slayed me: “Oh, the wonders she’ll see / and I know she’ll remember to watch over me.”

  Back then, I was writing for Warner/Chappell Music and I always sent everything through Collin Raye to see what he thought of the songs. He is one of my favorite male artists and a dear friend. He has recorded six or seven of my songs. So I pitched it to Collin and he wanted to do it. At the same time, one of my song pluggers pitched it to a really big female artist and she wanted to do it, too, but I fought for Collin, and won. Later, I ended up putting it out myself as well. I wrote a book about my life as a grown-up, dealing with teenage children, aging parents, etc., and included a 14-song CD. It’s titled On Angel’s Wings. Each of the book’s fourteen chapters is about one of the songs, how it came to be written and what it meant to me. The lyrics are included, too, and then there is a little love note for anyone who is going through something similar.

  I make a point of singing “On Angel’s Wings” everywhere I go and sharing it with everyone I can, because it really helps people going through Alzheimer’s or dementia with their loved ones. I have just signed a record deal with a company in Germany and I know what the hook will be to get me on NPR, even though I hate having to reveal my age to do so. The hook is “Woman gets first major record deal at age 60!” When I can get on NPR and have them review the CD, and share this song, my life will be complete!

  On Angel’s Wings

  This is the woman

  Who had all the answers

  The one I would lean on

  For comfort, for strength

  She’s never forgotten

  One grandchild’s birthday

  Now she can’t remember my name

  And it makes me so angry

  I shake my fist

  And cry out to the heavenly one

  Why would you play

  Such a cold hearted trick

  I thought your job was to love

  And the answer came down from above

  CHORUS:

  She’s gonna fly

  When her time here is through

  First she’ll have to let go

  Of some things she can’t use

  ’Cause people and places

  Memories and faces

  Are just way too heavy it seems

  To carry on angel’s wings

  This is the woman

  Who saw things so clearly

  The one who could pick out

  One crumb on the floor

  She saw through a white lie

  Saw me through love’s eyes

  She hardly can see anymore

  And it makes me so sad

  And it just isn’t fair

  Why should so much be taken away?

  But when I cry out

  For all that she’s lost

  I silently hear someone say

  CHORUS

  And oh, the wonders she’ll see

  And I know she’ll remember

  To watch over me

  CHORUS

  Online

  Story by Chris DuBois

  Song written by Brad Paisley, Kelley Lovelace, and Chris DuBois

  Recorded by Brad Paisley

  Brad had the idea for “Online,” so he and Kelley Lovelace and I started working on it together. It’s funny because I’d be surprised if any of the three of us have ever been in a chat room or anything like that, but you hear about people who are trying to be something they’re not online. The blessing and the curse of the Internet is that you can hide behind your computer screen and be whoever you want to be. It’s hard to do background checks on Facebook and Myspace and places like that.

  So Brad came to us with the idea and we thought it would be really interesting to write something about somebody who was your basic computer guru, with limited social skills, who portrayed himself to be the complete opposite of that.

  That song took a long, long time to write. It probably took about 12 to 15 writing sessions to finish — most of them at Kelley’s house.

  When we write with Brad, it’s usually because he’s getting ready to cut a new album and he’s going to cut it if it’s good. That’s the beauty of having Brad in the room when you are writing, because he knows what he will and won’t say, so you don’t have to guess. When you are writing with another songwriter, you are constantly guessing about what an artist may be willing to say, so it’s always nice to have the artist in the room with you.

  Brad had gotten to know Jason Alexander when Jason was in his video for the song “Celebrity,” so while we were writing the song, we were already talking about the video and all the cool things we could do. We thought Jason would be the perfect guy to cast as the pizza guy in the video. Jason also was able to get Estelle Harris, who played his mother, Mrs. Costanza, on Seinfeld, to be in the video, along with William Shatner. That was a hoot. Seeing the video getting made was almost as much fun as writing the song!

  Online

  I work down at the Pizza Pit

  And I drive an old Hyundai

  I still live with my mom and dad

  I’m 5 foot 3 and overweight

  I’m a sci-fi fanatic

  A mild asthmatic

  And I’ve never been to second base

  But there’s whole ’nother me

  That you need to see

  Go checkout MySpace

  ’Cause online I’m out in Hollywood

  I’m 6 foot 5 and I look damn good

  I drive a Maserati

  I’m a black-belt in karate

  And I love a good glass of wine

  It turns girls on that I’m mysterious

  I tell them I don’t want nothing serious

  ’Cause even on a slow day

  I could have a three-way

  Chat with two women at one time

  I’m so much cooler online

  So much cooler online

  When I get home, I kiss my mom

  And she fixes me a snack

  And I head down to my basement bedroom

  And fire up my Mac

  In real life the only time I’ve ever even been to L.A.

  Is when I got the chance with the marching band

  To play tuba in the Rose Parade

  But online, I live in Malibu

  I pose for Calvin Klein, I’ve been in GQ

  I’m single and I’m rich

  And I’ve got a set of six pack abs that would blow your mind

  It turns girls on that I’m mysterious

  I tell them I don’t want nothing serious

  ’Cause even on a slow day

  I could have a three-way

  Chat with two women at one time

  I’m so much cooler online

  Yeah, I’m cooler online

  When you got my kind of stats

  It’s hard to get a date

  Let alone a real girlfriend

  But I grow another foot and I lose a bunch of weight

  Every time I login

  Online

  I’m out in Hollywood

  I’m 6 foot 5 and I look damn good

  Even on a slow day

  I could have a three-way

  Chat with two women at one time

  I’m so much cooler online

  Yeah, I’m cooler online

  I’m so much cooler online

  Yeah, I’m cooler online

  Yeah, I’m cooler online

  Reuben James

  Story by Alex Harvey

  Song written by Alex Harvey and Barry Etris

  Recorded by Kenny Rogers and others

  When I first started writing for United Artists, Billy Edd Wheeler was there and he was the man who really taught me how to write songs. He went to Berea College and later stu
died drama at Yale. When it comes to writing songs, there’s a real art to simplicity. When I think back to Tchaikovsky or Beethoven or Rachmaninoff, or any of the romantic composers that I was moved by, I hear very simple melodies. As far as lyrics, I read a lot of Sandburg and Frost, who wrote simple but profound poems. So did Rimbaud. He was the French street poet that Dylan studied. Dylan also studied Bertolt Brecht. Rimbaud translates just as gutsy as he wrote it in French, which is hard to do.

  When Billy Edd was at UA, a fellow named Barry Etris came in with a song called “Reuben James.” It was a song about a white man, and for whatever reason, the song didn’t quite work. Billy told me about the song and said, “Can you do something with this? It needs a little help.” I said, “I don’t really like co-writing songs.” But I said, “Maybe I could find something from my own heart and experiences that could add to it.” So I went back to a memory from my childhood to help me write some of the extra verses.

  Across the road from my dad’s little country store in West Tennessee was a little sharecropper’s shack and next to that was a blacksmith shop that was run by a couple of black men named Wesley Watkins and Walter DeBerry. My dad had tuberculosis and when he had to go to the hospital, those men really became my fathers. They got me through some pretty rough times, so I was really close to them. I would go and sit in the door of the blacksmith shop, because my dad was gone and my mom was working, and they really became my family.

  My dad never really traded with white people much at his store. When he was born, his mother didn’t have any milk. A black woman named Majulia, who lived not far from them, had just had a baby named Jimmy Lee. So when he was a baby, my dad suckled on one breast and Jimmy Lee suckled on the other. That’s where I got the lines, “And although your skin was black / You were the one that didn’t turn your back / On the hungry white child with no name, Reuben James.”

  As a result, my dad really grew up thinking he had a black twin. He preferred dealing with black people and he built his store, I think, so they could have a place to trade. He built it in the middle of this section of land that was owned by the DeBerry family. They had been given some land after the war and they had split it up. They each had about twelve acres and lived all around that store. They farmed the land and made a good living, but what impressed was how they always carried themselves with such grace and dignity. They were deeply religious people and were always very proud of the fact that they were landowners at a time when not many black people owned land.

  One of them, Mose DeBerry moved into that sharecropper shack across from my dad’s store when he got older. I went to see him right before he died and the only thing in that shack was a bunk and a chair and a couple of books, and on either side of the bunk were two pictures: one of Martin Luther King, Jr. and one of John F. Kennedy. I’ll always remember that because here was this simple country fellow with no real formal education, out in the middle of nowhere, with pictures of those two men right beside his bed.

  I found out that Kenny Rogers was coming to Nashville; I think it was to do The Johnny Cash Show. I went down and sat at his dressing room door for almost three days. He would come in and see me sitting there and he would go into his dressing room. Finally, he looked at me and said, “Who are you?” I said, “Oh, I’m just somebody who wants to play you a song.” And he said, “Well come on in and play it.”

  I played it for him and he cut it. It wasn’t long after that, he said, “I really like the way you sing, and I’d like to do an album with you.” So I got on a plane and went out to L.A. for a year or two and did my first album on Capitol, which he helped produce.

  That song’s been covered about 27 times at last count. Although it did pretty well for us, it’s probably not one of my favorites, just because of all the doggone work it took to whittle that thing down. I’ve never worked that hard on a song before.

  Reuben James

  Reuben James

  In my song you’ll live again

  And the phrases that I rhyme

  Are just the footsteps out of time

  From the time when I knew you, Reuben James

  Reuben James

  All the folks around Madison County cussed your name

  You’re just a no-account, sharecropping colored man

  That would steal anything he can

  And everybody laid the blame on Reuben James

  CHORUS:

  Reuben James

  You still walk the fertile fields of my mind

  The faded shirt, the weathered brow

  The calloused hands upon the plow

  I loved you then, and I loved you now

  Reuben James

  Flora Grey

  The gossiper of Madison County died with child

  And although your skin was black

  You were the one that didn’t turn your back

  On the hungry white child with no name,

  Reuben James

  Reuben James

  With your mind on my soul

  And a Bible in your right hand

  You said “Turn the other cheek

  For there’s a better world awaitin’ for the meek.”

  In my mind these words remain from Reuben James

  CHORUS

  Reuben James

  One dark cloudy day they brought you from the field

  And to your lonely pinebox came

  Just a preacher and me in the rain

  Just to sing one last refrain for Reuben James

  She Thinks I Still Care

  Story by Dickey Lee

  Song written by Dickey Lee

  Recorded by George Jones, Elvis Presley, Anne Murray and others

  I used to tell a story to the audience when I played this song live. I would say, “This song is about the first girl I really fell in love with, and she really messed me up. But things worked out okay because George Jones had a #1 record with it. Then Anne Murray had a big hit with it, and then Elvis had a big hit with it. So I finally made enough money from the song to take out a contract on her and I had her killed.” That usually gets a big laugh.

  I had an apartment in Memphis in 1962 and I was going to Memphis State. I met a girl there who I really liked, but it wasn’t reciprocated. Her name was Beverly Meyer. We’re actually still friends today. I don’t see her regularly, but we keep in contact. The funny thing about that song was that I wasn’t thinking about writing a hit at all. I was just writing a song about her.

  The first guy I pitched it to was Elvis. I gave it someone who knew Elvis and he said he would make sure he heard it. I didn’t hear anything else about it, so I just forgot about it. Years later, I was talking to Elvis and he was saying how much he liked it and that he wanted to record it one day. I said, “Well, you’re the first guy I sent it to.”

  He said, “What are you talking about?”

  I said, “Well, I gave it to so-and-so to play for you,” and Elvis said, “Well, that S.O.B. He never let me hear it.” Elvis eventually did cut it, but it was on his last album. He put it out on the Moody Blue album.

  George Jones got a copy of it, though, and cut it in 1963. Anne Murray cut it in the 1970s as “He Thinks I Still Care,” and it works just as well.

  Years ago, I was told that this had been covered over 500 times and it’s hard to say how many more since then. James Taylor covered it on a live album he did back in the 1990s. When he introduces this song, he says, “When George Jones sings this song, even my dog cries.” James nearly always does his own material so I think I was the only songwriter listed on the album besides him.

  I think all songwriters have had their hearts broken at least once. But it sure helps when a broken heart can make you that much money.

  She Thinks I Still Care

  Just because I asked a friend about her

  Just because I spoke her name somewhere

  Just because I rang her number by mistake today

  She thinks I still care

  Just because I haunt the same old pl
aces

  Where the memory of her lingers everywhere

  Just because I’m not the happy guy I used to be

  She thinks I still care

  But if she’s happy thinkin’ I still need her

  Then let that silly notion bring her cheer

  But how could she ever be so foolish

  Oh where would she get such an idea?

  Just because I asked a friend about her

  And just because I spoke her name somewhere

  Just because I saw her then went all to pieces

  She thinks I still care

  She thinks I still care

  Simple Man

  Story by Charlie Daniels

  Song written by Charlie Daniels, John L. Gavin, Taz DiGregorio, and Charles Hayward

  Recorded by Charlie Daniels

  This song was born out of a lot of anger and frustration. I had just gotten disgusted with the level of violent crime in this country and our inaction to do anything serious about it. We just keep turning the same people loose in the streets until they finally go and murder somebody. We don’t need more laws. We just need to enforce the ones we have. But it’s like there’s a plea bargain for this, and a technicality for that and we just keep turning people loose to go out and keep committing crimes. Some drug dealer who smuggles a ton of cocaine into the country gets a million-dollar lawyer or a team of lawyers and comes up against some public prosecutor whose caseload looks like the Sears Roebuck catalog, and he wins.

  We also need to clean up our prisons. People shouldn’t go into prison and be able to join gangs and things like that. That’s not what it’s for. It’s punishment. It just goes on and on and on. We seem to literally manufacture a criminal class. They learn how to be good criminals in our prisons and that shouldn’t be happening.