And The Way You Used To Ride Out

Been thinking a lot lately about my father-in-law, who was a truly great man. He quit school when he was about eight years old to help support his family, and he worked hard all his life. Relatively late in life, he developed an interest in breeding horses. Typical of the man, he obtained books on the subject and taught himself from the ground up. Before he walked his slow, arthritic walk into the pool of spotlight in a dusty Texas arena and doffed his Stetson at the cheering crowd who had gathered to honor him before the end of his days, my wife’s father had built himself up into one of the top breeders of Arabian horses in the United States.

He was a man. Not many like him around anymore.

During the Eighties, I pretty much stopped listening to country music because it had been taken over by the Nashville Sound, syrupy, pop-oriented pabulum. Chet Atkins was a brilliant and venerable guitarist, but as the producer who pioneered and pushed the Nashville Sound, he did a lot of temporary damage. To this day, most of the country acts who flourished in the Eighties are to me unlistenable.

But there are exceptions.

When I was in high school, a pop duo was on the airwaves in my tiny slice of the tortured earth. The duo was England Dan & John Ford Coley, two boys from Texas who had a knack for sing-able songs. The one called England Dan (because he reportedly affected an English accent at one point in his British Invasion-enamored youth) was the younger brother of Jim Seals of Seals and Crofts. My friends enjoy smirking at my fondness for Gilbert O’Sullivan and Percy Faith and Tom Jones and Herb Albert, and some of them would doubtless giggle at my appreciation for England Dan & John Ford Coley. But the giggling ones don’t know how it feels to pilot a wheezing 1968 Toyota Corona through the narrow streets of summer at 1:00 am when gas was sixty cents a gallon, with no idea what FM radio sounded like, and the paperback book-sized speaker in the front dashboard dialed up to juuuuuust this side of distortion point on the local AM station, and “I’d Really Love To See You Tonight” spraying up into your face while you sang with all your teen power into the katydid-haunted air.

I remained a fan of England Dan & John Ford Coley until they broke up.

After they broke up, they passed beyond my knowing. Dan Seals reinvented himself as a country singer and had many hits during the Eighties, the era in which I would not scoot the boot to anything from Nashville.

One of the songs he wrote and recorded at that time is one that I heard for the first time long after it had peaked and declined and disappeared. It’s a song called “Everything That Glitters Is Not Gold,” a beautiful melodious lament about a man who is abandoned by his rodeo queen woman and is left to raise their young daughter alone. The tune is one that often finds its way into my mind when Jinx and I are scuffing along these mountain roads.

So I hope you enjoy it. My late father-in-law would have approved.

~ S.K. Orr