A Song the DJ Really Liked

Song 190: Today I posted Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way? by Waylon Jennings on the playlist. As the early '70s became the mid-'70s, Chicago-area radio just seemed to get worse, but still, spending time in traffic back then usually meant depending on the radio for music. Generally I would switch between stations searching for a song I liked, or at least one I could stand to listen to, and once in a while I found a gem. On an afternoon some time in 1975, DJ Larry Lujack played this song, but before he did, he gave it a really good introduction. On air, Lujack had a very sarcastic manner, and on this particular afternoon, he mentioned that listeners had been commenting that he didn't seem to think much of the music he played. He then said that as he saw it, rock and roll was getting worse, not better (I silently nodded in agreement), but his job was to air songs listeners wanted to hear, so if it made the charts and got requests, he'd play it no matter how he felt about it. But hey, were there any new songs that he did like? Well, here's one... Before those opening chords, I knew nothing about Waylon, his past connections with Buddy Holly, or his contemporary collaborations with Willie, but not long into this song, I knew I not only had to get the record, I had to find out more about the guy who made it. I would soon start adding Waylon LPs to my collection, and finding out a lot more about the man and his music. As I mention for song 179 (Bob Seger's Turn the Page), in this era, I heard a lot of Been on the Road Too Long songs, and most of them made me want to say, "Oh, Cry Me a River" (song 67), but once in a while, someone like Seger or Jennings would actually breathe some genuine life experience into the tired old cliches. In this song, Waylon calls up the ghost of one of the original country singer-songwriters and pays homage to that spirit while also painting a clear picture of his own day-to-day struggles. If you like country music, then most likely you too have some favorite Hank songs, just as Waylon did, and as I do. One sad side note -- I knew that Waylon died in February of 2002, but I only learned today that Larry Lujack died in December of 2013. On a different side note, this is the first posting on the list of an artist mentioned in my song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, and you can find the song video for that song just by clicking on the title.