A Fun-loving Fellow

Song 324: This week on the playlist you can hear Honky-Tonk Man by Dwight Yoakam, written by Johnny Horton, Tillman Franks and Howard Hausey. The original version of this cut came out when I was 4. My Ohio relatives had a good collection of country LPs, and on our summer visits, I essentially had my pick of listening material after I had demonstrated an ability to handle the records and the turntable with appropriate care, so during my grade school years I would soon learn many country classics of the era, getting to know the Honky-Tonk Man long before the Beatles rocked my world. I always appreciated the fun quality of the track, never taking it too seriously, but even as a kid, I thought the guy spending his time and money chasing women in bars and then calling home to ask his wife for help after he blew all of his cash sounded very entertaining in a song, but would have been a jerk in real life. Whatever changes I went through in my teens and twenties regarding viewpoints on relationships, that perspective didn’t change. When Dwight Yoakam’s version came along in 1986, peaking near the top of the country charts, it brought back memories of preteen times. If there’s any truth to the rumor that I played bass for a Bay Area country bar pickup band during a few years of that decade, then it’s quite possible that the group’s lead singer might have called this tune during a set on any given gig night, with the rest of us enthusiastically jumping in. On a side note, this track is a fourth sly reference to the second verse of my own song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, where the second line begins with But Dwight was only Yoakam when he said… You can find the As Long as Merle is Still Haggard video here.