Working Class Heritage

 Song 658: This week on the playlist you’ll find Daddy Never Was the Cadillac Kind by Confederate Railroad, written by Dave Gibson and Bernie Nelson, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. In the early 1990s I listened a lot to a NYC New Country radio station, as well as a RnR one, and by doing so, I got to hear a bunch of memorable movers, including this ride that came along around the time that spring arrived in 1994. In that era I moved from my Brooklyn apartment over to a scenic farm in nearby NJ, which was the place I featured in my As Long as Merle is Still Haggard video (which you can hear and see on YouTube by clicking on the title) and which included scenes with my landlord. While living there, I had a decent set of wheels, but I Never Was the Cadillac Kind, and neither was my Daddy (or grand-Daddy), so the message of this tune resonated with me the first time I heard it. Soon after moving into the farm, I began a romance with an attractive young woman who also Never Was the Cadillac Kind, and getting to know her parents a while later, I could tell that her Daddy Never Was the Cadillac Kind either. Over the next few years, I came to clearly understand the class divide that my teachers had denied during my school years, and which the lines of this excursion slyly reference. I didn't know then what I know now, but I did appreciate all that my father and grandfather did to make sure we the family were NOT ever going hungry, and I felt thankful that they taught us that love was the one thing money couldn't buy.