Thursday, February 20, 2003

What a sad way to start the day...I just read that Johnny PayCheck has died. When I was a kid, growing up in the 70's, for a few years before my folks bought the house they live in now, we lived in this rental-row-bungalow place and everyone, and I mean everyone in the place listened to country music. My mum jokes that we all learned to spell listening to Tammy Wynette songs (D-I-V-O-R-C-E). It was a lot of fun when we were kids, people would stick their radios in the window so there was always music in the street in the evenings. Summertime was a lot of fun because the adults would get into these water fights with their garden hoses (you'd sit, innocently looking in a lawn chair on your porch and then "attack" someone with the hose when they came outside). As kids, we'd get caught in the crossfire and it was always a good time. In addition to the George & Tammy show, you could always hear Loretta and Conway, Freddy Fender, Merle Haggard, Waylon & Willy and, of course, Johnny PayCheck. It's really sad that we've lost so many of these people in recent years. Unforunately too, they've all died so young. The hard living they did in the 1960's and 70's caught up with them sooner than I'm sure they would have liked.

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