Porter Wagoner: "Missouri Loves Company"

Porter Wagoner

"Misery Loves Company"

(Image from You Tube)

After posting yesterday on Porter Wagoner's death, the thought occurred to me that I might be able to find some You Tube video of Porter singing "Misery Loves Company" -- I was right. Here's the man singing that song with a couple of other musicians whom I don't recognize, and if you listen with the right mental framework, he really does sound like he's saying "Missouri Loves Company":

"Misery Loves Company"

I wish that the video's quality were better. In the first half of the song, the words being sung and the lips doing the singing don't match very well, but when the camera focuses on Porter alone, the match is perfect. [Note, I've now updated the video link.]

Humor aside, that song isn't one of my favorites. I like better this other song from his recent, most critically acclaimed Wagonmaster album, a song apparently about a nervous breakdown that he once had:

"Committed to Parkview"

It can also be seen and heard at Amazon, the site that I linked to yesterday but only later noticed hosts this same video as well. In "Committed to Parkview," Porter looks like Andrew Jackson might have looked if he'd become a country musician rather than the seventh president of the United States.

I was telling this to my wife yesterday, and she asked, "Who's Andrew Jackson?" She didn't ask me who Porter Wagoner was...

If you, though, ain't got no notion of who Porter Wagoner was, here's a ten-minute video of Porter and Dolly Parton having a good ol' time reminiscing about good ol' times on The Porter Wagoner Show. You even get to see Speck Rhodes on the bass.

You might not like this kind of music, and I can understand that reaction, having myself reacted against it at times, but it's some authentic Americana, and it's part of who I am . . . not that you'd consider that any sort of positive recommendation.

Porter Wagoner

Porter Wagoner, Wagonmaster

(Image from Wikipedia)

Porter Wagoner died just three days ago, and another link to my childhood is gone.

Wagoner grew up in the small Missouri Ozark town of West Plains, about 30 miles from my even smaller hometown of Salem, Arkansas and also the same place where one of my uncles got locked up for public drunkenness but released for praying so fervently that the jailor sent him away with the words "Go home. Any man who can pray like that don't need to be in jail."

In my uncle's young days and even in my childhood, Missouri was the place to go for getting drunk because Northern Arkansas was 'dry', so in my childish reasoning, I figured that the state of Missouri must be a truly wicked place for drunken partying and that Porter Wagoner's 1962 hit single "Misery Loves Company" must be about that state, which sounded to me like "Missouri Loves Company":

So break out the bottle, bring on the crowd,
Just gather round me, cause 'Missouri' loves company...

Anyway, I grew up watching The Porter Wagoner Show, which was taped in Nashville, Tennessee, was broadcast from Springfield, Missouri to my home on the only channel that we received, and was aired from the time that I was three, in 1960, until the second year of my graduate studies at Berkeley, in 1981.

As you can see, I literally grew up with that show . . . and with its cast of characters, which included a young Dolly Parton, of whom everyone has heard, and an older Speck Rhodes, about whom most of you have heard nothing at all but who was a genuinely funny countrified comedian, in addition to being a good musician, and who talked just like my 'Grandpa' Archie and looked a bit like him as well:

Speck Rhodes

(findagrave.com)

I'm even told that Thomas Bassham, the father of one of my childhood friends (Tonya Bassham), wrote songs for Porter Wagoner . . . but somebody would have to confirm this for me since I don't know it for a fact.

My condolences to Porter Wagoner's family, some of whom are probably still living in my neck of the Ozark woods...