You appear to be new on here – if so, welcome! – so regarding NME charts and how the Record Retailer one came to be canon, you might like to read the concise account by Marcello (who’s in hospital at the moment and we’re all sending our love) on the “School’s Out” thread – comment no. 31 onwards.

(Wales and Northern Ireland both played World Cup matches in Malmo in 1958, am I right?)

The guy did not kill the gatlin boys! He ‘beat ‘em up’

Just to prove that he was ‘man’…

Otherwise, what Punctum said.

On this background it’s perhaps easy to understand why I find “Coward Of The County” so offensive, and listening to it for the purpose of this blog an unusually upsetting experience. No doubt it was intended as nothing beyond a simple update on the old country/cowboy worm-has-turned routine, and 30 years previously would, with equal lack of doubt, have been bellowed out of the luminous lungs of Frankie Laine. But the song, with its theme of the pacifist told to live as such by his otherwise nogoodnik father but who finally has to turn to violence under Promethean provocation, is chilling in its seemingly whimsical acceptance of the argument that violence justifies violence, such that uxorial rape can only be responded to by dispatching her chortling assailants (“there wuz three of them,” hisses Rogers like a salivating snake).

Rogers sings this bloody and unforgivingly cynical song as though out for a pleasant afternoon’s fishing, his voice characteristically loitering half a beat behind the rhythm and changes. But the message it projected at the time was unwittingly Reaganite, exactly what its core audience was rabid to hear; an eye for an eye, whatever the circumstances. At least the killers of “I Did What I Did For Maria” and “Indiana Wants Me” recognise the wrongness of their actions and realise the price they must shortly pay. But the message of “Coward Of The County” appears to be: shoot the fuckers anyway, morally we are right (feel free to capitalise that “right”) – and then, as Eastwood mournfully points out to Hal Holbrook in Magnum Force, such thinking ends up making people shoot their next-door neighbour because their dog just peed on their lawn. The lesson still hasn’t been learned, and I don’t suppose ever will be until it’s too late.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ9fPnzcMHk

“Here’s what I would say: “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town” is depressing stem to stern, soup to nuts, all the way through—but it doesn’t deliver the knockout blow that “Coward Of The County” does. Now, I don’t want to step on it, but it does involve gang rape.”

This really was the best possible context for me to encounter this jaw-dropping work.

What did he die of? Answers on a postcard…

I don’t know what Mr Bowling died of but it certainly wasn’t good taste.

Before we fully consign Kenny R to the dumper, a thumbs up from me for his Eyes That See In The Dark album. All Barry Gibb written/produced, inc. Islands In The Stream.

Roger Bowling is the writer responsible for COTC and Lucille, as well as Billie Jo Spears’ Blanket On The Ground, What I’ve Got In Mind and 57 Chevrolet, and something called Always One Redneck Away From Loving You. He died in 1982 of unknown causes. Dare I suggest embarrassment?

UGH !

I’ve never much cared for Kenny Rogers either – too smooth and bland, not my kind of C&W. Combine that with such hateful ideas, and I’d give this 0, if that score exists here.

I call it ‘astronaut’s wife’ hair, though they were never that glam really. I hold it in very high esteem too

anyway i still basically prefer kids capering in horror masks (but plz to follow the safety-with-fireworks code everyone)

Re: 22 & the US switchover – exactly. Remember, we’ve got a full-time shadow government who in theory should be ready to take over instantly, whereas Obama and McCain simply have campaign teams. Also, back in the day, it could take weeks for new elected politicians to even travel to DC from the far reaches of the Union.

I worship the ground Bobbie Gentry walks on, especially when she’s wearing that tight red trouser suit.

(Okay, not him necessarily, but then I always thought – re: #21 – that the ‘slip’ of ‘I heard these words again’ was deliberate to imply that secretly the singer’s singing about himself. A bit like Beckett’s ‘Not I’. Only with a beard. And a twang in the voice. And a grating series of key changes.)

This isn’t a murder ballad, because Kenny doesn’t think he’s murdered anyone, just punished or executed them.

Mind you, I love this when I was younger. I used to tape Top of the Pops with a battery cassette recorder and I would happily segue between The Specials and Kenny without batting an eyelid. The first time I remember making my brother laugh was because of this song. My dad used sometimes to drop us off at school in his custard-coloured Chrysler Sunbeam (oh they were classy days), and my joke to my brother as my dad drove off was the sing ‘Hey look ol’ yeller’s leavin”. A profound, albeit ludicrous, bonding moment.