Commentary/Satire by Bill the Butcher

Over the many years there are countless memories that are now gathering dust in the mind of an old man (That would be me) but they never go away, and I don’t apologize for them. The memories of an old man are like that. One such memory of mine is from my time in Nashville. One of many times in my life that I became delusional and imagined myself to be something that I wasn’t. You write and sing in some bar in Austin and the drinks would tell you that you oughta be In Nashville. So, I went to there to become another Willie Nelson, unfortunately they already had a Willie Nelson, and their quota was filled for singing Texas Fools, and I ended up doing shows out across from Opryland just off Briley Parkway at the Ramada Inn. My agent told me it was a good gig. Tourists filled the bar, so you must be a star, you’re on a stage in Nashville. Hank Williams never died; he does a show every night at the Holiday Inn.

I lived in a studio on Westend and every morning I’d get up and write a song. Then I’d mix it down to a cassette just big enough for one piece, burn a few copies, and take them around Music Square to drop off to the various publishers on 16th Avenue. You learn that if you hand deliver your work there’s a slightly higher chance of it being heard than the volume of songs arriving in the mail that are automatically thrown in the trash. They wouldn’t do that to you while you were looking right AT them. That, and it served to secure breakfast. In the lobby of each stop there was always free donuts and coffee. Then back to my room hoping something would work (It never did) and in time I began to write what I called Adult Country Humor for which there was absolutely no market until Roy Acuff would have the common decency to die and open up distribution for those of us who had well under a million sales.

My only respite was on Sunday when I would get to take a little three-year-old girl to breakfast at Shoney’s just off Demonbreun where breakfast might be had for $1.88. I’d hold her little hand and she’d toddle down to eat “all the eggs in the world!” After listening to the Kris Kristofferson song, Sunday Morning Coming Down I began to realize the song related to me. I didn’t have a washing machine in my studio, so I was literally wearing “My cleanest dirty shirt!” I had “smoked my mind” the night before at the Pennington Lounge, fell asleep around four or five and “stumbled down the stairs to meet the day!” The distant bell that was ringing was calling the faithful to services at the Westend Catholic Church. When Nashville began to take hold of the national music scene the old houses along Westend and Broadway were being bought up and converted to studios. It was easier to buy an old Victorian house, gut it, fill it up with equipment and call it RCA than it was to build a whole new building. But there were some holdouts who refused to sell their homes to these upstarts from New York, so it was entirely possible for the smell of “someone frying chicken” to drift through the air on Music Square on any Sunday morning and yes, little children were in Sunday School singing songs! There was a little park across from the Country Music Hall of Fame and the “Laughing little girl” was the one who was holding my hand.

Aspiring songwriters were held to a lower benchmark than the homeless, which we were. Once, when spending the weekend at my agent’s place in Henderson he told me never to tell anyone we were in the music business. Say you were something more respectable, like a dope pusher.

So, I’d sit there at Shoney’s watching her eat “all the eggs in the world.” She would grow up and make a little noise on YouTube before the world took her away, but she left us another little girl called “Karrie the Puck” who picked up the microphone and blasts the airwaves every week.

Kris Kristofferson died recently, and all these memories came flooding back to me. And it was then I realized that Kris had obviously made that same trip to Shoney’s on a Sunday morning with some other little girl, and it had come down on both of us.

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