Country Mike Blog

Characters and Gracin Show

Mike Sudhalter  |  March 28, 2008

Remember Creole Williams? How about Clifton Clowers? Pancho and Lefty? We don't have enough characters in country music songs anymore. We need way more of them. I listened to a song from Montgomery Gentry's second album, "Black Jack Fletcher and Mississippi Sam," another tune about a couple of characters who you can just picture in your mind.

Creole, in David Lee Murphy's "Dust On The Bottle", was the ultimate wing man. He hooked up the narrator with some wine, and you know, the rest is history.

Clowers was based on a real person, so I'm told, but boy, was the narrator scared of him in "Wolverton Mountain," a classic by Claude King.

More characters in songs would make things seem more real. Sometimes, you can absolutely know that you would totally get along with these characters.

Case in point: Ryan Turner's "Julie's Gonna Dance." Julie is just a blue collar girl working at the Texaco, presumably in Texas. But she loves to have fun and her friends set out for a good time across the border in Mexico. I wonder if Julie is the girl that Turner is referring to in his "She's No Amy" song. Amy is the girl that he's getting over.

Last night, Josh Gracin did an acoustic show at Rodeo Club in San Jose. For most folks, it was a warmup for tonight's George Strait concert at the Oracle Arena in Oakland. Gracin's new song "Favorite State of Mind" is a great one.

He performed all of his hits, and did an impressive job on a couple of covers - Tim McGraw's "Telluride" and Ty Herndon's "What Mattered Most."

Gracin mixed it up a little on the final song of the night, "Nothing to Lose", singing it really fast, then really slow. Hopefully, his next album - set for release Tuesday - will set Gracin on the path to stardom.