geoMp3 of The Week: The Statler Brothers' "The Baptism of Jesse Taylor"
Eesh. I'm not sure how much more of this all-Statlers nonsense I can do. The problem isn't listening to Statler Brothers records. I actually do, unironically, enjoy it (despite how critical I am of them). The problem is that their geospatial catalog, it were, is shallow. Musically they never do anything that really evokes a sense of place. And lyrically they tend to just set songs in geography, which means they mention a lot of places but don't really craft anything that are about place (ostensibly the point of these geomp3 posts).
So that's my excuse for some of these tracks that have very frail geographic elements in them. And that sentence is my segue to this week's track, "The Baptism of Jesse Taylor," by The Statler Brothers.
Let's use shorthand, eh? Franklin County had itself a prick on the roster, named Jesse Taylor. Taylor boozed, fought, gambled, and of course ignored his wife and kids. They dunked his ass in Cedar Creek and -- voila! -- everything's okay. This song fits very well into The Statlers' catalog, of course, in that it's about true, unadulturated dirtbaggery amidst a community of otherwise-exhalted souls. This is so common I won't even bother to go into it with these posts. And although the boys' band does a cute little thing with a gospel bridge (uh, that's white gospel), it's otherwise not that interesting.
In fact it's so nondescript that it's hard to tell where Franklin County is. The guys often sing about Virginia, but this one is probably supposed to be generically rural. However! I wanted to put this one on the map, so I did a search for all "Cedar" features, type "stream," in county named "Franklin" at geonames.usgs.gov. There are "Cedar Creek" features in "Franklin" counties in Arkansas and North Carolina. But there's also a "Little Cedar Creek" in Franklin County, Indi-fucking-ana, and you can be sure that -- given what I've seen since moving to this state, which is lots and lots of Jesse Taylors milling around and just as many blue-eyed Christian spooks who would love, love to get that dirty fucker to pick up the way of the cross -- I'll be excusing the 'little' qualifier and dropping this track down there.
And for that reason, it's"The Baptism of Jesse Taylor," also from 1974's Thank You World. Put down in the location for "Little Cedar Creek" recorded at GNIS.
And the geoRSS and kml for all mp3s of the week.
Originally published at geoLibro.org.