Ep. 411: This Country Life – The Soundtrack of Our Lives

00:00:05
Speaker 1: Welcome to this country life. I’m your host, Brent Reeves from coon hunting to trot lighting and just in general country living. I want you to stay a while as I share.

00:00:14
Speaker 2: My experiences in life lessons.

00:00:17
Speaker 1: This country Life is presented by Case Knives from the store More Studio on Meat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcast that airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I’ve got some stories to share.

00:00:39
Speaker 2: The soundtrack of our lives.

00:00:43
Speaker 1: Music has been a constant for me as far back as I can remember. I enjoy the details and the meanings behind the songs the folks who play them. Some tunes are just filler and enjoyable noise, while others they take on a whole different level of importance to the listener. I’m going to talk about that today, so let’s get to it. Welcome to the grand old Opry. Let her go, boys. I remember hearing that most Saturday nights with my dad and I were down on the potlatch timber company roads and clean river bottoms of rural Cleveland County, Arkansas. We’d sat in the cab of the truck listening intently to Porter Wagner, Roy Acuff, Bill Munroe, and hoping to hear Charlie Pride or a story from Jerry Klower. We’d sing along with the ones we knew and wait impatiently during the square dancing segments to finish so we could hear who was singing next. Sometimes during the dance and the announcer would read a commercial for tobacco Martha White Flower, and that would trigger a memory of a store from my dad. He dialed back the volume on the AM only radio in his truck a bit to tell it to me. All through the story, I was hearing something similar to what y’all hear every week on this show, a soundtrack that subconsciously elevated the story I was listening to. I didn’t know it at the time, obviously, but I can’t tell you the amount of time since then that I’ve sat here writing about a memory from those days and not heard.

00:02:31
Speaker 2: What I remember who had been playing at that moment.

00:02:36
Speaker 1: The catalyst of that memory, most times having been triggered by a song. Then when the dog struck a track, we pile out of the cab like it was on fire and listen to the music that the dog would playing. Now, according to mister Webster, by definition, music is vocal or instrumental sounds or both come by in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, an expression of emotion. It’s the expression of emotion, and that definition that I identified with. Without emotion, it couldn’t trigger a memory. That’s the connection beyond the physicality of actually hearing it. It’s associated with our emotions at the time we heard it, in either what we were doing, who we were with, all of it intertwined to the consistency of a bird nested fishing reel. I can hear Willie Nelson singing me and Paul, and as soon as I recognize the tune, which is within the first two seconds of it starting, I’m sitting in my dad’s company truck listening to that song on an eight track player. Some or most of you are going to have to google that one. But I’m on the passenger side of that truck making the final left hand turn on a driveway that led from the huge metal chicken houses to a farmer’s home. They were expecting us, had our dinner fixed and it was almost noon.

00:04:06
Speaker 2: Now.

00:04:07
Speaker 1: It’s not occasionally that I find myself there. When I hear that song, it’s every time I hear it, every single time, regardless of where I am or what I’m doing. Two seconds into the intro and I’m riding in that truck and hearing the gravel crunch under the tires, I can feel the air conditioning blowing on me, and I can smell a hent of my dad’s after shave and a chicken house full of everything that came out of the chicken except the eggs. That mile oder a cent being a trigger for a whole different set of memories. But we’re not talking about chicken stuff. We’re talking about music. In August twenty eleven, I was standing at my post to the entrance of the Arkansas State Capital. The legislature was out of session, so the building was occupied only with daily employees and a few summer visitors. Anyone could visit the building on any given day, but they had to pass through a metal detector in a bag search at the visitors entrance. All other access to the building was by employee key cards. The entrance location was my third two hour post of the shift and my turn.

00:05:19
Speaker 2: To be the Walmart greeter of swords.

00:05:23
Speaker 1: My job was addressing folks as they entered the building, directing them through the security protocols, answering any questions, and pointing them towards the bathrooms, that being the majority of the requests.

00:05:34
Speaker 2: Since there were no committee meetings or hearing’s.

00:05:36
Speaker 1: Taking place in the absence of all the lawmakers.

00:05:40
Speaker 2: Now August, it’s hot in Arkansas.

00:05:42
Speaker 1: Most of the folks that walked around looking at the few exhibits on display were there more for the air conditioning than a history lesson. In my career as a law enforcement officer, the years that I spent at the state Capitol were some of my most memorable, and for the present I just believe it at that. But on this hot day and the last third of a blister in Arkansas summer, I saw a man walk in the door, being escorted by a former member of the legislature. He wore a faded, pearl snapped long sleeved denim shirt, Levi’s cowboy boots and an easy recognizable brown felt hat that he removed from his head with his left hand and revealed a head of thin and gray hair that he combed as best he could with the fingers of his right hand. The ones that were still there anyway, He was short of the normal tally of five by a saw mital accident when he was young. His long hair passed the collar of his shirt in the back and framed his tan face in familiar smile. I was surprised to see him standing in front of me, his hat in his hand, waiting for me to usher him in, and even more surprised to see the confusion on his face when I said, mister Billy Joe Shaver, welcome to the state Capitol. He stuck his hand out, the one with the missing digits, and he shook my hand and said, astonishingly, you you know who I am. Yes, sir, I absolutely do. Now, I’m sure some of you may have never heard of Billy Joe Shaver, but I bet most of you have heard his songs, and you should look him up. He wrote a ton of music that was recorded by a ton of folks, most notably Whaling Jennings. Now Old Whaling was one of my dad’s favorites, and my numero uno above and beyond anyone else, always has been. His music was playing in the background of many hours of driving from farm to farm, or from home to trips, hunting and fishing with my dad and that old eight track player he had mounted under the dash of his truck, and now standing in front of me was the man who’d written a large portion of those songs. We visited for a minute, and I thanked him for his talent, his contribution to the soundtrack of my life, and shook his hand one last time before allowing him to go on his way. What a random meeting that was. The odds that I’d be standing in that post during an eight hour shift were one and four. The odds that I’d be there the moment Billy Joe Shaver walked in was considerably less. What a crazy set of random circumstances over a literal lifetime that allowed me to shake the hand of someone who’d helped decorate the memories of by life from my childhood to the present. It was a surreal moment, for sure, and one no number of odds making calculations could muster into a possibility even remotely. So that’s what is so cool about the universe. It makes its own gravy and answers to no one. If everything was predictable, life wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. We’d just wake up and jump into the ruts that we’d made the day before, and trudge along until we fell over dead on our appointed date and time. I want to get another dose of randemonium. I hope you said yes, because here it comes. Thirty years or so ago, I introduced my nephew, Matthew, my brother Tim’s oldest son, to the music of John Pride. Matthew was still in high school at the time, and the style of John’s music wasn’t what the average high school kid was listening to in the nineteen nineties. What I was listening to in the early eighties was a bit out of the norm as well. I’ve already clued you in on what that was. But our love for good music was something Matthew and I love to share between us. He was mature beyond his years and like me, listen to the lyrics and tried to interpret what the song was saying in comparison to how it made him feel. Before Google gave you the answers it wanted you to have, music interpretation was up to whoever was wearing the ears when the song was playing. We enjoyed listening to music and having conversations about different songs that we liked and what we got out of it besides the allure of a catchy tune. Now, nearly twenty years later, as I thank you, Matthew called me one day and said, I want you to come to my house and stay a couple of nights. I’ve got us tickets to see John Prime in Houston, Texas on May the fifteenth, twenty fifteen. We sat down in our seats, about six rows back from the front of the stage and watched one of the best concerts I’d ever seen. And what made it so good was our history with the music that went all the way back to when he was just a young man in high school listening to a man his crazy uncle thought was cool. Music is one thing outside of the outdoors that we share, just me and him. I held on to my musical past and what I enjoyed listening to, pretty much shunning anything that came along during the nineties and afterwards, with a few exceptions. Then, almost a decade ago, Matthew sent me a link to a song. Now, when we first started this musical partnership, we had to buy a CD or a record, or catch it on the radio or say, hey, listen for this song. While you’re driving around. The link he sent me was from a band I’d never heard of. And several days later, when I remember that he sent me a song, I listened, and I like that one so much. I searched up all their music and listened to them, one after the other, one in particular, several times in a row. Did that guy just really reference a Belgium made browning in that song? A few songs later he did it again with the line my old auto five I’ve sat on here before that my family has an affinity for case pocket knives and brown and shotguns. That’s not an accurate description in all the reality. It bypasses collected and steps over the line toward a concerted effort best described as hoarding. We believe one man can never have enough of either. If one is good, two is better, And there ain’t an adjective they can describe the right number to possess. Like music, these two inanimate objects carry historical legacy within my family. My great grandfather Loved Reeves, the man who started the case knife what’s the word obsession, Well, he had the same feelings about brown and shotguns. My father, Buddy Reeves, extended that love for them to Tim and I children see and carry on the feelings of value, connection and kinship with the genius that was John Moses Browning and his meddling woodworks of art. I’d been listening to the Turnpike Troubadors for less than an hour, and in that brief span of time, I texted Tim and Matthew, listen to this one, Listen to this one. Whoever wrote these songs is one of us. That was almost ten years ago. December of twenty twenty three, I was the guest of Immediate Live Tour, stopping Kansas City, Missouri. This Country Life was only a few months old, and it was my first experience with the live tour. It was incredibly good to meet the folks who listen and watch the content, but I had no idea how all of that would tie into anything involving me and those songs that I so strongly identified with. Two years later, fast forward to December of twenty twenty five, and the frontman and bird Hunter himself, Evan Felker, was a surprise guest at our show in Fable, Arkansas. I had met Evan and his wife Stacy briefly at a previous event in Bozeman a year ago, but there were a lot of folks there, so we never really had the opportunity to visit much beyond the Howdy does and I really enjoy your music talk. Here we had the opportunity to sit down and relax and talk about kids and dogs and hunting and shotguns. One thing led to another, and before the show was over, a two way invitation for a duck hunt had been extended. Now I live in Arkansas, so obviously I’d have ducks before he would in Oklahoma. Nurp, think again, Brinley. He started sending me videos every few days of ducks working a spot of water on his land. A plan was put in motion, and shortly after Christmas, I made the trek to the Felkers Place for supper and a duck hunt in a state I’d only spent one duck season in before, and that was in nineteen eighty eighty eight waterfowl season.

00:15:01
Speaker 2: I spent a little further west at Fort Seal.

00:15:06
Speaker 1: I was wearing camo every day I was there, but there was zero time for duck hunting, even though I saw lakes and ponds holding all manner of ducks as I marched a rand in formation past them all winter long. Thirty seven years later I had returned, and this time, instead of totaing M sixteen in a rucksack, I brought some decoys in a twelve gage. This trip was gonna be a lot better, whether I killed a duck or not, except for that night I got to Evans was a joint effort from him, Stacy, and their nubbing of a daughter. She was a big help with a bigger personality, and when I met her and shook her little hand, she looked at me with her big old brown eyes like I was Santa Claus.

00:15:51
Speaker 2: We made friends.

00:15:54
Speaker 1: Evans was frying duck parks, Stacey was whooping up Aposta salad, and my newest best friend slapped me with the gauntlet of challenge after leaving the kitchen and reappearing with a game box labeled Candy Lad.

00:16:08
Speaker 2: I’m a highly decorated vetter than of Candy Land.

00:16:11
Speaker 1: Having played a semi continuously started with my oldest daughter I A’my around nineteen ninety four. My son Hunter was next, beginning around two thousand and two, and the last session beginning with Bailey. About the time I discovered the guy’s music that was cooking my suffer. Little bed explained the rules to me at the kitchen counter. I told her I wasn’t no rookie of candy Land, and she should be prepared to cry herself to sleep after the beatdown she was about to receive.

00:16:40
Speaker 2: I ain’t letting no younger win.

00:16:41
Speaker 1: Life is hard and they need to learn early. She did not seem intimidated. Youngest goes first, she told me. I said, well, I think that’s you. She looked at me like I look at breakfast when I’m hungry, and it scared me a little. I had calls for concern because the next twenty minutes of my life were a blur of rule changes and extenuating circumstances. I was learning at a much slower pace than we were playing. I’d lost twice before Sunshine, their bobtailed cat could lick his behind.

00:17:16
Speaker 2: It happened quickly.

00:17:17
Speaker 1: I had driven several hours from home to get beat up by a precare in a game I’d been playing, apparently incorrectly, for three decades.

00:17:28
Speaker 2: We’ll meet again, little one.

00:17:31
Speaker 1: The next morning, Evan and I loaded his side beside and we made our way in the dark to the duck blind he constructed on the edge of a small lake. Round haybales would be the backdrop, and four arm sized trees were driven into the ground like fence post the same servant as the frame. All the brush was zip tied to. Evan said, now, don’t be afraid to knock some of that out of your way so you can shoot easier. I made it a little too tall. The kids helped me, and I’m not sure we didn’t be fort instead of a duck blind imagining, imagining in the construction process that was most likely resembling a squirrel round up made me think about projects I’d done with my kids, one of which was a birdhouse Bailey and I built during the COVID lockdown that I absolutely cherish. She painted purple, and over the past six years it has served the bluebird community very well. I found my spot and we enjoyed a little coffee in conversation. After we chunked all the decoys out. As daylight started painting the blackness of the eastern Oakie sky into an orange hue, I noticed something at my feet. It was toy pink made out of foam and resembled a Varmit of some kind by the size of my thumb left there, most likely by the defending Candy Lamb World champion. I picked it up and placed it out of harm’s way on a post between us for luck. Shortly afterwards, Duck started coming in from every direction. We enjoyed the show, and when shooting hours arrived, we started working on him. Evan’s dog, Slick, made some good retrieves, and that was my first experience for the dog Like Slick, you’re not familiar with them. To me, they resemble a German wire haired pointer, but if you’re not careful, pronouncing their name could give you shingles.

00:19:25
Speaker 2: D R A t A R drethar sounds like some kind of voodoo. Now’m a side hurts.

00:19:36
Speaker 1: It was a good looking dog, for sure, But beyond his non typical duck dog his child designed duck blind fortress on the bank of Lake Turnpike, what I found Evan.

00:19:46
Speaker 2: And his family to be was a family not unlike my own.

00:19:51
Speaker 1: The guy responsible for a large portion of the soundtrack of my life for nearly ten years feels the same way I do about family and nostalgia and shotguns, and believe it in not case pocketknives. During my nearly thirty years of guiding duck hunters, I’d found that the blind to be a great place of commonality. I watched hunters on different ends of the socioeconomic scale have conversations that are relaxed, revealing and truthful. And when you’re standing in flooded timbers sitting in a blind, all things are equal among those who truly appreciate what they’re witnessing, with creations standing head and shoulders above the rest.

00:20:33
Speaker 2: As far as.

00:20:34
Speaker 1: How someone says in verse what we were seeing that morning, that’s a mystery to me. And it’s easy to see the love on a man’s face when he looks at his wife and children where they don’t see him looking, hearing it is for us when he talks about it, and that’s something that’s good and pure. We talked about a lot of things while I was there, our families, our childhood, our kids, the perfection of birds on the wing, and the joy of a good hunting dog. That’s why his relatable music has been a fundamental part of the soundtrack of mine for ten years. Putting those feelings, emotions, and subconscious observations in music, now, that’s a god given talent. Thatf you possessed, But my friend Evan, he excels at it. When I listen to some of them and I go back to a place reminds me of people I remember and miss, and for those three minutes, I’m in their company again. I know why the guy in the song risk it all for a photograph and his grandfather’s browning while the house was burning down around him.

00:21:43
Speaker 2: And you do too.

00:21:47
Speaker 1: Thank y’all so much for listening to Late Clay and myself here on the bear grease feeding.

00:21:51
Speaker 2: The next week, this is Brent Reeves, Sign it Off. Y’all, be careful the