Good Old Days
Have you heard this radio commercial for ice cream? A brand that's supposed to "taste just like the good old days"? The ad consists entirely of a slick country song that starts out, "I remember our old country home. . . ." The song is in line with a lot of what's coming out of Nashville, what I've been hearing on commercial country radio when I listen. There's a great deal of misty nostalgia in these songs, and I gotta tell ya, a hell of a lot of it rings laughably false.
In the ice cream song, the speaker reminisces about "simpler times," and sets the bucolic scene with mama in the kitchen and the kids down by the swimming hole. At the climax of the song my family just laughs out loud: "Mama hollerin' through the screen / 'would you kids like some home made ice cream.'" Now, anyone who knows anything about home made ice cream, or the past, or mamas, should find this image comical in several ways. We've got the kids down in the creek while mama is supposed to be churning ice cream up at the house, presumably in the kitchen, just like she might bake a peach cobbler. And she's going to surprise our apple-cheeked kiddies with that yummy chilly goodness when it's all finished and ready to serve.
For starters, making ice cream is messy. Rock salt is dirty, and when you mix it generously with gobs of ice, you get a messy, corrosive run off. So you churn ice cream in the back yard, preferably on some patch of dirt where theres no grass to kill, or even better, where there are some weeds downhill you been meaning to get rid of anyway. And what's more, in the gauzy past of my youth, ice cream churns were mostly hand-cranked, so I'm sure that in this "simpler time and place" of the song, mama ain't got no fancy electric churn. If you've never taken a turn at hand-cranking an ice-cream churn, let me tell you something: it's bursitis-inducing, back-breaking, mama-pissing-off work. You get as many people over to help as possible and you take turns.
If mama had been busy up at the house making ice cream for the kids, we're talking about cooking up custard, wrestling ice, handling dirty rock salt, turning that ass-whupping crank, and dealing with the messy run off. After all that, she ain't fiddin to sally over to the screen wiping her hands on her apron like Aunt B and sing out a friendly, "you kids want some ice cream?"
On the contrary, mama is stomping out onto the porch, hands red and hair flying, and she's hollering, "If you kids want some of this ice cream I'm a-churnin', you better get your sorry butts up outa that water and come help me! You think I'm doing all this for my health? Tell your daddy to come in from that barn and bring me some more ice or this isn't gonna set up. And somebody's gotta take a turn at this crank! I'm up here sweating like your aunt Edna at a square dance, and y'all just playing in that mud like you don't have a care in the world!
Silly as it is, this song would be right at home alongside some big country hits. Why, I'm surprised there're any farmers left in the fields; to listen to country radio, you'd think they've all pulled up stakes and moved to Nashville. Every time I turn around there's some song about "I'm a farmer like my daddy and his daddy before that / And I love Jesus and the flag, and you can tell it by my hat." I heard this song yesterday that was all about how great it is to be a Southern man because of our traditions of farming and respect for women and family and love of Jesus and all that. And I was thinking, hmm. I'm a Southern man, and all the men in my family are Southern men, and I gotta tell you, I have to look pretty long and hard to find someone like the gentle, faithful character this song describes as the stereotype. Don't get me wrong: I love my family and I'm proud of my heritage, but you gotta take the crunchy with the smooth, folks. It's true that we southerners are not all a bunch of nine-fingered, cross-burning, wife beating hayseeds. It is also true that I have been to a family reunion where a man was wearing a klan t-shirt (not a blood relative), that I have heard shockingly bigoted statements uttered by people I love, that I have seen families torn apart by neglect and ignorance and even violence on the part of men who probably see themselves as good Christians. There's nothing especially southern about the flaws in the people I know, but for some reason Nashville has decided that the South needs it's own special brand of flawlessness.
4 comments:
Amen, Patrick! Nashville pisses me off for a lot of reasons and I never picked on the ones you raised because I felt that as a northerner, I didn't have a right or the proper perspective. It's always been my belief that when you have to tout your own attributes, you're trying too hard and it might be to hide something else.
Thanks for the comment, Bud. By the way, my paternal granddaddy's name was Bud. Don't know if I ever told you that. I thought about him a lot while writing this, because he was a good, decent, gentle and fair man who also had real flaws.
And he was a farmer who hated farming and schemed constantly to leave it behind. He tried boxing and preaching and eventually became an electrician. His children, including my daddy, all sought non-farming careers. The South's large-scale family-centered agrarian economy has always belonged more to some Hollywood or Nashville fantasy than reality, at least since the depression if not before.
But it's low-hanging fruit for Nashville, easy money. I guess we'd all like to be shown a Vermeer and told it's a mirror. Or something like that.
Absolutely Amen. I hate that commercial too - it always makes me giggle a little when I think about the ice-cream churning circles we used to participate in. It's all packaged and processed when what we need is some Hank Williams grit.
My guess is, whoever wrote the song has never churned ice cream. He probably thinks you whip it up in the kitchen with your flowery apron on.
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