Woe, Kentucky

In 1981, at the zenith of his commercial powers, Kenny Rogers of Houston, Texas, recorded his first Christmas record, Christmas, and the first single was "Kentucky Homemade Christmas."

This album was a big hit everywhere; People gave the new record props in its J.R. Ewing Dec. 21 edition, and it eventually reached No. 10 on the U.S. country chart. I can only imagine just how giant it must've been specifically around here. For sure, the vision of holiday-decked-living-room bliss that was captured in the back-cover photograph of Kenny Rogers is replicated around Madisonville's Christmas open houses 30 years later.


"Kentucky Homemade Christmas" is a heartbreaking lyric co-written by a Kenny collaborator from the First Edition days (Kin Vassy of Carrollton, Ga.) and an eventual pecan magnate (Bill Caswell of Bartlesville, Okla.):

... There's a brand-new Barlow knife with a shiny wooden handle
Gleamin' in the window down at Galen Johnson's store
My wide-eyed little Billy boy, his face pressed to the window
Too young for understandin' what it means to be so poor ...

Little Linda ain't no baby; hell, she turns 13 in April
She's been dreamin' about that dolly in the window for half her life
She's old enough to realize that it ain't never comin'
I'd damn-near rob a bank to get that doll and Billy's knife ...

Now naming the store owner "Galen" is absolutely brilliant, and the use of "hell" and "damn-near" is just pitch-perfect in the context of the song. And, no question, the sweet-and-sour sentiment of the unemployed dad that is so expertly depicted in the song would be accurate to the experiences of thousands of Kentuckians every year. (As "mikeydonnie" commented at the YouTube clip 11 months ago, "I heard this song played in a store today and I had to come look it up. I grew up in eastern Kentucky. I come from 4 generations of coal miners. So, I understand about the mines being shut down. ...")

And yet when I learned that "Kentucky Homemade Christmas," performed by a Texan, was co-written by a Georgian and an Oklahoman, there's part of me that bristled--in the same way that a basketball player from Mozambique once bristled at the undercurrent of my questions about her beloved Africa.