Before Country Was Cool …

Welcome to Ray D's Liner Notes: Grandpa Jones, George Jones, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Red Foley, Hal Lone Pine, Mickey Gilley, Leroy Van Dyke, Roger Miller, Eddy Arnold, Brenda Lee, Barbara Mandrell

Ray d'Entremont , Bio and Archives--September 6, 2026

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Howdy! If you followed old time country music you may agree that everybody seemed to be working an angle. You had folks like Minnie Pearl, String Bean, Little Jimmy Dickens and Grandpa Jones. Bumpkins frequented banks and laughed back at their city slicker cousins.

Hicks were American idols. Hayseeds were “in.” Some of my buddies mimicked the lingo, and when we chased girls at twelve, they called it “goin’ wenchin’.” Pitching hay, the jokes ran like this: “Preacher asked Farmer Brown if he prayed before his meals. Farmer said, ‘No sir. My wife’s a good cook.’” Mostly it was self-deprecating humour.

I was sixteen before I set foot in a real city. Those were more innocent times, and I look back with more fondness than embarrassment. Someone should write a book about early country showbiz--or a podcast with the sound intact. I confess that I knew Barbara Mandrell’s song when titling this playlist.

That was the era when Nashville dusted the hayseeds off the albums and started producing the Dickens out of them; the urban cowboy became a thing. Until Chuck Berry captivated me at twelve, I was very country. A couple of years before that I saw Ross Bannington, a 5-string banjo player from Ontario, at the village Odd Fellows Hall and wanted to be as cool as that--not play rock guitar.

So we sang a few of the beloved, landmark songs on this list: significant classic country, largely from the 1940s--mid-1970s. Not always the foundational history-makers perhaps, but significant nonetheless.

Good Old Mountain Dew--Grandpa Jones:

Louis Marshall Jones recorded this in April 1947; he didn’t write it. In spite of the name, it’s not about soda pop. A banjo-pluckin’ lawyer wrote the original after a moonshine court case, but Grandpa’s version is way more fun. Cornball humour, fake moustache, pedal-to-the-metal clawhammer banjo: perfect for a pretend mountain man, and it became his signature. I saw him do it at Grand Ole Opry in the 1970s when he would have been in his sixties. More energy than a five-year-old--an unlikely grandfather. The same style worked on Hee Haw too.........

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