Here are both sides of a grimly disturbing 45 made by Dexter Gardner, a deeply troubled teenaged (and self-identified) LSD addict from Kearns, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City. As the record label indicates, the audio was "reproduced from (a) tape recorded message just before death by suicide.&...

Porter Wagoner  -  Skid Row Joe  (3:03) Joe Bravo Y Su Orquesta  -  Skidrow Joe  (2:58) Featured here are two versions of songwriter Freddie Hart's ultra-depressing Skid Row Joe.  The late great Porter Wagoner recorded the original version in November 19...

Harley Ford  -  Drunken Driver  (2:54) Just in time to serve as a cautionary tale for New Year's Eve, here is an MP3 that is specially tailored to scare the shit out of you and persuade you not to reach for the car keys after hitting the bottle.  Unless, of course, you're not par...

Is Santa Claus a hippie?  The three recordings below offer testimony on this timely question. Only Linda Cassady votes "no" on the issue, but it's hard to overlook the fact that she provides pretty thin evidence to support her position. Homer & Jethro and Don Sneed, on the other h...

Twelve years ago today the world of country music suffered a terrible loss when singer Faron Young, suffering from prostate problems and emphysema, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at age 64.  Young's career got started in Shreveport, Louisiana where he rose to prominence on the famed Lou...

In a Beware Of The Blog post dated Nov. 23, Listener Kilph Nesteroff was the first one to clue me in to the fact that a super-colossal chunk of LIFE magazine's photographic archives have been posted online, hosted by Google.  Ever since then I've been compulsively ogling this embarrassment of v...

Today we celebrate the 39th anniversary of the launch of the Apollo 11 mission, which blasted off on July 16, 1969.  The Apollo 11 was the first manned flight to land on the moon.  Among those on board the rocket ship were astronauts Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, who stepped out of their...

Jimmy Durante  -  We're Going UFO-ing  (2:25) Today marks the 61st anniversary of the Roswell Incident, which unofficially served as the beginning of the post-war UFO craze.  Many researchers believe that on that on the evening of July 7, 1947 an alien space craft crashed to the ...

Doing research for a recent post about country/twist records, I pulled from the bookshelf my copy of the Nick Tosches'  "The Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll."  A trip to this particular corner of the library also induced me to pick up and flip through "Where Dead Voices Gathe...

A couple weeks ago we explored the improbably wacky world of country tango and rhumba songs, which functioned as a follow-up to a previous post about hillbilly mambos.  We now turn our attention to country twist songs.  The Twist officially came to life in January 1959 when King records re...