I couldn't remember who sang this song or who wrote it so I finally snapped and googled it. Shel Silverstein! I should have known. Out of the top ten cleverest C&W songs ever written, he probably wrote at least seven. The melody is standard and the backing minimal (at least the way I do it) so it's got to be the words and the singing that make this into an almost perfect song.
Nope, it's not the singing.
I'm not usually comfortable changing the lyrics of a song I call "perfect" by a master of songwriting, but the last verse was a couple of measures shorter than the first two so I added a snippet, "with a few roads behind you" to make them the same musically.
ReplyDeleteI don't like changing it, but why was it shorter?