How to Write a Hit Country Song
It ain’t difficult, you just have to get it all wrong!
Take a man, let’s call him Ordinary Joe.
Joe loves his life, the cold, the rain, and the darkness of winter. As a teen, things were looking pretty fine. Ordinary Joe was a handsome guy, had conquered some high school girls, hell, even a few of their moms.
He was doing well on the ranch, rode well, roped well, and high marking in his studies. Of course, Ordinary Joe was a popular quarterback, playing college football, and some said he had attracted the attention of the pros.
Yep, everything was looking pretty damn good.
Then horse accident left him with a small metal plate in his throwing arm, and sure, he could still use it, but it sank his dream of throwing in the professional leagues.
Imagine how that pissed him off?
Then he got his girlfriend pregnant, winding up having to marry her. Then came the mortgage, the second kid, and the end his dreams. Friends became fewer as he drank more, and the marriage fell away. Divorce came next.
Ordinary Joe in his forties, broke horses for a living in Montana, alone and doing his job. He had few friends and no real interests but for the occasional woman in town, each canned for one reason or another.
Ordinary Joe never had much to say, preferring to drink bourbon until he fell asleep. The years passed and his children moved on with their lives.
It had all looked pretty good at sixteen, and one night he thought about how bad it had all become. Working a dead-end job, just another nobody, an ordinary Joe.
If he’d known how it was all going to work out, every day a grim struggle, he sat by the fire and wrote a song. He should not have been born, but he had, so the second-best was dying too soon.
Ordinary Joe called it: A Song to Hang Yourself By.
