IN TUNE WITH WHISKEY
Country music celebrates its booze of choice,
When country artist Chris Stapleton takes the stage, his fans can always be sure of at least one thing.
The Grammy and Country Music Award-winning singersongwriter will croon a tune, possibly two or three, about American whiskey.
This doesn’t make Stapleton more special than any other country singer out there. Consumption of it has been a hot topic in the genre for decades now, though only alluded to in the early days when Nashville stars were expected to at least show an appearance of sobriety.
Stapleton, like the outlaw country singers he clearly reveres, has no problem with bluntly naming the demon drink, having penned Whiskey and You, Drinkin’ Dark Whiskey (for his former band, bluegrass outfit The SteelDrivers), and sending his version of the David Allan Coe number Tennessee Whiskey to the top of the charts after George Jones hit No. 2 with it in 1983.
He’s even served up the aftereffects, having penned Hangover Tonight with Gary Allan.
He’s not alone in this regard. Gossip has it that Eric Church enjoys a shot of Jack Daniels with the band before heading out on stage, a rumour that doesn’t seem so far-fetched considering Church named a song off his Chief album from 2011 after the brand. The iconic whiskey makers were so pleased they gave Church a customized bar and whiskey barrel in January as a thank-you for his unsolicited marketing.
As an aside, we could devote this entire article to instances of Jack Daniels being mentioned in country songs.
But that’s too narrow a focus, especially when we could talk about Merle Haggard’s love of George Dickel.
Haggard, who was actually better known for tackling a different beverage with the top-five hit Misery and Gin, was so enamoured of the drink he did print ads for Dickel in the mid ’80s, one of the few instances of a whiskey company directly using a country singer to sell their product.
Despite his professed love for Dickel’s, legend has it that Haggard set a world record in 1983 by buying 5,095 shots of Canadian Club at Billy Bob’s Texas in Fort Worth for the entire bar. It was apparently his way of publicizing the song C.C. Waterback, which he sang with George Jones. A
C.C. Waterback involves a shot of Canadian Club and a glass of water on the side. The club’s website claims that the round totalled 40 gallons (more than 150 litres) of whiskey, and cost US$12,737.50.
Country music and whiskey (specifically bourbon) may be inseparable, but companies don’t need a celebrity name attached to sell their wares.
If they did, they could have their pick, whether Toby Keith (Whiskey Girl), Brooks & Dunn (Whiskey Under the Bridge), Luke Bryan (You Don’t Know Jack), Hank Williams III (Five Shots of Whiskey), or the Zac Brown Band (Whiskey’s Gone), just to name a few. Go back a few decades and you can choose from Marty Stuart and Travis Tritt (The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’), Willie Nelson (Whiskey River), Kris Kristofferson (Whiskey, Whiskey), Jerry Lee Lewis (It Was the Whiskey Talkin’), and this writer’s personal favourite, Gary Stewart’s Whiskey Trip.
Possibly the goofiest song about drinking whiskey is The King is Gone (So Are You), which Jones somehow got into the top 25 in 1989. It starts off with “Last night I broke the seal on a Jim Beam decanter / That looks like Elvis / I soaked the label off / A Flintstone jelly bean jar” and gets weirder from there — a perfectly odd paean to getting wrecked by the Possum, a man who knew something about the topic.