Cowboy Copas "Alabam" (1960)

Album: N/A
Label: Starday Records


A living fossil in the age of rock'roll, Cowboy Copas had a career that dated back to '20s string bands, then had a top five country hit in 1946. “Alabam,” which topped the country chart and got to #63 pop in Billboard when he was 47, partook in a rhythm unmistakably echoing those bygone eras. And it wasn't even the last of its kind "Guy Drake" (1970's race-baiting “Welfare Cadillac”), Jerry Reed (most blatantly maybe in “The Uptown Poker Club” from 1973), obese Hee Haw sideshow Junior Samples, and “Convoy” trucker-rapper C.W.

McCall all made music at times harking back, somehow, to the white talking country blues of the Great Depression, long after most anybody remembered was being harked back to. “Alabam” itself consists primarily of warmly recited couplets that, for all we know, could've survived on stages or in barn dances since Reconstruction days "about people down the street eating like wild geese, tramps in the cornfield, Sal with worn-down shoes tied onto her feet. Who knows anymore whether it was heard as a novelty, or whether its sound had simply retained backwoods currency over the decades? Not Cowboy Copas, that's for sure "he died three years later, in the same plane that killed Patsy Cline.