My Funeral Mix, part one

Thank you all for your contributions to the funeral mix meme. I read and enjoyed them all. I have been giving this a lot of thought for some time and I just couldn't settle on what I would like to have played. I got the idea from Ozzy Osbourne's "Goodbye to Romance". For a long time I thought that this might be a good "exit" song, but Ozzy? Is it a good idea to venture into the great beyond with this as my final soundtrack? So I asked you what you would want.

I learned quickly that I don't know jack crap about music and I have lead a very sheltered life. I'm familiar with a lot of classic rock, and older country music, but there ends my musical knowledge. I am not the proverbial "old dog", but old enough to know I don't have a lot of "new tricks" left in me. So rather than learn say thirty years of various musical genres, I decided to just pick from ones I already know.

That brings me to my first song, "The Ballad of Forty Dollars" by Tom T. Hall. Tom T. Hall was the entire soundtrack of my childhood. My Dad had every album and listened to them exclusively. We didn't have a radio until I got to highschool and when we did get one, it would only pick up the local station that played top forty hits of the seventies, so the old Hi-Fi was the only music we had in the house. My Dad was hard of hearing, so when he sat down in the evening to read the paper and play some Tom T. records, he played them LOUD.

Youtube didn't have much of a selection of Tom T., but I did find one that has "The Ballad of Forty Dollars", but it is paired with another of his hits, "The Year That Clayton Delaney Died", which kind of goes along with the whole funeral theme, but it wasn't what I was looking for. The video is a series of stills and leaves a lot to be desired, but the sound is well done. I hope that even if you don't enjoy country music that you will give it a chance. He is a master storyteller. To skip to "Ballad", just pull the slider to the center.

I hope you laugh as hard as I do every time I hear this song.



Doc