“I thought everybody had to drink to be in this business,” country singer Keith Whitley said in an interview not long before his death at the age of 33 in 1989. “Lefty Frizzell drank, Hank drank, George Jones was still drinking, and I had to. That’s just the way it was. You couldn’t put that soul in your singing if you weren’t about three sheets in the wind.”
Country has always loved an ode to liquor.
”There used to be this place in Texas where some of us would go to drink after we got off work at night. Some people called it a bar, some called it a tavern. The yellow pages, I think, called it a restaurant.
We called it home.
During the week all of those names probably were appropriate, but on Saturday nights it was a honky tonk.
It must have a flashing neon sign that guides the lonely to its doors, as a lighthouse guides a disabled craft during a storm. It has to have a gravel parking lot too small to accommodate all the Saturday night cars so that the leftovers have to park halfway up a nearby grassy knoll.
And there must be a juke box.
On particularly bad nights the barmaid would slip a quarter in the juke box and play some country music. After a few songs and a few beers we were always in a better mood. By last call, we’d be telling her how pretty her pants were.
This was around the mid 1960’s and I remember one particular song. It was titled, inappropriately enough, Close All The Honky Tonks, and Charlie Walker sang it. I think I even remember the jukebox number. I think it was C-7”.
Tom West Cincinnati Enquirer 1973
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