Country Music

I'd just done a show and came back to the hotel, walked in this lounge and nobody in there. Bartender was watching television, watching Ironside. And there was this old gray black gentlemen who was going on polishing tables and kinda sweeping up, and I'm sitting there and he walked by and says, "How old do you think I am?" he said And I said, "I don't know, I have no idea." "You ever drink any watermelon wine?" I said, "No, but I'd sure like to hear about it." He just struck me as something that sounded so, you know, what could be wrong with watermelon wine? I'd like to hear more about it. So, he sat down, he told me, we talked about philosophy and everything. I took the napkin that he brought me and I got out my pen, I wrote watermelon wine on the napkin and put it in my jacket pocket. I wandered off to bed and I got up the next morning, I got on a airplane, looking for something and found that napkin. it said, "watermelon wine." I didn't have anything to write on, so I got the sick bag out of the airplane and wrote the song on the sick bag. And made up the melody in my head. Personal favorite would be Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine. That is a great song and it tugged at a lot of people. I remember the day we did it. There was a guy named Joe Talbot that was in our building. He came down when the session was over and there was a big bi-fold kind of thing that separated the board from the little seating area there. He was hanging over that thing crying like a baby. And Joe's a big 6'6 guy, but that song got to more people, I think, than we'll all know about. That's country music. That's about a conversation a guy had in a bar and he told a story about it. That record came out and about two weeks later, it was playing all over town. Somebody came into my office and said, "Jerry Reed says he needs to talk to you." I was in a meeting and I said, "ask him if I can call him back." They came back in a couple of minutes later and he says, "He's not going to go away, he needs to tell you something." So, I though maybe something was wrong, so I picked it up. He said, "I just heard Tom T. Hall's record, I just want to tell you you're a son of a bitch." And hung up. Later he told me he'd been crying on the side of the road when he heard the thing. That was Jerry's way of letting you know that you had really gotten to him.