Ten Country Songs That Make Me Cringe: Don't Want to Reveal the Title in Case You're Eating (#1)

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Thirty days, thirty really really bad songs. It's all over now, but not without one really, really bad song left. As I said yesterday, I think "Little Rosa" is the worst song ever, but this song was a massive hit and is considered a "classic" in country music. So, because more people have been forced to suffer with this one, it tops the list. With apologies to you all, here's the king puker. #1: You've Never Been This Far Before - Conway Twitty There are about 20 million things wrong with this song. Bom-bom-bom. Funny story time: I was 13 when this song came out. I was in the car with my dad and it came on the radio. It was the first time either of us had heard it, and after a few seconds of listening to the song my dad, in his inimitable way, angrily turned off the radio and said, "You're not listening to that." "Yeah," I replied, "It's awful." There's nothing like controversy to help a song sell. This piece of crap went to #1 and stayed there for three weeks. And why oh why did people buy it? I have no clue. I would much rather sit here, 44 years after the fact, and tell you it was banned because it was a horribly crappy song. No. This song was banned by a lot of country stations in 1973 because it was sexually suggestive. Now, understand, country music has a history of sexually suggestive (if not downright dirty) songs (see: "She Came Rolling Down the Mountain" by the Callahan Brothers, recorded in the late 1930s). Things were getting a little more risqué in the late 60s and early 70s, with things like "The Son of Hickory Holler's Tramp" (by Johnny Darrell, about a woman with 14 kids who became a prostitute to support her children [and you know there's a joke about a woman with 14 kids turning to prostitution, but I was seven when that song came out, so what did I know]). But here, according to the radio programmers, things went a little too far. "I don't know what I'm saying as my trembling fingers touch forbidden places." ZAP, off the radio it went. Worse, Twitty, who actually wrote this hogwash, tried to defend it: "just putting your arm around a married woman was 'forbidden places,'" he said in Country Music magazine. Hey, Lamont you big dummy (in best Fred Sanford voice), you didn't say "arm," you said fingers. I don't know what I hate worse about this song: those lies that I knew were lies when I was 13 ("you have no way of knowing but tonight will only make me love you more"....yeah, right. Ladies? Show of hands? ), or those ridiculous bom-bom-bom's after every line. I had lunch with a friend in Knoxville, and he was telling me that his elderly mother was fawning over Twitty on a Hee Haw rerun. "Oh, no, throwing their panties at the TV?" I asked. "Just about," he replied. And that's probably why so many women took this garbage: Conway Twitty was a country "sex symbol." Not to this hillbilly, he wasn't. I'd rather watch and listen to Doug Kershaw (look him up...as my mother of blessed memory used to say of Kershaw, "He's so ugly he's cute") than Conway Twitty. "Hello, Darlin'" is a great song, but there's just too much of his stuff that never appealed to me. And this song wouldn't have appealed to me no matter who had sung it. Thanks for reading, and my apologies. You've Never Been This Far Before Written by Conway Twitty Recorded by Conway Twitty From You've Never Been This Far Before, 1973 Conway Twitty started in rock and roll. Here's one of his great early rock songs, and I love this one: