THE RIDE (SONG)

The Ride is a country song recorded by David Allen Coe, an “outlaw” country singer... It was on his album Castles in the Sand in 1983.

Written by Gary Gentry and J.B. Detterline Jr, it is about an encounter between a drifting singer hitchhiking towards Nashville, who gets a ride with a country singer who looks ghostly –half drunk and hollow eyed.  They listen to the radio and as he looks at the driver, he realises that this is no ordinary ride...

 The driver asks him if he can “make folks feel what you feel inside”.  As he lets the man out of his car so that he can drive back to Alabama, the hitch hiker thanks him and he replies “You don’t have to call me Mister, Mister; the whole world calls me Hank”.

And he realizes it was the dead Hank Williams….

 The song has a chilling quality, helped by Coe’s delivery.

I like it particularly because it hits so clearly at the appeal of country music. People who think that it is commercialized schmaltz don’t understand the deep meaning that it has traditionally had for poor “country” people. Most of the older singers, now beginning sadly to leave us, came from impoverished hard–scrabble backgrounds, sharecropping families in the southern states.  It appeals in most countries where there is a rural base and where people have had to work hard to make a living… It has always been popular in Ireland and Scotland and the North of England.  Also in Scandinavia and in parts of Eastern Europe. It’s usually sneered at by the well off and the sophisticated.

For people of that time, music was one of the few entertainments that they had.  They were too poor to go to the movies often; there were no theatres, not many books, and no TV, but most houses had some kind of musical instrument and someone who could play it... and they could listen to the Grand Old Opry on the radio.

 Hank Williams wrote songs that appealed to the people he came from, whom he played for.  People who were poor, struggling to live, who had stormy lives, trying to bring up children on too little pay, where a love betrayal was a tragedy... Many of his songs came from his love hate relationship with his wife Audrey and his own despairing addiction to pills and drink…

And he could make people feel the pain that he suffered; make them believe that he felt their pains… -and that’s what makes a great country singer…

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