My song today is ‘Texas’. This is a song by British singer-songwriter Chris Rea which was released in 1990 as an extended play from his tenth studio album ‘The Road to Hell’ (1989). It was written by Rea and produced by Rea and Jon Kelly.’ Texas’ reached No. 69 in the ‘UK Singles Chart’.
‘Texas’ was inspired by a conversation Rea had with his neighbour about Texas. At the time, Rea had not been to the state, whereas his neighbour described the long, clear roads and the absence of traffic jams there. Texas was also described to Rea as being the place where one wants to be, for whatever reason, a place where everything is bigger and better and is on the menu so long as you have enough money to buy.
On its release, ‘Music and Media’ wrote: "Well-crafted pop-rock that starts off mellow and sparse but gains more substance along the way. Particularly good slide guitar.”
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I never got to Texas when I spent a few years out in Canada in 1963-65, but when I worked in the ‘Glenview Terrace Hotel’ in Toronto, we would often have Americans staying overnight before they caught the morning flight back home into the USA.
At first, whichever part of the USA the Americans came from, they all sounded the same to this Irish man with the English accent. Over a period of one year, I met many Americans who lived across the USA, and I was even able to tell which part of the country they originated from by their dialect alone. I was starting to distinguish American accents and mannerisms from different parts of their country.
Texas is geographically located in the south-central region of the United States. It is the second-largest US state by both area (after Alaska) and population (after California). Texas shares borders with the states of Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the west. Texas also shares a coastline with the Gulf of Mexico. The great Texan cities include Houston, San Antonio, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, El Passo.
Texas has long been known as being the ‘Lone Star State’ for its former status as an ‘independent republic’, and as a reminder of the state's struggle for independence from Mexico. The ‘Lone Star’ can be found on the Texas state flag and on the Texas state seal. The origin of Texas's name is from the word táyshaʼ, which means ‘friends’ in the Caddo language. Historically four major industries shaped the Texan economy prior to ‘World War 11’. They were cattle and bison, cotton, timber, and oil.
Naturally, their cattle had more meat on their bone than any other American cow, their cotton was stronger yet lighter in weight to all other cottons ever picked, their lumberjacks felled the tallest trees in the world, and their oil wells were drilled deeper than any other man-made chasm ever created. Were I to give the Texans a slogan to match their own expectations, it would be “Been there, done that bigger and better!”
I have always found Texans to think big in all they do. They are not the type of people who suffer fools gladly and they are always keen to point out that whatever the current attraction is, it can be found in the heart of Texas, as large as life will allow decency to display. Such largesse of character can stretch from the huge amounts of food a hungry Texan boasts he can consume in one sitting or the number of litres of gas it takes to fill the tank of their truck.
Naturally, the cows and horses that bronco riders mount in their star-spangled rodeos are the most dangerous of steed in the whole of the USA, and when it comes to ‘records’ whatever it was that was first done, you can bet your bottom dollar (that according to every Texan who ever lived), it was done by a Texan! The Texans are proud of their rebellious nature, and it always surprised me to have met so many from the Lone Star State whose ancestral line included some distant great relative who fought alongside David Crockett and James Bowie and other Americans who died at the ‘Battle of the Alamo’ during their 13-day struggle between February 23rd, 1836- March 6th, 1836. The Alamo will always represent the Texan badge of courage.
As for the merits of Texan womanhood, any wise chap from outside the Lone Star State would be better staying alone and steering clear. From the few Texan women who I ever got close enough to, all I will say is that I would prefer to tangle with a dancing bear than to attempt to persuade a Texan woman to do anything she is determined not to do. Texans are rarely disparaging about their womenfolk as many on this side of the Atlantic Ocean appear to be.
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A male friend of mine often referred to feminine thought as being far more positive and optimistic than any male. He referred to women having their ‘e’ moment. He wasn’t particularly complimenting them on having their Eureka moments of discovery but was talking more about the illogical manner in which they made their calculations and interpreted the symbols in the dashboard of the cars they drove.
My friend would be so disparaging about women drivers that he would find it impossible to go through one week without some discriminatory mention being made about some woman motorist who he had passed or who had screeched past him on his way into work that morning. The female motorist would have been driving either too slow or too fast; and whichever way he told hid story, the bottom line is that they would always be driving dangerously and be a road menace. He would call the slow women drivers his ‘Miss Marple’ motorists who would never exceed the speed limit by even I mph. He hated getting behind farmers driving tractors on a country road or Miss Marple motorists who would create a two-mile tailback every time she moved down a gear. Alternately, he also hated the high executive businesswoman who had made it and was determined to show all the male motorists on the road in their little cars how to burn rubber from a traffic-light ego race. This female motorist would always drive a car that most men could only dream of ever owning, She was so wealthy that she would constantly bump another car whenever she rushed to steal a parking place. If you complained of the damage she had done, she would simply smile, reapply her deep red lipstick and say “It’s only money, honey. You can’t take it with you!”
He never once went to the supermarket when he did not witness ‘some stupid woman driver’ as he generally called them either bump another car while attempting to reverse park or almost kill an innocent shopper or child in the process of looking for a parking place. There were naturally those women wearing fashionable stilettoes who would park in the disabled bay, before proudly displaying a disabled badge that belonged to their aged mother who they had not visited in her Residential Home since the previous Christmas.
His best female motorist ‘put downs’ he would save for his own wife, who had seemingly failed her driving test six times before she passed it. He claimed that it was much more than a coincidence that as the female skirt lengths were worn higher and higher above the knee in every year of the 1960s, that eventually when her skirt could ride no higher when she changed gear on her driving test, the examiner had seen enough of her leg movement to pass her with distinction!
His most told quip was his wife being an ‘e' woman’ motorist. He was forever complaining that when he got in the family car to go anywhere that he would find the petrol tank with hardly enough fuel to turn the engine over. His punch line concerned the ‘e’ symbol on the car dashboard that was there to indicate that it was nearly empty. To his wife’s female mind, the ‘e’ symbol did not equate with being empty but suggested that she had ‘just enough’ to make it back home without filling up again.
Love and peace
Bill xxx