My song today is ‘Your Good Girl’s Going to Go Bad’. This song was written by Billy Sherrill and Glen Sutton, and it was originally recorded by American country artist Tammy Wynette. It was released as a single in 1967 in the ‘Columbia Recording Studio’ in Nashville, Tennessee. The song has been identified as one of Wynette's signature hit singles. And ‘Taste of Country’ named it one of their ‘Top 10 Tammy Wynette Songs’ on their 2018 list, citing the song as having "strong feminine lyrics".
The song reached Number 3 on the ‘Billboard Hot Country Singles’ chart in 1967. It became Wynette's breakthrough hit as a recording artist. A cover version by Billie Jo Spears, from her 1981 studio album, ‘Only the Hits’ reached Number 13 on the ‘Billboard Hot Country Singles’ chart in 1981.
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This song was released one year before I first got married. I was 25 years old at the time. I had spent a few years out in Canada sowing my wild oats, during which time I travelled to as many American states as I could. I had planned to have a few years abroad ever since my early teens after I was awarded a sizable amount of compensation for a traffic accident that I incurred at the age of 11 years. Although I could not get my hands on the money before my 21st birthday, when it finally arrived, I sailed for Canada one month after my 21st birthday knowing that I had a financial safety net to economically cushion me if necessary during the immediate years ahead.
While in Canada (and previously for all my late teenage years 18-21) I remained footloose and fancy-free. I was a good-looking young man with a clever brain. I was confident, wild, and outgoing, and my talent for fighting, dancing, and singing made me highly popular with my peer group. All in all, I considered myself to be God’s gift to any young woman who was looking for either a good time or a good man to marry. As far as husband material went, I would have graced the doorstep of any potential ‘in-law’ household and parents wanting the best for their daughter.
Marriage, however, was the one thing farthest from my mind. I was enjoying my life to the full and I had no intention of curtailing my fun and settling down into a life of domesticity and fatherhood before I reached thirty. In many ways, I had grown up well before my years and possessed two weaknesses which could prove my downfall and put a spanner in the spokes of my travelling wheels. My first weakness was a proneness to ‘fall in love’ with every beautiful young woman I dated without wanting the responsibility of ‘being in love’. In short, the ‘thrill of the chase’ always proved more exciting to me than the ‘capture’ and the ‘kill’, though in my defence, I would have to say that I always honestly presented my situation and intentions at the commencement of every relationship. I always made it quite clear that I would travel abroad at the age of 21 years and did not intend to get married until I approached my late twenties. My second weakness was my proneness to enjoy having brief relationships with women who were often up to ten years older than me. In short, I wanted my cake and eat it. I wanted to date ‘good-time girls’ and swing with them on the dance floor as well as having the occasional brief relationship and swinging with ‘bad time girls’ in less public places.
It would be ideal if all of us could select one person in our lives who possessed everything within their personality and character traits that satisfied all our needs, but sadly we cannot. That is why men and women require many different types of relationships to satisfy their full range of needs and human wants/desires. If we are very lucky, we will have a partner who possesses a good number of these differing qualities, but in the final analysis, what our closest relationship does not offer us, we often seek elsewhere, unless we are the type who prefers to do without.
In this analogy, I refer not to obtaining sex outside one’s primary relationship, as that is a definite ‘No, no!’ for most of us. What we seek through our relationships with other individuals is usually found in our friendships with a range of significant others. One friend might share certain interests with us. Another person might be an excellent listener, and another might make us laugh and feel lighter in mood whenever we are in their company. One friend might have a knack for making us forget your troubles, and another might be a good problem solver. We may even have a relationship with a work colleague of the opposite sex with whom we enjoy mutual, innocent, flirtatious banter that each of us knows will never go anywhere. The fact that it won’t go anywhere enables friendship between you and the other person to remain perfectly safe, yet pleasurable, and with a frisson of excitement, because deep down (and in a different world and time) we know that it could!
In the country of my birth, Ireland, the relationship between religion, family, and marriage is invariably mingled and mangled in a moral morass of contradiction. Given the inherent human desires, human practicalities, and human guilt involved in this complicated combination of life, the Irish man has nevertheless produced a male definition of ‘the perfect wife’. This definition may be far from the ideal wife a man ‘gets’, and is more likely to represent the ideal wife that most Irish men would dearly die for. I refer to the feminine qualities of being the best cook in the kitchen, the most loving of mothers to her children in the home, the most respectable woman of repute in the community, and a whore in the privacy of the bedroom. This Irish definition reminds me very much of the content and message of today’s song.
Love and peace Bill xxx