Riding Hard Luck - A Chris Knight Retrospective, Part 2
On hard hearts, rural lives, and simple pleasures
Read part one here: Kentucky’s Unsung Songwriter - A Chris Knight Retrospective, Part 1
Don’t Break Yourself
From Knight’s fifth studio album of the same name, released in 2008, “Heart of Stone” is a song about bitterness, broken families, and how some character traits just get stuck in your blood. The chorus, as is common for Knight, portrays bitter realities mixed with practical wisdom, anchoring the song in the smallest bit of hope: “Got the broken promises / Got the broken home / Don’t break yourself on a / heart of stone.” My story is much different than the one Knight tells, but as someone whose parents divorced when I was nineteen, I used to belt this one to the rafters. Sometimes I still do.
The song is a reminder to fight against the urge to be hardened by life’s disappointments, but it’s more than that. On those days when your heart is hard despite your best efforts, or on those days when you don’t fight against the calloused wall being built around it—because sometimes, in the moment, a hard heart just feels good—it’s imperative to remember: you don’t have to break yourself on it. Anger and cynicism may come at times and that’s okay, but you don’t have to let them calcify over a lifetime. There’s always a new day, until there’s not, so we keep living in the hope that, with the dawn of each one, we conjure our resolve to fight against matters of the heart becoming matters of geology.
At the beginning of the story, the narrator’s father leaves the family, but by the end of it they reconnect over a couple of beers. He then reflects: “I hear people sayin’ like father like son / Don’t think about it much but I worry about it some.” There is something slightly humorous in the narrator’s kind of “we’ll just see what happens” attitude about it, but also profoundly tragic in the potential pattern of generational fatherlessness. Every son at some point or another becomes concerned about some of the more unsavory aspects of his father emerging in his personality. Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about that too much. I’ve got a pretty good one.
I experienced a powerful moment hearing Chris Knight sing this song live last year. He was playing The Burl on January 20, 2023. There is a line in the song that goes, “I married a girl I met in Tennessee / the baby didn’t make it so neither did we.” I had forgotten about the line until I heard it that night, and an unexpected wave of emotion came over me. I was standing next to my dad, probably five beers deep by that point (Knight brings out the guzzler in me). I felt my eyes water just up to the point of a fully unleashed-and-losing-it belly cry. But I caught myself so as to not make too much of a scene. The reason that line made me so emotional is because two weeks prior to the concert, my wife had a miscarriage. In typical male fashion, I had bottled everything inside since it happened, and it all almost spilled out that night in a torrent. Looking back on that moment, three things are clear: 1) A good cry would have been healthy, 2) It wouldn’t have been the first time Chris Knight had made a grown man cry, and 3) I will never forget it.
Times Are Tough
Speaking of my dad, “Nothing On Me,” from Knight’s 2012 album Little Victories, will always remind me of him because of one line, a line I wasn’t even sure the words of until a few years after it came out. Knight’s gravelly drawl, while lending natural authenticity and gravitas to his songs, can at times be hard to decipher. Come to think of it, that’s probably how some people who haven’t known my dad for very long feel when they’re talking to him. His accent, however, is eastern rather than western Kentucky, but it’s all relative.
A number of years ago, my dad began collecting Case knives. Every time I’d go to his house I’d learn about blade types, blade compartments, blade sizes, special editions blades, types of blade handles (ranging from bone to pearl to wood to animal horn), among other aspects of fine pocket cutlery. The lyric I didn’t understand at first goes as follows: “Caught a 22 bullet in my thigh one night / Tryin’ to break up a barroom fight / Went home, dug it out with my old Case knife.” I always got the gist of it because the only word I didn’t understand was, of course, “Case.” When it finally clicked that he was talking about a Case knife, I sent the song to my dad with a text message that said, “Sounds like Chris Knight is a fan of Case knives!”
“Nothing On Me” was most likely written in the years following the Great Recession of 2008. Even if it wasn’t written specifically about the hard times people faced during that recession and in subsequent years, it’s nonetheless an anthem to forge ahead in the face of adversity, as the chorus succinctly demonstrates. Not only that, Chris Knight reclaims the phrase “Get ‘er done” from Larry the Cable Guy, who bastardized it to the point of parody while making millions with a fake Southern accent. Case (wink, wink) in point:
But you can bet your ass I’ll keep the lights on
Keep my babies fed and throw my dog a bone
Cause I’m a bring it on, get ‘er done, don’t run S.O.B.
Times are tough But they ain’t got nothing on me.
As far as authentic depictions of rural Americans go, Larry the Cable Guy ain’t got shit on Chris Knight—or my dad for that matter (though he long ago migrated to the city). But let’s hope my pops never has to dig a bullet hole out of his flesh with a Case knife. God knows if it ever comes to that, he’ll have a few lying around.
All the Lights Are Out
I wouldn’t know what a rural route is if I hadn’t worked at AAA for a few years during and after college. You see, for as much as I love Chris Knight and the rural life and characters he sings about, I am not a rural person. I’m a city boy through and through. Whereas Knight tends more often toward singing about the harsh realities of rural living, I tend more toward romanticizing the idea of living the good life in the country. Sometimes I even find myself romanticizing Knight’s hardscrabble songs, for better or worse.
Perhaps I do this because I’ve always lived in the city. I don’t know what it’s like to live in rural America; I am merely a tourist there. The country is, however, in my blood. Both of my parents were born in rural southeastern Kentucky mountain towns. I went through a phase during and after college where I became obsessed with that Appalachian heritage—which I thought to be my own in some small way—and I wanted to learn all I could about it in hopes that I would learn something about myself. And if I was lucky, perhaps I’d figure out the trajectory of my life in the process.
I built a fire up on the hill
I sat in the woods and drank my fill
Talked to God all night
Took another shot to set me right
Speaking of figuring out life, years ago I had a habit of conversing with the Lord over a can or three of Miller Lite. Argue is perhaps a more appropriate word. And sometimes I still go to whatever concept of God still resides in my head with some bones to pick. “Rural Route” is about a man who leaves the small town that made him who he is. He leaves because there “ain’t much of nothin’ left.” Even when he goes back, it doesn’t feel like home; he can’t even call his mother because she doesn’t have a phone.
It’s a song about the dissolution of so many smalls towns all across the country. Homogeneous cities and corporate big box stores have taken over, the kind of stuff most of us love to rightfully complain about when it comes to the things that ail our society. But a line has been crossed—sacrificing small towns in the name of greedy, corporate capitalism—that there may be no coming back from. And while the narrator sits on that hill talking to God about leaving the little slice of godforsaken country he grew up in, I used to sit on that hill, can in hand, talking to God about how in the hell I was going to get there. My own little slice of country heaven.
At AAA we’d get calls from people stranded on the side of rural routes through every hill and holler of eastern Kentucky. Sometimes I’d take the call, sometimes I’d dispatch the tow truck to the stranded person’s location. But each time I hung up the phone, I’d think of the last lines of this song—“All the lights are out down on the rural route”—and my heart would sink just a little bit.
Ain’t Lookin’ For Trouble
“Oil Patch Town” is Chris Knight in celebration mode, so much as a song extolling the simple pleasures of driving around can be considered a celebration. This is Chris Knight at perhaps his most fun. This is a Chris Knight song that’s easy to romanticize: Friday nights, beer runs, driving around, getting in fights, getting pulled over by cops your parents are friends with. It’s got all the trappings of cliched Hollywood depictions of small-town life. But his authoritative voice cuts through all that noise. An adopted son of Texas, Knight decided to set this song in the small towns and oilfields of the Lonestar State, a setting that can almost seamlessly be interchanged with the coalfields of his home state. And by God, you can still have fun and make your own entertainment in a town with seemingly nothing to do. Knight humorously observes:
By nine o’clock got a half case between us
Pull into the Quick Pick Lendell had to have some smoke
There sits Susie in Billy Scott’s Camaro
Lendell gives her a wink
Billy says, “You want your neck broke?”
In my head right now I can hear every Chris Knight crowd I’ve ever been in singing the chorus of this one at the top of their lungs. It’s easily beltable and one of his catchiest: “Another Friday night / in this oil patch town / Keep the beers out of sight / when the state troopers come around.” And it reminds me that a Chris Knight show, beyond just being a blast every damn time, often feels like a sacred thing. Yea, people are there to have a good time, and “Oil Patch Town” delivers and enables that in spades. But his words also connect with people, his songs bring catharsis and comfort, even the most brutal ones, and because of that he’s garnered a fiercely loyal following. Call us “Knighties,” if you will. We are a peaceful fanbase, but if you try to play Hardy or Brantley Gilbert at the backyard barbecue, you have committed the unpardonable sin. Like the man sings: “We ain’t lookin’ for trouble / Wouldn’t mind a fight / What else you gonna do / It’s just another Friday night.”
*Note: The next post will be the third and final part of this Chris Knight retrospective here at my nameless Substack (suggestions welcome). I’ll be talking about a couple more of my favorite Knight songs, writing about what they mean to me, the memories they spark, the stories they tell. Writing this has been an endeavor in rediscovering not only what an incredible songwriter Chris Knight is but also what a deft and literary storyteller he has always been, going all the way back to that first album. He’s truly one of Kentucky’s great musical and artistic treasures.
Read part one here: Kentucky’s Unsung Songwriter: A Chris Knight Retrospective, Part 1