The 333 Best Pop Songs of the 2000s: #288

#288: "Pistol Packin' Mama" (2007) - John Prine & Mac Wiseman

Speaking of all-covers records, here's one from the best covers album of the decade: Standard Songs for Average People, the album of old country, bluegrass, and rockabilly songs by John Prine and bluegrass legend Mac Wiseman (who played guitar with Bill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggs). On "Pistol Packin' Mama," the old honky-tonk standard (written and first recorded by Al Dexter back in '42, but later covered by the likes of Bing Crosby & the Andrew Sisters, Gene Vincent, and a slew of C&W artists), Prine and Wiseman infuse the song with life, love, and laughter. It's not a radical re-invention, but this first-time duo (never even met before these sessions) sound like old friends having a ball, laughing at each other over the trouble they used to get into. They treat the song like a lark, and the fun's contagious, bringing out the wit in the lyric. The production is stellar: clean and open, allowing the singers to relax into the melody, pushing their personalities to the forefront, uncluttered by too much unnecessary instrumentation. The high tenor (sounds like Wiseman when he was much younger) singing over Prine on the chorus is a hoot, too. When I first heard the song, I imagined the aged (but not old) Prine and Wiseman drinking beer, cabareting, and dancing with blondes, and women getting jealous over them, and coming home at four in the morning...well, if I'm lucky enough to grow that old and still have that much fun, I'd sing about it with glee, too...whenever my wife wasn't around.

This performance reminds me of a song my aunt Bernice used to sing to me about my grandparents:

Maw loved Paw
Paw loved women
Maw caught Paw with two out a' swimmin'
Here lies Paw....

I was about seven or eight and as naive as they come, and I believed this had happened; well at least the first part. And this is when my grandparents were both in their seventies. No wonder Paw didn't talk much around Maw, I thought. He's still in trouble. That must be why he went to the drugstore all the time to meet his friends, I thought, because he's been kicked out for a while. Now, of course, I know better. He went to the drugstore to tell his friends about this one time, years ago, when he was at a bar, and there was this blonde....

You can listen to it here.