Elvis Presley – "Kissin' Cousins" (1964)

Yes, we’re all cousins, that’s what I believe

Because we’re children of Adam and Eve

Advice columns are the gift that keeps on giving to bloggers who can’t think of anything interesting to write about.

Here’s a recent letter to advice columnist Judith Martin, whose “Miss Manners” column began to appear in the Washington Post in 1978 – just a few months after 2 or 3 lines moved to Our Nation’s Capital to live and work. 

Dear Miss Manners: Last July, one of my adult daughters died.  I placed the obituary in the Sunday paper, cross-referenced to my maiden name so my relatives would be sure to notice it.

With the pandemic, we did not have an open funeral.  But not one of my 29 second cousins on my father's side even sent a sympathy card, and only four of my 37 first cousins on my mother's side did so.

Now one of them has died, and I'm having mixed feelings about how to respond.  I did send a sympathy card.  But attend the funeral Mass?  Why should I?  They can't even send a sympathy card.  Why should I go out of my way for any of them?

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I thought had a lot of cousins, but I’m way behind the woman who wrote to Miss Manners.

My father was one of eight children – which was an unusually large family even a hundred years ago.

Those eight siblings had a total of 19 children.  One of the 19 is my sister, and one is me – which means that I have 17 first cousins on my father’s side.  

That seems like a lot – my kids have only six first cousins – but 17 pales in comparison to 37.

If the letter writer’s mother was one of eight children, each of her seven siblings would have had to have five-plus children to get the total number to 37.  

Even if she was one of ten children – a very large family indeed – her siblings would have had to average a little over four children apiece to reach 37.  (I have four children, and I don’t consider that to be out of the ordinary – but it would be a real statistical rarity for nine siblings to average four children each.)

Whatever the specific facts were, only a tiny percentage of people have that many first cousins on just their mother’s side .

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I wasn’t that close to any of my 17 first cousins on my father’s side when I was young – most of them lived hundreds of miles away from where I grew up.  I’ve established contact with a couple of them in recent years thanks to Facebook, and I would expect those few to reach out if I lost a family member.  But I wouldn’t be surprised or feel insulted if the others didn’t – for better or worse, we weren’t close as kids, and it’s doubtful that we’ll suddenly become close now that we are in our sixties and seventies.

Based on my experience, it’s no surprise that only four of the letter writer’s 37 first cousins sent sympathy cards when her daughter died.  Did her mother’s siblings remain in the same area where they grew up?  If not, their children – the first cousins – probably weren’t that close as children.  (That was the case with me and my first cousins on my father’s side.)  

The mere fact that there are so many of them probably makes it less likely that more than a few would be close to the letter writer.  For one thing, it would be surprising if most or all of them still lived in the same area where their grandparents lived – Americans are just too mobile for that to be probable.  

And even if most of them remained in the same area where they grandparents lived – which would be surprising – it’s almost impossible to remain close to 37 cousins.  (How would you even remember their names?)  

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My mother was an only child, so I don’t have any first cousins on her side.  

But her mother was the oldest of seven children, and my mother had a total of 11 first cousins.  Which means that I had 11 first cousins, once removed.

Because my mother was the oldest in her generation, most of her first cousins are closer to my age than to hers – so they always felt more like my cousins than hers.  (Two of them are exactly my age, and one is actually several years younger than I am.)

I grew up only a short drive from where all of my mother’s cousins lived, and I saw them regularly when I was a child.  Even though they are first cousins, once removed,  I knew them much better than the “pure” first cousins on my father’s side.

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I’m guessing that most or all of the 29 cousins the “Miss Manners” letter writer describes as second cousins on her father’s side are actually first cousins, once removed. 

Given my experience, it’s easy for me to imagine that her mother might have been an only child, and that – like me – she ended up with a number of first cousins, once removed, who were nowhere near her in age.  If that was the case, I understand why she was disappointed that none of them sent a sympathy card – although I wouldn’t expect her to still be close to more than a few of them.

If they were true second cousins, it’s a different story.  Second cousins are the grandchildren of siblings.  I can’t imagine that the letter writer really expected to hear from a significant number of second cousins, absent unusual circumstances.  

Even if the second cousins’ grandparents and their parents never moved away from where their great-grandparents lived, there would likely be a pretty big age spread between the younger and older second cousins, which probably means they didn’t spend a lot of time playing with each other when they were growing up. 

I’m not aware of any of my second cousins on my father’s side – I’m sure I had some, but I never met any of them, and couldn’t name a single one of them.  (My father’s father died long before I was born, and I know nothing about any of his mother’s siblings – assuming she had siblings.) 

While I know some of my second cousins on my mother’s side, most of them are closer in age to my children than they are to me.  So while I would expect to hear from their parents if a close family of mine died, I wouldn’t expect to hear from any of them.

Given that, I wouldn’t expect to hear from my second cousins in the situation described by the letter writer.

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It’s probably a mistake for me to make assumptions about the “Miss Manners” letter writer based solely on my relationship with my first and second cousins.

Consider my eleven first cousins, once removed, on my mother’s side – who are first cousins to one another.

They all grew up within ten miles of their grandparents’ home.  I know their families all went to the same church – they gathered most Sundays after church for dinner at their grandparents’ farm.  They probably attended the same schools.

All of them live within a hundred miles of each other today, and I think that most of their children – my second cousins – remain close by as well.   Like their parents, they may see each other often and have a much closer relationship with each other than I do with any of them.  (Remember, I not only lived some distance when I was growing up – meaning that I only saw them infrequently – but I was also much older than they were.)

If the “Miss Manners” letter writer was any of my second cousins other than me, she might have had good reason to be upset if none of her second cousins noted her daughter’s passing.

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In Matthew 22:35-40, Jesus responded to a trick question from – who else? – a lawyer who was trying to make him look bad:

And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”  And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.  This is the great and first commandment.  And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” 

If Jesus was able to sum up all the law and the prophets in just two fundamental commandments, far be it from 2 or 3 lines to go him one better and offer up three commandments.

But if there were a third 2 or 3 lines commandment, it would be “JUST LET IT GO!” – which would be my answer to the Miss Manners letter writer.  (I think that is essentially what Miss Manners told her.)

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Did you know that more than 10% of marriages in the world today are between first or second cousins?

First-cousin marriages are common in certain parts of the world (like the Middle East) but are legally prohibited in China and Korea.  (Korea prohibits marriages between second and third cousins as well.)

About half of the United States prohibit first-cousin marriages.  (Only a few states prohibit marriage between first cousins, once removed.)  

You might be surprised to learn that first-cousin marriages are illegal in Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, and West Virginia, but are legal in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York:

The practical reason for prohibiting cousin marriages is that children of first-cousin marriages have an increased risk of autosomal recessive genetic disorders (which include cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, and Tay-Sachs disease).  Children of more distantly related cousins have less risk of these disorders, though still higher than the average population.

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Elvis wasn’t talking about a first cousin in today’s featured song – the object of his desire is a “distant” cousin, if you take Elvis’s word for it.  (Which I’m not sure I would do.)

(

Two Elvises are not necessarily
 better than one!

Click here to listen to “Kissin’ Cousins,” which was released on the soundtrack of the 1964 movie of the same name, which starred Elvis as both a US Air Force officer and his hillbilly third cousin.

Click below to order the recording from Amazon:

Elvis Presley – "A Little Less Conversation" (JXL Radio Edit Remix) (2002)

Don’t procrastinate

Don’t articulate

Girl, it’s getting late

ELV1S: 30 #1 Hits is an Elvis Presley greatest hits collection released by RCA Records in 2002.  

It included the 18 singles that reached #1 on the Billboard “Hot 100,” plus 13 singles that made it to #1 in the UK but not in the U.S.  

You don’t need a calculator to figure out that 18 plus 13 doesn’t equal 30.  Elvis actually had 31 singles that reached #1 in either the U.S. or the UK.  

So why was the album titled 30 #1 Hits?

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In 2002, Dutch musician Tom Holkenborg (a/k/a JXL) remixed Elvis’s 1968 recording of “A Little Less Conversation.”  That remix hit #1 in the UK just before the 30 #1 Hits was scheduled to be released, so RCA decided to add it to that compilation.

God only knows why RCA didn’t change the title of the album from 30 #1 Hits to 31 #1 Hits.  (I’m guessing it had something to do with saving money.)

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I mentioned before that Elvis had 18 #1 singles in the U.S., and that 13 additional Elvis singles made it to #1 in the UK.

But six singles made it to #1 in both countries.

So Elvis actually had more #1 hits in the UK than in the U.S. – 19 compared to 18.

I find that very surprising.  I had no idea that Elvis was even more overrated in the UK than he was in the U.S.

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I’m featuring Elvis in the 29th and final of this year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days” because I think he is unquestionably the most overrated recording artist of my lifetime.

Take a look at Elvis’s #1 hits sometime.  Most of them were released between 1956 and 1962 – a period of time when popular music was truly horrible.

The top selling records of those years included “Love Letters in the Sand” and “April Love” by Pat Boone, “Singing the Blues” by Guy Mitchell, “It’s All in the Game” by Tommy Edwards, “At the Hop” by Danny & the Juniors, and “Rock and Roll Waltz” by Kay Starr.

Given the level of competition, it’s hardly a surprise that crap like “Don’t Be Cruel,” “All Shook Up,” “Teddy Bear,” “Love Me Tender,” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” were so successful.

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The original version of today’s featured song – which was written by Mac Davis and “Wrecking Crew” member Billy Strange – may be my favorite Elvis song ever.

“Viva Las Vegas” is pretty good, too.

But after that, you fall right off the cliff.

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Click here to listen to Elvis Presley’s 31st #1 hit single.

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Elvis Presley – "Wear My Ring Around Your Neck" (1958)

Won’t you wear my ring around your neck

To tell the world I’m yours, by heck

Is that the worst rhyming couplet ever written?  

If you ask me, it's the leader in the clubhouse.

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Elvis Presley recorded a lot of terrible music – including today’s featured song.

Keep in mind that Elvis died when he was only 42.  Can you imagine how much more bad music he could have recorded if he had lived another 10, 20, even 30 years?

Elvis in 1957

Leonard Pinth-Garnell never reviewed “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck,” but here are a few quotes from Bad Performances that could be used to describe that song:

– “Stunningly bad!”

– “Monumentally ill-advised!”

– “Perfectly awful!”

– “Couldn't be worse!”

– “Exquisitely awful!”

– “Astonishingly ill-chosen!”

– “Really bit the big one!”

Elvis in 1976

Unlike Elvis’s previous ten singles, “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck” didn’t make it to #1 on the Billboard “Hot 100.”  It peaked at #3.

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You younger 2 or 3 lines readers may be confused by the title of this song.

Fifty or sixty years ago, a high-school senior who was “going steady” with a girl might give her his class ring to wear as tangible proof of his affection.

If he was a hulking gridiron star and she was a dainty cheerleader, his ring would be far too large for her fingers.

Not what Elvis was suggesting

One way around that problem was for the comely young lass to put the ring on a chain and wear it around her neck.

That is what Elvis is asking his beloved to do in this song.

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Click here to listen to “Wear Your Ring Around My Neck.”

Click on the link below if you’d like to order the song from Amazon:

Ronnie McDowell – "Older Women" (1981)

Older women, they understand

I've been around some, and I have discovered

That older women know just how to please a man

In the previous 2 or 3 lines, we learned about an Iranian wife who behaved very badly on a recent Qatar Airways flight.

Today’s 2 or 3 lines is about a woman who was guilty of a very different kind of bad behavior on a recent Delta Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Detroit. 

It seems that once that flight took off from LAX and the cabin lights had been  dimmed, a sharp-eyed flight attendant noticed that a female passenger’s head – which was partly concealed under a blanket – was bobbing up and down in the lap of her male seatmate.

The flight attendant reportedly told the woman to “sit up straight,” which put an end to the monkey business.  

I wonder how Kris Conrad would have handled the situation:

It turned out that the woman turned out to be 48 years old (i.e., old enough to know better), while her seatmate was 28 (i.e., young enough to be her son).

It also turned out that the woman had an 0.12% blood-alcohol level, had bloodshot eyes, and was (to quote the airport police who met the flight in Detroit)  “wobbly.”

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Would you believe that the couple were total strangers before they boarded the flight?  (Southwest allows you to pick your seats, but these two were flying Delta, which preassigns seats.  That means that it was purely random that they ended up seated next to one another.)

So either it was love at first sight for this May-December couple – how romantic! – or the unwatchable Snatched was the in-flight movie, forcing them to come up with another way to entertain themselves during the long flight.

Unwatchable

Several of the other passengers noticed what was going on.  But the guy sitting next to the couple was oblivious.  From the Detroit News:

One witness “felt bad” for the cross-country airline passenger situated on the end of a three-seat row where a man and woman engaged in a sex act, according to reports released by airport police.

“But I guess he was sleeping,” wrote the witness.

A Delta Airlines 757-300

The pair initially claimed that the woman had just placed her head in the man's lap to sleep.  

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

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The FBI's Detroit office, which apparently has very little to do, investigated the incident.  At first, the feds said that the couple could be charged with a misdemeanor, or even a felony.  But because their conduct didn’t threaten the safety of the passengers or the crew, it seems unlikely that they will be prosecuted.

One former FBI supervisor said he thought the frisky pair was guilty of “criminal stupidity – felony stupidity.”

But if stupidity was a crime in this country, we’d need to build a helluva lot more prisons.

Why didn't the woman wait until the plane landed, and then invite her new beau to accompany her to a nearby airport motel?  It’s simple – she had a connecting flight to Nashville, and he was flying on to Miami.

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The last 2 or 3 lines featured a song by an imitation Elvis Presley, and so does this one.   I don’t like the real Elvis much, so you’re probably surprised that I’m giving such prominence to a couple of Elvis wannabes like Terry Stafford and Ronnie McDowell.

Ronnie McDowell’s first hit was “The King Is Gone,” an Elvis tribute song that he released shortly after Presley’s death in 1977.  

Later, McDowell recorded a number of Elvis songs for the 1979 made-for-TV Elvis biopic, which starred Kurt Russell as Presley.  McDowell later covered the Elvis songs used on the soundtracks Elvis and the Beauty Queen (a 1981 made-for-TV movie), Elvis and Me (a 1988 miniseries), and Elvis Meets Nixon (a 1997 Showtime special). 

I’m going to cut McDowell a little slack because he served on board the USS Hancock, the aircraft carrier that my father served on during World War II.

The USS Hancock in 1968

I had never heard of McDowell, but he’s kind of a big deal in country music.  (He’s released 23 studio albums and 51 singles, and 34 of those singles cracked the Billboard “Hot Country Songs” chart.)

Here’s “Older Woman,” which was a #1 hit in 1981:

Click below to order the song from Amazon:

Terry Stafford – "Suspicion" (1964)

Ev’ey time you call me

And tell me we should meet tomorrow

I can't help but think that

You're meeting someone else tonight

There are a zillion ways I can unlock my new Samsung Galaxy S8 phone.

I can unlock it the old-fashioned way, by typing a four-digit PIN.  But that’s no fun.

It’s much cooler to use facial recognition to unlock the S8 – or better yet, the built-in iris scanner.

Eat your hearts out, you iPhone lemmings!

You can also activate the phone’s “Trusted places” option, which keeps the phone unlocked whenever you’re at particular locations.  

Likewise, you can turn on the “Trusted devices” feature, which keeps the phone active as long as you are connected to any Bluetooth device you’ve chosen.

Or you can use the phone’s voice recognition feature to unlock the S8 without having to type in four digits.  (Which is sooooo inconvenient!)

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The S8 and many iPhones (although not the brand-new iPhone X) also can be unlocked with fingerprint scanners.  But if I were you, I wouldn’t activate that feature.

Why?

A few days ago, an Iranian couple boarded a Qatar Airways flight in Doha, which is Qatar’s capital.  They were bound for the tropical paradise of Bali.

The nonstop flight from Doha to Bali is ten hours long.  The husband feel asleep soon after the flight took off.  The wife decided to have a few drinks, no doubt hoping to join her spouse in slumberland.

But before she feel asleep, she carefully picked up her sleeping husband’s index finger and pressed it against the fingerprint scanner on his phone to unlock it.

A Qatar Airways 777

Voilà!  All the husband’s dirty little secrets were revealed – including the fact that he may have been having an affair.  

According to some who witnessed the incident, the wife reacted exactly as you would have expected: she started whaling away on her sleeping husband.  There was also a lot of shouting and some unspecified misbehavior that was too much for the flight attendants to handle.

The pilot ended up putting the Boeing 777 down in Chennai, India (which used to be called Madras), where the couple were frogmarched off the plane, along with their young child.  (That's right – they were traveling with a small child.)

I hope the wife learned her lesson, and never pulls a stunt like that again!

And if you are ever tempted to pull a similar stunt, remember the official motto of 2 or 3 lines: MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS! 

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“Suspicion” was one of the 25 songs that Doc Pomus and Mort Shulman wrote for Elvis Presley.  (“Viva Las Vegas” is perhaps the most familiar of those songs.)

Presley recorded the song in 1962.  It was included on the Pot Luck album, but was not released as a single.

Two years later, Presley soundalike Terry Stafford released his recording of the song, which quickly climbed into the top ten.  (I believed for years that Stafford's version was actually a Presley recording.)

“Suspicion” sat at #6 on the Billboard “Hot 100” in the first week of April 1964 – the five songs ahead of it were all by the Beatles, the first time that one artist had held down the top five chart positions.  The next week, “Suspicion” leapfrogged over “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “Please Please Me” to take over the #3 spot, behind only “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “Twist and Shout.”

Presley’s record company hurriedly released his version of “Suspicion,” but it was the record’s B-side, “Kiss Me Quick,” that charted.

Five years later, Presley’s cover of another song about suspicion – “Suspicious Minds” – became his final #1 single.

Here’s Terry Stafford’s recording of “Suspicion”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Chuck Berry – "Johnny B. Goode" (1958)

Deep down in Louisiana close to New Orleans,

Way back up in the woods among the evergreens

There stood a log cabin made of earth and wood

Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode

Who never ever learned to read or write so well

But he could play a guitar just like a ringing a bell

(Yes, I'm aware that's more than two or three lines, but this verse is so good that it deserves to be quoted in its entirety.)

The late Chuck Berry was the first person inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, which is fine with me.

Here’s the first sentence from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s biography of Chuck Berry, who was 90 years old when he died on March 18:

After Elvis Presley, only Chuck Berry had more influence on the formation and development of rock & roll.

Chuck Berry in 1964

Writing on slate.com, Jack Hamilton (an American studies professor at the University of Virginia) begged to differ:  

“Who invented rock and roll?” is a truly unanswerable question, but Chuck Berry’s claim is as solid as any.  Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88,” the 1951 song most frequently cited as the music’s Big Bang, predates Berry’s emergence by four years, and Lloyd Price, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Carl Perkins, and even Elvis Presley had all made records before Berry broke through with “Maybellene” in 1955, at the shockingly advanced age of 28.  But Berry . . . was rock and roll’s first great auteur, blessed with an effortless ability to render the specific into the universal, and vice versa. He wrote songs infused with play, humor, ennui, pain, rage, swagger, and sex. They spoke to a generation who assumed they were about them, which was always only partially true.

Hamilton goes on to identify exactly what it was about Berry’s early hits that was revolutionary:

Musical revolutions tend to happen more gradually and subtly than pop mythology would like . . . [T]here are precious few moments on record that you can point to as a precise, tectonic shift in music itself.  But Berry’s early hits provide just this.  If you listen closely to “Roll Over Beethoven, “School Days,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Johnny B. Goode,” or any number of other Berry sides from the period, you’ll hear a rhythm section playing a standard shuffle, the swung eighth-note rhythm that was the most common backdrop of 1940s and 1950s Chicago blues and R&B.  Berry and pianist Johnnie Johnson, on the other hand, are playing the arrow-straight eighth notes that would soon become the defining rhythmic currency of rock and roll.  It’s a startling clash, the sound of the old world colliding with the new, and once it’s pointed out, the drums and bass on these recordings sound instantly out-of-date, a relic of an earlier era. 

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I think that Berry was a better performer than Elvis Presley.  And I know he was a better songwriter.

Elvis was credited as the co-writer of a number of his songs, but he contributed significantly to only a very few.  By contrast, Berry wrote not only “Johnny B. Goode” but also “Roll Over, Beethoven,” “Rock and Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Back in the U.S.A.,” “Memphis, Tennessee,” and many others.  

But I can’t argue that Elvis Presley was a bigger star than Berry.

Was that only because Elvis was white?  I don’t think so.  It didn’t hurt that Elvis was only 21 in 1956, when he had five #1 hits.  Berry turned 30 in 1956, plus he was a bit of a skeeze.  (I wouldn’t describe Elvis as exactly clean-cut, but he was a helluva lot more appealing to teenaged girls than Chuck Berry.)

Berry was still in high school when he was arrested for armed robbery after robbing three stores and stealing a car at gunpoint.  (Berry later wrote that the gun he used to flag down the motorist driving the car he stole wasn’t functional.)

In 1959, he was prosecuted and convicted under the Mann Act, a federal law that forbade the transportation of women across state lines for immoral purposes.  (Berry was found guilty of having sex with a 14-year-old girl he had transported across state lines to work as a hatcheck girl in a St. Louis nightclub that he owned, and spent 18 months in prison.)

A few months after going to the White House in 1979 to play for President Jimmy Carter, Berry pled guilty to tax evasion charges.

And in 1990, he was sued by a number of women who found out that he had installed a videocamera in the women’s bathroom at a restaurant he owned.  Berry paid the plaintiffs an estimated $1.2 million to settle the case.  He also pled guilty to misdemeanor drug possession when police who were searching his house for his bathroom videotapes found 62 grams of marijuana.

Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll, baby!

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Today’s featured song is ranked number 7 on Rolling Stone magazine’s “500 Greatest Songs of All Time” – just behind “Good Vibrations” and just ahead of “Hey Jude.”  It’s the only song from the fifties in Rolling Stone’s top ten.

And it’s also the only rock ’n’ roll song included on the golden record that was placed in the Voyager spacecraft that was launched in 1977 and is currently travelling through interstellar space.

Chuck Berry wrote a lot of iconic songs, and “Johnny B. Goode” is probably the iconic-est of all of them.

If you read the lyrics to that song on the printed page, they aren’t anything special.  But they are perfect lyrics for a rock ’n’ roll song.

“Johnny B. Goode” peaked at #8 on the Billboard “Hot 100.”  (The songs that reached #1 while “Johnny B. Goode” was on the “Hot 100” included “Witch Doctor,” “Yakety Yak,” and “The Purple People Eater.”)

I always assumed that Johnny B. Goode was a white boy from the boonies, but Berry’s original lyrics were “where lived a colored boy named Johnny B. Goode.”  

Berry was born and reared in St. Louis – not the piney woods of Louisiana – but the song is based on his life.

Here’s “Johnny B. Goode”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

Richard Thompson – "From Galway to Graceland"

To be with her sweetheart, 

She left everything

From Galway to Graceland

To be with the King

When we meet the unnamed Irish heroine of Richard Thompson’s “From Galway to Graceland,” she is getting dressed in the middle of the night.

Her husband of twenty years is sound asleep, so he doesn’t hear her sneak out of their County Galway home.

Where is she going?  To the nearest airport, where she will board a flight for the United States.  Her ultimate destination is Memphis – the home of Elvis Presley.

When our heroine – who has “Elvis, I Love You” tattooed on her breast – lands in Memphis, she heads straight for Graceland and Presley’s final resting place:

She was down by his graveside 

Day after day

Come closing time they 

Would pull her away

Elvis Presley's final resting place

Ignoring the throngs of tourists who pass through Graceland every day, our heroine spends the day conversing to Elvis:

[B]lindly she knelt there 

And she told him her dreams

And she thought that he answered 

Or that's how it seemed

If you think that anyone who flies from Ireland to Memphis and then spends every waking moment kneeling at the grave of Elvis Presley and talking to the dead man is mentally ill, you’re right – as the song’s final lines demonstrate:

[T]hey dragged her away 

It was handcuffs this time

She said, “My good man,

Are you out of your mind?

Don't you know that we're married? 

See, I'm wearing his ring.”

I’m guessing that ring was given to her by her husband, who’s sitting in their home back in Ireland, wondering where the hell his Elvis-obsessed nut job of a wife is.

I’m also guessing that the husband is not altogether sorry that she's disappeared.  Seeing an “Elvis, I love you” tattoo on your wife's body every time she gets undressed isn’t exactly a turn on.

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Speaking of Elvis, the 23rd annual “Night of 100 Elvises” took place in Baltimore last night.

Most of the people who attended that event aren't really Elvis fans.  (A group of real Elvis fans would break 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 for Trump over Clinton.  The folks at the “Night of 100 Elvises” last night would probably break 3-to-1 or 4-to1 the opposite way.)

The woman from Galway in the Richard Thompson song wouldn't enjoy "Night of 100 Elvises."  For her, Elvis was no joke.  (Of course, she was stark raving bonkers.)

I don’t know how you feel about Elvis.  I’m not a fan – I find his music (like most music from the fifties) hopelessly dated.

Elvis Presley was only 42 when he died on August 16, 1977.  I would have guessed he was much older.

The day he died I was in Kansas City, which was the last stop of a three-week, 5000-mile driving trip through 13 Western states.  I saw the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Las Vegas, the Great Salt Lake, Yellowstone, Grand Teton National Park, Mt. Rushmore, and much, much more – all for the first time – on that trip.

Did Elvis impersonators exist before Presley’s death?  I don’t remember there being any, but maybe there were.

There weren’t literally a hundred Elvis impersonators at the “Night of 100 Elvises”  this year – more like two dozen (including one ten-year-old).

What made those guys decide to be Elvis impersonators?  For some of them, maybe it's because they really love his music.  But I'm guessing that most of them were hoping that being an Elvis impersonator would help them get women.  (That's the explanation for most of the things guys do, after all.)

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I can't say that “From Galway to Graceland” does much for me.  The Irish Elvis fan is too grotesque for me to take seriously.  I don't feel much empathy for her because I don't really believe in her.

But Thompson's performance indicates to me that he buys into his character and her situation 110%.

Here’s “From Galway to Graceland”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: