The Well-Pressed Cowboy, And Tattling On The Mountain

by Thomas M. Pender

I’ve been a music lover since I was a toddler.  Regardless of talent, I loved singing with the television commercials, radio, records, you name it.  Unfortunately, knowing the lyrics to a song doesn’t always equal understanding the lyrics, particularly when you are very young.

My sister and I used to sing songs with our Grandpa Mac, who played the saw and the ukulele.  Since he was a Sunday school teacher, some of the first songs we ever sang were kid-level church songs.  I understood “Jesus Loves The Little Children.”  I understood “Jesus Loves Me.”  I even got the gist of “The Old Rugged Cross,” which I heard in church and, despite its somber topic, was a favorite of mine at five years old.  One song that tended to confound me, however, was “Go Tell It On The Mountain.”

English is a very delicate language, in which a single comma, letter or two-letter word can change the entire meaning of a word or sentence.  Here, the word in question is “It.”  This word sort of breezed by me in my singing.  To me, the song was about a naughty mountain that I was being instructed to turn in to the authorities.  In other words, “Go Tell On The Mountain”!  I understood that the song was (also) about the birth of Jesus, but for some unknown reason . . . and to my memory, I never actually asked . . . some mountain had done something its parents would be very upset about, and they were supposed to be informed immediately.

Don’t worry.  As I got older, I absorbed the meaning and importance of the “It.”

The other non-intentially-humorous song that made me laugh as a child was a Western song by Marty Robbins.  My dad was a big fan of his music, and he would play Robbins' album Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs a lot.  In these lyrics, cowboys, sheriffs, bandits and ranchers painted a picture of the rough and beautiful Old West.  I liked listening to the songs of the good guys and the bad guys, but the hero of one song struck me as fairly ridiculous.

In the song “Big Iron,” a Texas Ranger comes into town looking for a mean and nasty outlaw.  Everyone in town fears this outlaw, but the Ranger is bold and (spoiler alert!) guns down the criminal in the end.  How he ever succeeded in doing this was a mystery to me as a child, however, since he, as the song relates, “had a big iron on his hip”!  I had watched Mom iron.  It was a useful tool, indeed, and even a bit dangerous, due to the heat exhausted from the bottom.  Still, picturing the scene as I sang, I could never figure out how a guy with a heavy appliance designed for smoothing out clothes – and which fired no projectiles at all, unless you count steam! – on his hip was going to defeat a bandit with an actual gun.  Perhaps the lightning-fast champion got close enough to the bad guy to burn his shooting hand before he could fire?

Again, it wasn’t until I was much older that I caught the slang-ness of the title.  Part of maturing is learning where you went wrong in your younger interpretations of the world, and correcting them.  In doing so, the sad attachment is that we lose the wonder of a child’s view on Life.  Somewhere, there is a fantasy land where cowboys smooth out ruffians and mountains break rules, only to be ratted out.  It doesn’t exactly sound like a bad place to be, but perhaps a bit sillier than our world.

Such dreamers of silly things and singers of silly lyrics have even been known to immortalize such fantastic images in online columns!