For a while on May Day – a celebration of workers’ rights in much of the world – one of the top trending topics on Twitter was #CountryMusicin5Words. Quite where it came from or what prompted it is a mystery, as is much of Twitter for that matter.
But given that a lot of country music is about hard-scrabble, struggling people, it is perhaps not that inappropriate that it showed up on May Day.
Breaking it down loosely, there were three different types of tweet: disparaging, thematic and poignant.
We, here, can pretty much ignore the disparaging ones, although some were quite clever. @gomartyman, for example, opined with “Puts the ‘ick’ in music” while @sharpestspoon said it was “Bad rap with a banjo”. @tonyposnanski said it was “Horrible Music To Workout To” (which — the grammarian in me points out — is actually six words because it should say “to work out”, but never mind).
Some of the thematic ones tried to sum up country music in five things most sung about or via five people who sing it.
So we had “God legs beer truck dog” from @LisaVikingstad, “broken hearts, glossy lips, trains” from @paulapoundstone, and “Mama, whiskey, truck, train, lonely” from @davjolly. “Waylon, Willie, Johnny, George, Merle” came from @ChrisCopeComedy.
Otherwise there were some quite clever descriptions. @strpeterontweety had “A rhyming expression of depression”. There was “My Beer’s Brewed with Tears” from @carrolltoonz and “Add guitar, stir in misery” from @Will3K85.
“Nuance will not be tolerated” was quite good from @mattknudsen, as was “99 problems. You’ll hear each” from @josh_il_us.
As for the poignancy, my prize goes directly to @EKeratis for his five simple words: “Hello, my name’s Johnny Cash”.
