The Great Fear of Being a Bore: Country Music, Conversation, Parenting, and Shame

At the intersection of Adams and St. James, I pull up to the curb. Two tired, sweaty  sophomore girls clamber into the back seat. Heloise and Lily have just finished flag football tryouts, and they chortle with happiness that I’ve brought snacks and cold water.

My son will always choose to sit up front with me, but I am my daughter’s chauffeur. Heloise only rides shotgun when the back seat of my Mazda contains at least three of her girlfriends. Using her oldest nickname, I call it “Driving Miss Mouse.”

Miss Mouse has an announcement for me. “I’m gonna disconnect your phone and put on mine, m’kay?”

What my daughter means, for the less technologically inclined reader, is that she’s going to switch off my Bluetooth – and pair her own phone with my car’s speakers. Heloise will be disc jockey for the ride from downtown to Mid-City.  She does this every time she’s in the car for more than ten minutes, and I mind less than you might think, as my first-born has recently discovered… country music.

It's not quite the traditional stuff, but I’m quite confident that the likes of Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen will serve as a gateway to more authentic sounds, and I can be patient.  In the meantime, I sing along with what I know. This time though, what comes through first isn’t pop country, but the sublime Josiah and the Bonnevilles version of “Jersey Giant.”

I sent my daughter that song last week. She has never, ever, added one of my suggestions to her sacred car playlist.  I gasp.  My daughter laughs.  “I knew you’d be happy, dad. It’s a good song.”

“Yeah, I really like it,” echoes Lily. 

My taste praised, my jaw slack, I turn it up.  And then, the impulse becomes too overwhelming, and at the first red light, I turn and ask --  my voice all too eager -- if Heloise wants to know the story behind the song.

“I’m good,” my child says. She doesn’t want to hear more. When I sent Heloise the song, I’d typed out, and then deleted, the following breathless caption: So -- Jersey Giant was written by Tyler Childers about an ex-girlfriend and out of respect for his current relationship he doesn’t sing it but he knows it’s a wonderful song so he released the publishing rights into the public domain and now anyone who wants to can record and perform it, which is so cool — and I think very romantic, don’t you?

Maybe I should have sent it, but I didn’t and anyhow, Heloise and Lily want to sing along, and so do I, so I wait until the song is over, and then, even as the next track begins, try to catch my child’s eye in the rear-view mirror. Once I do, I give into a rare impulse: “Did you know that a Jersey Giant is a kind of very large chicken?  We never have them at the ranch. Ours are mostly Rhode Island Reds, because they do better in our climate.”

“That’s great, dad. No more, please.” Heloise does not want the back story of the song, or to know the fowl reference, or what I was planning to say next, which is that the chorus of “Jersey Giant” references “Long Black Veil,” a canonical country track first recorded by Lefty Frizzell, an artist who gets less attention than his chronological peer Hank Williams, but who was arguably his near-equal in both talent and trouble-making.

No fifteen year-old wants to hear that. Lily is a well-brought up girl, so if I continued, she might have said, “That’s so interesting, Mr. Schwyzer,” and then Heloise would have hit her playfully  and pleaded for her friend not to encourage me any further.

I say no more about chickens, or Lefty Frizzell, or how rare it is for a song to be released into the public domain without publishing rights attached. I drive in respectful silence, marveling at this compulsion to share every little thing I know, and noting the shame that urge brings with it.  I am told it is a very male thing, this urge to offer a running commentary on all that passes by, to take such pleasure in imparting anecdotes and trivia. It is a forbidden pleasure, in part because in the WASP culture in which I was raised, to be either a bore or a know-it-all was a fairly significant transgression against the code. 

A gentleman asks questions. A gentleman becomes interesting by being interested. A gentleman learns to treat the urge to impart information as a dangerous temptation, to be indulged only when one is certain that it will fascinate or amuse.

I remember driving up the ranch road with my second wife, more than thirty years ago, and pointing out the cows on a hillside.  “Big Mike usually runs Herefords up here, but those are all Black Angus,” I had said, and the woman I loved had sighed.  “I don’t care,” she said, “and I didn’t need to know that.”  I flushed and apologized. I’d been the guy I was trained to never be.

I was very hurt, but I remembered the lesson.

(We are not permitted to be these men.)

After my second divorce, I updated the WASP rule in my head: it’s not enough to avoid being a dull dinner partner. A good husband never bores his wife either, so he does his damndest to keep that inner monologue to himself, unless she asks.  (Years later, I brought a new girlfriend to the ranch, and she asked, What is the name for the breed of those brown and white cows? and I wriggled with pleasure as I answered.)

Surely, though, parents are different from boyfriends? Surely, it is a father’s job to share some of what he knows, useful or otherwise?  When I was Heloise’s age, mama would say, “Come here, I want to read you a poem,” and I would sigh and roll my eyes and sit impatiently through a Betjeman or a Sexton or a Nemerov.  Forty years later, I treasure those poems, and mama has lived long enough to hear me say how glad I was that I was forced to listen. 

A good father can’t treat his children like dinner guests, can he? Surely it is his paternal duty to risk their derision, their irritation, their vehement lack of interest?  Isn’t it possible that by keeping so much of that inner conversation unspoken, he robs his children of something they might need, or at least someday enjoy?  (And yes, this is why I worked so hard to become a very entertaining and dynamic lecturer, and why I now write memoir so compulsively. Substack seems a socially sanctioned way to let all those thoughts and recollections – and soupçons of trivia—out into the world. You can always unsubscribe, and people often do.)

We are who we are, I suppose, and just as I have generally chosen women who chose me first, I suspect I’ll spend the rest of my children’s adolescence sharing the asked-for stories, the requested facts, the needed news.  Perhaps more questions will come in time.

For now, what a blessing to have a child whose musical taste is rapidly evolving towards the good, the true, and the beautiful.