THE COUNTRY BOY KING: Speaking of those WMA music files that I bought and downloaded the other day, one of my selections was a tune by Elvis Presley. I was never a big fan of The King. The whole legend about Graceland and Colonel Parker and Blue Hawaii just never got me going. And even though I consider myself to be a disciple of rock music, I never considered Elvis to be one of the gods. Elvis may well have been The King, but not of rock and roll as I know it. Perhaps he was a predecessor, a step in the evolution of true rock, but he was not a rock musician per se. At heart, Elvis was still a country boy.

Despite being a city boy, I shelled out $0.99 for the rights to listen to a song by Elvis. I picked out the one and only tune from the huge Elvis Presley collection that hits a nerve in me. That tune would be “Kentucky Rain”. “Rain” was a ballad, almost a country-and-western ditty. It’s the perfect story-telling song. You listen to it and you say yea, I just heard a story. A story about some guy who had a woman he deeply loved, and one day she just split, so he’s out there wandering the back roads of Kentucky during the autumn rainy season, trying to find her. It’s a story without an ending; at the finish, all you get is a power-refrain and a fade-out. But the two story fragments in the song are entirely worth the price of admission.

In the first fragment, Elvis is at a general store in a little Kentucky town, talking with some old guys who, frustratingly, have seen his woman but can’t quite remember when she was there. In the second, Elvis is walking along the road with his thumb out on a cold and rainy day, and some big car driven by a preacher-man (in a black overcoat, no doubt) pulls over and lets him in. Elvis explains his quandary to the preacher-man, no doubt with much sincerity. They arrive in the town where Elvis is headed, and the preacher man leaves him with a prayer, a prayer that country boy Elvis might find his girl.

Ah, now that was Elvis in his true element, in the world of back roads and hollers and general stores and preacher-men offering prayers. No doubt that’s why the song was so good. You didn’t need a happy ending. Country boy Elvis was home, and that’s all you needed to know. In my mind, the King ain’t dead; his spirit is still wandering all those back roads down South.