Friday, December 26, 2008

"...and Reverend Green, be glad to see you..."

"when you haven't got a prayer....boy, you've got a prayer in Memphis..."
I'd guess a lot of folks, mostly younger country music fans, know that song as an album track from Lonestar's Greatest Hits album from 2003. Still others know it as a track off Cher's 1996 album It's A Man's World. But this paean to the home of the blues and the largest city on the Mississippi River was actually recorded first in 1991 by the man who wrote it, Cleveland, Ohio native Marc Cohn — who, ironically, had never set foot in Memphis before he wrote the tune. It was a large part of the reason Cohn took home the Grammy Award for Best New Artist that year...but even if he hadn't won that award, "Walking in Memphis" would still have been a great song, and a great record too. To my ear his version of it is by far the best.



More guns 'n' politics comin' soon, I reckon. ;-)