WIP: DYNAMIC DUO OF THE OZARKS

This post is about a hit love song and a member of the Kansas City Chiefs, but it is not about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey.

I wanted to post this closer to Valentine’s Day, but I was busy at work (media people rarely get to rest). I was listening to some of the songs that I mention in the chapter, where Mykel and Cint escort Sherry and Kathy to their sorority’s Valentine’s Day dance.

One of the songs I mention that Mykel and Sherry dance to is a song called “Today” by the New Christy Minstrels.

The song was actually from two years before the novel takes place. It peaked on the Billboard Top-40 chart on May 16, 1964, at number 17. It was from a Civil War comedy (?) movie, Advance to the Rear.

This may have been the song that was playing when Mykel tells Sherry he could hold her for “eternity.” She tells him she doesn’t want him to because she drunk too much of the (spiked) punch and she needs to go to the Lady’s Room.

I may have heard the song on an oldies radio station or on an oldies show like Dick Bartley’s Solid Gold Saturday Night or Live From The Sixties with the Real Don Steele, but it never made an impact on me until I went to work at K-T-X-R in Springfield, Missouri in 2000. We were a light A-C radio station and it played on the station often.

Our morning show host, at that time, was a really nice guy and a former Kansas City Chief name Curt “Mother” Merz. Merz HATED that song. He has since passed away, but I wonder if he, in the great beyond, met up with his old gridiron rival Dick Butkis and told him “Getting tackled by you didn’t hurt all that bad, but being forced to hear that song ‘Today’ by New Christy Minstrels – THAT REALLY HURT!”