Sunday, February 8, 2009

I Got My Education Out Behind The Barn



Last summer, I picked up a whole box of 8-tracks for, I think it was one dollar. There was a lot of shitty tapes in it (Sonny James, Anne Murray, Charlie Pride, Meat Loaf) but about half of them were home-recorded tapes which is what really caught my interest. For some reason, I enjoy listening to other people's mix tapes and will often purchase them.

All of the home mixes were on these 40 minute Audio Magnetics tapes. Lots of 70s easy-listening, country, and polkas, usually all three on one tape. This one has Olivia Newton John, Bill Withers, and Peter Hnatiuk - a Ukrainian comedy singer who put out quite a few albums that I actually own, passed down from my Ukrainian grandmother.

To my surprise, there's two (out of three) Peter Hnatiuk songs that are sung entirely in English, one called "Please Re-grease Me" (a parody of Engelbert Humperdinck's "Please Release Me") and this catchy little redneck song called "Out Behind The Barn". It is by far my most favorite song out of all the tapes in the collection. Give it a listen:



In case you're wondeing, my 8-track player is a Realistic model TR-802. It's a fine player/recorder that I picked up for $5 at a yard sale about 15 years ago, solely because it has Dolby noise reduction (and that cool mechanical eject seen at the end of the video.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The original Little Jimmy Dickens of that song has always been one of my favorites back from when my dad used to play it all the time. One I liked even better is called "Plain old country boy".