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A quote: “There’s nothing like a good cheating song to make me want to run home to be with my wife.” ~~ Steven Curtis Chapman
I’ll start with a story …
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‘Play it again, Sam.’
Chuckles from the dark. I hear it at least once a night, usually after midnight. After the couples leave and it’s just the lonely, the drunks and the ones trying sober up before furtively slipping out.
The lights are dim, the air is smoky and I lose myself in the playing. Old school, some jazz, pieces from old masters unpersoned that mom taught me on the sly.
My pay is the pleasure of touching a real piano – plus tips. Each night the grace of song, a benediction of music. I risk it all to be here.
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Now, it’s your turn.
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. featured image, cropped, Adobe stock standard license.
Steve McCann says: At 93 the long retired doctor, half blind, mused, “when I die I want to be buried between Marilyn and Doris”, (the two mistresses of his life). “What about my MOTHER who you were married to for forty years?!?” his daughter exclaimed, to which he merely repeated it.
She then took his checkbook, had her mother exhumed, cremated, and buried under a fifteen foot granite monument, visible from his breakfast window, that to this day bears the sign, “Free at last, free at last, thank God I’m free at last!”
Lewis says: I didn’t need to look at the keyboard, hardly ever looked at the “patrons”. So when the door opened I saw him out of the corner of my eye. Two decades of forgetting dropped into my head. Oh please, don’t do Casablanca to me!
I ignored that corner table, at this point I looked at the keyboard like a student.
He came over, dropped some bills in the tip jar, stood quietly there in my peripheral vision. “Bet you’ve still got that husband of yours, don’t you? Still beautiful, I’m still out of luck.”
I just kept playing, eyes averted.
Cameron says: I treasure moments like this. It’s just me playing everything from classical to rock. The patrons love it and the tips I get reflect that.
Once in a while, someone will look at me and figure out who I am. I politely confirm their suspicions and ask them to keep it a secret. It’s a good bar with decent people and they agree.
So why am I here? After all, I’m very famous. I can get an appointment at luxury resorts anywhere in the world.
Simple. My brother owns the bar and no one thinks to look for me here.
Don’t ask me why, but I always thought “Who’s Cheatin’ Who” was a Dolly Parton song. Looking back, it was probably the result of “Workin’ 9 to 5” coming out right about the same time, so both songs were getting a lot of air play on the Country-Western stations back in south-central Indiana those days, so they got linked in my mind. But I came awful close to destroying my credibility, thanks to that false memory lodged in the back of my head.
I was down at my office in Engineering, going over our inventories of spare parts, looking for gaps in our coverage before I met with Captain Waite on Monday. The Saturday Night Barn Dance was playing on Shepardsport Pirate Radio. Quinn Merton usually plays more current Country, but that night he must’ve been getting a lot of requests from folks my age, because he was playing songs I hadn’t heard since I was in grade school and junior high.
When he spun up “Who’s Cheatin’ Who,” I chuckled and muttered, “Well, hello Dolly. It’s been a long time.”
Imagine my embarrassment when the song finished and Quinn announced it as “by Charly McClain.”
The next day at breakfast I asked my daughter, who has the weekend off from her usual show Breakfast with the Beatles. Was the Charly McClain version of “Who’s Cheatin’ Who” the original, or was Dolly Parton’s?
Brenda pulled out her phone and looked it up. “Sorry, Dad, but I’m not finding any record of Dolly Parton ever doing that song. There are a couple of covers by reasonably well-known Country-Western acts, but Charly McClain’s is the original. Recorded it in 1980, same year as Dolly did ‘Workin’ 9 to 5,’ and when you come down to it, they’re both stories about dissatisfaction.”
What was there to do but give her a sheepish grin. “Sorry, kiddo, but your dad’s showing his age today. I was in junior high in those days, and I had the world’s biggest crush on Dolly Parton right then.”
Brenda just grinned. “What teenage country boy wouldn’t? She’s one heck of a lady. And I’m sure she’d be flattered at the confusion, although she’d insist on giving credit where credit’s due.”
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