PATSY YOUR ENTHUSIASM (4)
By:
July 13, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… Country Music of the Fifties (1954–1963)! Series edited by Josh Glenn. Qobuz playlist here.
PORTER WAGONER | MY BONFIRE | 1957
For nearly seventy years, until the very recent rise of Chappel Roan, Porter Wagoner was the Missouri Ozarks’ most famous musician. It always meant a great deal to me that Porter represented the same half of the Show Me state from which my own family hailed. I’ve prized Wagoner and his twang-heavy brand of country my entire life: His syndicated television series first aired in 1961, a couple months before I was born, and ran until I was an undergrad. I recognized Wagoner — his architecturally unsound updo, his collection of technicolored Nudie suits, his flatly drawled south midland accent — as one of my kin.
I’ve come most to appreciate the way Wagoner became so closely identified with the least popular parts of a midcentury-modern blue-collar aesthetic that many fans and critics look away from in the more heralded works of country music peers like Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn or Wagoner’s employee/protégé/co-star Dolly Parton. Porter was a master of story songs, be they murder ballads, barroom bawlers, or sweet remembrances of his Ozark youth, but he also persisted with that most derided of cornpone expressions, the recitation. He was a successful producer, publisher, bandleader, talent scout, and live performer, but remained, to his death in 2007, a relentlessly ingratiating showman.
His recording career began in that lost window between the death of Hank Williams and the emergence of Elvis Presley. One of my favorites of his recordings, the little-known “My Bonfire,” seems as if it were attempting to bridge those worlds but fits neither. Maybe that’s why, though Porter recorded the track at a Springfield, MO radio station, on December 30, 1953, “My Bonfire” wasn’t released until early ‘57, when it was included on Satisfied Mind, Wagoner’s album debut titled after the homey homily that was his first chart topper in 1955.
The song, co-written by Horace Whatley and Jack Segal, fuses its songwriters’ respective backgrounds, backwoods and uptown: Whatley later wrote the not-quite country-standard “Sawmill” with Mel Tillis; Segal co-wrote the Tin Pan-sounding standards “When Joanna Loved Me.” That class mismatch, combined with Porter’s sharp, strange wail, makes “My Bonfire” sounds chilling. Its pedal-steel guitar whines like it’s from a sci-fi soundtrack. Porter is burning old love letters, hoping his cruel former lover in some big-city penthouse will espy his Ozark spook light blaze below. Behind him, electric guitar and piano play eerie, supper-club blues.
Like some mountaineer sorcerer, Porter casts an evil-minded spell: “Bonfire! BONFIRE! Hear my plea… My soul is in the flames!” It’s an unsettling, chill-bump raising performance. Across fifty illustrious years, and on more than eighty albums, Porter never cut another record remotely like it. It feels like no kin of mine, and I can’t look away.
PATSY YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn. Nadine Hubbs on Marty Robbins’ EL PASO | Elizabeth Nelson on Dave Dudley’s SIX DAYS ON THE ROAD | Lynn Peril on Jean Chapel’s WELCOME TO THE CLUB | David Cantwell on Porter Wagoner’s MY BONFIRE | Will Hermes on Johnny Cash’s RING OF FIRE | Mimi Lipson on Loretta Lynn’s I’M A HONKY TONK GIRL | Charles Hughes on Roger Miller’s YOU DON’T WANT MY LOVE | Eric Weisbard on Lefty Frizzell’s THE LONG BLACK VEIL | Steacy Easton on Jean Shepard’s A SATISIFIED MIND | Josh Glenn on Johnny Cash’s THE REBEL — JOHNNY YUMA | Carlo Rotella on Buck Owens’ CLOSE UP THE HONKY TONKS | Annie Nocenti on Patsy Cline’s THREE CIGARETTES IN AN ASHTRAY | Douglas Wolk on Lucky Starr’s I’VE BEEN EVERYWHERE | Will Groff on Ray Price’s NIGHT LIFE | Jonny Auping on Willie Nelson’s CRAZY | Brian Berger on Ernest Tubb’s THE YELLOW ROSE OF TEXAS | Jason Grote on Bill Browning and His Echo Valley Boys’ DARK HOLLOW | Peter Doyle on Willie Nelson’s FUNNY HOW TIME SLIPS AWAY | Sam Glenn on Johnny Cash’s BIG RIVER | Annie Zaleski on Patsy Cline’s WALKIN’ AFTER MIDNIGHT | Adam McGovern on Elvis Presley’s BLACK STAR / FLAMING STAR | Chris Spurgeon on Ricky Nelson’s BELIEVE WHAT YOU SAY | Stephen Thomas Erlewine on George Jones’ WHITE LIGHTNING | Devin McKinney on George Hamilton IV’s ABILENE | Mark Richardson on Elvis Presley’s BLUE MOON.
ALSO SEE: DOLLY YOUR ENTHUSIASM (25 of our favorite Country records from 1964–1973) | & more Country at HILOBROW, including short appreciations of Gene Pitney, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Buck Owens, George Jones, June Carter Cash, Charley Pride, and many others.
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