PATSY YOUR ENTHUSIASM (13)
By:
August 15, 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.
LUCKY STARR | I’VE BEEN EVERYWHERE | 1962
American readers are most likely to know this rapid-fire catalogue of place names from Hank Snow’s #1 1962 country hit about a boastful hitchhiker, or from Johnny Cash’s 1996 cover. It’s originally an Australian country song, though: the signature tune of Lucky Starr, written by Geoff Mack, and a durable and flexible joke. There have been rewritten versions that substitute locations in the British Isles, New Zealand, North America, Ontario and Texas specifically, and if a singer happens to need to breathe, there are opportunities for that in the chorus.
When I toured to promote my book All of the Marvels, I figured it could use a theme song I could perform at readings. So I rewrote Mack’s lyric as “I Read Every One,” setting it up with an intro about running into the ghost of Stan Lee, then piecing together the relentless verses from titles of old Marvel comic books, grouped thematically or phonemically. Rhyming them wasn’t as hard as I’d imagined; it turns out that given a sufficiently long list of proper nouns, four verses’ worth of them can be nudged into “I’ve Been Everywhere”‘s meter and rhyme scheme. But when I first attempted to sing my version, I discovered the real nemesis of patter-song lyricists: colliding consonants.
“Codename: Spitfire, Firestar, Blaze / Annihilation, Damnation, Ant-Man: Last Days” was fine — punching each syllable of that last title meant I didn’t have to double-time it. On the other hand, “Rom, Rogue, Royals, Ruins, Rocket Raccoon” tripped me up more often than not. “Tomb of Darkness, Crypt of Shadows, Chamber of Chills / White Tiger, Widowmaker, Winter Soldier: Winter Kills” required my poor mortal tongue to navigate the consonant groups “sscr,” “pt” and “wsch” to get through its first half. That would have been fine if I’d gotten to enunciate them at a conversational rate, but singing them at the lightning speed the joke requires was tough.
The Australian locations mentioned in Mack’s original lyrics are blessed with names that flow together smoothly (“Muckadilla, Wallumbilla, Boggabilla, Kumbarilla”). When (as legend and Wikipedia have it) he pulled names out of an atlas for the U.S. version, he relied heavily on those that ended in vowel sounds and didn’t have anything too tricky in the middle: “Reno, Chicago, Fargo, Minnesota / Buffalo, Toronto, Winslow, Sarasota.” It was an impressive act of translation — Massachusetts, Winston-Salem, Murfreesboro, College Station, West Virginia and Lehigh Acres all have the pitter-patter meter of Mack’s original lyric, but if he’d included them in the American hitchhiker’s itinerary, Snow and Cash might have had to take it at a much slower pace.
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 SATISFIED 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 | Mark Richardson on Elvis Presley’s BLUE MOON | 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 | Annie Zaleski on Patsy Cline’s WALKIN’ AFTER MIDNIGHT.
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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