Country music is sometimes quite meta! Comrade physicist Dr Mary recently shared the song "You Never Even Called Me by My Name", written by Steve Goodman and John Prine, performed by David Allan Coe. It begins ordinarily enough, though apparently with a subtext of protest against the Nashville country music industry. Then, halfway through, in a spoken section Coe starts to describe the song itself:

Well, a friend of mine named Steve Goodman wrote that song
And he told me it was the perfect country & western song
I wrote him back a letter and I told him it was
Not the perfect country & western song because
He hadn't said anything at all about Mama,
Or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting' drunk
Well he sat down and wrote another verse to the song
And he sent it to me, and after reading it,
I realized that my friend had written the perfect
Country & western song ...

... and then, as promised, it touches all those requisite bases!

(And in analyzing names it arguably ventures into Category Theory ...) - ^z - 2019-07-25