Thanksgiving doesn’t get any respect, but we’re looking to change that. The beleaguered middle child of the holiday season, Thanksgiving is often overlooked. Yet so many elements of Thanksgiving (gathering with family, romanticizing our past traditions, and reckless binge-eating, among others) seem to make it the perfect holiday for a dad and for country music. We explore why Thanksgiving doesn’t get its due and we take our best shot at creating a Country Music Thanksgiving Playlist.

0:01 – The introduction: Why do we, in the country music and dad community, not elevate Thanksgiving to its rightful place as the American Holiday?  

2:33 – A Bit of History about Thanksgiving and how it became today’s National Holiday. Please note that Donnie had a lot of trouble with the word “popularization.” 

5:30 – What does Thanksgiving mean to the Dads? What must you have to eat in order for it to be “right?” And how does being an adult make a difference? Donnie also talks about when he was in shape and ran really fast during a Turkey Trot (Much like the misremembered history of the holiday, Donnie made up a bit of the story, but he did come in first place in the Clydesdale division one year).

13:16 – Deep-fried turkeys, roasting turkey and handling the bird like a chunky nine-month-old. Also, how do you pronounce “giblets?”

16:30 – How do kids change your traditions? Establishing these rituals is very important, and with a bit of planning, you can do great things. But there is more that gets done, and less pure enjoyment and celebration. 

19:08 – The great joy of being a parent comes from hard work, and what Donnie says to people who are considering having kids. 

21:21 – A Call to Dad Action: We should take Thanksgiving and make it THE American Dad Holiday. 

22:30 – What must be on your Thanksgiving table?

26:20 – Donnie and Dave discuss why we think Thanksgiving doesn’t get the respect it deserves. And like the Father of our Nation, George Washington, the Country Music Dads make a proclamation naming Thanksgiving the Dads’ Holiday. 

29:48 – Why are there no country music Thanksgiving songs? There are a few songs that work, and the Dads try to jam a square peg into a round hole. 

40:51 – Green Bean Casserole is easy: Dads, you can up your game! Donnie outlines the entire process of making it—and it’s super easy. 

42:31 – Alice’s Restaurant by Arlo Guthrie is a bonkers banana pants song, but it’s a song about Thanksgiving. Sorta…

44:00 Change My Mind: Donnie pretends to believe that turkey is overrated. And Dave changed my mind — in the name of tradition. But everyone can agree that the next day sandwich is what Thanksgiving is really all about.

Thank you for listening. The best way to support us is to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or whatever podcast platform you use. If you want to see new episodes and more content delivered straight to your email inbox, please subscribe to our newsletter: countrymusicdads.substack.com. You can find everything we do on our website: countrymusicdads.com. And we’d love to hear what you think, so send us comments, suggestions, friendly banter on Instagram @countrymusicdads, or via email countrymusicdads@gmail.com.

Mentioned in the Episode

• Butterball Togetherness Report
• Cooking with Country Cutler and Donnie’s fascination with Jello molds
• Family leave episode
• Christmas Music episode
• Holler’s list of Thanksgiving songs
• Brent Cobb
• Alice’s Restaurant Massacree by Arlo Guthrie
• The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald by Gordon Lightfoot
• Mustache episode

References:

• Theme Music: “Dark Country Rock” by Moodmode 
• Children’s Folksong- Yankee Doodle by Nesrality on Pixabay.
• All I Want for Christmas Is You by Mariah Carey
• The Thanksgiving Song by Adam Sandler
• Thanksgiving Song by Mary Chapin Carpenter
• It’s a Great Day to Be Alive by Travis Tritt
• Glad to Be Here by Hailey Whitters (feat Brent Cobb)
• Turkey in the Straw by Burl Ives
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer by Burl Ives
• Family Table by Zac Brown Band
• Crowded Table by The Highwomen
• Family Tradition by Hank Williams Jr.
• Buck on the Wall by HARDY
• Chicken Fried by Zac Brown Band
• Biscuits by Kacey Musgraves
• Cornbread and Butter Beans by Carolina Chocolate Drops
• Gravy by Tim McGraw
• Polk Salad Annie by Tony Joe White
• Berry Pie by Dolly Parton

Transcript

This is Country Music Dads, the parenting podcast with a twang. We’re driving a highly subjective, comically contrarian, often a reverent conversation about fatherhood and country music for people who have a passion for both.

My name is Dave, and I’m a country music dad.

I’m Donnie, and I’m also a country music dad. Thanksgiving doesn’t get any respect. Much like the beleaguered middle child, Thanksgiving is often overlooked.

As soon as Halloween is over, Mariah Carey seems to appear like an angelic figment of our collective imagination, an apparition in snow white, marking the beginning of an interminable year-end holiday season. You really can’t blame her.

Reportedly, she earns an estimated $2.5 million to $3 million per year from royalties from All I Want for Christmas Is You, which breaks down to roughly about $6,800 to $8,200 per day for each day of the holiday season.

But this got us thinking, why is it that Thanksgiving is so chronically overlooked, especially within the country music community? It is really the perfect holiday for country music.

You got family, cool weather, which is perfect for boots, hats and tons of traditions, Americana, and a tendency to romanticize the past, all key ingredients to country music.

Enter the American dad. I dare you to name a holiday that matches the dad ethos better than Thanksgiving. There’s the excuse or perhaps the responsibility to eat reckless amounts of food.

Fueled by the wine, the whiskey, or toxic amounts of sparkling cider, we laugh, swap stories, and reignite simmering family controversies. Football is on TV, or in the backyard, or both.

Not to mention the opportunity for high-risk, deep-fried outdoor cooking activities. More on that later. It feels like this should be every dad’s favorite holiday.

So today, we are giving Thanksgiving its due. So first, a little bit of history. Put on your thinking caps, as if you’re back in elementary school again.

2:33

A Bit of Thanksgiving History

So in 1621, 52 English pilgrims and approximately 90 members of the Wampanoag tribe gathered for a three-day feast that followed a successful harvest. Although it’s considered a precursor to the modern holiday, it didn’t become an annual event.

The feast included game like deer and fowl, some shellfish and other seafood, along with wild plants and the pilgrims’ first corn crop.

While George Washington delivered a presidential proclamation in 1789 for a national day of Thanksgiving, many of the Thanksgiving traditions we now know today came from the efforts of writer and lobbyist Sarah Josepha Hale.

She spent years campaigning for Thanksgiving to become a national day of celebration, arguing that it would unify a country on the brink of war.

Thanks to Hale’s work, President Abraham Lincoln declared the last Thursday of November a national holiday, a national day of Thanksgiving, in 1863.

The proclamation happened to coincide with the popularization of turkey among Americans as a cheap and plentiful meat across this great nation.

Interestingly, Franklin Delano Roosevelt shifted the holiday a week earlier in 1939 to extend the holiday shopping season. As part of a compromise, Congress made it an official holiday and made it permanently the fourth Thursday in November in 1941.

Again, perhaps a coincidence, this was the same period of time that Country Music was finding its footing as a differentiated genre in the United States.

First commercially produced and sold in the 1920s, it wasn’t until the 30s and 40s, thanks in part to the radio and the World Wars, that Country Music gained widespread popularity nationwide.

The Grand Old Opry had started about 100 years ago this year. But it wasn’t until it increased its power to 50,000 watts in 1932 that it started to make a lasting impact on American culture. But let’s get back to Talking Turkey.

So here’s something that’s real that we found while we were doing research for this show.

The Butterball Togetherness Report, which is 100% a real thing, has noted that now today we are seeing larger celebrations with many families hosting approximately nine people on average, down a little bit from last year, which was at 10 people, but

up significantly over the last few decades, with people feeling a little bit of that pinch of that economic realness coming through. They’re not going to change those traditions about eating.

They’re going to continue to eat too much, so they’re asking people to bring a side dish. And unsurprisingly, considering the source, turkey remains a critical aspect of this meal.

As we start thinking about these traditions, turkey, side dishes, things like that, Dave, what does Thanksgiving mean to you?

5:30

What does Thanksgiving mean to The Dads?

And what did it mean to you when you were growing up?

First of all, I’m so thankful to Butterball for giving us that excellent analysis of our togetherness.

Yes, indeed.

That’s good news, though, because we’re all isolated. We’ve been isolating since 2020, so maybe this is a good sign. Everyone’s coming together.

We’re favoring large gatherings again.

Yes, we gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing, I would say.

Yeah, my family was, I come from a small family. So growing up, like we were less than the nine people average gathering, just because our family was small. Usually on Thanksgiving, I’d go to my grandmother’s house, my mom’s mom’s house.

I learned later on in life that the reason we showed up at her house every Thanksgiving was because she insisted on having Thanksgiving at her house, which is probably not a very pleasant interaction.

She would have with my parents probably at the time. But that’s what I remember, going to grandma’s house. And I would always really look forward to that holiday.

It’s been really my favorite for a long time because of the simplicity. There is nothing else to do but eat and relax.

A lot of the credit has to go to my mom and my grandma because like while I was eating and relaxing well into my teens, they were in the kitchen putting all the food away. And washing all the dishes.

I’m pretty sure my dad helped with the dishes, at least a little bit. But I definitely have images of him like relaxing alongside me in the den, the cool of the den.

To me like it was always a holiday that was about ease and simplicity and some safety too as a kid. Like we’re always going to go to grandma’s house. That was our tradition.

And I could look forward to watching football on the TV or watching my uncle play Mario Brothers 2. Way better than I ever could and it was just it was very pleasant.

When I was growing up, we were on the East Coast and we’d go up to Boston into a suburb called Taunton, Massachusetts, where my Aunt Midgey and Uncle Hal’s house was where we went.

Aunt Midgey was my grandmother’s sister and we would go there and they would have their three kids and my grandmother’s four kids and their kids and in-laws. And it was a mess. I mean, it was probably close to 20 people, maybe a little bit more.

But, you know, when I was a kid, it was probably like 150 people, right? That’s at least what I thought. And we’d get there and you’d be dressed nicely and then you’d have to take a picture.

And then you’d eat forever. And there was a kid’s table in the kitchen and the adults table in the dining room. My dad carved the turkey.

He was a caterer and did a lot of food work. So he was good at that. And I just remember it being a lot of fun and it being easy.

I look back now and know it was not, but it was really a lot of fun. And I remember like there was the basement that had like the mid to late 80s vibes of it being from the 70s. And my aunt Midget had a big thing about clowns.

There were a lot of clowns around. That part was a little creepy. But I don’t know.

I don’t know about ease and safety.

Yeah, they were they were coming for me, but not really.

It was just always fun and easy and chill. We ate too much and we would play football. It was the reflection connection.

All of us on one side of the family had no hair. I had hair at the time versus the in-laws. And my uncle, when I was younger, would beat on me pretty hard because I was the only person he could beat on.

And then I came back one Thanksgiving. I was a sophomore or junior in high school and playing varsity football and I sought my revenge. And it was ugly.

To me, I thought it was something special that we would go to Boston and go to Massachusetts for Thanksgiving. I thought it was super duper American and really cool because we were there at the original Thanksgiving.

I don’t know, it gave me a real connection to it being possibly the only truly secular, religious American holiday. There’s no Christian imagery in Thanksgiving as growing up in a Jewish family that was nice.

That you could feel like you were part of this civic, religious holiday without it feeling like it wasn’t yours. I always enjoyed it and going to do those things.

And looking at it today, it’s a little bit different because the veil of childhood is gone. But, you know, it’s still nice.

We had a common theme. We felt like it was really easy and relaxing as kids. I was feeling when we reflect on how it is now, it’s going to be different.

Yeah, very.

It’s a lot of work now. My mother-in-law’s birthday is always around Thanksgiving. So we go to her side of the family.

We live in the same neighborhood as my parents. So we see them for most other holidays. But Thanksgiving is for my wife’s side of the family.

We go to Tulsa, Oklahoma, which requires a day of travel. No matter how you do it, we go there. And the main dinner is at mother-in-law’s house.

And then we have dinner with my father-in-law on another night. It’s a lot of work. The dinners are usually our family plus a couple.

Not super big. But it’s still a lot of work. I end up doing a lot of cooking because I’m capable of doing it.

And my mother-in-law’s boyfriend is also very capable in the kitchen, but not so many other people are. So we do a lot of the cooking. We’ll probably play a little football in the backyard this year.

And the kids are old enough to do that. But it’s a balancing act. You got to manage all those difficult things and feelings and stuff.

Just the travel alone, thankfully, since all my family, both sides of the family are in LA.

And we’re one of the rare people, I feel like, that are in my circle that don’t have to travel for Thanksgiving. We benefit a lot from that, like not having to deal with the airports and everything. I feel that on your behalf.

I’m sorry. And then you’ve got to cook somewhere that’s not your own house, which is, it’s always fun.

Well, for a while during COVID and right after it, because of the restrictions that were on the kids. For school, we would gather in Palm Springs. My in-laws would fly in.

My sister-in-law would come in and we’d rent a house down there and have Thanksgiving. That was a big pain because you get into an Airbnb or whatever. And they’d say, we have a full kitchen.

It’s like, yeah, you have a kitchen. You don’t have a knife. You don’t have a cutting board.

Your oven doesn’t really work.

Oh yeah, those Airbnb knives are very dangerous.

It’s like you might as well just use a baseball bat to carve a turkey. But you know, at least going to their house, it’s nice because at this point it’s been decades. So I know where the stuff is and it’s pretty easy.

That I will say is that the expectations have been clearly enunciated. At this point, we know what our kids can handle, we know what our parents can handle, and we know what we can handle and whatever we can’t, we drink away.

There was a time when I was in really good shape and I wanted to be ready to run the turkey trot the next morning. I was a serious athlete at the time and I wanted to win the turkey trot and I did. So that’s cool.

I came in first place, Fatboy.

You won the turkey trot?

I came in first place in my division.

Oh, man.

Yeah, I was running a lot at that time. And I finished a 5K in 20 minutes and 40 something seconds. It was pretty fast.

Yeah, it was fast. If I did that today, I’d have to drive.

What happened?

Mostly the beer.

Yeah.

So here’s the question for you, Dave.

13:16

Deep-fried vs. roasted turkeys

Have you ever deep fried a turkey? And if so, did you light the house on fire?

I have not attempted the deep fried turkey. I’ve only roasted the turkey. I’ve been responsible for the turkey one time, and it was in 2020 during lockdowns because I’ve actually married in to a big family holiday tradition.

My wife’s family does Thanksgiving.

Got it.

Really big family. And so the family with the biggest house, they’re usually stuck with hosting and doing all the big stuff. That checks out.

So we’re just responsible for bringing side dishes or a dessert or something. That one year, though, in 2020, I was responsible for the turkey. So I didn’t want to mess around.

I was going to do traditional in the oven, control it. I brined the crap out of this turkey. And that was the main thing, the wet brine.

And it was delicious. It was the best turkey, the most delicious turkey that really anyone had ever tasted.

I’m sure it’s actually the most delicious turkey I ever tasted. And I didn’t know you then.

Oh, yeah. I hope I’m doing it justice with my description. At the time also, I had our second child was like nine months old, and he was a really chunky baby.

And I remember he was about the same size as the turkey. So I handled that turkey a lot while I was preparing it. And I’m like, they’re the same dimensions.

Yeah. Yeah. It’s kind of weird.

Yeah. But no, I’ve not tried deep fried in the backyard, screaming at children to run away.

Yeah. It’s definitely one of my favorite holiday real themes on the Instagram. I have not done it either.

I actually don’t like it. I’ve had the deep fried turkey. I do not think it tastes as good as the roasted.

People are like, hot take, hot take.

It’s a hot take.

I just don’t like it as much. May you blow up your backyard in peace, but I would much prefer the turkey to be in the oven. I will say that there have been multiple occasions when the frozen butterball turkey, shout out again to Butterball.

And if you want to sponsor us Butterball, we’d be more than happy to take it. But the Butterball turkey did not defrost in time. I take it out of the fridge.

And now I check like a day ahead of time because like a deep, deep frozen turkey, that thing, that takes some time. Put that in like cool water and let it sit for a few hours. And then it was like malleable.

I wouldn’t say it was defrosted. It added to the gravy juices. And then there were at least one other time that we forgot to take the giblets bag out.

We still ate it.

Oh yeah. That year I was responsible for the turkey. It’s a very complex process when you’re responsible for the turkey.

The main thing is that there’s a lot of pressure.

There’s a lot of pressure.

So yeah, I checked for the giblets bag probably about 15 times before.

It’s a whole thing. It’s now part of the tradition to check for the bag. I called my dad again, who’s a caterer, I was like, hey, we cooked the turkey with the bag of stuff in it.

Is that a problem? He’s like, no, it’s fine. Just eat around it.

I said, OK, cool. I said, just don’t use it for the gravy. Speaking of those mistakes, any changes in your Thanksgiving tradition since you’ve had a whole bevy of children?

16:30

How do kids change your Thanksgiving traditions?

What I’m starting to learn is that it’s really important to have traditions and rituals for your kids.

It takes a little bit of planning and creativity sometimes to establish something. I’ve also learned early on in going through a few different baby cycles that kids like ritual and predictability. They respond well to routines like sleep training.

We’re a big sleep training household here. I’ve been convinced that babies, kids, they’re looking for safety and predictability. They can remember some of these traditions too.

That’s something that now I feel responsible for before you get sucked into whatever tradition you’re a part of and that becomes, you have some memories of that, hopefully pleasant memories of your family traditions.

I’ve been absorbed into Kim’s family tradition, which is much more about we’re going to see all these people, cousins, uncles, aunties, that you don’t usually get to see otherwise. We have that to look forward to and talk up to the boys.

Are you going to see your second cousins?

Remember them, you’re about the same age, you guys get to play together, and you get to play wiffle ball with your uncles, and it’s going to be a great time, festive atmosphere where all these people are going to be doding on them.

So I think that’s cool. The other big change, there is just the pressure that come with the holidays, now that you’re an adult and you’re responsible for your kids’ experience.

So you’re talking about the cooking the turkey or just traveling with your family. There’s just, you need to get all that stuff done.

And so the relaxation and the ease and maybe even the opportunity for reflection and renewal that you get from or you should get from like the season of Thanksgiving, and the reason the holiday is there in the first place.

It can be hard to find the quiet to do that kind of thing when you’re rushing around trying to make things happen, trying to remember to take the bag of giblets out of the turkey. So, yeah.

But I mean, as a parent, do you do anything for your own benefit these days? Like you should, that self-care is important. But I mean, a lot of these things, going camping with kids or even like the holiday season, like it’s for them.

And so I kind of have to step aside and say, I’ll relax later. The Monday after Thanksgiving. That’s when everyone’s back at school.

Yeah. I’ll go on Amazon and just buy some shit you don’t need.

Yeah. There’s just more that gets done and less that gets purely enjoyed. I will say that’s a reality.

I think of it all. There’s great joy in being a parent.

19:08

The joy of parenting comes from hard work.

But that joy comes from hard work in establishing something. It is always my refrain to people who ask me like, hey, do you think I should have kids? You have a parenting podcast.

How should I have kids? My answer to that question, whenever anyone asks me that is no, because they’re asking me a question. You got to know you want to have kids.

You need to know that’s what you want. It needs to be everything in your fiber. You’re like, oh yeah, I want to be a parent.

I want to be a dad real bad. Then go for it. That seems like a good idea for you.

Anyone’s like, you know, I’m not really sure if I want to have kids. I was like, no, you don’t want to have kids.

Convince me.

No, the answer is no. And they’re like, oh really? I was like, yeah, you don’t want to have kids.

You’re asking me to tell you not to have kids. That’s what you’re doing right here.

I think that’s my thing on this is that the holidays, all of them, anything that you’re looking for like deeper intellectual stimulation or like true relaxation, that just doesn’t happen with kids.

You know, I’m looking at other other big holidays for my family, one of them is Passover. It requires a lot of sitting, a lot of reading and a lot of traditions. And that just does not fly with young kids.

You have to do it much faster. You have to do much less. And I love that part.

Maybe one day we’ll do it again. But it isn’t happening for the next four or five years, if not longer. And that’s fine because traditions have to change and you need to find a new way to celebrate the right way for you.

You mentioned also that you do a lot of the cooking for Thanksgiving.

Your dad did a lot of the cooking. That seems like it was not typical of most families. Like most families, like mine, it was grandma and my mom that were responsible for everything.

Even the big family gathering, a bunch of Kim’s uncles do a lot of the cooking, actually. But for the most part, there’s a big portion of the family where the ladies are expected to do most of that.

And I will give a shout out to my aunt, Midgie, and many of my other aunts, who for sure did it. The women of the families did a lot of work for sure in that. It’s different.

No joke. And if, Kate, I just wanted to make sure if anybody heard this, that I’m not taking credit.

Don’t take all the credit. Yes.

I know better in that family.

This is an opportunity, though, where I think dads could take control of Thanksgiving.

21:21

A Call to Dad Action: Make Thanksgiving THE American Dad Holiday

Because this is like a planned backyard football, roasting a large piece of meat. Just happens to be a turkey this time. But you can bring out the smoker dads and like really make it your own.

And that’s not to say that dads can’t be in the kitchen.

Exactly.

Yeah. Maybe that’s what’s holding them back. The other stuff, the stuffing, the mashed potatoes, I don’t know.

I’m a big fan of making my own gravy.

No one else likes the gravy. Shockingly, most of the gravy is gone by the time we put it away. I’ll make it based off of whatever’s around.

So, you know, if there’s red wine, I make a red wine. Rude gravy. If it’s white wine, I make a lighter gravy.

If there are mushrooms, I put in the mushrooms. It just is what it is. And one time, someone threw out all of my juice to my turkey, and I was very sad.

Oh, no.

So we had to use canned gravy that was in like the back of the pantry.

And that was a devastating blow to my ego.

Ouch.

I do like me some gravy.

I’d love to have some time.

So we should do a friendsgiving with all of our calm children and have them sit quietly around the table.

22:30

What must be on your Thanksgiving table?

So what has to be on your table? I got gravy on mine.

You can bring the homemade gravy. I’ll bring the canned cranberry sauce. For whatever reason, this is one of my family traditions that didn’t make any sense to me.

But we always had two kinds because someone preferred the smooth version and someone else preferred the whole berry. And there was no overlap. They had to have their thing.

And to me, they tasted the same.

I have a question for you. Did you cut the canned cranberry sauce or did you leave it in the canned shape?

The way I remember it, it was a cylinder of cranberry sauce.

With the circles.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

It’s important. Yeah. As the Pilgrims wanted it.

Canned cranberries.

Yeah. There’s that. The yams with marshmallows is also something that like similar to the cranberry sauce, like thinking about it right now, I actually don’t want to eat any of it.

It’s just too sweet. But this is the occasion when you can have a yam so sweet, it’s like eating ice cream with a spoon. More just the nostalgia to me.

I agree with that.

I actually missed that. That was from when I was a little kid. We had the sweet potato pie essentially with the marshmallows on top, in a huge casserole dish.

My mother-in-law does a sweet yam thing. Not my thing. I eat around that particular one.

The turkey is always good. There’s good stuffing, gravy. I’m usually good on that.

We also have a jello mold on our table these days. And that is… I love me some jello mold.

It has become kind of a side passion of mine to actually execute a complex jello mold. I have failed miserably. There is evidence of that on Instagram.

I tried it on the 4th of July. I put in way too much gelatin into my mid-white section. It came out like a rubber ball.

I think I remember that.

Cooking with Country Cutler.

It was revolting. The actual jello parts were fine, but they got a little bit soft. It was a fail.

I’ve tried a couple other times. There’s some tricks of the trade, like using a jello mold container from a Rubbermaid where you can pop the top and it unseals it. That’s some pretty elite space-age stuff right there.

But the only other thing I need to have on my plate is really good stuffing. Like a brioche stuffing is good or a sourdough bread-based stuffing. That’s important to me.

I need it needs to have a little crustiness on it, a little goopiness in the middle. That’s important.

Oh yeah. That’s the unsung hero of the Thanksgiving table, the stuffing.

Yes. My wife would be totally fine if there was no turkey and it was just sides. I need some turkey.

I need some dark meat. I would eat the thigh all day.

Okay.

All day. It’s like that square of deliciousness. My youngest and I will carve together and we’ll both take the oysters out.

That’s the good. You know the oyster on the back of the turkey?

No.

It’s like the little, there’s like a little indentation in the bottom part of the spine of the turkey.

There’s two little disks of meat that have no connective tissue, and it’s pretty much encapsulated in fat that then roasts off because it cooks for so long in that spot.

So you get like the perfect moist piece of turkey, and on a good size turkey, the oyster is as big as like a silver dollar, and it is the perfect piece of meat. Highly recommend when you get to carve the turkey to steal that.

Because those are the only people who get to eat that, is the person carving the turkey.

Yeah.

Oh, okay. That’s delicious.

That’s not where I thought you were going with the oyster on the turkey. I was thinking like Rocky Mountain oysters.

Yes, you can eat the turkey nuts if you want. It’s right next to the neck.

So obviously you have a lot of passion for various aspects of Thanksgiving.

26:20

Official Proclamation: Thanksgiving is the Dads’ Holiday

But why doesn’t Thanksgiving get the same love as the other American holidays?

I don’t get it. I think part of it is there’s no like very clear thing to do, right? There’s no trick or treating for the Halloween side of things.

There’s no fireworks for the Fourth of July. There’s no Christmas traditions for Christmas. But Thanksgiving is very much a let’s just get together and have a meal together and be thankful.

That’s hard for Americans not to do something. We don’t relax very well. We don’t slow down very well.

There are countless studies that American working folks who have access to paid vacation don’t take it all almost ever. We have talked about this in the Family Leave episode that most fathers of new children don’t take all of their leave.

And I think this is a big part of our culture is a hustle culture is to work hard all the time. And taking a Thursday and Friday off doesn’t work in our heads. The lack of a clear commercial aspect of it also gets in the way of our thing.

You’re not going shopping for anything but food for Thanksgiving, right? You get your meal and that’s it. There’s no Halloween candy.

There’s no Halloween costume. There’s no tree. There’s no presents.

There are fewer things need to purchase and do. Roosevelt was all about it, right? Let’s get this thing out of the way and we can have more time for shopping for Christmas presents.

I think it’s hard for us to slow down. It’s tough.

It’s tough. Yeah, and skipping forward to Christmas, the day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday when you do your Christmas shopping. So you can get ahead.

It’s just ingrained to look forward to the holidays where you’re buying gifts. And there’s way more things to do than just cooking the big meal.

But I think that’s a big part of it, too, is that we love to look forward. And giving thanks is a process of looking backwards, right?

That forces you to slow down and say, this year was long, there were some hard parts of it, but you know, I’m grateful we got to this point. I’m grateful that we had the harvest. I’m grateful we did all these things.

You look at almost any religion or any culture that is at all older than the American culture.

There are holidays for every harvest, and you give it time to like slow down, give some food to those who need it, sacrifice some food to whatever it is that you’re doing that to, and have a big meal. It’s a huge part of almost every religion.

Civically, we are not connected to that in the same way that we once were.

It’s still so important, like you were saying. Maybe again, this is the opportunity for dads to take control of a holiday. Halloween, there’s a lot of stuff going on.

Christmas, there’s a lot of stuff going on. Make Thanksgiving our holiday.

Yeah.

We can relax and slow things down, but maybe we can encourage the family to do that.

We shall make a proclamation here as the Country Music Dads, a proclamation, just like George Washington did, that Thanksgiving shall be the dads holiday.

It is our responsibility, moving forward, to take the mantle of Thanksgiving and elevate it to its proper place in American culture. Dads, you’re on.

And Mother’s Day, don’t forget Mother’s Day.

So now that we’ve proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday that dads are responsible for, let’s see if that takes off. Moving right along, why are there no good Thanksgiving songs, especially country songs?

29:48

Why are there no country music Thanksgiving songs?

Because of course, there’s Adam Sandler’s song. But why are there no good country Thanksgiving songs?

Unfortunately, Sandler’s doesn’t really check enough boxes to be considered any type of country song.

He has a guitar in it.

But I think similar to how we’re looking forward to the next thing, there is a category of people that love Donnie C. Cutler’s favorite genre of music, Christmas music. I’m saying that facetiously.

I actively hate Christmas music.

Yeah.

Mick and I did a Christmas music episode last year, but it’s not like something I really look forward to. But lots of people do. Costco’s got the Christmas decorations up pre-Thanksgiving.

The Christmas music starts to get piped in pre-Thanksgiving. So there’s just no time. There’s no window for songs about Thanksgiving.

And I think that’s a big part of it, honestly.

Looking at it from purely a commercial standpoint, you have to be able to write the song, promote the song, place the song, do the radio play thing, and there’s just not enough time for it.

You have to be pretty earnest, and there’s only so many earnest songs you can have about Thanksgiving before it gets really boring.

But there are tons of great ways to be kind of snarky about Christmas music and have some fun with it, or be really serious about it, or engage in traditions in a certain way.

There’s a lot more that can be done to go against what I was just saying about why Thanksgiving should get its due. But I think that from a commercial standpoint, it makes a ton of sense why Christmas music exists and Thanksgiving music doesn’t.

But there are some Thanksgiving songs that are out there.

There is a song called Thanksgiving Song by Mary Chapin Carpenter, a country singer. But it’s on her Christmas album.

It certainly is.

I was pretty disappointed when I saw that.

But we could potentially find some songs that work. Holler has a great list of Thanksgiving songs. Some of them are a little bit more of a reach than others.

We’ve had this on our show before, A Great Day to Be Alive. That’s a pretty good song that works for Thanksgiving, though it isn’t about Thanksgiving. But it embodies the energy of the holiday.

It’s got the elements like simplicity, being at home, cooking for yourself.

Although you could cook the rice somewhere other than the microwave for Thanksgiving. That’s more of an everyday thing. You could do that.

There’s always the option, if you’re in a pinch, don’t worry about it. Your microwave rice can go right next to my cylinder of cranberry sauce on the same table.

Hey, you put it in a bowl, no one’s going to know. Glad to be here by Haley Whitters and Brett Cobb. I actually got to say hi to Brett the other night here in LA.

He had done a show over at the Troubadour and then came over to the Five Spot to do a quick number, which was cool. I hadn’t seen him in 15 years, it was nice to say hi.

He’s also a Country Music Dad, so shout out to Brett, but he makes some really great music and that song’s pretty lovely. It’s a nice message. And between the two of them, the vocals are quite beautiful.

You brought up Turkey in the Straw by Burl Ive.

If you want to go down a rabbit hole on a song, I almost got sucked in to the history of that song, the complicated and controversial history of Turkey in the Straw. I had to stop myself before I got too far in, but it’s a fun song though.

Burl Ive’s voice is great, but again, he’s somebody else who has been, his voice and his presence has been usurped by the Christmas season. Next to Mariah Carey, I’m always thinking of Burl Ive’s and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer had a very shiny nose So Turkey in the Straw got buried in his potentially rich list of holiday music.

Yeah, it was buried in the straw. Thank you.

Love it.

Yep, and now for a one-two punch from two very different groups. We got Family Table by Zac Brown. As well as Crowded Table by The High Women.

Both songs give you a little bit about coming around the table and finding room and giving thanks.

I love Crowded Table.

If I was to pick one of those two songs, it would definitely be that one. That song, I think is, that’s an anthem. It really is.

It can be put to serve a number of very important inclusive concepts, Thanksgiving being one of them. Feel like you can open the door to a neighbor who wants to be somewhere, doesn’t have a place to go.

You could probably fit another chair at that table and pull up that thing and talk to that person and make them feel welcome. Even in the most awkward of family situations, that’s the goal, right?

Is that this whole holiday is about welcoming everyone in and making sure that there’s place for them and that they feel welcome and you’re grateful. That song, I think, speaks to that.

Yeah, I love that message. And then that song became personal for me this summer because I was getting ready to welcome our fourth child. She’s here.

We’ve got four kids now. And I was worried that our table was too small, that it was too crowded at our table. We found a bigger table.

We’ve got this giant table that takes up the whole room. We could barely fit chairs around this table. But we got a big enough table to accommodate a bigger crowd.

And so I got a little emotional listening to this song before baby number four came because it’s like, yeah, man, we’re going to have a crowded table that I have no choice. They all live here. It’s true.

For a very long time.

So those are the good ones. And then perhaps some more ones that are a little bit more fun. You got Family Tradition by Hank Junior.

That one is just an irreverent look back at your family traditions, even the colorful ones.

And taking a little bit of, I don’t know if it’s pride or just being glad that you have those stories to tell about all those family members.

That’s a good one.

I threw one on to our list by Hardy because a lot of stuff he’s putting out is just a little bit vanilla. He knows how to write a catchy song though, and Buck on the Wall has caught my attention enough that sometimes I can’t get it out of my head.

It fits with some of the general themes. It’s about going to his grandfather’s house that he remembers when he was a kid. In the case of the song, his grandfather’s not alive anymore.

That’s also something when we have these holidays every year with family, we’re reminded of the people that maybe we remember were there for those holidays when you were a child and aren’t here anymore.

There’s an extra layer of emotion that comes to the holiday season in general. Leave it to Hardy to pull on the heartstrings with Buck on the Wall.

He has a way with words. I’ll give him a hand. Of course, there’s an entire set of songs about food that we could go here.

And I think we’ve almost put together a full meal. We’re just missing possibly the main dish, even though we go back to Zac Brown Band for Chicken Fried.

You know, well, I’m a chicken fried In cold beer on a Friday night A pair of jeans that fit just right It was Turkey Fried would be perfect, but…

I know, so close.

We’re so close. We have Biscuits by, sorry. We have Biscuits by Casey Musgraves.

Did you drop your Biscuits?

I did drop my Biscuits.

We have Biscuits by Casey Musgraves. Which is a great song. And perhaps was some pretty good advice for Thanksgiving, too.

Just mind your own and smoke your own, I suppose. We’re back to this smoking thing, which is legal in California and in Oklahoma. So that’s good for me.

Continuity.

Continuity.

I don’t fly with it.

For the record.

For the record. Cornbread and Butter Beans by the Carolina Chocolate Drops is a fabulous song. I love cornbread.

I’m not the biggest fan of Butter Beans, but I do love this song and I do love the Carolina Chocolate Drops. They are a stacked group of some of the most talented pickers that I’ve ever picked.

And if you don’t know the Carolina Chocolate Drops, you should go check them out.

Yeah, that song is awesome.

Yeah, the vocals on it are just so good. We got Gravy by Tim McGraw. I have to take gravy because I love me some gravy.

Take a second to stop and smell the daisies.

Tim McGraw has a lot of those borderline, sappy, reminiscing songs of Thanksgiving.

Borderline?

Yeah.

It’s like he sees the line and takes 10 steps over it.

Yeah.

It’s his MO.

Does Tim eat gravy anymore? Does he take that? What’s like, he’s really…

Is he keto?

Or is he intermittent fasting?

Maybe he’s just drinking gravy, that’s it.

That’s it, that’s it.

Nothing else.

Mixed with creatine. You gotta give him credit. The man is not young anymore and boy, does he look good.

I believe he’s still on my wife’s list of things that are okay.

The hall pass.

The hall pass, yes. Yeah.

I want to make sure that we have a well-balanced Thanksgiving meal. So I’ll throw Poke Salad Annie on the list by Tony Joe White. Because somebody’s got to bring the salad, even if you’re not going to just eat it.

Like you got to at least make an effort to put some greens on the table. And dads, by the way, we’ve been harping on dads. You got to do more than just the grilled stuff.

Put a salad together. Don’t leave it up to Annie to bring the salad.

And if you really want to, you can do Green Bean Casserole. It’s simple. Guys, it’s simple.

You take the bag of beans from Trader Joe’s, put it in the microwave so they’re a little soft.

40:51

Green Bean Casserole is easy, thanks to Cooking with Country Cutler

Get a can of cream of mushroom soup, pour it over it in a casserole dish, put it in the oven for, I don’t know, call it 30 minutes, 350. Take it out, put the little onion things on top, put it back in the oven, 10, 15 minutes, it’s done. That’s it.

You’ve done it. Congratulations. You’re done.

You want to make it even easier? Can of green beans, can of cream of mushroom soup, put it all in. Guys, it’s it.

It’s this Cooking with Country Cutler here live on Country Music Dads.

But this episode in your headphones, the green bean casserole basically cooks itself.

It’s right there. It’s so easy. And people love that.

It’s delicious. Better the next day.

Green beans are one of those vegetables that my kids love. Even the toddler will eat his green beans. I don’t even want to mess with it being in a casserole.

Just give him the green beans until he stops eating them.

Yep. We are a green bean house. We are a broccoli house, but not a cauliflower house.

Yes.

Let’s get back to dessert.

Dolly Parton for dessert.

I’d have her over for dessert any night of the week.

She has a song called Berry Pie.

There must be more, but this is a late Dolly Parton. Not late. I’ll rephrase that.

Dolly is still alive. This is a song from later in her career. There we go.

I think it was from like 2020. You got to end with something sweet.

You got to end with something sweet.

No better than Dolly.

No better than Dolly, exactly. That’s something sweet.

We can’t end a conversation about country or roots music and Thanksgiving without talking about Alice’s Restaurant, which is by far the most bonkers banana pants folk song that has ever been recorded by Arlo Guthrie.

42:31

Alice’s Restaurant is about Thanksgiving… sorta

It is by anybody but Arlo Guthrie wrote it and sings it. It is, I want to say, like 15 or 20 minutes long. And it has nothing to do with Alice’s Restaurant, which is, I think, the point.

And it’s absurd. It’s like this wildly absurd song.

That’s for when the food coma starts to kick in. After you push that plate away for the final time, sit on the couch, put this song on for 18 minutes and just be transported to a world that you would never expect.

It is a weird song. I like the people who really believe in that song. It’s the whole obsession with the Edmund Fitzgerald that has been gripping the internet these days and the song that goes with it.

Alice’s Restaurant is a weird song and it comes around this time of year. The first time I heard it, I was like, why are people singing this? We’re getting excited about this for Thanksgiving.

I don’t get it. It’s a perfect song if you engage in some of those family traditions, you want to get lost in the storytelling, but it’s weird. It’s a weird song.

Good song. Fun. A lot of fun.

Weird song.

There’s your playlist of country songs for this Thanksgiving.

Along with this great podcast, as we get towards the end of this conversation, as traditions go, it is Thanksgiving. We should stick with our traditions.

44:00

Change My Mind: Turkey is Overrated

When Dave and I are on a podcast together, we do the Change My Mind segment, a fun, light-hearted way of trying to change each other’s mind about an important topic of the day.

Many people, not to quote those who quote many people, but to quote those people, one of whom I am married to, does not think turkey is worth it on the table.

She’s not one that believes that you should have brisket or a ham or anything like that, but she believes that the main meat is an unnecessary, perhaps even superfluous item on the dinner table.

I am not necessarily one who subscribes to that opinion.

However, I can respect that opinion because why waste time with what is usually a very dry, somewhat tasteless piece of meat when you could have stuffing, you could have Green Bean Casserole, what she loves to eat a lot of and I don’t care for that

much. The Carrot Ring, a family tradition in her home. Again, the Jell-O mold I come back to. The potatoes, mashed, smashed, roasted.

However, there’s so much food to eat. Why waste your time on turkey? Turkey is not necessary.

Turkey, Dave, is overrated on the Thanksgiving table. Change my mind.

I will try my very best to change your mind or to change someone’s mind in your household.

Yes, that’s probably correct.

Wait. The last time I tried to change your mind is about the mustache, which I miss. It’s not there anymore.

I think I miss your mustache more than I miss my own. I changed your mind on that topic. So I think maybe there’s a chance that I could do this with the turkey.

The turkey is, as we’ve said, the staple of a Thanksgiving feast. And I might add, it should be the staple of your diet in general, dads, because turkey is one of the leanest cuts of meat you can buy. That’s right.

Aging dad, you and your rapidly increasing cholesterol, you can get some lean protein from turkey. And if there’s anything we dads need these days, it’s more protein. And I mean, I’m no bodybuilder, but I know many bodybuilders.

Prefer turkey as a source of protein. You might say that chicken would also qualify as a lean meat. But allow me to educate you on chicken’s shortcomings.

So for one, in this case, turkey does taste better. It just does. It’s richer.

It has a deeper flavor. And if you’re saying that it’s too dry, you did it wrong. Or someone did it wrong, okay?

Because ask me and Donnie, we’ve made delicious turkeys in our time. It took some expertise, some skill. It’s possible to make a juicy turkey.

And if you didn’t brine your turkey, like what are you even doing? My second knock on chicken is that they’re so small. Turkey, these are big, beefy birds.

I mentioned I’ve got a larger family now, and the oldest two were very active boys that are eating as much as I do sometimes. And I have made two 3 to 5 pound chickens at the same time for a meal.

So I would have plenty of leftovers for the week, and they just don’t last. A 24 pound turkey though, that is going to feed a growing family. Around this time every year, I think maybe I should just be roasting a turkey every week.

Like, why not stock the fridge for turkey sandwiches every day for lunch until my boys just can’t handle it anymore and get school lunch, which is what they’re doing now.

Anyway, turkey, it’s healthy, it’s delicious, and it’s also just hard enough to prepare that if you do it well, you can carry that pride like Donnie and I are through the whole holiday season and maybe throughout your entire life.

There it is, Dave. I know my mind was always with you, but in order to keep with traditions, our misremembered past, our idealization of what was, I had to do this controversial change my mind.

I love turkey and I will eat it all the time, and it’s definitely something we say in our family. Why don’t we make this more often? It’s delicious.

That is said about a number of very good holiday meals, turkey being one of them.

I do love a turkey, and I actually almost bought one today when we were going out to grab some dinner, but I knew it would take too long to cook, so I just got some chicken breasts, which were tasty, but nowhere near as good as the quarter turkey

that they were selling. I would have loved that, but I would have needed an extra, you know, 45 minutes to cook dinner, and that didn’t work out.

That’s probably one of the biggest reasons why you don’t do a 24-pound turkey every week, is that it does take four to six hours to do it, right? And if you’re gonna smoke it, it’s gonna take you all day. And no one has time for that.

It’s so damn good. It’s so delicious. And if you don’t want it on your Thanksgiving plate, believe it for me, I’ll eat it.

No one will notice if your plate is stacked with stuff.

Oh, yeah.

After a can of it.

I gotta say, though, the best part, and this is, I don’t think, controversial at all, is the next day sandwich.

That’s really what Thanksgiving is all about, being grateful for what happened and the leftover sandwich on Friday.

Sure. This could have been a much shorter podcast. We just bleed with that.

That’s what Thanksgiving is all about.

Thanksgiving is about Friday, mid-morning lunch. Thank you.

I can’t argue with you. I’m already looking forward to it.

You get the cranberry sauce, the thick mustard, little mayonnaise, so good.

On the theme of Thanksgiving, thank you all for listening. We are so grateful for you, our dear listeners. The best way to support us is to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or whatever podcast platform you use.

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Stay tuned for our next episode until then, whether you’re at the dance hall, the playground, or just folding some laundry. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll talk to you soon.

I do like me some gravy.