Home » Country Grammar: Children’s Lit with Some Country Grit

Children's Books, Country Music, Education

Country Grammar: Children’s Lit with Some Country Grit

The Country Music Dads dive headlong into the world of children’s literature, pop culture and its intersection with country music. We discuss the viral video of Ludacris’ incredible rapping of the book Llama Llama Red Pajama, discuss our favorite kids’ books, which ones would make incredible country music songs and who should cut them.

Show Notes: 

2:22: The Kids Books We Love and Love to Hate: Dave and Donnie discuss the nighttime classics and some modern-day page turners for kids (and those reading them to kids). And what would a podcast episode be without some conflict — so we jumped on a few we wish would just fall behind the bookshelf.

21:27: Books That Sound Like Country Songs: Before diving into who should sing our kids’ book songs, the Country Music Dads explore the fairly significant crossover between country music songwriting and children’s book writing — and some of those people who did both. Namely, Shel Silverstein.

38:34: Who Should Sing These Kids’ Book Country Songs? From Colter Wall to Miranda Lambert, the Country Music Dads consider the best artists to bring these books to life.

46:57: Dad Life Sound Check: This recurring segment is an opportunity for Dave and Donnie to discuss a song that is hitting home in recent days. For Dave, “Buy Me a Boat” by Chris Janson had been resonating in his house, while Lasers Lasers Birmingham’s “Shorter Letter” was touching a chord for Donnie.

52:22: Change My Mind: Donnie challenges Dave to think differently about the glories of shopping at Costco — from the sea of beautiful TVs, to rows of top-shelf bulk-size booze to Costco staples, like rotisserie chicken, availability of eggs and the $1.50 hot dog and soda. 

Mentioned in the Show:

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References:

Books

  • “Magic Candies” by Baek Heena
  • “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” by Dr. Seuss
  • “Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown
  • “The Going to Bed Book” by Sandra Boynton
  • “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See” by Bill Martin Jr., Illustrated by Eric Carle
  • “Hatchet” by Gary Paulson
  • “The Last Stop on Market Street” by Matt de la Pena, illustrated by Christian Robinson
  • “Oh Look, A Cake” by J.C. McKee
  • “The Alphabet Book” by Dr. Seuss
  • “Little Blue Truck” by Alice Schertle
  • “Little Blue Truck Leads the Way” by Alice Schertle 
  • “Goodnight, Goodnight Construction Site” by Sherri Duskey Rinker
  • “Otis” by Loren Long
  • “Two Little Trains” by Margaret Wise Brown
  • “Goodnight Songs” by Margaret Wise Brown
  • “Giraffe and a Half” by Shel Silverstein
  • “Tow Truck Joe” by June Sobel
  • “Harold and the Purple Crayon” by Crockett Johnson
  • “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak
  • “Runaway Bunny” by Margaret Wise Brown
  • “Green Eggs and Ham” by Dr. Seuss
  • “The Old Man and the Sea” by Ernest Hemingway

 Songs

Transcipt

This is Country Music Dads, the parenting podcast with a twang.

We’re driving a highly subjective, comically contrarian, often irreverent conversation about fatherhood and country music for people who have a passion for both.

My name’s Donnie, and I’m a country music dad.

My name’s Dave, and I am also a country music dad.

In this episode, we’ll discuss the greatest hits of children’s books.

The ones we wish never were printed, and a few that would be great country music songs.

There’s a well-known country and western artist and fan of ladies in the street named Ludacris, who was challenged during an on-air radio visit to read the wonderful children’s book, Llama Llama Red Pajama, as a rap.

And he delivered.

Every few months, a video of this visit featuring Ludacris makes the rounds in the parenting social networks, leading elder millennials and younger Gen X parents to smile and perhaps to snicker just a bit about the juxtaposition of the sweet words of this book coming from this rapper’s mouth.

Even as you chase your little one from the windows to the wall for bath time.

The video sparked a number of copycats on the gram and tiktok and several great books were worked into rap numbers on the social medias.

With simple rhymes and consistent syntax, kids books are the perfect genre for this game.

So when we started thinking about some great cross dad country music content, we thought it might be fun to explore a few books that would make great country music songs.

But first, Dave, what are a few of your favorite books that you read to your kiddos?

Kim and I just kind of did an early spring cleaning of our books and we have a lot of books.

We have acquired many books.

So I got to actually see them as I sorted through the many iterations and the many different styles of books that we have around us.

We’ve got the board books for the baby.

We’ve got lots of picture books because my oldest is seven.

That’s our core age range, the core level of reading.

And then the seven-year-old is starting to get into more advanced stuff with a little less pictures, more words.

So it’s an exciting time for reading.

A newer book that came across my radar recently, it’s called Magic Candies by Beck Heena.

It’s actually up for an Oscar as a short film.

They made it into a short film this year for 2025.

It’s a really unique artwork.

It’s kind of like claymation style and the author actually hand creates the scenes with clay and then takes photos of them.

The book is about this lonely little boy and he goes out.

He likes to play with marbles and he picks up some new marbles and it turns out they’re actually candies, hard candies.

But each time he eats one of the hard candies, he starts to hear inanimate objects like his couch or his dog talking to him.

There’s one scene that shocked me the first time I read it because it’s a scene with the dad where dad comes home and it’s an entire page of all these reminders that the dad has given the kids.

Did you do your homework?

Put on a jacket, brush your teeth, all this stuff.

85% of them were things that I say all the time.

And then he eats the candy that represents his dad and all he can hear is, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.

Man, it got me the first time and every time I read through it.

So I’ll be prepared hopefully when I watch the film.

I’m excited to see how they do that scene.

But that’s a that’s a recent favorite.

Of mine.

That’s intense.

I’m always amazed at the creativity of some of these beautiful books that come around where my brain doesn’t work that way.

It’s always very impressive to me when a children’s book or song or piece of art or culture that is intended for kids helps me as an adult better understand my kids.

And what you were saying about dad reminders is rough, man.

That’s heavy and you hear it all the time and you hate hearing yourself say it.

Today, I video my kids play baseball and like swinging at the bat and then I hear my voice and I go, oh man, I do not like that.

That sounds bad.

I don’t like that at all.

So I hope that they hear the love in what we’re trying to get across.

That’s what you hope.

That’s why that scene, it just like cuts straight into you.

That’s heavy.

That’s awesome.

It’s heavy.

More of a classic book that I really like is How the Grinch Stole Christmas, especially for a long kids book.

It takes a while to get through it and usually I’m opposed to the long ones, but the pacing and how the words flow together, it is so poetic.

I don’t mind.

I will sit there and read the whole thing and I really get into it.

It is, in my opinion, a masterpiece.

Also, I learned that Boris Karloff won a GRAMMY Award in 1968 for Best Recording for Children for his rendition, his reading of that song or his reading of that book.

Yeah.

So it has some musical connotations to it.

Yeah.

My final one, another classic is Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown.

I’ll talk about Margaret Wise Brown a little bit later also.

I think this one is a little controversial because it’s a little weird, but that’s why I like it actually.

It’s kind of haunting and surreal.

I feel like I get something out of it also.

It’s also really soothing.

I took that approach where you’re just saying good night to random stuff in the room.

It actually works.

It works with my youngest right now.

I’ll just say good night lamp, good night window, and somehow that’s soothing to him.

So I don’t know if it’s something written on the hearts of man.

We just want to say good night to everything around us before we finally close our eyes.

It reminds me of the Farron Young, Willie Nelson written Hello World, right?

This concept of, it doesn’t make any sense, but it works perfectly.

Because the inanimate objects in which we find ourselves surrounded by are part of our lives.

And especially when you’re a kid, and the peekaboo is a terrifying concept for a kid, right?

You go behind your hands, you’re gone.

Like, where’s dad?

I don’t understand.

He was here a second ago, and now he’s gone.

Oh, he’s back, thank God.

Like, that concept is wild.

Object permanence, it’s a scary concept for kids.

And I think that it plays into it a lot.

These things that don’t necessarily, like we forget about, we just let it be.

As you understand object permanence, it’s not something that you think about until you have a baby and you play with them doing that thing.

And they’re like, oh no, you’re gone forever.

And no, you’re back.

It’s great.

I think it speaks to it in a beautiful way.

And yeah, Good Night Moon can be terrifying.

I’ve seen some memes online that it’s actually like a metal song or like a horror movie, which also checks out pretty well.

I think Peek-A-Boo might be written on the hearts of man also, because there’s the show The Masked Singer, where they have somebody in a ridiculous costume until suddenly it reveals, I was a celebrity the whole time.

I think that’s like adult Peek-A-Boo and everyone loves it.

They’re just waiting for the big reveal.

Just as mature of a concept.

Yeah, that’s pretty solid.

Yeah.

What are your faves?

For me, it’s the Going to Bed Book by Sandra Boyden here.

We read this book to my oldest every single night for years.

And this had nothing to do with him wanting it and everything to do with me being a little bit crazy.

There was a guy I learned a lot about teaching kids and parenting really in the end, but really being a great camp counselor from.

His name was David Berkman.

And his thing was, among many others, that tradition is what you do twice with some kids and then you never can’t do it.

And so I was really big on creating traditions with my kids.

And as they got older, some of those things have fallen off.

But the Going to Bed book is silly and relaxing and there are cute animals and all of that.

There’s one part where they go back up after taking a bath, after brushing their teeth to exercise, which honestly I’ll suspend belief that there’s a bunch of animals going to bed together on a boat, but not the fact that they’re going to go up and get exercise.

That’s the true point.

Yeah, that one is the totally random scene.

It’s like, why aren’t we exercising?

We’re already clean.

I don’t understand.

We jump the grove, someone’s upside down.

Come on.

You don’t want to elevate the heart rate right before you go to bed.

This is a known fact.

You want to chill.

And then they all come back down and go to sleep.

But there’s the last part where they say good night, someone turns off the light and they rock, rock and rock to sleep.

And when he was little, we would rock and rock and rock to sleep with him.

And he would do it with us.

And now he’s this big galophe of a nine-year-old, big and strong and fast and pitches baseball and hits balls 50 feet past the fence and does all that stuff.

He’s still my little boy, you know, and he’s almost as tall as my mom.

And I sang to him tonight, actually, because he needed a little extra time to relax and fall asleep, and it was nice.

It was really nice to be able to do that again.

But the rock and rock to sleep was like sometimes you get wrapped up in the crazy of the day.

And even back then, I knew then I would look back at that and be like, this is really sweet and something that was important to us.

A galophe is a good word.

Yeah, it’s a strong word.

And it fits, man.

He is full on a galophe.

But another one in a similar way was Brown Bear, Brown Bear.

Our youngest memorized that from a very young age.

Our youngest is smart in a way that makes me frightened for my life in some ways.

And he terrifies me.

And I hope that’s inspired and utilized for good and not for evil.

It remains to be seen.

But he wanted to read to us because we read to him.

And so he had memorized the book.

And he would always like look to the next page and goes, Oh, yeah, it’s Yellow Duck, Yellow Duck, Yellow Duck.

What do you see?

Both of these things were very much of their personalities.

And I think a lot of when you read these books to kids is that you put a little bit of your own self into it, which is, I think, part of what we’re doing on this.

And the Rock and Rock to Sleep was something that I wanted to do, but it became part of this other thing.

And the reading was something that our little one wanted to do and be able to do it for us.

And I really liked that a lot.

But the last book, it’s not really a little kid book, but my dad read it to me and I read it to my oldest.

It’s Hatchet by Gary Paulson.

And this book is not a light read in any way, shape or form without giving anything away.

It happens in the first chapter or so.

Is that kid goes to visit his father who has newly moved away in divorce and his plane goes down.

He’s like on a bush plane to somewhere up north and he has to survive.

And the Hatchet is this thing that his mother gave him before he went so they’d have something to do when he was out in the woods with his dad.

This was one of these page turners.

It was the first book where I was like, I want to know what happens at the end.

And it was the same way with my son.

He loved reading it.

Gary Paulson was the first author that I read just a ton of his books.

And when I went back and read it again, it held up.

It’s definitely young adult, older kid fiction, but it’s not like youth reading.

It’s accessible for a younger person to read, but it’s still interesting.

I remember that my dad finished it one day when I was at school because he’s like, I gotta know what happens.

Because we read like 40 pages one night.

We’re like 20 pages one night.

It’s a really good book.

It’s a good adventure book.

It’s a good survival book.

It just was fun to read.

And it was one of the first that I remember being like, I want to know what happens.

Yeah, I don’t remember much about Hatchet, but I have a similar emotional response to it.

As my kids are starting to get a little older, I’m looking forward to that.

I remember liking Where the Red Fern Grows a lot and Chronicles of Narnia.

It’ll be cool to revisit that because I really don’t remember a lot about the books because it’s been so long.

Yeah, I might cheat and read ahead also.

Yeah, you never know.

I’m not gonna hold it against your neck.

We remember your past because it’s all within the context of where we are today.

I’m gonna add one more to this is the last stop on Market Street.

This book is by Matt de la Pena and is illustrated by Christian Robinson.

It’s breathtakingly beautiful.

It has a Caldecott Honor and a John Newberry Award.

And it’s just that it’s so beautiful, not told from a kid’s perspective, but is told in language that a kid would want and understand.

It’s just such a pretty book.

And it’s about leaving church with your grandmother and going to a soup kitchen and what you see and experience along the way.

And it’s really a beautiful book.

And it’s all about finding the beauty in the world.

And there’s music in it too.

And being happy with your place.

It’s a very country music song for something that is based in a 100% urban setting about being there for the people who are around you.

And I love reading it to my kids.

We got it when we lived in San Francisco.

They go into a less than savory neighborhood, which is definitely the last stop on Market Street.

Anybody who’s looking for a change of pace in their picture books for their kids, this one’s high on my list, because it’s just so pretty.

Great message, not preachy in any way.

It’s quite lovely.

It’s a lovely book.

So books that we like to read, those are easy.

Now, which ones won’t you ever read again if you could get away with it?

These might be easier.

That’s fair.

They’re the ones that you search out on the bookshelf and then push and somehow hide.

Yeah, exactly.

To me, there’s one that’s called, Oh Look, a Cake.

And it’s a perfectly fine book.

I just think it’s mean.

The whole storyline is these two animals who like, oh, found a cake.

Let’s eat this cake.

Who should we invite?

And they go through the list of all the different animals and why they shouldn’t invite them because they’re starky or mean and they’ll never let you eat.

Oh my God, let’s just eat it.

And the end is come on, this is not a story that you want.

And of course, my youngest, who I’m worried about, The Evil Streak, is like, loves this book.

And I just like, of course, I don’t like it.

The storyline is clever, but it’s man, like, I don’t like the book, man.

I just don’t like it.

And it falls into a very certain category.

And I know that some people really like that stuff.

They like being snarky and silly, as do I, but that one just hits me wrong.

So anyway, what are some that you don’t like?

Like, for me, it’s Magic School Bus.

And I love the Magic School Bus, actually.

I think they’re great books, because they’re also a little nostalgic, because I read them growing up.

But they’re not a bedtime story, because they’re so long.

There’s so much going on.

There’s dialogue.

There’s the narrative.

There’s all the little facts.

My boys are real curious, so they want me to read everything.

And they know now if I skip something.

Because early on, I could skip over lots of it.

But I can’t skip stuff anymore.

And that’s a big problem in a Magic School Bus book.

Those are on a special shelf for reference material.

But Daddy, you didn’t tell me about the endocrinology of this system.

No, we’re going to do the endocrine system another night, kid.

You forgot to tell me my weight on Uranus.

When they get older, that’ll be even funnier.

Yes.

Yeah, I totally feel that those super long ones are killer.

There’s certain books that are daytime books, and that’s definitely one of them.

And another one I would just absolutely love to keep in the daytime again for the blank are the alphabet books of the cities.

This was our own doing.

Like we went away, we got stuck at the airport, and we’re like, oh crap, we didn’t get anything for the kids.

Let’s get them the letter for city book.

So N is for Nashville, C is for Chicago.

Oh my God, I just never want to read these books again.

We have to go through the whole alphabet.

Could we skip W, maybe N.

Let’s take a couple of letters out.

Every city is, oh look, I’ll be so creative and create one of these.

And then all of us bum parents go out and buy them.

And then we’re stuck reading the entire alphabet.

Dad, can we do two of these books tonight?

This is, I’m not reading 100 pages of alphabet.

It’s not happening.

And you can’t skip pages in an alphabet book because then your kids might not learn the alphabet.

But sometimes I just skip some of what’s on there.

I don’t need to know all of the things that start with X.

Another one I cannot do is Love You Forever by Robert Munch.

I think actually it should be banned.

It is a cruel book.

And of course, I’m joking.

It’s a beautiful book.

But unsuspecting parents everywhere are just trying to get their kids to sleep.

And they end up weeping while reading this book.

And somehow it’s like a zombie book.

Because I remember my mom would read this to me or try to read this to me when I was growing up.

And I know it’s still at their house.

But somehow it showed up in my house too.

I have one.

I don’t know how it got here.

And they requested it.

And I was like, oh no, here we go.

And yeah, sure enough, it transcends generations.

It hits real hard.

I remember my mom coming home from work.

And her deal was putting us to bed.

My dad stayed home.

My mom was in charge of bedtime because she wanted to spend extra time with us after she would come home.

And she read, we got that book probably about when it came out.

And she read it and she was reading it.

She goes, oh, this is so lovely.

And it says, oh, this is so lovely.

Like snot bubbles running mascara.

I was like, are you okay, Mommy?

Like I just remember the snot bubbles.

And I made fun of her for it because I was a sh**head kid.

And that’s what I did.

And now, oh, man, I read it for the first time.

I was like, no, nope, we’re not going to read that one again.

It is one of those generational things.

And it’s such a universal American parent experience, I think, for anybody who’s read that book.

And there’s this great artist here in the LA area.

Actually, she’s out on the kind of the Northwestern part and lives out in Malibu, Lizzie Passion.

And she has this great song about refocusing how she sees success, called Success in My Mind.

And it’s all about her kids and her family and making sure that they’re healthy and safe.

She has a real deep church music background and it comes through in this song.

It’s really quite beautiful.

And she wrote about how she had some loss in her life.

I was like, wow, this is a really beautiful song and it’s really poignant.

And then she busts out the I’ll Love You Forever in the middle of it.

I was like, not cool, Lizzie.

Like now I’m crying and doing the dishes as I’m listening to music.

That’s not all right.

And just in case you’re not in your feels already, let’s just make sure.

Here’s the clincher.

I’m like, oh man.

And it was like such a beautiful use of that section of the book.

And it, you know, it was just, come on.

That’s like cheating.

It’s like using truffle on a delicious menu item.

Of course it’s going to taste better with truffle on it.

You got it in your side and then she twists the knife just a little bit.

It’s like, oh, got me right there.

Not fair, man.

The Truffle Fries of Sad Parenting Books.

It really is the Truffle Fries of Sad Parenting Books.

But it does get us to our main discussion, taking great kids books and making them country songs, just like Ludacris did for Llama Llama Red Pajama.

So let’s talk criteria.

There’s some real clear themes that work for country music.

And I think we see a lot of the crossover in the kids book genre.

So what do you think what best subject matter of books to country music could be?

Beer and Girls is that the top two?

Those are definitely my favorite kids books.

Yeah, there’s trucks.

There’s got to be trucks.

Kids love trucks.

Kids do love trucks.

Country Music loves trucks.

Country does love trucks.

It seems like it’s mandatory.

Farms.

Farms and animals.

Rural stuff.

Rural stuff.

Tractors.

Tractors work too.

But I think taking it back a little bit and a little less silliness.

I think love and family, the fairy tales, storylines, a lot of that really fits into country music.

These big stories, truths that are perhaps a little truthy work very well in country music and that from forever, right?

The story of faith and family and agrarian lifestyles, all that stuff is deep in the kids’ stories because it’s foundational to a lot of societies, not just American society, but where we find ourselves in the United States.

A lot of stuff is foundational to our understanding of where we came from.

Even if we didn’t come from here, we came from here.

I think that’s kind of powerful.

The trucks and the animals and the silliness aside, that’s kind of deep and important in kids’ books is that there’s some sort of message in the end.

A lot of it has to do with your family, doing right when it’s not easy, all those types of things.

I think those are good kids’ adjacent issues minus the beer and trucks part, but definitely the truck part.

It’s like beer and girls.

Yeah, that’s for the young adult ones.

Young adult ones, I think that’s there.

To play off of gender stereotypes, there’s all sorts of quote unquote girl books that would yield great country songs as well.

Those Barry Tales type stories that are seen as not for boys, which is a ridiculous conversation, which we can have another time.

But for this, I think those types of stories really do put it into a strong category of country music slash kids books, which I think could work.

The question though, does it need to rhyme?

A lot of books do, especially for kids, because it’s easy for us to stay awake while we’re rhyming.

But do they need to rhyme for it to work?

Does it need a complex rhyme structure?

It is very pleasing to the ear.

There’s a reason that a lot of songs rhyme.

I don’t think it needs to be a requirement, because I think we’ve probably all read books and heard songs where the rhymes were forced.

And that always turns me off.

If it makes sense and it’s done really well, then it adds something to it.

But the story is the important part in the imagery that it creates and the message.

And that’s a good point too, is does it need to be a story?

Because there are great books, especially a lot of Dr.

Seuss books, that are lists.

And those lists songs yield incredible rhymes that are silly and fun and get you into great raps.

And we’ve seen tons of those videos on social media.

The Dr.

Seuss Alphabet Book is perfect for that because it’s like, zig or zag or zoz, come on, that’s a banger right off the bat, man.

That one’s gonna slap.

As the kids say, that’s fun, it’s a list.

But does it yield a great country song?

Do you get good country music off of a list?

It’s not three chords in a list, it’s three chords in the truth.

There are lots of country songs that are a list of country things.

Yeah.

They’re usually not the best song though.

I think probably the best crossover version of that is Tom T.

Hall’s I Love and then in parentheses, Little Baby Ducks.

It is a very strange, I have to say.

If you think of it, it’s like, oh, this is a cute little kid’s song.

But then you take a step back, you’re like, oh, this is Tom T.

Hall, so this is probably a little bit messed up.

And that he’s making a song about this or he just needed to get another song out.

He did it.

That’s another option.

Tom T.

Hall has some of the greatest story songs ever written.

And then you have I Love, parentheses, Little Baby Ducks.

And you’re like, I don’t know what to put on here.

It would be interesting to know what led to that.

Was it a child in his life or just purely the record company saying, let’s try and tease out placement on a children’s record someday?

Yeah.

I don’t know.

But it could easily be adapted to a children’s book, I think.

Every image except for the bourbon and a glass and grass line.

Yeah.

I don’t know if this is like the green grass that you’re running around on.

I think he may have been running around on a little bit of grass at the end of that writing session.

He was like, let’s just get this thing done.

Come on.

We need one more.

Come on, everybody.

Let’s do this.

I saw ducks in my pool this morning.

What else you got?

Then he loved them.

Yeah.

He loved those ducks.

Let’s list all the things I like.

Drinking, ducks in my pool.

Let’s go.

And grass.

So now, what are the best books?

I’m going to jump out first because I want this one.

It is Little Blue Chuck, The Little Blue Chuck Series by Alice Chartel.

All about that slow country living.

It really is.

And honestly, I sing this book when I read it because you’ve got to put a little drawl in your voice.

Oh, for sure.

I get an accent every time I read that book.

I acquire an accent.

Horn wet beep, engine purred.

Friendliest sound you ever heard.

All of a sudden, I’m from the Midwest and I’m aligning myself with these values of slowing down and saying hi to the frog and the toad, and all of these things.

But it’s so catchy.

This whole thing is great.

This book, Little Blue Truck, the original OG is quite good.

Little Blue Truck Leads the Way, though, it like screams current country music.

It screams it.

I don’t think I’ve read that one.

I’ll have to go check it out.

You should check it out because it’s about Little Blue Truck going to the city where everything’s fast and scary and they don’t follow the rules.

He says, stop.

We should slow down, go one at a time so that we can make it work together.

The mayor jumps out and he says, hello.

Everybody’s loving it.

My young guest loves that one.

When he was first talking, he called the point to the chef in one of the pages and go, look, a cook cook.

It was a spatula.

Obviously, a spatula became a cook cook in our house for a very long time.

Books are country songs.

There’s no two ways about it.

There’s no two ways about it.

The message works for me also because part of the reason, as someone who lives in a busy, scary city, the reason that I listen to country music is to slow down and imagine the simpler life out in the country.

It works.

After a rough day, the kids at school running around all their activities and all the stresses of growing up, I’m sure they want to slow down and hear you sing a little country song to them before they go to bed.

Those books are good.

That’s a slam-dunk country song.

I had to jump out and take that one first.

Now, what’s your first pick?

My first pick is right here, Good Night, Good Night, Construction Site.

We’re talking about trucks and how that is a country trope, an image that is in many country songs.

There are lots of trucks in this book.

In fact, the characters are literally trucks.

You cannot go wrong with this one.

Similar to modern country music, it’s glorifying blue collar work.

All the trucks in the construction site, they’re cleaning up at the end of the day and they’re going to sleep and relaxing.

It’s also very lyrical and I think you could easily put this one to music too.

Yeah.

I think we’re going to talk about who should do these songs later.

I have an idea for that one that I think would be quite hilarious.

Speaking of glorifying the blue collar but the original old-fashioned version one is Otis.

Otis is about a tractor who loves his job on the farm.

He just enjoyed being out there and working hard and then he’d play in the farm and jump through hay bales, play duck-duck-goose with the geese, which I thought was always funny, and then go to sleep in the barn and he made friends with the new calf.

The new calf was scared to be away from his mama, but Otis made him sleep and it was all good.

One day the farmer brought in the new tractor and kicked Otis out, and how awful.

Then the calf got stuck in the mud pot.

It’s a cute, cute story.

It checks all the boxes too.

Checks all the boxes.

Animals, farm, trucks.

There are other trucks, a bad truck because it’s new, and looking back at the old because that’s better.

But it’s a great book.

I enjoy reading it.

There’s a lot to unpack.

Fibs has a book, but it’s a great book, and the kids love it, and it’s also another beautifully illustrated book.

It’s not like slam dunk that Little Blue Truck and Little Blue Truck Leads the Way are, but thematically, it’s a near perfect classic country song.

There’s some onomatopoeia in this book that is my favorite part.

I’m going to read it because it’s kind of a tongue twister.

Oh, I love a tongue twister.

Putt, puff, puttity, chuff, and it’s repeated many times in the book.

I would love for a trained singer, a country singer, to try and mix that in to the song.

I agree with you, this needs to be a country song, and I want to see, you know, Lainey, give it a try.

Yeah.

Putt, puff, puttity, chuff.

Yeah.

Lutonis.

Somebody, yeah.

Someone who could yodel, I think, would be really good for that.

There we go.

Like a yodeling, putt, putt, puttity, chuff.

Do people yodel anymore?

Yeah.

There are a few people who yodel.

My friend, Hayley Brown Spence of The Doohickeys.

She just actually was named a finalist for the Dolly Parton Talent Search, for being a Dolly Parton actress on Broadway.

So congratulations to her.

Good shutout.

Awesome.

But she did her video because they were supposed to do videos on TikTok to promote themselves and get it in.

There were 15 finalists and they were all incredible.

They all sounded a whole lot like Dolly.

But her finishing was like, I can play fiddle and banjo and I can yodel.

But you’ll have to call me back for that.

A great, incredible audition which she did from her hotel room being evacuated from the fires here in LA a few months ago.

But she did a great job and it went semi-viral, and people really liked it and it also helps that she’s incredibly talented.

But she can yodel and Willow Avon, she can yodel I’m pretty sure.

So we can bring in some folks that can do this.

So I think you’re right.

But yeah, I think that’s true, like the tractors, the trucks, but one other real major mode of transportation which is extremely important in country music, and David Allen Coe would agree with you, is trains.

So what’s your next one?

Back to Margaret Wise Brown, I have two little trains.

This also has some fun onomatopoeia.

There’s puff, puff, puff, chug, chug, chug, which also has several different meanings, depending on how browish you are.

That’s what first caught my attention when I read this to my kid.

We checked it out from the library, and I was like, what are we reading with this puffing and chugging?

But it’s great.

You’re talking about the old versus new, as like a thematic thing.

It’s got the sleek new train versus the old steam engine.

And they’re both going west, which is another theme in country music.

Indeed.

They’re traveling through terrain and weather and all these obstacles, but they’re both traveling the same direction.

They both have the same mission, and they’re coming at it from two different perspectives.

There’s several different illustrators for this book over the years.

And so one illustrator actually had, the sleek train was a real train.

The old steam engine was actually a toy train.

So you get to see the toy train making its way west, and he ends up at bedtime, of course, because that’s the goal of a lot of these stories, is to get our kids to fall asleep.

Let’s be done.

Yeah.

Also very lyrical.

I could see that book getting turned into a song.

There was actually an album called Good Night Songs that was put out by these two musicians, Tom Prout and Emily Gehry.

And it accompanied a book called Good Night Songs.

Whoever was responsible for or was kind of archiving Margaret Wise Brown’s estate, found a bunch of these old manuscripts and they were songs that she had written.

And she had kind of intended to write some children’s songs at some point.

So these two musicians put some of her unpublished poems to music and recorded an album.

And it’s out there on Spotify.

You can listen to it.

She died, I think, when she was pretty young, maybe in her 40s.

That she lived beyond that.

Maybe she would have been putting out more music.

Maybe she would have gotten Shel Silverstein on us.

Yeah.

That actually is the perfect transition.

Because I’m going to talk a little bit about Shel right now.

One of my favorite books by him is A Giraffe and a Half, which is an absolutely bonkers book.

You read this to the kids and they’re laughing about it.

And it’s a long book too.

And I feel like if you stretch a giraffe in half, it’s going to be dead, so the book should be over.

This book itself is silly and fun and could 100% be a Johnny Cash song.

It could 100% be modernized by some other folks.

It could be any of these songs.

It’s Boy Named Sue Level, which was written by Shel Silverstein.

He was a prolific country songwriter.

He was responsible for Boy Names Sue.

He also wrote Emmylou Harris’s Queen of the Silver Dollar.

And Loretta Lynn’s On the Way.

He wrote hundreds of country songs.

He wrote for himself.

He wrote for all these other folks.

That book checks out.

That could be a country song because it’s just snarky enough and just twisted enough and just long enough to go and get that repetitive of the up-down chord progression to make it ridiculous.

And I think it could be a lot of fun as a country song.

Got one more for you.

This one’s for you.

This is a bro country song.

Yes, our little bros in training need something to help them sleep too.

Wow, there’s a lot to unpack in that particular statement.

But we’re going to leave it alone.

Tow Truck Joe by June Sobel.

This is the Children’s Storybook version of Redneck Yacht.

It is the most ridiculous book.

It’s like this tow truck goes around with his buddy dog who is able to go fix stuff.

And then there’s a car crash where cookies spill, and then there’s a mixer and some milk, and they make ice cream and they eat it together.

This is Bro Country.

You might as well be on a pontoon, drinking out of a red solo cup when you’re reading this to your children.

It is, it’s a party anthem.

That’s all it is.

It’s just crazy.

It’s like the flip side of the coin of Giraffe and a Half with the Dada-esque craziness of Shel Silverstein.

This one’s just straight, straight radio country for you.

It’s good stuff.

Yeah, it is artificially cheery.

Joe is always just saying hello.

There’s all these really major mishaps are happening all around.

Unbelievable.

He’s like, it’s cool, man.

Yeah.

And there’s 15 different versions of it.

There’s the Christmas one.

There’s the Halloween one.

There’s some other ones.

It’s really hot during the summer.

The big rig gets stuck in the car wash where everyone wants to go and then it explodes and everyone’s in the bubbles cleaning up.

Come on, man.

You might as well just take the top off and run around.

That’s what’s going on here.

Show me your engine.

Come on, Joe.

Be a little bit risqué.

Yeah, I think we’ve gone to a place where…

We went there, yeah.

We went there.

We have some winners.

We have some ones we shouldn’t touch again.

But these books and stories, they’re kids books.

Many of them blend themselves to interpretation.

Some of them might be perfect songs on their own.

And so, as we start thinking about who should be doing this, I want that to be like in your head while we’re doing this.

And dear listener, I love to hear what your favorite ones are.

So hit us up in the comments about that, because I feel like there could be just a massive list of great country songs from these books.

If anyone out there wants to make a song, we’ll definitely talk to you about it.

With that in mind, Dave, who would you want to sing your choice of?

Children’s Book, The Country Song?

For Good Night, Good Night Construction Site, the Highwaymen would have been perfect for this one.

There’s the four singers of the Highwaymen, and they go through each of the construction vehicles and Good Night, Good Night Construction Site.

Willie could be the bulldozer because it has a smokestack, and Chris Christopherson could be the crane truck, Waylon is the cement mixer, and then Johnny Cash comes at the end and inexplicably he could be the Mars Rover.

I’ll fly a starship across the universe divide, and when I reach the other side.

He’s out in outer space.

That would have been perfect.

Unfortunately, Willie is the only one that is still alive at this point.

So maybe the High Women could do it in homage to the Highwaymen, because girls can like trucks too, man.

It doesn’t have to be the Highwaymen.

So Marin, if you’re listening, let’s do this.

You got kids too.

Marin, you got kids.

Let’s make this happen.

Tyler Childers, I would love to just unleash his creative mind on any number of children’s books.

There is some precedent for this because on the last album that he put out, Rustin in the Rain, there is a song based on a book or a section of a book.

They had a song on that album called Luke 2, 8-10, and it’s a section of the Book of Luke and the Bible where the shepherds see the angel of the Lord for the first time.

And his interpretation is hilarious.

He said that this is the closest he’s gotten to having a Christmas song.

As he’s just reacting, like, what would it be like if I was the shepherd seeing this angel out in the field when I’m watching after my sheep?

I would want him just to go to town on Harold and the Purple Crayon or Where the Wild Things Are, any of these, like, kind of surreal runaway bunny, Good Night Moon.

I think he’d do a great job and the music video would be bizarre and amazing.

Those are really deep and beautiful concepts of what could be a lovely kids’ story and kids’ song.

But you, as the number one Hardee apologist slash fanboy, I feel like you got to tell me something about Hardee here.

I could not get through an episode without doing that.

Yes.

If we want a broke country song based on a children’s book, I think Green Eggs and Ham would be a good one to start with, because it’s very repetitive and the song that comes to mind, it’s not a Hardee song, it’s a Kip Moore song, something about a truck.

He’s listing stuff out just like the Green Eggs and Ham.

This could be adapted for people who refuse to listen to country music because that’s what the whole book is about.

Someone that is refusing to try something new for no reason.

We want to encourage people to, like we were talking about in the last episode, maybe dip their toe in country music waters, and maybe broke country is the way that they do that.

If it was Kip Moore singing Green Eggs and Ham, it would be, I don’t like him in the rain, on a train, in a box with a fox.

It just works.

And Hardy, of course, would be featured on the song, and he would come in for the chorus, and he would sing, I do not like green eggs and ham, and by sing, I mean scream.

That’s how Dr.

Seuss always intended it.

Yes, some screamo new metal country adjacent to music.

That’s right.

As visualized by Dr.

Seuss.

So, to take a slight turn away from that particular space.

Yes, bring us home.

I will bring us home.

I want Colter Wall to do Little Blue Truck.

Both of them, in fact, because he loves that slow life.

That’s his thing.

Tough like this.

He sings differently than I will.

I won’t do it.

I won’t try to sing like Colter Wall.

It’s not good.

I could listen to him read the phone book.

Yeah.

We saw it in phone books.

Yes, indeed.

I think that his voice fits the style of music that he does.

I love listening to him.

I find his music really soothing.

Also, not just his song, but the songs that he chooses to cover are sometimes a little esoteric, but they’re perfect for him.

His cover of Evangeline on Little Songs is absolutely great.

It’s a Hoyt Axton song, and Hoyt did a beautiful version of it.

But I think Colter’s version of it takes it to a very different place somehow.

Hoyt Axton wrote a wide range of songs, including Joy to the World.

If you listen to Emangeline by Colter Wall, you’re like, oh, wow, this is a great song about crossing the desert for your love and all this stuff.

And then you have Hoyt Axton’s, and you’re like, oh, I get it, this guy is a brilliant songwriter.

But Colter embodies that song and feels like he’s singing about some girl that he’s crossing the desert for.

Which is weird, because he’s from Canada, and it’s cold there, not so hot.

But he…

It’s a high desert, the high desert out there in Gregory.

Yeah, north, cold, too.

But anyway, his singing style is incredible.

In the same way that a book is something you read, not necessarily watch, his presentation style on stage sounds very much like his voice.

He doesn’t move much, he doesn’t have much going on.

That said, it’s still a great show because the music’s fantastic.

I have heard that his next album is going to be a little bit more honky-tonk.

I’m excited to hear that.

I think it will be an interesting shift for him away from that Western style into a true honky-tonk vibe.

I’m pretty excited to hear that and see where that goes.

Calling back for my next book, I’d like to see Miranda Lambert do Giraffe and a Half because I think she could nail that.

She has a lot of those songs where there’s kind of a extended end verse or an extended line at the end of each verse into the chorus.

It would do well for her as more things happen to the giraffe.

And so I think that would work out very well, like the snake in the book and the hole in the tie and the hat, the cane, the bike and all the things that happen.

I feel like she could do that.

Like the Geraldine song, she does a couple of things like that.

Definitely a different vibe between those two books, two songs, but I think Giraffe and a Half by Miranda Lambert would be an absolute gold hit.

I think it’s fabulous.

So I had fun thinking about songs that don’t exist.

Let’s talk about some that actually do.

We have a recurring segment on the show called Dad Life Soundcheck, and it’s all about songs that are speaking to us right now.

Something about them hits home for us as parents listening to it, as dads listening to the song.

It’s just such a great thing to be able to talk about this with another dad and get into it.

I like this segment a lot.

I always liked it when I was listening to it last season.

So Dave, tell me the song that is working for you, speaking to you right now.

I don’t know if it’s speaking to me, but it fits with something that’s been going on in the household.

It’s called Buy Me a Boat by Chris Janson.

So my oldest last year for a school assignment, he was asked to write what one of his future hobbies was going to be.

He wrote that getting rich would be one of his hobbies.

Despite our best efforts to strip away materialism from his goals and to make it about him being happy and healthy and kind, he wants to get rich.

That’s his hobby.

That’s his intended hobby.

And I don’t know where he got it from other than the game of life.

So maybe that was the influence where at the end of the game of life, whoever wins is whoever accumulated the most wealth.

You even trade in the people you met along the way for a dollar amount.

So maybe that was the wrong message.

Chris Janson’s song is about the human desire for wealth, but it’s done in a very self-aware way and a funny way where you know it’s a big joke that of course money can’t buy happiness, but a boat would be nice.

So the song makes me laugh and it’s light-hearted and makes me feel better when I consider my oldest son and his new hobby.

There are worse things.

My song this week is Shorter Letter by Lasers Lasers Birmingham.

I’m sporting his hat tonight.

I really like this song.

This song came out right around the time my oldest was at sleepaway camp this summer.

The line that sticks with me is if I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.

I would have cut out the awkward parts and made the poetry flow better.

To me, that’s really powerful as a writer and as someone who’s trying to convey happiness and everything’s cool but we’re not doing anything at home.

You’re not missing out on anything.

I’m hoping you’re having fun.

Did you brush your teeth?

Have you changed your underwear?

Those type of things in a camp letter, it just gets long and there’s really nothing in it.

So this song playing as I’m writing a letter to my son.

Yep.

If I had more time to think about this, I would make this tighter and I’d make everything better.

You think more about it, you’d have more time to be sharper and better.

I think we all faced with that.

If you had more time to do it, you’d do it better, but you’re not and you end up talking more as we do.

The album is spot on crazy pants.

There’s songs about alien abduction and getting roofied by a bunch of hippies on your way to a honky tonk at Bakersfield and Cosmic Trucker songs and again, doing drugs.

It’s not a kid’s album, but this song, I think, is the sleeper best written song on the album.

They’re all really creative and they’re really smart.

This song is real good.

I don’t know why it reminds me of Ernest Hemingway, because Hemingway wrote in those short tight sentences and Old Man in the Sea is, I think, fewer than 100 pages and it is must read literature in the English language.

This song reminds me of that for some reason and it’s beautiful.

It’s just like, it speaks to the kid thing, like figuring out how to do it better with even less time than you think you had before.

It seems counterintuitive that you would need more time to write shorter, but it is true.

Anybody who’s tried to write something, I used to write really long e-mails at work and edit them down because I was like, no one’s going to read this if I send it to them like this.

It’s very applicable.

This year, my oldest wrote his mom a Valentine’s Day card and it was so sweet.

He told me in the car while we were driving home from his basketball practice that, oh, I’m going to write her a card when I get home.

I already know what it’s going to say.

So he had been like ruminating on this and sure enough, he just, he wrote it.

It was short, succinct, and it was beautiful.

And in crayon, it fit on a quarter sheet.

Yeah, there you go.

So there’s some beauty to simplicity and it’s hard to distill complex emotions and thoughts down to a few words.

A lot of these Children’s Books authors were able to do it.

These songwriters can do it.

That’s why I love following this stuff and digging into it.

It’s really amazing what these artists can do.

So our next segment we call Change My Mind.

And in a world where flexibility and opinion is seen as a weakness, we want to model good behavior to our kids and to our listeners as we respectfully and humorously try to change each other’s mind about pressing issues of country music, fatherhood and other nonsense.

So this week, Donnie, going to Costco is a miserable chore.

Please change my mind.

I would love to.

And for all those who are on audio only, please know that I am wearing my Kirkland Signature Sweatshirt from Costco that I love.

It is so cozy and so lovely.

Dave, I will buy you one next time I’m there because Costco is fantastic.

Number one, there are samples, man.

They offer you free food.

You go in, they say, welcome to Costco.

You little scan your card because they don’t want any of those freeloaders in there anymore.

You scan your card, you go in and you look, wow, look at these beautiful televisions.

They’re so huge.

I don’t need one, but boy, they sure are pretty.

And then you go and they give you free food.

There are pizza rolls.

There’s some dip that should never have been made, but you try it anyway.

There are cookies.

The cookies are fresh, hot cookies.

You can buy them like a buck.

They’re delicious.

For people who have more than two kids like you, you can get eggs.

They still have them at Costco where you can’t get them almost anywhere else right now, but at Costco, you can get 18 eggs.

Cheaper there, which is good.

And they’re organic or they’re not organic.

You can choose.

You can make your decision.

It’s whatever you want.

They have produce that’s big and fresh and delicious.

And I didn’t even get to the booze.

The booze is big and cheap.

And this is actually a cool little side note on Costco.

Costco partners with some of the biggest distilleries in the world.

So their Kirkland Select stuff is top shell.

It comes in a Kirkland Select bottle, but you can decant it and tell them it’s, you know, Schmeigruss or, I don’t know, some other type of liquor that it might be or might not be.

And that’s the thing about Costco is that the stuff is very high quality.

As a parent, busy people, go in between basketball practices and baseball practices and schoolwork and forgotten projects and all the other stuff, stresses of work, stresses of family, stresses of whatever else.

You can go to Costco and get a rotisserie chicken for five bucks and feed your family.

Five bucks, dinner’s done.

Sorry, bro, you’re not going to get anything better than that.

And it’s delicious.

Two rotisserie chickens is cheaper than any other meal you can have.

Now as you’re leaving Costco, because you’ve worked up an appetite from all those samples and all the fabulous clothing opportunities that you may have to purchase from.

And you know, nuts in gigantic bags and bushels and rice that you could feed small countries with.

You need to get yourself a hot dog and a soda, because you’re a little peckish.

A hot dog and a soda is a buck fifty, man.

You can’t beat that.

It is the best price for anything in the world.

They will never change the price.

And I know I’m preaching here, and I’m going to stay up on my soapbox for this for a while.

The $1.50 hot dog and soda, for that alone, you should be a member of Costco and be happy to be there.

That’s the thing.

Be happy to be there.

And I know that your littlest is probably still in the diapers.

Toilet paper’s thing gets expensive.

Costco toilet paper, you can’t beat it.

It’s the best toilet paper.

I could go on and on about Costco.

You make many points.

I’ll give you that.

Oh, okay, I see.

So there is part of me, we’re talking about how a lot of these books that we were talking about today were about slowing down.

I’ll admit that part of what makes Costco miserable to me is probably a me problem.

Because I want to be in and out of there.

Yes, the eggs.

That is where you go for eggs.

Actually, I got to cut that because I don’t want people taking my eggs from Costco.

I thought that was our secret, Donnie.

Sorry, bro.

I got to preach the Costco gospel.

Yeah, big family here.

I got three kids.

It makes sense to go to Costco and buy in bulk.

If they combine the $1.50 hot dog with the high-end booze somehow, if they were able to give me a hot dog and a shot of bullet bourbon, maybe I would change my mind.

That would encourage me to take it a little bit slower and relax.

A trip to Costco, to me, it’s like a three-hour excursion between finding parking and then getting blocked by all the carts, of people stopping for samples, and I’m not a sample sampling kind of person.

I’m trying to get in and out.

But you know what?

Maybe I should be.

Maybe I should.

It’s like the shopping equivalent of stop and smell the roses.

You’ve got to stop and sample the samples at Costco.

Yes.

Maybe that’s what’s missing in my life.

I appreciate the impassioned plea for the home team that you’re sporting there on your chest.

The Kirkland Faithful.

Maybe when I go this week for my next round of eggs, I’ll stop and block traffic with my giant cart and eat a pizza bagel or something.

There you go.

You got to give it a shot.

I appreciate your open mindedness to this.

It’s very good modeling.

I needed you to change my mind because I don’t want going to Costco to be miserable because I have to go a lot because the boys are eating a lot of food.

Yes.

They don’t stop.

That seems to be something I’m learning as the children get older.

It was a fun conversation and thank you all for listening.

The best way to support us is to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and whatever platform you use.

If you want to see new episodes and more content delivered straight to your email inbox, please subscribe to our newsletter countrymusictads.substack.com.

You can find everything that we do on our website countrymusictads.com and we’d love to hear what you think.

So send us your comments, suggestions, friendly banter.

You can do it on Instagram at countrymusictads or via email at countrymusictads.gmail.com.

Stay tuned for our next episode where we’ll get into Luke Combs’ most recent album, Fathers and Sons.

It seems appropriate that we should weigh in on an album like that.

Whether you’re at the dance hall, the playground, or the schoolyard, or just folding some laundry, thanks for tuning in.

We’ll talk to you soon.

So our next segment, we call Change My Mind.

I actually don’t have it up.

Okay.

I didn’t have the script up.

There we go.

Yeah, you’re fired, man.

I know.

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