The Snakes Crawl At Night

First of all, thank you to everyone that has reached out to me, to us, it is much appreciated.

I covered this song because it reminds me of my mom. She loved Charley Pride. I like his music but I mostly love the memories of her that it brings back. I heard this song all the time as a kid. I never listened closely to the lyrics. I thought it was about snakes. He had another song about a wooden Indian. There was another hit song about spiders and snakes. Narratives and metaphors, they meant nothing to me. It was written by Mel Tillis and Fred Burch, who also gave us Patsy Cline’s ‘Strange’. I knew Mel Tillis as the stuttering guy from Hee Haw but he was also a brilliant songwriter. ‘Ruby (Don’t Take Your Love To Town)’ is a brutal and beautiful song. Beneath the tale of a crippled veteran helplessly lamenting the wife that is openly cheating on him, there is a simmering rage. ‘The Snakes Crawl At Night’ has a similar quality. In the first verse, he discovers his wife is cheating on him, and you feel for him. In the second verse, he is waiting for his wife and her lover with his gun. He is scared, his hand is shaking, but he’s going to do it. In the third verse he is convicted, sentenced to death, and has only this to say: all the snakes crawl at night. He is unrepentant. When you know the whole story, the empathy you feel for him in the first verse is gone. The unreliable narrator.

That is how I hear it now, but I still hear the innocent country song that I liked as a kid. I think of both my mom and dad, who both loved country music, I’m comforted by the nostalgia of it all. I’m here at a time in my life when I look to them, I ask myself who they wanted me to be. My father once said something to me when I was going through a tough time, and I don’t remember the exact words, but it stuck with me. It was something like this:

Even a dead fish can swim with the stream.

It’s been said in many different ways over the years. When everything is going your way, it doesn’t tell you very much about who you are. When things are bad, that’s when you find out. So I listen to Charley Pride and then I go out into the world and try to be someone that would make them proud. Simple in theory, not as simple in execution.