Live in my heart, and pay no rent.
Old Irish saying
Well, here I am, the guy who keeps insisting he has little use for country music, writing up another ballad fit for a bunch of weary cowpokes gathered around some campfire after a hard day of punching cattle on the open prairie. Have a listen. I think you’ll feel, as I do, that it transcends the superficials of style and familiar musical phrasing.
I heard it just a few days ago on the penultimate episode of Paramount’s Yellowstone. The scene was at a huge outdoor party with a somber theme: it’s the eve of a public auction at which literally every saleable physical asset on the failing ranch, from livestock to old blacksmith’s anvils and everything in between, is going to be liquidated. As darkness falls, the live entertainment, a band announcing itself as the Turnpike Troubadours, takes the stage, and plays a lovely, heartfelt country hurtin’ song. It matched and enhanced the mood perfectly, and the song, so evocative of sadness, loss, and abiding love, was too thoughtful and nuanced to have been thrown together just for the show, much as the group was too good to be fictional.
Written in E Major, the key said to evoke the emotions of restless love, grief, and mournfulness, Pay No Rent may sound at first like a conventional love song, but it was actually composed by lead singer Evan Felker and his friend John Fullbright as a tribute to Felker’s beloved Aunt Lou, owner-operator of the Rocky Road Tavern in Okemah, Oklahoma (by all accounts a local watering hole of some renown), a bit of a wild child, and a virtual big sister/best friend to the singer as he was growing up:
She was about the only person I could go drinking with at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. We got to be really good friends. We’d hang out a lot, fish together, cook together, drink tequila, and build a big-ass fire at her place out on Buckeye Creek. She loved that song ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.’ She said, ‘If I ever die––I hope I never do, but if I do––you gotta play ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ at my funeral.’
I’m not sure whether Lou’s death came before her time, or what got her. Nothing I can find offers anything beyond how she passed about a year before the release of the album A Long Way From Your Heart, in 2017, and that Felker and Fullbright were rehearsing to perform her favourite song at her funeral when Felker learned that somebody else was probably planning to sing it. Seems Lou’s wish to be played off stage to Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain was something she’d expressed to four or five other musicians, and with that base already more than covered, the boys decided to come up with something new. Beginning at noon on the day before the ceremony, and wrapping up at around three in the morning, they wrote Pay No Rent.
I hear the crackle of a campfire
You’re howlin’ at the moon
We all know that you gotta go
But does it have to be so soon?
Bet somebody’s yelling last call
I hope you get some rest
Hope you found everything that you wanted
In the place you love the best
Are you cracking jokes with the common folks?
Are you serving to the well-to-do?
Well I’ve traveled ’round
And I ain’t found nobody quite like you
And is all this living meant to be or a happy accident?
Well in my heart you pay no rent
Well in my heart you pay no rent
It’s a beautiful sentiment, isn’t it, that old Irish saying, an assertion that true love is given freely, asking nothing in return, to which Lou’s loving nephew adds an implied promise never to forget how much he, in turn, was always so grateful to receive free of charge.
the needlefish 