I go back to this video A LOT.
You have one of my all-time favorite George Strait tunes, “Nobody In His Right Mind Would’ve Left Her,” and you have Jon Pardi, arguably the most legitimate “country” artist in mainstream country music right now.
In the introduction, Pardi shares a little story about growing up listening to Strait with his grandmother on cassette tapes, (if you don’t know what that is, that’s what we had before CDs were invented) and if you’re anything like me, his story brings the nostalgia rushing in like a tidal wave.
“We’re gonna do a George Strait song, one of my heroes, I think everybody’s hero in country music. If you’re playing country music, you like George Strait.
But the reason I’m doing this song is that my grandmother loved country music and she’s really the one who got me into country music… during the ’80s and early ’90s everybody had cassette tapes and she had a lot cassette tapes and she had George Strait tapes, a bunch of ’em.
And so I always remember listening to tapes, taking them out and just the covers, and the back, cassette tapes are kind of a dinosaur these days, but every time I hear this song it takes me back to cassettes and growing up listening to George and growing up singing songs with my grandmother.”
SAME.
My mom had a literal suitcase of old cassette tapes from from the ’80s and ’90s. We’re talking a high-quality, leather luggage designed to hold all of your cassette tapes. The type of thing that a James Bond villain would carry. One of these double-sided bad boys…
If you know, you know…
Anyways, when I was a little kid, we’re talking 6 or 7 years old, I would drag that thing out of the closet and flip it over, unhook the latch and dig into all these old cassette tapes from artists that never really heard of it.
Or even if I recognized the name I probably didn’t really know many of the songs. We’re talking Billy Ray, Reba, Alabama, and of course… the great George Strait.
And that is why I love this performance from Jon.
This song takes us both back in time to our formidable years, learning about country music with an old George Strait cassette tape.
