Bluffton University retired football coach Carlin Carpenter recently entertained the Maple Crest Senior Living group known as "Men-N-Friends" with some of Carpenters own songs and stories.
Arriving in a comfortable-looking pair of jeans and a denim shirt, he claimed that by the time he was done with his one-man show, everyone present would love country music.
Carpenter told a story to the group that he once surprised even himself ago by winning first place at a Brown Derby Town Contest in Dallas, Texas, during a football coach convention.
He won by spontaneously deciding to sing "Five Pound Box of Cheese" by J.D. Jewell, as he strummed a guitar that wasn't even his own.
The prize? An all-expense paid trip for two to Nashville, Tennessee, where Carpenter performed at the Grand 'Ole Opry Hotel for the next year's football coach convention.
While this story is true, some of his stories during his afternoon performance at Maple Crest may have had poetic license. For example, he bemoaning the mice in his childhood home due to too many free pounds of government cheese and reminiscing about how his dad tried to be a vet, with no formal schooling for it, but ended up having to do taxidermy instead.
Carpenter's humor spilled over into his music, as well, as he crooned out the words to "Putting on the Dog," where Mama ended up in a fur coat that she didn't know had been made out of Fido (accidental road-kill).
Carpenter explained that country music often has a sense of "comic relief" to it, partly because the other major themes are more serious - love, work, poverty and the addiction to alcohol.
Each theme received a moment of its own during Carpenter's program, and by the time he was finished, he may have been correct - the audience was "into country" and ready to put on their own jeans and denim shirts.
