Gerry House, the famous country radio personality and accomplished songwriter (recorded by Reba McEntire, LeAnn Rimes, Brad Paisley) delivers a tangent-filled, unabashedly name-dropping, highly entertaining first book.
Saying a thing “defies description” feels like a critical failure, a writer’s decision to bow out of the contest. But House’s book certainly comes close to earning that status.
Biography? Yep. Gossip? Absolutely. Marriage advice? Of course. Interesting observations and stories about music? Tons. Also: Travel recommendations. A strange story about being ignored by Taylor Swift at a public function. Dinners with Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman. Plenty of golf. You name a kitchen sink brand, and it’s probably in here.
What holds this stuff together? Humor. House has been entertaining people for years, and he’s very good at it.
He likes one-line quips. Early in the book, he includes a glossary of terms like these:
“Clearance: Music you record that you found at a yard sale.”
“Cowriter: Person who actually writes the song while the artist is on a cell phone to landscaper.”
He also concocts a list of fake band names: Righty Frizzell. Crotch Moxley. The Foggy Minded Mountain Boys. House says ‘70s singer Johnny Paycheck “was a genius at singing and questionable at life.”
House’s writing style brings to mind the town sheriff and title character of the 1939 western movie Destry Rides Again. Destry, played by a young Jimmy Stewart, shows a knack for making points using amusing anecdotes that initially seem completely unrelated to the matter at hand. He declares, for example, his intention to keep fighting the bad guys by telling a story about a stamp collector he knows.
House has a similar talent for suddenly turning rhetorical corners. He talks about dogs and cats, for example, and then segues unexpectedly in a new direction. “Cats hold a grudge and retaliate by peeing in yours slippers if they can,” he writes. Out of nowhere, he then mentions Brad Paisley, also “a cat … friendly and smart and adorable, but he’s a cat.” (Hide your slippers next time Paisley comes to town.)
It’s not as if Paisley can complain, given that House helped break the singer’s “The World”—one of the last decade’s most joyous hits in any genre—on his radio show. Apparently, this happened by accident. House originally planned to play a different tune from Paisley’s album, but he “forgot to select the song,” because he was “distracted or talking or reading the newspaper.” No matter. “The World” did just fine.