Well, they loaded up the train
with the cows and the boys.
Off to the stockyards
at the end of the track.
To hold the fort,
they weighed their worth
Then they all bought a new Cadillac
And they raced out on the plains
all the way back.
This is part two of a three-part blog series and those are the lyrics to the second verse of the song Fort Worth - a joyful “chapter” in the twelve-song story album I wrote about my Texas cattle ranching family. If you’ve ever seen the movie Giant, multiply that by six and you have the second Texas generation of Cluck brothers - Cluck being the ironic last name of these cow boys.
In the bible there were six cisterns which held water. From these six, Jesus turned water into wine. I'm told that Homer Cluck, their father and my great grandfather, used a slightly tilted "C" for his brand because, he would explain, "It holds water." - a saying he used meaning a thing was worthy, worthwhile, dependable, durable, etc. I’m here to talk about the celebration of prosperity in America today and I’m going to start right here: Of one hundred verses in the bible about money, this is my favorite...
Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot. Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions, land power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil—this is the gift of God. For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart. (Ecclesiastes 5:18-20)
I’m not going to get into the beef debate - just yet, for it is a mightily complex and quite honestly, gut wrenching conundrum for me in ways. Yet, in other ways it's quite simple and crystal clear. But, we’ll get to that later. There’s a video I refer to often when talking money matters in America. I always start with the disclaimer, “Before I show you this, know that I am not a socialist.” The video concerns wealth inequality in America, produced in 2012, and I refer to it for the value of its visuals, specifically when mentoring young artists on the back end of being mercifully spit out of the putrid belly of the whale that is the music business, never more grateful to find my slimy self on the shores of “normal” life again.
Let me give you a broke, single-mother songwriter's working class rap sheet: I was a paralegal on a 30 million dollar RICCO (racketeering, a.k.a. organized crime) lawsuit in the cattle hide trading business. We represented the plaintiff, and we won! Next, I launched a natural gas firm in the deregulated market of New Mexico with my father and one other salesman. Next, I was a staff accountant for a commercial builder in Dallas. Next, I managed an independent ("descendant" of RCA Records) mastering studio on Music Row. Next, I was a staff songwriter for a big-name but at the time, relatively small fish, Nashville publishing company. Next, I was a software development team lead in a two-year, world wide accounting conversion for CFSI (Caterpillar Financial Services Incorporated, a.k.a. Corporate America.) Next, I launched a Texas retail electric provider in the newly deregulated market of Texas - as a division of the natural gas firm my father and I had built almost a decade earlier. From there, I went into full time ministry and eventually back to focusing on writing this album, and have been blissfully broke ever since. ...The last half of that last sentence is a bold-faced lie.
Good Lord! I just wanted to be a hippie songwriter. What in the Sam Hill happened? Fort Worth happened, that's what happened. In 2003, I was wrapping my mind around the concept of deregulation and the fact that TXU, the only electric provider available to the fine folks of the Dallas - Fort Worth area, had just awarded their brand new CEO an ELEVEN MILLION DOLLAR signing bonus, while my 30-year paralegal mother, serving in an upscale law firm in downtown Dallas, struggled to pay her increasingly high electric bill on a sweet little garden townhome in Arltington. At the time, I was living in an apartment in downtown Fort Worth that overlooked the growing cityscape, including the Worthington Hotel (see yesterday’s blog)
Memories of the Cluck brothers’ days of racing Cadillacs in celebratory prosperity beckoned in constant gestures as I would, for example, jog past The Man with the Briefcase on my way to Corner Bakery to stress eat the caloric equivalent of what I’d just jogged off. The music business was crumbling as it was literally eating itself into the digital age. “But what about the Clucks?” Did they have it right? Wrong? Did they blindly stumble into it all, partially driven by a reckoning with their own childhood memories of the dirty thirties and the great depression? So many questions and years of contemplating later, still so many.
Yet, one answered question is now settled in my mind and heart: What "happens in Fort Worth"...feeds the world. (To be continued)
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