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This is my first time that I placed the song of the day before writing anything, but today I’ve changed my format because of the subject matter. I remember my Grandmother brought a copy of the LP of Welfare Cadillac and I thought it would be a good song to start my series on the poor in America. I always I found the video of the song on the internet. To be honest I was amazed by this video from the Porter Wagoner show. You might need to watch it another time in order to really understand what’s going on. I’ve heard the song from listening to the LP when I was a little kid, but I was not prepared to see this video as an adult and to see the disgraceful laughter of the audience during the song and if that wasn’t pitiful enough Porter decided to take it to another level and talk to this singer where he could make fun of his “big fat lazy wife” and the audience laughed even more at that. After all what could be more funny than lazy, fat, poor people!
Today I don’t believe there are a lot of people who remember Guy Drake and one would have to be as old as me to remember The Porter Wagoner Show. Of coarse there is something we all remember from the show. That’s Dolly Parton! The grand lady of country music who wrote the song Coat of Many Colors about her poor mother sewing her a coat out of different pieces of cloth because that’s all she had. She goes to school and the other kids laugh at her, just like this audience laughs, but Dolly sings that every stich was sewed with love. I wonder what did Dolly think of this song, did she watch it live backstage or was she busy and didn’t see it at all? Now I know that you know where I’m going with this and you would be right. However something happened the other day in the Arkansas Legislature that changed my focus on this post. It’s about the poor, reading, and the school lunch funding. But as it turns out, Dolly Parton is still important to this cause.
Dolly Parton started the Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library in 1995. The program mails out a free book each month for children from birth until they are five years old. The books are chosen by experts in the education and writing field and are age appropriate for the child. I can tell a personal story about Dolly’s Imagination Library. My niece has always been a big fan of Dolly and when she gave birth to Mollie (her big brothers named their new sister Mollie Dah! Mollie is the girl train on Thomas the Train) my niece enrolled Mollie in Dolly’s program. Every month Mollie received a book, but somehow our sweet Mollie thought the books were coming from her daddy. We couldn’t ever get Mollie to understand that they weren’t coming from her daddy so after a while we just let her go on and believe that.
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library is an example of showing love, that’s right real love to the poor kids of America. The Republicans in the Arkansas Legislature are not showing love to the poor kids in Arkansas they are showing what’s really in their hearts. That’s the hatred Republicans have for the poor. They claim that by taking away the little funding (money) they have their helping the poor. Because just like today’s song and the audience agreement they believe giving any money to those poor, fat people is stealing from them!
Yes I have a story to tell about Porter’s interview, where this singer makes fun of his big fat wife, and the audience thought that was so funny! My sister was a church secretary for several years serving at three different Southern Baptist church’s including our current church we attend. At the first church my sister served at the pastor came into her office one day and told her that there was a needy family that the church was going to help out and he needed my sister to find out what size of clothes the family needed. My sister got the information and put in on the Pastor’s desk. The next day the Pastor came back in and told my sister that he got some else to help that needy family, we (our church) wasn’t going help them. What changed we were going to help them one day and the next day not. Well my sister got the clothes sizes and it turned out the woman was very large, so that explained that. If fat people came to the church the Pastor would give them a box of food but as soon they were out the door, complain or say something demeaning about those fat people wanting free food. So there was no doubt what happened here as so as the Pastor found out it was a big fat woman, he handed them of to someone else. By the way he never did use that as an illustration in any of his sermons! I’ll have more to say what “good” people think of fat people in a later song. I haven’t decided on a song for tomorrow but it may be Dolly’s Coat of Many Colors.