The night Hank Williams Jr. ruined our camping trip

This post sorta goes right along with THIS post.

When I was growing up, my dad was a Knox Co. public school teacher. That meant that he had the summers off. We didn’t have a lot of money to go on vacations but we did manage to go to the lake quite often. On occasions we would camp out at the lake. I was thinking about those times this morning and one in particular kept coming back in my mind. Let me tell you about it…

The year was 1980; it was probably in June or July so I was still 13-years old. We still had the avocado green Plymouth Fury station wagon and we had that thing packed tight with camping and fishing gear. We headed off to Black Fox, one of my dad’s favorite fishing holes at that time. That was way before some developers ruined it with a bunch of houses. If there was anything that I loved to do back then, despite this incident, it was fishing with my dad. What made it even better was camping out! Dad never did like staying in a camping area or in a tent or anything; his idea of camping was a sleeping bag and the great outdoors. On this occasion we did bring a few of those fold out lawn chairs that you could lay on, and we used them along with our sleeping bags for beds.

We arrived at the lake around 4:00 in the evening. We backed the station wagon down as close to the lake as we could and unloaded our stuff. It was so quiet and peaceful. Fish were jumping in the lake and we couldn’t wait to wet a line. We unloaded our stuff and set up camp there on the side of the bank and then headed toward the water to fish. We fished for a couple of hours and then built a campfire. It was the perfect spot on the perfect evening. We were sitting around our campfire enjoying ourselves when all of a sudden, a loud truck came pulling in about 10-feet away from us. There were 3 or 4 rednecks in the back of the truck and they all jumped out. They built themselves a big fire, pulled their cooler out of the back and commenced to having themselves a party. Of course you can’t have a party without music so them fellers had them a big loud stereo in the truck and I reckon they wanted to entertain the entire county.

As you probably can guess, my dad was none too happy about all of this. We had drove way out here in the middle of nowhere to get away from people and to enjoy the lake and family time. “Well I’ll be dadgum,” dad said, "drive all the way out here and have to put up with this!” I could barely hear him over the loud music that was playing just a few feet away from us but I knew he was mad. The song that was playing had a driving beat of a large bass drum; “bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, Kaw-liga was a wooden Indian standing over by the door, fell in love with a Choctaw maiden over in the Georgia store, Kaw-ligaaaaaaaaaaaa, whooooooooo.” I thought it was pretty cool myself. As you well know, I was raised mostly on Gospel, Bluegrass, and Folk type music. I had heard Kaw-liga before but never like this. My dad stood up with a disgusted look on his face. “That dadgum Hank Williams Jr., has ruined that song!” dad stated. Dad didn’t know it but I made a mental note of that and from that moment on I was bound and determined to buy myself a Hank Williams Jr. album.

We ended up leaving that night and not camping out there. The next time I had some money, I went to the Kmart and bought myself Hank Williams Junior’s, “Habits Old and New” album. For the next several weeks, if you walked by my room you would hear, “bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, Kaw-liga was a wooden Indian standing over by the door, fell in love with a Choctaw maiden over in the Georgia store, Kaw-ligaaaaaaaaaaaaa, whooooooooo.” With me singing to the top of my lungs right along with old Hank Jr.

Well, thank the good Lord I finally grew out of that stage but I will shamefully admit that every now and then I would enjoy hearing me some Hank.