Where His Dad Sat

Time to move beyond "my/his father's shoes" as the cliche — as in my/his father's shoes are large ones to fill.... Fortunately, we've got just the spectacle to help.

The shoe words and images are pretty well shopworn. In addition to all the bad Hallmark poetry and spiritless obituaries that have dragged it down, we've also lived through the country ditty "Walking in My Father's Shoes," and the made-for-tv snorefest, "In His Father's Shoes."

What's needed is a new way to say or do the same thing. A few years ago Eric Clapton tried working with "My Father's Eyes." Nice, melancholy, but not something that draws attention to itself.

Not like RISKING DEATH in your father's seat. That's the way that Robbie Knievel rolls. [Earlier: Daddy Daredevil] Next May, Evel's son will try and jump London busses, the stunt that ended his father's career. Junior Knievel will even upgrade to a Harley, just like dad. So let a thousand cliches bloom, a million images fly as we praise the son for trying to fill his daddy's seat.

Cashing In

Here's an interesting father strategy. Don't tell your kid what you know, tell them what they should know and wait to see what happens.

Singer/songwriter Johnny Cash was a tad unsatisfied with his daughter Roseanne's musical knowledge of classic country. He gave her a list of 100 songs she ought to know ("really know") if she was going to be a musician. The result, other than the influences found in her music, will be on display in the fall as she releases "The List," what she learned from her father's suggestion distilled into 12 songs. As she put it in her press release:

"If my father had been a martial arts master, he might have passed a martial arts ‘secret’ on to me, his oldest child,” Cash says. “If he had been a surgeon, he might have taken me into his operating room and pointed out the arteries and organs. If he were a robber baron, he might have surveyed his empire and said, ‘Honey, some day this will all be yours!’. But he was a musician and a songwriter, and he gave me 'The List.' "

Johnny Cash's Top 100 Essential Country Songs


For comparison's sake, her brother, working without his list but from the same material offered — in a surprising collaboration with Snoop Dog — the "Johnny Cash Remixed" last year:

Can't Stop

Upon the precipice of a new baby, a common (already) father fear is whether or not he can find the same (or at least enough) love for another when he is already all-consumed with adoration for his current child(ren). To that fear we dedicate this week's objet d'eBay, the Solomon Burke 45 vinyl, "I Can't Stop." A father's capacity for love can just keep growing.

Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Burke, the self-proclaimed King of Rock and Soul, has 21 kids and 88 (let's just round to 100) grandchildren. He can't stop loving his kids — or their mothers, apparently — and even dedicated his performance of "If I Give My Heart to You" from Like a Fire, his latest album, to all his children.

The fact is, no matter how many he has, He Can't Stop:

A Tour for "That's My Job"

As far as googlesearching goes, there is nothing remotely Jewish about Conway Twitty. Yet, it is hard not to think of schmaltz on corn pone while listening to "That's My Job" and fighting back at least a small tear. The twist at the end of the lyrics when the son makes his father's chorus his own is enough to turn even the hardest soul a little verklempt.

Twitty wanted to be Elvis and managed to do okay without going down that road. He has been gone over 15 years, but the good intentions of his song do live on ... in various stylings:

Thats My Job

In addition to the videos, his four children have finally stopped fighting with his third widow (the one that was none of their mother) and have produced Conway Twitty: The Man, The Music, The Legend, The Musical, which they have also made their story and put on tour of mid-sized theaters and fairgrounds. No doubt they would like you to think, in the paraphrased words of their father: "Everything [they] do is because of [him]/to keep [him] safe with [them].

King for a Day

Today, King Father hands his crown to Prince Son in Bhutan, a Himalayan kingdom 101 years old. New king Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, by most accounts, has the good fortune to follow in a popular monarch's footsteps and his father has the wonderful opportunity to see his son start out in a new direction — the monarch is no longer the dictator of government — and with popular support for well defined programs.

Imagine how glorious that father-child situation compared to the one between (for example) daughter Jett and father Hank Williams. Jett is a singer and the illegitimate dauther who never met her country music legend father. [Earlier: Tuned In] JW and HW Jr. (with whom she shares their father's estate) have culled CDs from unreleased material of their father. While it would be wonderful if it were more, but the result just seems to highlight that the main connection seems to be name and money.

Also living with name and money, and in this case the resulting infamy, is Omar bin Laden [Earlier: Legaciousness], who might be rich, but certainly isn't wanted in Spain (or probably anywhere else). Omar shares with father Osama wealth and well as being crazy, but it is unclear how far their connection goes beyond that.

Although sonO has called for daddyO to behave, he is unlikely to be given a chance by the present or history to reclaim a legacy and draw himself closer to a beloved father. In short, there is unlikely to be an opportunity such as was given to Peggy Wallace Kennedy to revision the historic, hateful legacy of her father (George "segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever" Wallace).

So all hail the old king and all hail new. It doesn't happen often enough that a father and child combine for a legacy bigger than the mere sum of the two parts.

Togetherness

One more thing that makes dadding so hard is that even the best of advice doesn't fit every situation. Once upon a time it was thought that writing a book made one an expert, so let's say that black-hatted cowboy crooner Tim McGraw knows his way around the parent corral based on his new kiddie tome, My Little Girl.

MLG tells the tale of a dad and daughter who set off on a day of errands. Advice from father of three daughters McGraw is to, "Do what you have to do in your regular routine and take them with you. It makes all the difference in the world." And there doesn't seem to be anything that could go wrong with that...

Except when you have to go get a cell phone from your wife. And she works at a strip club. And you get a lap dance while you are waiting to pick up the phone (even if you dispute the police report). And you leave your baby asleep with the keys in the unlocked pickup.

Sometimes it's better to let them wander on their own and just know they'll find their way and come back, much as Josh Brolin did in learning from his father so he could get to the essence of President 43 Bush (who unlearned from his pop) in the current W.

Competition

In the current Essence, songhawk Usher unveils his son and offers some non-lyrical thoughts on being a father:

“I think I’m learning how selfish I really can be as an individual. Man, before you just get up and go everyday and you work people to oblivion —- and I do. But when you have a child, it’s like, ‘Wow! All of this time now goes towards making sure that one, he has the milk that he needs. He’s being burped properly. Diapers are being changed —- and Lord knows he has let me have it! I am changing diapers!”

Previously, he offered an apology for his dad — who died in January, but had walked out when Usher was two, with no reconciliation until about two years ago — among his lyrics to Anything.

Since, he, like many artists, overtly incorporates his world into his work, it shouldn't be too long before such an opinions on being a dad manifests itself into raps. Similarly, expect to hear from Aussie countryman Keith Urban soon about life with his young'un, Sunday Rose. He, too, fits chords to his life ... and previously hit gold with his (Song for) Dad:

People, Not Just Places

They (the omniscient "them") say that there are two sides to every story. But the tales of dads are polyhedrons — a shoutout to Thing 2 who is now mathing them at school.

So when the Country Music Hall of Fame wanted to celebrate his father as a way to bring in a bit more tourist business, Hank Williams Jr. became a hard son to romance. His dad's musical legacy claimed many children, but his biological offspring were left with some more difficult issues to deal with in life. [Earlier: Embrace, Escape, Repeat]

But the study of one father's family tree was grown in Nashville and "Family Tradition: The Williams Family Legacy," will be available for vacationers and others through December 2009.

Not that every vacation has to go somewhere to be joyfilled. Some vacations can be ecstatic celebrations of simple love, as when Ohio's Andre Sanders took his place among fathers with their children when he took a vacation day to build a Rain Gutter Regatta sloop with daughter Andrea.

** And now Things 1, 2 and Me are off. **

Advise and Content

Is Snoop Dogg, the Blunt rapper, such a noteworthy fathering expert thanks to his "Fatherhood" [Earlier: "Forgiveness" and "What You See; What You Get"] that Marc Antony will be taking his advice on how to raise his twins? Not that "one baby at a time" is a particularly controversial hint to daddyhood, it's really just the source of the wisdom that causes wonder.

Or should the wonder be shelved in the face of either "just like everyone has an a**h**e, everyone has an opinion" or the preferable, "Father Knows Best." In any case, fathers do give advice. Nothing stops them. From dead fathers — Dmitri Nabokov asks pop and author and deceased Vladimir — and you can't keep one-time first time dads from sharing their experience to one on the cusp of joining their club.

So, dads advise wisely. Even dead fathers provide sage counsel. Is it any wonder Mr. Dogg is an expert or a daughter peddles her butcher dad's advice and wisdom after his death in the prosaically entitled, Lunchmeat & Life Lessons.

** For the most part the Marvelettes got it right, "Daddy Knows Best." **

(Not) Letting Dads Go

Do you really need a traditional family to know the importance of daddies?

Doubt it. And it's a good thing because the traditional family (not really that traditional in most cultures or times), according to British Conservative party leader Lain Duncan Smith, the proposal letting lesbian couples (sans hombre) be parents to one embryo would, “drive the final nail into the coffin of the traditional family.”

Fathers aren't necessary, they're irreplaceable. As Trisha Yearwood sings on her new CD in the final cut, a paean to her late pop, ""If I could write a song that would bring you back to me, it would be the only song I'd ever sing."

** How can anyone forget that fathers are not just fertilizers? **