When I was a boy, I used to spend as much time as possible with my Grandma, Bobbie Grundberg. She lived down in Beaumont, Texas and I can see her yet, wiping her hands on her apron, sipping a cold Pearl beer, tapping her toes and frying us up some “scrammelt eggs, biskits an’ sostages” as I played her all the songs I had written since the last time I passed through down from Canada. She told me about my Texas Cherokee heritage at her kitchen table.
Here is one of those songs, I found recently while searching for some fire starter for my wood stove. I never did record this hit (wink) but I sure don’t mind if someone else lights it up. I wrote it in Bobbie's kitchen in the 70s. I called it, Do The Math. Three or four chords are all you need but you can add more if you are a picker. Be nice to have a pedal-steel guitar and twin fiddles. However, consider this letter my open invitation to any musicians out there reading this, to put your own musical wings on this song. Bobbie's listening.
Do The Math (Lyrics by Michael Hawes / Music by You)
Got a six pack, some cigarettes and a foot that's always cold,
squared my roots in Louisiana when I was only six years old.
Been on the run since I was one and fell in love at ten,
put eighteen wheels on the sixty-six and subtracted another friend.
So, one more double for my trouble and play L-17,
twenty-nine times that two-step equals the ghost in my machine.
Smoke any given number and plead the Fifth, divided by the telephone,
you get a lonesome long-haired Texas boy three thousand miles from home.
fin