Last Tuesday afternoon, I was lying in my deckchair beneath the unyielding Dunedin sun listening to Mike's Country Show on newly branded Otago Access Radio (OAR) and on came Red Sovine. Mike is a local lad - he had his dad playing guitar in the studio the week before - and he knows what the good stuff is. Red Sovine is the sort of country music Mike likes.
The song was called Little Joe.
Red Sovine was so much more than a moral philosopher. A contemporary of Hank Williams, he had some hits and then he discovered sentimentality songs, recitations that not so much jerked tears as sucked them from the eye in buckets.
Many of Red's big songs in the second phase of his career were spoken from the cab of an 18-wheeler truck, with a trucker's voice to die and go to heaven for, like Teddy Bear, his biggest hit.
They say true country music tells a story. Teddy Bear is one of these. Red happens on a crippled little boy, Teddy Bear, talking on his dead father's CB radio, which is now his only companion.
Red chews the fat with Teddy Bear and it transpires Teddy Bear wants to be taken for a ride in an 18-wheeler just like his dad used to do for him before his truck tragically ran off the road in the snow. Red tries to swallow a lump in his throat that just won't stay down, and finally turns his truck around, the delivery will have to wait, and drives straight to Teddy Bear's house. Imagine his surprise when every other trucker in the state, who had all been listening on the CB, was there as well. The queue went back three blocks.
No musical country does a follow-up like America, and Little Joe was Red Sovine's hammer-them-into-the-ground follow-up to Teddy Bear. This time Red is looking through a truckstop window and sees a tiny little puppy, half-starved and shakin' with fear. Red carries him into the cab and it is as if the puppy had been there all his life. Red calls him Little Joe.
A few months later, Red is driving with Little Joe and there's a fearsome storm, the worst Red had ever seen, and a camper full of kids, its driver blinded by the rain, hurtles straight at him. Red wrenches the wheel to save the lives of the children and his rig goes right off the mountain and explodes.
But Little Joe, his tiny body fattened and strong from many truckstop stops, hauls Red clear.
However, the accident takes Red's sight. He would never drive again and he knew now how Teddy Bear felt when his legs were taken away from him.
What's worse, nobody is talking about Little Joe, so Red figures Little Joe lost his life saving his.
Red goes to his brother's house - and all the truckers are there! And so is Little Joe! With a handle attached to his collar! Yes, Little Joe is Red's new eyes.
But Red Sovine was so much more than a moral philosopher and truck-driving tear-sucker.
He found another gear during Christmas. Here It Is Christmas was a divorcee's draining Christmas lament, Faith In Santa had a poor runaway boy talking to a sidewalk Santa, and his yuletide masterpiece, What Does Christmas Look Like?, was a little blind girl asking her father to describe the Christmas she cannot see.
Otago Access Radio has just gone FM - 105.4. Real country music every Tuesday afternoon at 3.30 in stereo. It doesn't get any better than this.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
