“The Lord Knows I’m Drinking“
Cal Smith
Written by Bill Anderson
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
March 3, 1973
Cal Smith might be the most surprising artist to have been in the mix while I was growing up in New York City.
I’ve written before about my exposure to country music through my parents. They had visited our family in Nebraska and heard “Jason’s Farm,” and it set off years of trying to search down the record because they loved it so much.
My mom was already a huge fan of “Country Bumpkin,” which I thought was cute, but I never paid much attention to. I didn’t think much of Cal Smith beyond those two records until much later in my life when it was time to start seeking out digital versions of the two hits we knew.
We had to settle for newly recorded versions of them, and I was quickly distracted by the title of today’s entry and clicked on it out of curiosity.
And boom. A new favorite record from the era.
I love everything about the systemic dismantling of conservative Christian hypocrisy on this record. The audacity of this woman to show up at a bar and get up in his business, all in the name of God, as if God isn’t seeing the both of them anyway and fully aware of what’s going down.
I love the dig at the end where he says he’ll put in a good word for her when he talks to God himself. It reminds me of an exchange I had in college with a lunatic from the Church of Christ.
He was trying to save my soul. I thought I could end the conversation by explaining I was already a practicing Catholic, but that just made it worse.
His face dropped as he said, “You’re not saved if you’re Catholic. You’re not going to heaven.”
I stretched my face into an exaggerated shock and said, “You’ve seen the list????”
I’m not a practicing Catholic anymore, and the older I get, the more tired I am of people pushing their religious beliefs on others when they’re just a smoke screen for their bigotry and hypocritical judgment.
This record captures the essence of that classic quote from Anne Lamott: “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
Or you can just go with Jesus: “You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.”
Go work on that plank and leave the rest of us alone, lady.
“The Lord Knows I’m Drinking” gets an A.
Every No. 1 Single of the Seventies
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