Country Music Broke My Brain

By Gerry House

I read the book, Country Music Broke My Brain, in the hope it would be better than the title. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. The author is Gerry House, who hosted a syndicated radio show for 25 years, penned songs such as Reba McEntire’s “Little Rock,” and wrote comedic scripts for numerous TV awards shows. The book, advertised as “a behind-the-microphone peek at Nashville’s famous & fabulous artists,” could have been a treasure trove of inside stories.

Instead, House prefers to ridicule the music that gave him a livelihood. “For more than thirty-five years, I’ve been subjected to country music,” he says. That’s apparently supposed to be funny, along with his statement, “Country music causes brain damage.” The front cover billing of “possibly America’s #1 country radio personality” must also be a joke. In my fifty-plus years as a country music fan and almost fifteen years as biographer and researcher, I don’t recall ever hearing his name.

He is entertaining, no doubt about that, and more comedian than country music insider. One chapter provides a glossary of terms. A few are clever, such as “Press Release: Lies sent to newspaper, radio, and TV. Also, how you open the bathroom door on a tour bus.” Others are demeaning and without humor, such as “Steel Guitar: Country instrument most used to get prisoners of war to confess.”

The remaining chapters read as if he wrote topics on index cards (incidents from personal life, childhood through parenthood, career experiences, interactions with other people), pulled several cards at random, and produced 3-6 pages of comedy to tie the topics together. There is no chronology or continuity or theme.

As an example, a chapter titled “The Flatts” begins with a description of the author’s wife searching for her underwire bra. Then House introduces the three members of Rascal Flatts, talks about their beautiful wives, whom he has never seen naked, and grumbles because “guess who” played a Rascal Flatts album cut that became a big hit and he never got any credit for the discovery. The chapter ends with, “As far as I can determine, Gary LaVox has never seen my wife naked. Or even in her under-why-er.”

Here is an author quote that surprised me because the question was often on my mind while reading this book: “What about country music? Did author boy forget about some tie-in to country music?” This was after two pages on redecorating his house and being forced by his wife to choose from 1.52 million different shades of white. The connection? He writes, “Here it comes. Most country singers are a variation of white. I don’t mean skin color; I mean they are just ever so slightly different.”

The “Taylor Swift” chapter describes the rise of Taylor Swift and House’s admiration for her. He says he “suggested she was about to get so successful she would soon make a gospel album called Lord and Taylor.” When he talked about her on his radio show, she expressed her appreciation by sending him a painting with “Because you believed in me” written across the top. “It was hand-painted and signed by Taylor,” House writes. “It meant so much. . . . I put it on the wall and looked at it almost every day.” Then he tells the story of seeing Taylor and her dad at an awards banquet, and they ignored him when he sat down by them. He ends the chapter with, “I gave the painting away.”

If you like cornball humor, if you enjoy not knowing whether a famous person really said or did something or whether the author is merely poking fun at a friend, this is the book for you. If you’re interested in learning about actual people and events from a country music insider, you won’t find much in Country Music Broke My Brain.