“It’s been a little while since I hit you with free-style,” as Poter Wagoner once sang. Okay, it wasn’t PW, it was Ice T but who’s counting? I’ve been busy since my last post but wanted to say something about the late C&W singer, just ’cause his legacy is so damn strange, and has so little to do with the mush that comes out of Nashville today.

I was driving back and forth between Connecticut and Brooklyn last month and picked up some new CD’s for the radio-less portions of the trip: the new Superchunk, the new Robert Plant, the Dum-Dum Girls, all of which I liked and which have stayed in rotation (especially the latter). But the most compelling of the bunch might be a CD from Wagoner’s 1970s’s oeuvre entitled What Ain’t To Be, Just Might Happen.

You’re to be forgiven if you don’t remember Porter Wagoner. You would have to be pretty hardcore country to care; if you set your wayback machines to the 1960’s you’ll hear he had a couple big hits, most notably “Green, Green Grass of Home” and “A Satisfied Mind.” If his work had a theme it might have been man’s unregenerate nature, as seen in the reflection of his Nudie suit from the bottom of a shot glass.

By the time of the recordings on What Ain’t to Be, Porter was a king in Nashville. He was known as Mr. Grand Ole Opry and introduced the world, and his TV audience, to Dolly Parton. But he was recording songs like “The Rubber Room” and “If I Lose My Mind,” all in a private studio and seemingly pulled from more than just his imagination. It’s commonplace now to see stars go crazy in public, but it still takes cojones, and maybe a big blond pompadour, to write songs about it.

For despite its anti-drug stance at the time, a lot of country music of the seventies was beginning to acknowledge that too much booze and pills will make you act batshit. Don Carpenter, who wrote the screenplay for the great unsung country music meltdown movie of the seventies, Payday, said that he was inspired by stories he heard about Wagoner from Shel Silverstein. (Whether they were true or not is another story.) In a performance that makes Jeff Bridges’s foray into the same territory in Crazy Heart look rather safe and studied, Rip Torn played a country music legend careening toward the grave, one hand on his prescription pills and the other on some girl he just met.

Torn seemed to be reprising that role last year when he tried to rob a bank in Salisbury, CT — the town he calls home. As the title of one of Porter’s songs would have it, “I Haven’t Learned a Thing.”