So what could have the legendary country singer, Jimmy Carter, had been if he put his mind to it other than being the pot smoking & alcoholic country singer who has defined a generation?
Discuss
His drug habit tends to be way overblown IMO. Of course I'm a bit of a fanboy, so I'm not exactly representative. Nonetheless, read some of his lyrics. There is no way a booze-addled pothead could have written them. In many ways he is to country what Dylan and Cohen are to folk.
But regarding his options, not a lot of people are aware that he was a career navy officer before he became a musician. IIRC he later credited the influence of a music teacher during his high school years (Willings or Willards or something - an underemployed graduate of some East Coast conservatory reduced to teaching high school in rural Georgia, the thirties were like that. Also himself a minor light of the folk movement of the fifties unless I'm much mistaken). But he wasn't anything like a drifter or beatnik in his youth. He ecxelled academically and graduated in the top ten percent of Annapolis. Hell, he served under Rickover, that has to mean something. Maybe if the two had been more personally compatible, Lieut. Carter could have stayed in the nuke business and made submarining his career. He certainly had the brains and discipline for it.
Could you see him as an admiral? OK, that's probably taking things too far. But retiring as a captain sometime in the sixties and getting a job in consulting or engineering somewhere. Hard to imagine him in a quiet house somewhere around Newport News commuting to work every morning, but stranger things have happened. It certainly wasn't fated that he would be sucked into the beat generation.