Jimmy Carter - Legend Country Singer

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
 
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.
 
Just as well he stayed in music-if you can call it that. With his fusion of country styling in terms of the music itself and the lyrics he wrote (see, for example, his hit "I Can't Never Look You in the Eye", which gets constant air time on chick rock stations), he country music's answer to Phil Donahue. (No wonder his stuff is so popular on painfully PC campuses like Oberlin and Swarthmore.) If he had ever indulged his whims to go into politics, I shudder to think what might have happened.
 
Just as well he stayed in music-if you can call it that. With his fusion of country styling in terms of the music itself and the lyrics he wrote (see, for example, his hit "I Can't Never Look You in the Eye", which gets constant air time on chick rock stations), he country music's answer to Phil Donahue. (No wonder his stuff is so popular on painfully PC campuses like Oberlin and Swarthmore.) If he had ever indulged his whims to go into politics, I shudder to think what might have happened.

Politics? You're not serious, are you? Look at his biography. he was a smart, sensitive, indecisive, peace-loving, fairly nonassertive guy (I mean, even his marriage survived stardom, how many people can say that?). How was he supposed to survive an election campaign?

Though what with his high-mindedness and his knack for listening, he may have made a good career diplomat. We'll never know.
 
Politics? You're not serious, are you? Look at his biography. he was a smart, sensitive, indecisive, peace-loving, fairly nonassertive guy (I mean, even his marriage survived stardom, how many people can say that?). How was he supposed to survive an election campaign?

Though what with his high-mindedness and his knack for listening, he may have made a good career diplomat. We'll never know.

I said "whims": granted, he talked about entering politics in no more than a sardonic/semi-serious manner. I'm saying that if he ever did indulge those whims/fantasies, and ever got elected to a federal office (he was rumored to be lining up a run for Congress from some rural district in Georgia)...well, it would have been a giant leap forward for political correctness and a colossal pain in the butt otherwise.
 
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