While driving to Jackson recently, I must have repeated the lyric, “I’m goin’ to Jackson. Better comb my hair” about a million times in my head.

The song isn’t true to reality though because when you get there you see that plenty of people have not combed their hair but, because of the song, you expect it to be a place where everyone wears those fancy rodeo cowboy starched shirts with an expertly coiffed Johnny Cash pompadour loaf of hair atop their heads.

I’ll bet there are only a handful of people who still take these lyrics to heart and they are older farmers who smell like mothballs and live on the outskirts of Jackson and get all gussied-up to hit the Golden Corral before a fun filled date night of square dancing at the AmVets hootenanny in downtown Jackson on a Saturday night.

Not everything in the old days was better but I imagine the formal Jackson of yesteryear, where everyone in town combed their hair and worked themselves up in a frenzy where they became hotter than a pepper sprout, was probably much nicer.