Them That Don’t Know
For almost two decades I worked
for and with a fellow named Rick Hall. Rick was a larger than life music
business character who, over the period of 60 years or so in the music
business, was a part of some of the music that became a piece of the
soundtracks to most or our lives. If you aren’t aware of him I highly recommend
the Muscle Shoals documentary to get to know about him and the history of music
in our little area.
As his engineer, a songwriter,
publishing company manager, studio manager and just about every other job we
could work together on I got to know him in ways that very few people other than
his immediate family knew him. The two of us spent thousands of hours working
together and during so many poignant moments he would tell me stories I cherish.
My favorite thing about Rick was his country colloquialisms that summed up his view of the world. One that everyone who worked with Rick
remembers is “Them that don’t know don’t know they don’t know”. It was such an
accurate observation about most of the people who think they are the next great
thing in the music business. In truth, they often have no idea how far away
from working as hard as you have to in order to be competitive they really are.
As I have gotten older, I’ve
realized this saying applies to the simplest of beauties and pleasures in the
world, as well. As a young man I believed that success would afford me the
opportunity to see, feel, taste and experience the very greatest things in life
that the poor and downtrodden would just never get to experience. But I’ve come
to know there is no beauty like the beauty of simple things.
Until you have taken the Orient
Express from London under the English Channel to Paris you do not know that
you’re better off just taking a plane over. If, that is, you have any good
reason to even go to Paris. When you finally eat caviar you discover that grits
taste better. It only takes tasting expensive champagne to know that nothing is
better than your fist sip of coffee on a cold morning (and I mean coffee, not a
double shot pumpkin spice latte with whipped cream).
I am much more comfortable
traveling in my pickup truck than I ever was in any of the sports cars that I have
owned. I have never had a $10,000 Rolex watch but I do know that my cellphone
keeps perfect time and automatically changes when I go to a new time zone. And
there could be no more comfortable footwear than broken in Roper boots.
I remember listening to a symphony
in a fancy concert hall in Vienna playing Mozart thinking that I would rather
hear twin fiddles play western swing Bob Wills style. Could there be a better
smell than the simple smell of bacon in the morning or fresh cut grass?
The glory of touring the Vatican
and walking into St. Peter’s Basilica is impossible to describe- so much gold
and precious artwork everywhere. But God does not feel any closer there than He
did in a small country church in my childhood with an alto singing too loud
(and a little bit flat) two rows behind me while a country preacher brought a
sermon to the rhythm of every sister in the small church trying to keep from
passing out from the summer heat by furiously fanning with a songbook or church
bulletin.
I’ve gotten to see and do a lot of
fancy stuff in my time. Don’t misunderstand me- I’m glad I got to experience
those things. But at the end of the day, the real beauty is in the simplest
things. After you stand in line for a few hours to see famous paintings at The Louvre
or The British Museum you will forever know that you’d rather have one of your
grand kids’ school drawings hanging on your refrigerator any day. I wish I could
tell twenty somethings not to waste their time and money chasing that fancy
life their idols sing about. But you know the deal: them that don’t know don’t
know they don’t know.
"One day me, my mom and my grandfather went to 6 Flags. We got to get splashed on the log ride! It was the best day of my life!" Jackson Hillin
