Thorne had tried, once, to tell him. To explain that real country music was fuck all to do with lost dogs and rhinestones… Thorne had tried to convey to Holland the beauty of George Jones’s voice, the wickedness in Merle Haggard’s and the awesome rumble of Cash, the dark daddy of them all. A few pints in, he was telling anybody who would listen that Hank Williams was a tortured genius who was undoubtedly the Kurt Cobain of his day and he may even have begun to sing ‘Your Cheating Heart’ around closing time. He couldn’t recall every detail, but he did remember that Holland’s eyes had begun to glaze over long before then…
From Lazybones, by Mark Billingham.