Bear Grease - Ep. 411: This Country Life - The Soundtrack of Our Lives

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

Brent's talking about music this week and the role it plays in his life. We can all relate to the moment when a song from your past takes you to a remembered place or triggers a memory of people or events. Hearing new songs that describe what you thought was indescribable is another joy altogether. Having the opportunity to spend time with the artists that can do that makes for a great story we think you'll enjoy. Shop This Country Life Merch Connect with Brent and MeatEater MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and Youtube Clips Subscribe to the MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube Shop This Country Life Merch Shop Bear Grease MerchSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

First Lights fieldwear collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends. Products built for early mornings, full days in real use. Hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season. Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new fieldwear gear at firstlight.

Welcome to this country life. I'm your host, Brent Reeves. From Coon Hunting to Trotlining and Just General Country Living, I want you to stay a while as I share my experiences and life lessons. This Country Life is presented by Case Knives from the Storemore Studio on Meat Eat Eaters Podcast Network, bringing you the best outdoor podcasts that Airways have to offer. All right, friends, grab a chair or drop that tailgate. I've got some stories to share. The soundtrack of our lives.

Music has been accosted for me as far back as I can remember. I enjoy the details and the meanings behind the songs and the folks who play them. Some tunes are just filler and enjoyable noise, while others, they take on a whole different level of importance to the listener. I'm going to talk about that today. So let's get to it. Welcome to the Grand Old Opera. Let her go, boys.

I remember hearing that most Saturday nights when my dad and I were down on the potlatch timber company roads and Celine River bottoms of rural Cleveland County, Arkansas. We'd sit in the cab of the truck listening intently to Porter Wagner, Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, and hoping to hear Charlie Pride or a story from Jerry Clower. We'd sing along with the ones we knew and weighed impatiently during the square dancing segments to finish

so we could hear who was singing next. Sometimes during the dancing, the announcer would read a commercial for Tobacco, Martha White Flower, and that would trigger a memory of a story from my dad. He dialed back the volume on the AM-only radio and his truck a bit to tell it to me. All through the story, I was hearing something similar to what y'all hear every week. week on this show.

A soundtrack that subconsciously elevated the story I was listening to. I didn't know it at the time, obviously, but I can't tell you the amount of time since then that I've sat here writing about a memory from those days and not heard what I remember to have been playing at that moment. The catalyst of that memory most times haven't been triggered by a song. Then when the dog struck a track, we'd pile out of the cab like it was on fire but listen to the music that the dog would play. Now, according to Mr. Webster, by definition, music is vocal or instrumental sounds

or both combined in such a way as to produce beauty, a form, harmony, and expression of emotion. It's the expression of emotion in that definition that. I identified with. Without emotion, it couldn't trigger a memory. That's the connection beyond the physicality of actually hearing it. It's associated with our emotions at the time we heard it and either what we were doing or who we were with. All of it intertwined to the consistency of a bird-nested fishing reel. I can hear Willie Nelson singing me and Paul, and as soon as I recognize the tune, which is within the first two seconds of its start, I'm sitting in my dad's company truck listening to that song on an eight-track player.

Some or most of you are going to have to Google that one, but I'm on the passenger side of that truck making the final left-hand turn on a driveway that led from the huge metal chicken houses to a farmer's home. They were expecting us, had our dinner fixed, and it was almost noon. Now, it's not occasionally that I find myself there when I hear that song, it's every time I hear it. Every single time, regardless of where I am or what I'm doing, two seconds into the intro, and I'm riding in that truck and hearing the gravel crunch under the tires. I can feel the air conditioner blowing on me, and I can smell a hint of my dad's

aftershave and a chicken house full of everything that came out of the chicken except the eggs. That mile-oader is sent being a trigger for a whole different set of memories, but we're not talking about chicken stuff. We're talking about music. In August 2011, I was standing at my post to the entrance of the Arkansas State Capitol. The legislature was out of session so the building was occupied only with daily employees and a few summer visitors. Anyone could visit the building on any given day, but they had to pass. through a metal detector and a bag search at the visitor's entrance.

All other access to the building was by employee key cards. The entrance location was my third two-hour post of the shift and my turn to be the Walmart greeter of sorts. My job was addressing folks as they entered the building, directing them through the security protocols, answering any questions, and pointing them toward the bathrooms. That being the majority of the request since there were no committee. meetings or hearings taking place in the absence of all the lawmakers.

Now, August is hot in Arkansas. Most of the folks that walked around looking at the few exhibits on display were there more for the air conditioning than a history lesson. In my career as a law enforcement officer, the years that I spent at the state capital were some of my most memorable. And for the present, we'll just leave it at that. But on this hot day, in the last third of a blister in Arkansas' I saw a man walking the door being escorted by a former member of the legislature.

He wore a faded, pearl-snapped, long-sleeved denim shirt, Levi's, cowboy boots, and an easy, recognizable brown felt hat that he removed from his head with his left hand and revealed a head of thin and gray hair that he combed as best he could with the fingers of his right hand. The ones that were still there, anyway. he was short of the normal tally of five by a sawmill accident when he was young. His long hair passed the collar of his shirt in the back and framed his tan face and familiar smile. I was surprised to see him standing in front of me, his hat in his hand, waiting for me to usher him in. And even more surprised to see the confusion on his face when I said, Mr. Billy Joe Shaver,

Welcome to the state capital. He stuck his hand out, the one with the missing digits, and he shook my hand and said, astonishingly, you know who I am? Yes, sir, I absolutely do. Now, I'm sure some of you may have never heard of Billy Joe Shaver, but I bet most of you have heard his songs, and you should look him up. He wrote a ton of music that was recorded by a ton of folks, most notably Whelan Jennings.

Now, old whalen was one of my dad's favorites and my numero uno above and beyond anyone else. Always has been. His music was playing in the background of many hours of driving from farm to farm or from home to trips hunting and fishing with my dad and that old eight-track player he had mounted under the dash of his truck. And now, standing in front of me was the man who'd written a large portion of those songs.

We visited for a minute, and I thanked him for his talent, his contribution to the soundtrack of my life, and shook his hand one last time before allowing him to go on his way. What a random meeting that was. The odds that I'd be standing that post during an eight-hour shift were one and four. The odds that I'd be there the moment Bill and Joe Schaeber walked in was considerably less. What a crazy set of... random circumstances over a literal lifetime that allowed me to shake the hand of someone who'd helped decorate the memories of my life from my childhood to the present.

It was a surreal moment for sure, and one no number of odds-making calculations could muster into a possibility even remotely so. That's what is so cool about the universe. It makes its own gravy and answers to no one. If everything was predictable, life wouldn't be nearly as interested. We'd just wake up and jump into the ruts that we'd made the day before and trudge along until we fell over dead on our appointed date and time. On Blood Trails, the stories don't end when the hunt is over.

They just get darker. I've seen something in the road. I instantly thought it was a sleeping day. And there was a full of blood. Oh, my God, he doesn't have a hit. Blood Trails is a true crime podcast born in the outdoors where the terrain is unforgiving, the evidence is scarce,

and the truth gets buried under brush and silence. Indications were he should be right there, but he wasn't. This season, we're going deeper, from cold case files to whispered suspicions, from remote mountains to frozen backwoods. Each story begins in the wilderness and ends in darkness. Because out here, there are no witnesses, no cameras, just fragments, and the people left behind trying to piece them back together.

He's not an honest person. He's incapable of being honest. Somebody somewhere knows something. I'm Jordan Sillers. Season 2 of Blood Trails premieres April 16th. Follow now on Apple, Iheart, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Want to get another dose of randomonium? I hope you said yes, because here it comes. 30 years or so ago, I introduced my nephew, Matthew, my brother Tim's oldest son, to the music of John Prine. Matthew was still in high school at the time, and the style of John's music wasn't what the average high school kid was listening to in the 1990s. What I was listening to in the early 80s was a bit out of the norm as well.

I've already clued you in on what that was, but our love for good music was something Matthew and I love to share between us. He was mature beyond his years and like me, listened to the lyrics and tried to interpret what the song was saying in comparison to how he made him feel. Before Google gave you the answers it wanted you to have, music interpretation was up to whoever was wearing the ears when the song was playing. We enjoyed listening to music and having conversations about different songs that we liked and what we got out of it besides the allure of a catchy tune. Now, nearly 20 years later, as a thank you, Matthew called me one day and said, I want you to come to my house and stay a couple nights. I've got us tickets to see John Prine in Houston, Texas. On May the 15th, 2015, we sat down in our seats about six rows back from the front of the stage

and watched one of the best concerts I'd ever seen. What made it so good was our history with the music that went all the way back to when he was just a young man in high school listening to a man his crazy uncle thought was cool. Music is one thing outside of the outdoors that we share just me and him. I held on to my musical past and what I enjoyed listening to, pretty much shunning anything that came along during the 90s and afterwards with a few exceptions. Then, almost a decade ago, Matthew sent me a link to a song. Now, when we first started this musical partnership, we had to buy a CD or a record or catch it on the radio or say, hey, listen for this song while you're driving around.

The link he sent me was from a band I'd never heard of, and several days later, when I remembered that he sent me a song, I listened. And I liked that one so much, I searched up all their music and listened to them one after the other. one in particular several times in a row. Did that guy just really reference a Belgium made Browning in that song? A few songs later he did it again with the line, My Old Auto 5. I've sat on here before that my family has an affinity for Case Pocket Knives and Browning shotguns. That's not an accurate description in all the reality.

It bypasses collected and steps over the line towards, a concerted effort best described as hoarding. We believe one man can never have enough of either. If one is good, two is better. And there ain't an adjective they can describe the right number to possess. Like music, these two inanimate objects carry historical legacy within my family, my great grandfather, Lovett Reeves, the man who started the case knife, what's the word, obsession? Well, he had the same feelings about Brown and shotguns.

My father, Buddy Reeves, extended that love for them to Tim and I. Now our children see and carry on the feelings of value, connection, and kinship with the genius that was John Moses Brown and his meddling woodworks of art. I'd been listening to the Turnpike Trubidors for less than an hour, and in that brief span of time, I texted Tim and Matthew. Listen to this one. Listen to this one. Whoever wrote these songs is one of us. That was almost 10 years ago. In December of 2023, I was the guest at a immediate live tour stop in Kansas City, Missouri.

This country life was only a few months old, and it was my first experience with the live tour. It was incredibly good to meet the folks who listened and watch the content. But I had no idea how all of that would tie into anything involving me and those songs that I so strongly identified with two years later. Fast forward to December of 2025 and the front man and bird hunter himself, Evan Felker, was a surprise guest at our show in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I had met Evan and his wife Stacy briefly at a previous event in Bozeman a year ago,

but there were a lot of folks there, so we'd never really had the opportunity to visit much beyond the howdy-dos, and I really enjoy your music talk. Here, we had the opportunity to sit down and relax and talk about kids and dogs and hunting and shotguns. One thing led to another, and before the show was over, a two-way invitation for a duck hunt had been extended. Now, I live in Arkansas, so obviously I'd have ducks before he would in Oklahoma. NERP. Think again, Brentley. He started sending me videos every few days of ducks working a spot of water on his land.

A plan was put in motion, and shortly after Christmas, I made the trek to the Felker's Place for supper, and a duck hunt in a state I'd only spent one duck season in before. And that was in 1987-88 waterfowl season I spent a little further west at Fort Seale. I was wearing camo every day I was there, but there was zero time for duck hunting, even though I saw lakes and ponds holding all manner of ducks as I marched or ran in formation past them all winter long. 37 years later, I had returned, and this time, instead of toting an M-16 in a rucksack, I brought some decoys and a 12-gauge.

This trip was going to be a lot better, whether I killed a duck or not. Supper that night I got to Evans was a joint effort from him, Stacy, and their nubbing of a daughter. She was a big help with a bigger personality, and when I met her and shook her little hand, and she looked at me with her big old brown eyes like I was Santa Claus. We made friends. Evan was frying duck parched. Stacey was whooping up a pasta salad, and my newest best friend slapped me with the gauntlet of challenge

after leaving the kitchen and reappearing with a game box labeled Candy Land. Hmm. I'm a highly decorated veteran of Candyland, having played it semi-continiously, started with my oldest daughter Amy around 1994. My son Hunter was next beginning around 2002, and the last session beginning with Bailey about the time I discovered the guy's music that was cooking my supper. Little bit explained the rules to me at the kitchen counter. I told her I wasn't a rookie at Candyland, and she should be prepared to cry herself to sleep after the beatdown she was about to receive.

I ain't let no young and win. Life is hard and they need to learn early. She did not seem intimidated. Youngest goes first, she told me. I said, well, I think that's you. She looked at me like I look at breakfast when I'm hungry, and it scared me a little. I had caused for concern because the next 20 minutes of my life were a blur of rule changes and extenuating circumstances I was learning at a much slower pace than we were playing. I'd lost twice before sunshine, their bob-tailed cat could lick his behind.

It happened quickly. I had driven several hours from home to get beat up by a pre-care in a game I'd been playing, apparently incorrectly, for three decades. We'll meet again, little one. But the next morning, Evan and I loaded his side-by-side, and we made our way in the dark to the duck blind he'd constructed on the edge of a small lake. Round hay bales would be the backdrop, and forearm-sized trees were driven into the ground like fence-post. The same serving as the frame that all the brothers were.

was zip tied to. Evan said, now don't be afraid to knock some of that out of your way so you can shoot easier. I made it a little too tall. The kids helped me, and I'm not sure we didn't build a fort instead of a duck blind. Imagine the construction process that was most likely resembling a squirrel roundup made me think about projects I'd done with my kids, one of which was a birdhouse Bailey and I built during the COVID lockdown that I absolutely She painted it purple, and over the past six years it has served the Bluebird community very well.

I found my spot and we enjoyed a little coffee and conversation after we chunked all the decoys out. As daylight started painting the blackness of the eastern oaky sky into an orange hue, I noticed something at my feet. It was toy, pink, made out of foam and resembled a varmid of some kind about the size of my thumb. left there most likely by the defending Candy Lamb World Champion. I picked it up and placed it out of harm's way on a post between us for luck. Shortly afterwards, Duck started coming in from every direction. We enjoyed the show, and when shooting hours arrived, we started working on.

Evans' dog Slick made some good retrieves, and that was my first experience with a dog-like slick. You're not familiar with them. To me, they resemble a German wire-haired person, corner, but if you're not careful, pronouncing their name could give you shingles. D-R-A-T-H-A-A-R. Drithar. Sounds like some kind of voodoo.

Now my side hurts. It's a good-looking dog for sure. But beyond his non-typical duck dog, his child-designed duck-blind fortress on the bank of Lake Turnpike, what I found Evan and his family to be was a family not unlike my own. The guy responsible for a large portion of the soundtrack of my life for nearly 10 years feels the same way I do about family and nostalgia, browning shotguns, and believe it or not, case pocket knives. During my nearly 30 years of guide and duck hunters, I'd found that the blind to be a great place of commonality. I watched hunters on different ends of the socioeconomic scale have conversations that are relaxed, revealing, and truthful. And when you're standing in flooded timber or sitting in a blind, all things are equal among those who truly appreciate what they're witnessing with creation standing head and shoulders above the rest.

As far as how someone says in verse what we were seeing that morning, that's a mystery to me. And it's easy to see the love on a man's face when he looks at his wife and children where they don't see him looking. Hearing it is for us when he talks about him. And that's something that's good and pure. We talked about a lot of things while I was there, our families, our childhoods, our kids, the perfection of birds on the wing and the joy of a good hunting dog. That's why his relatable music has been a fundamental part of the soundtrack of mine for 10 years. Putting those feelings, emotions, and subconscious observations of music,

now that's a God-given talent that few possess, but my friend Evan, he excelled. at it. When I listen to some of them and I go back to a place it reminds me of people I remember and miss, and for those three minutes, I'm in their company again. I know why the guy in the song risked it all for a photograph

in his grandfather's browning while the house was burning down around him. And you do too. Thank you all so much for listening to Lake Clay and myself here on the Barry Grease feed. Until next week, this is Brent, Sign it all. Y'all be careful. First Lights fieldwear collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends.

Products built for early mornings, full days in real use, hard wearing where they need to be versatile where it matters. No shortcuts. Just gear designed for the work that earns the season. Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new fieldwear gear. at firstlight.com.