Musician discovers that a good song is a good song, no matter its style

Unwanted pregnancies are hot topics with both adults and teens, but they rarely become the subject of Top 5 country songs.

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Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw, however, have recently scored with hit songs about that very topic: Mr. Chesney with There Goes My Life, co-written by Wendell Mobley and Neil Thrasher, and Mr. McGraw with Red Ragtop, by Jason White.

There Goes My Life is about a young unmarried couple who end up appreciative and happy for their unwanted child, while Red Ragtop is about a young unmarried couple who decide they would have a better future by terminating the pregnancy.

Mr. White will perform at 9:30 p.m. Friday at The Blind Pig, 1251 Broad St. He will join a new MCA Records artist, Australian-born Jedd Hughes, and singer/songwriters Patrick Davis and Clay Cook for a show. Cover charge is $5.

"Red ragtop" refers to the car in which the couple in Mr. White's song conceive their child. Some lines that tell of their decision to have an abortion go:

"We were young and wild, we decided not to have a child

So we did what we did and we tried to forget

And we swore up and down there would be no regrets ..."

Mr. White, who has lived in Nashville since 1998, recorded the song on his widely praised debut rock album, Shades of Gray, on the independent Hanging Vines label.

It was rerecorded by Mr. McGraw in 2002 for his 3 million-selling album Tim McGraw and the Dancehall Doctors and released as a single.

"The story I heard was that my version was being played on a rock station in Nashville," Mr. White said in a recent telephone interview. "An independent song-plugger heard it. He went out and bought a copy of my album at Tower Records and immediately took it to Tim and told him to listen to it.

"I never thought of it as a country song. I played a resonator guitar on my recording, which gave it more of a country vibe, but I thought of it as more of a Bruce Springsteen kind of ballad thing."

Mr. White, who toured the nation for eight years with his Cleveland, Ohio-based rock-jazz band The Janglers, barely knew who Tim McGraw was when told that Mr. McGraw was recording his song.

"I said, 'He's the one with the hat, isn't he?' I did know that he was married to Faith Hill, but that's about all," Mr. White said.

Mr. White is of the opinion that "good music is good music," no matter what style a song is originally recorded in.

"Ray Charles was a prime American example that a good song is a good song no matter how it is done," Mr. White said. "If it is given an R&B treatment, it will come out R&B. If it is given a country treatment, it will come out country.

"I personally thought (the Seattle grunge band) Nirvana was just a bunch of noise until I heard them do their unplugged thing. Then it struck me: 'These melodies are so nice.'"

Don Rhodes has been writing about country music for 33 years. He can be reached at (706) 823-3214 or don.rhodes@morris.com.