It outta be sure fire

For a number of years I was fortunate to count among my dearest friends a fellow by the name of Joe Taylor. Joe was a local folklorist down in McCreary County,KY and used to do a show on the radio as "Professor Nitwit." The Nitwit segments were usually filled with Joe's methods of ironclad hillbilly logic and how to apply them to everyday situations. A typical Nitwit solution to something like ice fishing would be to lower a burn barrel through the ice and when the fish came close to warm up, pull up the barrel.

Among other things, Joe was my turkey guide. He was not much of a turkey hunter per se, but he did know all the little-known parts of the county, and would drive me around and drop me off in places and tell me to get out and then he'd come and pick me up later in the day somewhere else. Sure enough, I'd run into turkeys. Along the way, he'd point to abandoned cabins or just empty turnouts in the road and go on for a long time about indians, caches of silver, murderous husbands or just run of the mill horrendous personal tradgedies.

One classic Nitwit idea of Joe's was if you could find a copy of the Turkey's National Anthem and play it for the turkeys, they'd all come out and bow their heads, and then you could blast them with your shotgun. The problem was going to be hauling the piano out to play the music.

Joe's been gone since 2003. I watched him die in his bed the day Columbia came down in pieces. I woke up this morning thinking about Joe , and the bad copy of the Turkish national anthem I pulled off my shortwave way back and the tape I made for him that never got played on the air, and I went back out and searched. Sure enough, there is now a neat, clean version of the Turkey's National Anthem out on the web.

The Turkey's National Anthem


I'd appreciate if y'all would download it and find some way to take it out in the woods this year and play it, and let me know if it has any effect on the turkeys. Joe figured it would.