Book Report: The Adventures of Slim & Howdy by Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn with Bill Fitzhugh (2008)

Book coverI have to say that this is the best novel based on country-and-western album liner notes that I have ever read.

Apparently, Brooks & Dunn’s albums had some stories featuring Slim & Howdy in the liner notes. Gentle reader, I gathered my Brooks & Dunn albums in those dark days of audiocassettes, which contained liner notes in very small type indeed. So I had not seen any of this material before.

Slim and Howdy are a couple of hard luck singers who meet at a used car lot and decide to pool their resources for a bit. They have some adventures recovering Slim’s guitar; wooing a couple of women from a honkytonk who then lead them unwittingly into a burglary; and ultimately into rescuing a friend and employer, the woman who owns the Lost and Found bar in Del Rio, Texas. A border town, get it? Lost and found in a border town? Yeah, the book alludes to a number of Brooks & Dunn songs like this. It probably does more than I know since my collection stops at Hard Working Man, and to be honest (as you can guess, gentle reader) my country and western listening is limited to the rare occasions (rare now as my son is mowing the lawn, and rare as it will be for a year or so until he is too busy or two gone to do so).

The bulk of the book is ultimately (I guess I already said that) to the latter quest–finding the bar owner who has been kidnapped for unknown reasons, but for whom a ransom note eventually arrives. Is it the recently fired employee, a hard case with body piercings making a fake mohawk? Is it the person from whom Slim and Howdy recovered Slim’s guitar, the person who has vowed revenge? Is it someone who has done busines with the woman’s father, who has gotten wealthy not entirely honestly? Or something else?

Well, it’s something else, a bit twee and perhaps expected. It ends up with gunplay that only scratches the heroes but mortally wounds the bad guys. And finis.

Not a bad read. Certainly targeted to Brooks & Dunn fans. The book included a CD single with the song “Gotta Get Me One Of Those”, and very stern warnings indicated you could not return the book if the envelope containing the CD had been breached. I assumed that the CD was missing, as it is on so many of my tech books, but I discovered it is intact and unbroken. Oh, the dilemma: Get the single which I will not listen to often or preserve the collectibility of this book for future generations who will not find it collectible anyway?

Well, gentle reader, they might have saved it from Napster kept it off of the iTunes store and forgotten to make it available on Amazon, but it’s on YouTube:

No word on if it’s available for free on Napster.

I did not break the seal on the CD, anyway, as it is my wont to not adulterate the books I read in any way except for some Dorito dust now and then.

At any rate, an okay, if simply told bit of modern Western. Not the amount of depth you get in, say, Louis L’Amour or James R. Wilder, but a bit of fun for Brooks & Dunn fans. Speaking of whom, holy smokes, those guys are like 70 years old now, and they’ve been retired as a musical act for over a decade. Somehow, in my head, they’re always forty-something like they were when I got the albums in the middle 1990s. And I’m still twenty-something.

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