This is the fourth edition of Honky-Tonk Weekly, a weekly column here at the Tropical Depression Substack. You can read previous editions here. Every week, I will listen to and share a country song and write whatever comes to mind. Listen along! This week, we’re picking the most unlikely places for some back street loving with Mel Street.
There have probably been songs about cheating nearly as long as there have been songs. But country music, for whatever complex of reasons, has been particularly fixated on the topic.
The archetypal country song tells a story. The story probably finds its way to the bar. And there is probably drinking, a lot of drinking, because there is sadness. And often there is sadness because somebody’s cheating on someone.
The sexual revolution happened and rock & roll was there to let its hair down and party. Country music leaned into the guilt and shame. If it’s 1972 in the suburbs somewhere, don’t play country at the swingers party. Country will be waiting for you if things get awkward. It will be the soundtrack for certain would-be swingers who may feel anxiety or regret the next day.
The killer honky-tonk singer Mel Street specialized in cheating songs, but offered a novel flavor. In his best songs, the bad behavior is hot. It feels good. This perhaps was implied in cheating country songs of the past. Otherwise, why would cheaters cheat? But shame or depression was the more typical thematic currency of the country cheating song than desire.
Street went all in on the passion part, perhaps in a mode that simply would have been too risqué for Nashville in the past. The sexual revolution has very much arrived in the honky-tonk of Mel Street songs.
Street has a rich emotive thrust to his voice, and like his hero George Jones, he has a remarkable control in his singing style: highly emotional but tender and restrained when necessary, the perfect tone for tearjerkers. Only in Street’s case, all this emoting is about the exquisite passion of sleeping with women behind his wife’s back.
I read somewhere that these songs were not autobiographical, and that Street was a happily married, loyal husband. I have no idea, and it doesn’t really matter. The thing is that Street sang it like it was stone true.
Occasionally, the narrator in Street’s songs is the cuckold, the classic perspective of honky-tonk crooners (whiners?) like the genius Gary Stewart. This was the purview of Hank Williams, too, in “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and many other numbers.
But Street was at his best when he’s the cheater in the song. Or sometimes, he’s sleeping with a woman who is cheating on her husband. Or it’s both of them—he and his lover are both married to someone else. The point is, rules are being broken, and he is sleeping with someone.
His innovation, I think, was that he always mentioned the shame and regret stuff, but often gave it an almost perfunctory placement in the song, like a “to be sure” paragraph in an op-ed.
The real emoting was for the hot loving. The songs aren’t dirty, in the way that David Allan Coe was when he went blue. They have the tenor of a romance novel, but they’re not graphic. There’s no body parts, and the lovey stuff has the corny quality of an American culture closer in time to the 1950s than to today.
But listen to Mel Street sing, and tell me that you don’t hear a horndog. Despite not being explicit, the songs are still indisputably sexual, in a way that Hank Williams, say, was not. At least one chronicler speculated that Hank had a wild sex life before his body gave out on him, but that wildness is barely even implied in his songs (when Hank did bring blues lyrics that were a little too salty, producer Fred Rose would be sure to clean it up). It was a different time. He loves certain women very much, and he is very hurt when they are untrue to him. Because I like Hank, I can conjure some virile energy in the boogie of a song like “Honky Tonkin’” if I want to, no doubt. But I would say that his songs are mum on the sex lives of their characters. When you and your honey have a fallin’ out, just call me up sweet mama and we’ll go steppin’ out. You’ll have to imagine the rest.
Street was born in Appalachia, near Grundy, Virginia. His family were coalminers. In 1968, he started hosting a local television show in Bluefield, West Virginia, and eventually broke through as a country star with “Borrowed Angel,” a song he wrote. It hit #7 on the country charts in 1972. You can get the gist from the title, but here’s the vibe: “Her fingers feel so gentle with her hand in mine / Her hair feels like silk on my arm / Her lips tell me so tenderly she’s mine alone / Until we park tonight and she goes home / Borrowed angel belongs to someone else / I love my borrowed angel / I just can’t help myself / That ring on her finger don’t belong to me / But she loves me / And I know she’ll save some borrowed time for me.”
And so on. His conscience makes a brief appearance. “It isn’t right,” he croons—but, you know, he just can’t help himself!
“Lovin’ on Backstreets,” also released in 1972, was his next and biggest hit, making it to #5 on the country charts. Street wrote a few more songs but mostly relied on other songwriters, as with “Lovin’ on Backstreets.” I don’t know if he had some kind of cosmic ken with the song pluggers, but he consistently wound up singing songs that sound undeniably like Mel Street songs.
One hallmark of his songs is to announce the cheating dynamic or bad behavior right away. The opening lines of “Lovin’ on Back Streets” gets us right in the zone: “We tried to pick the most unlikely places / Where no one’s out to know us by our name.” As he carries on, he is explicit about the tradeoff of his cheating heart: “for a while we shared the sweet affection / that makes it worth the sorrow and the shame.” And the tradeoff is hot stuff: “we suffered hell through the daylight for the Heaven darkness brings.” Ha. His singing sells it: He sounds like a liar with an irresistible charisma. Like a filthy bad idea. When I say his voice sells it, sell is just the right word: He is a salesman of that sweet affection, even as he slips off his wedding ring.
Cheating is bad! Do whatever works for you, romantically, with your partner or partners—but don’t lie, don’t sneak around. Or do your best. Okay. But songs are not morality sermons. These are just stories, good tunes. And Street, in his maudlin melodrama, knows how to make it sexy.
Or if you’re not in to him, let’s say he knows how to make it perverse, raunchy, a bit scary, more than a little smug. There’s a way to read his songs as dark and grotesque, even if you still conclude, like me, that they are forgotten honky-tonk classics. It’s creeper country. It’s fitting that an album was put out with half his songs and half songs by Conway Twitty, perhaps the creepiest creeper of all.
This is the power of the human voice, and also of a hot Nashville backing band (and man are they having fun playing Mel Street songs—those frisky guitar runs, barroom fiddle boasts, pedal steel accents). You can build a real richness, depth, and pathos for a character who is basically a dumbass. I wouldn’t particularly want to hang out with this character in real life. But I like spending a song with him.
In “Lovin’ on Back Streets,” the loving that, um, takes place on back streets gets the full Mel Street treatment. But I dig how the song has a kind of wicked irony as our narrator protests too much when it comes to his sorrow the next day, when he’s back to “living on Main.” It’s not just the cold, retrograde description of his wife (“In the morning when I face the one who owns me”). When he emotes, “once again I hate myself for living,” I don’t believe him!
Like you can tell: He’s ready to get right back to it: “two hearts in the shadows / tradin’ passion for pain.”
Mel Street struggled with alcoholism and depression, and on his forty-third birthday, he shot himself. His friend George Jones sang “Amazing Grace” at his funeral. Street had a few songs chart posthumously, including a weeper called “Just Hangin’ On” that debuted on the charts the day he died. That’s a title that lends itself to mythos, but the myth never really came. Street faded into obscurity. It’s always hard to know why that ends up happening. He had a run of sixteen top twenty-five country hits in the 70s and seven more that charted. That’s the sort of showing that typically keeps your name in lights even after you’re gone. But like a lot of traditionalists at the time, it was easy for him to get lost in the shuffle. He was Hard Country when Nashville was going Urban Cowboy.
He has his partisans, but the truth is, it’s almost impossible to imagine him getting the revitalization treatment today. His sound is a kind of platonic ideal of a honky-tonk song, but his material is maybe too retrograde for modern ears. This stuff veers toward the cancellable at times. Sometimes it’s funny, in the way that out-of-date culture can be funny, but it is seeped in attitudes we have said good riddance to. It’s hard not to hear that, listening now. I won’t tell you what to do; personally, I’m still able to enjoy his output. But my line is loose, I guess. I can still happily groove to the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb,” say, which is much worse if you make the mistake of paying close attention to the words.
Just in terms of the sound, one of Street’s best songs is “Forbidden Angel,” which is just about the perfect honky-tonk song. I played it for a friend; he wasn’t paying attention to the lyrics, and he texted me, “This is such a country home run pitch for me. Fastball middle in.” I told him to pay attention to the content. “Holy moly,” he responded.
The song wastes no time in establishing that this is a sultry number about being smitten with a teenager: “Girl you kiss me like a woman / though you’re barely seventeen.” The 70s, man. Street drawls the word “woman,” as only he can, a lascivious redneck coo.
I briefly thought about doing “Forbidden Angel” for Honky-Tonk Weekly, but it’s just too intense in this department. It’s distracting. “There’s no doubt you’re old enough to satisfy…Why does Heaven let forbidden angels out to play…You’re so warm, so sweet and eager to try your wings and fly…So just keep your halo shinin’ and I’ll love you all the more.”
I mean. Out of control.
If it makes you feel better, the narrator resists the temptation: “I love you so I know I can wait to unlock heaven’s door / When my forbidden angel is not forbidden anymore.” But again, you listen to him, and you don’t quite believe him.
Before we scold Street or the character in the song, I do want to say that—while I have never found myself in this particular pickle—people have complicated encounters across big age gaps all the time, and that is (ahem) fertile territory for an emotionally complex story. What would really rock me is a honky-tonk song from the perspective of a seventeen-year-old girl who is lusting after middle-aged Mel Street. Maybe she had no interest in keeping her halo! Maybe the squeamish moralizing from a hot older man spoiled her fun! The sexual charge in the tale could have been more tangled than we can surmise from the material.
Or maybe she was just creeped out, or afraid. We get no clues. That’s another song entirely, perhaps, and the tunnel vision of the narrator is a believable feature of the obsession. Still. Street is almost an all-timer. But the welcome verve that he puts into singing life into his protagonists makes it all the more of a bummer that the rest of the characters in his songs hardly exist. In particular, the women in these songs are either a hot paramour or guilt-inducing wife, but they don’t say anything or do much of anything of their own accord. The honky-tonk angels are forbidden or they’re borrowed or whatever, but they have no agency. They have bodies only insofar as they are under the sheets with our narrator; they have desires only insofar as they share forbidden passions with him.
I love to put these records on, and I think Street is one of the more underrated performers in country—but for me, it’s this gap that leaves him short of the pantheon.
Another hallmark of Street’s songs, again enhanced by his perv/powerhouse delivery: clever country zingers and punchlines. Sometimes you can practically feel the songwriters slapping each other on the back. Here’s one: “Tonight let’s sleep on it baby / just give me one more chance to change your mind.” What a perfect, sneaky, winking come-on. I laughed out loud the first time I heard it.
Or in cuckold mode, from his cover of a Freddie Hart song: “I don’t even want to know what you’ve been up to / But if fingerprints showed up on skin, wonder whose I’d find on you.”
Even the cringiest bits are so self-assuredly on the nose, they earn an LOL: “Cause baby I’m a victim of the devil in your kisses and the angel in your eyes.”
The universe of Street’s songs is an exhaustion of infidelity. He returns again and again to caress the theme. “This motel room may make you feel uneasy / Or maybe it’s this wedding ring I wear,” opens “(This Ain’t Just Another) Lust Affair.” In another song, he begs a married woman, “Don’t let me cross over love’s cheating line”—in precisely the intonation that would encourage her to do just that. And he croons what might be his mantra in “I Have Found Heaven in Your Arms Tonight”: “Those little guilty feelings, just brush them from your mind.”
Then there’s “You Make Me Feel More Like a Man,” a melodrama that deserves to be dissected in a Dan Savage advice column. (“There’s a ring on my finger, there’s a girl who waits at home / I’m ashamed of what I’m doing but I keep cheatin’ on / When I tell you that I miss her, will you try to understand? / That she’s the one I love, but you make me feel more like a man.”)
In his vocal phrasing, George Jones found the poetic space of sadness. Street’s phrasing wasn’t quite on the level of the master, but he knew what he was doing. For him, the bend and pause in his syllables conjured doomed histrionics and horny desire.
Street was not the only country singer to play the horny dog, though to my ears, he was the most convincing in summoning the steamy atmospherics. As I mentioned earlier, Conway Twitty had an even thirstier style. (“You ain’t had much till you
been touched in the moonlight”… “As my trembling fingers touch forbidden places”… “you’ve never been this far before”…“But I won’t talk of starry skies or moonlight on the ground / I’ll come right out and tell you, I’d just love to lay you down.”) And so on. When the Pointer Sisters sang “Slow Hand,” it was sexually empowering Southern soul; Twitty did his take the following year and he kind of just sounded handsy. Look at this guy:
Hello, darlin’.
One thing that accentuated the Mel Street experience, meanwhile, was his own look and persona. This may sound like a gratuitous detail to bring up when we are listening to a song together, but country musicians have always been showmen. The look was part of the package, no pun intended. Okay, pun intended.
If you’re spinning up romance-novel yarns, it helps if you can be the cover boy. Street looked sort of like a West Virginia David Hasselhoff. He let his collar fly open. When he dropped midsong to a low speaking voice, he made you believe it would lure you right in.
The press was enamored. “The emergence of young good-looking country singers is a growing trend in Nashville…,” swooned Country Music People. “He is extremely good-looking, dresses well and has stylishly long hair.”
As he grew older, his features softened and his body rounded, but his hair was there to hold him steady. Here, in 1976, the curly poofs are almost like a sidekick member of the band:
Were the Mel Street vibes sexy or gross? To me, the answer is both, which is why it all comes together and works: Boozy, late-night country music.
The profane desperation in his narrators is recognizable and true, more sweaty and lived-in than the less explicitly libidinal protagonists of most classic honky-tonk songs.
To return to an earlier question about these songs: As he runs around the back streets with honky-tonk angels, are the gals having as much shamed-and-chagrined-but-irresistibly-delicious good times while behaving badly as he is? We can only guess. The passion always sounds pretty good for everyone involved in the context of the songs, but perhaps we are dealing with unreliable narrators. He’s in a lather on “If I Had a Cheating Heart”: “Your eyes tell me you don’t mean maybe / And oh baby you’re makin’ it hard / And it would be easy to let you please me / If I had a cheatin’ heart.” And I stop to wonder: Selfish lover?
Street did have some range. I don’t care for his up-tempo numbers, but his catalog has great songs on topics outside the cheating heart routine. He could be just as convincing in a sincere appreciation of longtime love or any number of classic hangdog tearjerkers—or songs about the sort of love that makes the hangdog feeling hang a little less low. “Smokey Mountain Memories,” another big hit for him, is genuinely sweet.
These are strong tracks, but I have to say, I find myself missing the dirty dog.
Rest in peace. If he is with the angels now, I hope he is singing to them, with foul intentions.