Handcuffs & Headlines

In a lonesome prison cell in darkest

Russia There's a flyer, Francis Powers is his name He was captured on a mission for his country And he'll never see "Old Glory" wave again.

These dismal lyrics are modestly acknowledged by their author to be "the last great hope of the world." If they catch on, he argues, they will shame the Russians into releasing U-2 Pilot Powers; if they fail, the U.S. can expect total war. By last week, the twangy contribution to international amity had notched its sixth week on the pop charts, and this more limited achievement seemed to be enough to please the man responsible: 45-year-old Country-Western Singer Dave McEnery, known to his fans as Red River Dave.

McEnery, who claims to have turned out more than 1,000 songs, makes a specialty of trying to turn headlines into hits. He has written remarkably tasteless salutes to the memories of Amelia Earhart, Floyd Collins and Emmett Till, and he still cannot understand why a ballad about Evangelist Billy Graham prompted threats of a lawsuit (sample lyrics: "To the hills of North Carolina/ Where the Smokies dot the land/ God sent a new boy baby/ And he called him Billy Graham"). Fourteen years ago, McEnery also achieved some slight notoriety by handcuffing himself to a piano and writing 52 original songs in eight hours without getting up. When the plight of Pilot Powers swam into McEnery's vision, he waited, he says, to be sure that Powers was "a real American hero" and not "a turncoat or something like that," then quickly ground out the lyrics and set them to the music of There's a StarSpangled Banner Waving Somewhere. So far, Nikita Khrushchev has not even bothered to acknowledge the copy of the song Red River sent him.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.