Country music from a fan's point of view since 2008
There was one track on Reba’s new Keep On Loving You album that jumped out at me from the first listen, and that was ‘Maggie Creek Road’. The ominous opening catches your attention right away and as the story unfolds, like a good book that’s a page-turner, you can’t wait to hear what happens next. Clearly, this was an attempt to recapture some of the magic she found with similar-themed classics like ‘Fancy’ and ‘The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia’ – though this is a Reba original this time, as the other two were covers. Occasional Hope pointed out that she thought it fell somewhere in between the two, and I have to agree with her. It lacks the knockout punch of ‘Georgia’ but is slight above ‘Fancy’ lyrically in my opinion.
I won’t give away too much of the storyline here – I want you to listen to the song for that – but it’s basically the story of a Mama who gets vengeance for what happened to her 20 years ago and saves her daughter from a similar fate at the same time. The lyrics don’t come right out and tell you what happens at the very end, but the foreshadowing in the final verse gives you a pretty good idea. It’s the kind of story song, meaty and emotional, that Reba McEntire is peerless with, an expectation she lives up to here. When she sings ‘you don’t wanna see Mama go to war’, I truly don’t. I feel her wrath already.
Listen to Reba – ‘Maggie Creek Road’ and tell us what you think about it. How do you think it stacks up against the aforementioned Southern Gothic classics already in Reba’s catalog?
My Kind of Country 
I really love this song. I love the mood that’s set as soon as the music begins. And it goes perfectly with the lyrics. I find it hard to compare it to the classics “Fancy” and “The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia”. I think Reba does such a fantastic job with all of those songs – she is a master of the story song and these are three terrific stories. 🙂
Not exactly sure if Reba was first to record this song since you can find a recording of the song on the myspace page of an artist named Beth Cayhall. Don’t know when that appeared on her myspace page, but someone made a youtube slideshow videoi in Aug 2008 with that artist singing the song. And there’s another youtube vid of the artist singing the song live in Jan 2009. (Reba recorded Keep On Loving You in Jan 2009, but I believe she’s said that she had heard Maggie Creek Road back when she was listening to songs for the Duets album, but it wasn’t appropriate for that project.)
http://www.myspace.com/bethcayhall
Lyrically, I’m impressed by the way the listener (me, anyway) is somehow led to believe the second verse is from the perspective of the daughter, until that very last line.
Nothing on the album will match the DELIGHT I feel every time I hear “I’ll Have What She’s Having” … but this one ain’t bad either.