“Oh Lord It’s Hard To Be Humble”

A post by Blo­ga­gaard had me savour­ing the tune to “King Of The Road” for much of yes­ter­day, even though I could­n’t recall many of the lyrics. Some­how by evening this had led my mind to the clas­sic Mac Davis hit “Oh Lord It’s Hard To Be Hum­ble,” which I have not thought of in quite some time, either. It has long been a sort of ances­tral theme song in the McCutcheon clan; my father and my father’s father before him were wont to bel­low this out while clean­ing the barn or shov­el­ling snow, and I fre­quent­ly con­tributed my ren­di­tion to the col­lege dorm show­er expe­ri­ence back in the day. It has been a long time since then, so I dust­ed it off on our snowy walk last night, caus­ing Mrs. Mac to laugh uproar­i­ous­ly and (shock­ing­ly) to say she had nev­er heard it before.

For her ben­e­fit and that of oth­ers who may be rusty, here are the pow­er­ful and mov­ing lyrics:

Oh, Lord it’s hard to be hum­ble, when you’re per­fect in every way
I can’t wait to look in the mir­ror, ‘cause I get bet­ter lookin’ each day
To know me is to love me, I must be a hell of a man
Oh, Lord it’s hard to be hum­ble, but I’m doing the best that I can

I used to have a girl­friend, but I guess she just couldn’t com­pete
with all of these love-starved women who keep clam­or­ing at my feet.
Well, I prob­a­bly could find me anoth­er, but I guess they’re all in awe of me
Who cares? I nev­er get lone­some, ‘cause I trea­sure my own company.

I guess you could say I’m a lon­er, a cow­boy out­law, tough and proud
Oh, I could have lots of friends if I wan­na, but then I wouldn’t stand out from the crowd
Some folks say that I’m ego­tis­ti­cal, hell, I don’t even know what that means
I guess it has some­thing to do with the way that I fill out these skin-tight blue jeans

Truer words have sel­dom been spoke or sung.