Today I’m talking about a country song revolving around a small town, though this one is 32 years old and wasn’t a political lightning rod, instead it’s just an enjoyable song from the ’90’s country era.

Hal Ketchum came up in the Texas scene and began his recording career in the late 1980’s after playing for several years on the live club circuit. His second album Past The Point Of Rescue would be his major label debut for Curb Records and is where today’s song hails from. The album would go gold for half a million copies sold and was the start of Ketchum’s solid presence on the airwaves of 1990’s country.

Small Town Saturday Night was one of three singles from the album that went to number 2 on the Hot Country charts. This was the lead single and served as Ketchum’s introduction to the national country stage, where he picked up steam right off the bat. While Ketchum did write a lot of his own material, this song was brought in from outside songwriters Pat Alger and Hank DeVito.

Like much of country music from the 1990’s, this song is pretty smooth. Nothing was rough around the edges in this era of high production values and mining for radio hits. There is just a bit of rough and tumble to this song but it’s still a prototypical offering from country of this period.

Lyrically the song’s concept is self-explanatory – some bored kids need something to do on Saturday night in their small town. They have just enough for gas money to go cruising, enough booze to catch a buzz, and absolutely nothing of substance worth doing. The third verse offers a pretty stark reality about small town life – the main “character” Bobby tells his girlfriend Lucy that the world has to be flat because their small town is everything – anyone who leaves never comes back, so the world cant’ be round. And yes it’s a metaphor, that flat earth bullshit wasn’t taken literally in the 1990’s.

And yeah, I can confirm that this is life in a small town, Saturday night or otherwise. The town I grew up in had all of 2,500 people in it. There really wasn’t a lot going on and this song is what a lot of younger folks did. Ketchum didn’t have to stretch to write this song, it’s all right there for anyone who had spent more than a night in a small town. I was a bit more disaffected than most in my childhood so I wasn’t really partying back then, but we would go drive around backroads looking for old abandoned buildings to check out, which there were no shortage of on the old, isolated farm lands. Sometimes you just got in a vehicle and went somewhere, even if that place was nowhere, because it’ wasn’t the nowhere you were living in.

Small Town Saturday Night entered country radio rotation on release in 1991 and it never left. It’s on just about any station that plays classic country today, and even more so now since ’90’s country is having a huge retro appreciation wave. Hal Ketchum continued to record and tour into the late 2010’s when it was announced he had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he would pass away in late 2020.

For me I was never a huge country fan when this stuff was actually going on in the 1990’s. By this point I was well on my way to exploring death metal and all of the “alt-metal” stuff showing up. But I do remember these songs being on, and this one especially was one I kind of always like hearing. As time has gone on I wound up getting more into country and came to appreciate more of these early ’90’s cuts. Country music today has become far too much of a thing for the politically-charged masses to spew venom at each other about, but a song like this is always enjoyable no matter what kind of crap is going on in the news cycle.