Doyle & Debbie – Country’s Crazy Duo
For the last year and a half, I have been obsessed with The Doyle and Debbie Show - a country music send-up that is still going strong in Nashville. See, Doyle Mayfield is a washed-up country star who never really had too many hits to start with, but when he discovers his “new Debbie” in a rural VFW hall, he realizes that she’s his ticket back to the big time. It’s a script, so you get the same show every night (and I’ve seen it 11 times now), but it’s just so clever that I can’t keep from cracking up time and time again.
My favorite line in the whole thing may come from “Stock Car Love,” as Debbie confides, “I miss the pole position. I used to get it all the time. But now I barely qualify at all.” The whole song is completely ridiculous, yet it’s more inventive than just about any novelty song I’ve ever heard. You can hear most of the music (but unfortunately none of the dialogue) on their Web site. Still, the real reason to see it in person is for Doyle’s anything-for-entertainment gestures, and Debbie’s hilariously subtle expressions that prove she’s giving it all she’s got with this wacko.
To me, Doyle is pretty much a cross between Bill Anderson and Glen Campbell, and he seems ready to come unhinged at any moment. Meanwhile, Debbie is a pretty little gal who actually has a brain and a strong set of pipes. She just wants to be a star so bad that she makes some bad decisions. (Really… really bad.) She can sing like Loretta Lynn or Patsy Cline, but “For the Children” is like a melodramatic Martina McBride ballad gone very, very wrong. But that’s OK. As Doyle & Debbie are proud to admit, they’re just doing all they could with what the good Lord gave ‘em.
©2008 Country Music Television, Inc., a Viacom company. A division of
beverly selby says:
Ok Mr Shelburne we know by now that you do not like Martina, it is time to move on to someone else to put your little digs into.
Ron Ruffier says:
Their show is what Country Music needs now. The Ray Steven’s, Jerry Clower, and so many others provided great comedy and laughter. Considering Ray Steven’s has a terrific voice and could have made it in any venue he chose, he did something that we still remember. We are ready to embrace “rock” so quickly, but there is fear for this type of music, lyrics, and acts which poke comedy at ourselves, government, etc.. What I have seen of Doyle and Debbie is a return to country with lyrics that bring a smile to ones face and thought to what is expressed. Perhaps our hypocricy is what pokes fear into embracing Doyle and Debbie and perhaps we need to get our head out of the sand because our butts are so prevelant. Go get um!!!
patti stacy says:
If you want to laught until tears run down your face then please go see this. What a fun evening. Everytime you go you will pickup something that you missed the first time because you were laughing so hard.
Rich Williams says:
Craig - I have read 2 articles you wrote about the Cayamo cruise. I was there also and invested $3,400.00 plus $1,100.00 in airfare for my girlfriend and I to go on the cruise and also used up a significaant portion of my annual vacation - so I was truly “invested” in the cruise being great. I am a VERY big fan of all six headliners and Buddy Miller and I have nothing but praise for how their performances went. But I have written a long critique to the cruise managers (Sixthman in Atlanta) to say basically they booked way too many inapropriate and imature Nashville and Atlanta musicians for the lower-teir tallent. I expected singer songwriters not country singers and not rock groups and not groups that tour with rock groups. I felt that the lower-teir performers were all very marginally tallented at either singing or songwriting or their guitar playing or usually a lethal combination of the three (even the musicians you singled out as ones you know of and like). I realized during the cruise there was a large contingent of passengers from Atlanta who seemed to idolize many of these performers but not me and not most of the many people I met who had traveled from far away parts of the country or from Canada or Europe…we were there for the headlinerss and what we all expected would be many similarly styled singer songwriters. Sixthman stacked the deck with marginal talent and their buddies from the Atlanta scene who must play in the bars there. We had no way to appreciate that the line-up was going to be so focused on country and southern rock performers and very marginal local Atlanta performers when we signed up for the cruise. If that is what Sixthman is going to do again next year they won’t find me going along, but if they book lower-teir tallent who are on the national singer songwriter circuit of the “folk” type clubs - like the clubs that Patty and Shawn have always played in around the country, then I will be there again for sure…because Sixthman doees really know how to manage a music cruise - the concerts all started on time and the sound and lighting was all great and every aspect of the logistics was managed perfectly. I know country is your main thing (at least we agree totally about Patty who is probably my #1 favorite artist of the last decade) but my hopes for were for an entirely different line up of tallent that the rest of the US audience away from Nashville and Atlanta catagorizes as “singer songwriters”. Even the Los Angeles band Celtic Storm was a bar band - though they were all very talented instrumentalists they were certainly not what I expected (and you were worried they would be) which would have been a more traditional celtic band that would be accustomed to be playing in quiet accustic clubs and not just for folks drinking heavily. It was the fans of this band and the lousy Atlanta groups and bar bands that were the obnoxious passengers on the cruise and the reason Emmy Lou, Patty and Shawn would not go anywhere on board without uniformed security. I wonder if you agree that the lower-teir performers were mostly too marginally talented and that they were not within the catagory of “singer songwriters” which was the theme of the Cayamo cruise? If you agree please tell Sixthman like I did - if you disagree at least advise them to advertise the cruise next time as a cruise of musicians who are their friends from Atlanta and also some country acts that haven’t matured yet. Tell them they don’t have any business labeling the type of line-up they had below the headliners as a “singer songwriter cruise” again.