The Milk Hauler and the Radio Choir
Our bulk tank driver left his truck radio on in the lot, and the whole herd formed a choir that still sings at four o'clock.
Our milk hauler is a gentle man named Boyd who drives a long silver tanker and listens to country music at a volume suitable for a rodeo. Every afternoon at four he pulls into the lot, backs up to the bulk tank and hooks up the hose. And every afternoon, for about forty minutes, the radio plays.
It began as an accident. Boyd stepped out one day with the engine running and the window down, and a fiddle tune drifted across the barn lot. Mabel, a stout brown Swiss who had never shown musical interest, lifted her head and let out a long low note. The cow beside her joined in. Within a minute the whole south pen was harmonizing with a song about a truck and a girl and a river.
I stood there with a bucket in my hand. Boyd walked back from the tank, saw the herd swaying, and calmly turned the volume up one notch. 'They like the slow ones,' he said. It is the kind of observation you only get from a man who has driven ten thousand miles with a load of milk behind him.
Word got around. Visitors started coming at four, parking their trucks by the fence and watching the cows sing. A choir director from the Baptist church asked if she could bring her singers out for a joint rehearsal. I said the cows would need a rest first. She said she understood. We settled on a Saturday, and I will tell you the cows outperformed the humans on the second verse.
Boyd has since become a local legend. He keeps a small tape of slow ballads in the cab and a hand-lettered sign on the dash that reads 'Do Not Skip This One.' I have a bigger stack of cow-and-country stories than I can fit on one page, so I send folks to country music on farm.FM, which is where I learned that cows have apparently been in the business a lot longer than we have.
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