When Harley Allen would bring his bluegrass band into the Station Inn, folks within and without the group would wonder how many songs he'd likely get around to actually singing in a 45-minute set. He certainly had plenty of choices, starting with the many hits he'd written and co-written for and with the stars of country music, and passing through the ones he'd written as a young bluegrass singer to the standards he learned from his father, bluegrass Hall of Famer Red Allen. Usually, though, the number would come out somewhere well shy of the typical dozen or so — and that was OK, because Harley's rambling musings between one song and the next were sometimes some of the most outrageous, and always some of the funniest, stuff you'd ever want to hear.
Then, just when you were trying to figure out the exact mixture of hilarity and bad taste you'd been hit with, he would launch into some heartbreaking ballad, or one of those driving old bluegrass standbys. And if it was one of the latter, once it was done, he'd say, "Boy, that's a whole lot more work than writing a song."
