Once upon a time, there was a very lovely couple known to us only as A and R. A and R were very much in love, and knew the best way to commemorate that love was to get married. Having been to a couple of weddings before and known the DJs that prowl the wedding circuit—the ones who were always ready with a flexidisc of “Macarena” whenever the oh-so-hilarious spectacle of old people and little kids dancing presented itself—A and R decided their wedding would be different. Enter Robbie Fulks, a grizzled alt-country veteran with a sizable catalog of albums on Bloodshot Records. A and R decided Mr. Fulks would play at their reception in Vermont, and provide their guests with a truly spectacular, “Macarena”-free performance.

So Fulks and his band show up and proceed to tear everybody’s faces off musically. Well, I’m just guessing based on the songs A and R posted to their website, presumably some time after the honeymoon. Anyways, the happy couple have brought in a somewhat eclectic performer, and it seems the crowd’s a bit eclectic as well, because somehow Fulks and the band get on the topic of song-poems.

Song-poems? Song-poems. Back in the days when you could order pretty much whatever your heart desired from the magazine classifieds or the back of a comic book, there were a lot of new music studios sitting around and going unused. A recording studio without musicians is a recording studio that doesn’t pay the bills, so they had to come up with some way of generating income. The solution? The music industry version of vanity publishing—pay us $500, send us a poem you’ve written, and we’ll set it to music with professional musicians and everything. The studio gets paid, the musicians get paid, and the poor sucker that wrote the poem gets delusions of top 40 success and a piece of vinyl containing the unholy marriage of poem and song.

Well, I shouldn’t say unholy; some of the songs are actually really damned good, good enough that some of them made it onto compilations produced years after the fact, like the American Song-Poem Anthology. “Jimmy Carter Says Yes” is one of those songs, a hopelessly naive and optimistic song about superman/President Jimmy Carter’s dedication to government reform. In its original funk incarnation by Gene Marshall, “Jimmy Carter Says Yes” ain’t bad. But thanks to A and R and the internet, we have Robbie Fulks performing “Jimmy Carter Says Yes,” a truly inspired combination that’ll stick in your head for weeks.

Can a marriage reception totally rock? Can a song-poem endure through the ages? Can a government be competent? Jimmy Carter says yes!