Country Song Roundup

This was a monthly magazine that is no longer published, but had a very long run in the 60’s and 70’s. It featured articles on country stars and had the words to currently popular country songs. I read it every month. I also got "Song Hits", which featured the words to current pop, r&b, and country hits, and I also read "Hit Parader" every month, which was pop and rock oriented. I think Hit Parader is still in publication and caters to heavy metal now. I still have a few issues of Hit Parader.
As most magazines do, CSR had a letters column. At the age of 7, I believe, I wrote a letter to CSR saying how much I enjoyed the magazine and asking them to print the words to "El Paso" by Marty Robbins. The letter was published and I was a minor celebrity at school (after I showed it to the other kids, of course; I don’t want to give the impression that all of the other second graders were music-magazine reading freaks). I also got a LOT of letters from other people; many of them explained to me that CSR only printed the words to current country songs and that El Paso was a hit in 1963. Most of them had actually taken the time to write down the words to El Paso (and it is a long story-type song) and send it to me. (It is amazing that I didn’t get letters from pedophiles – at least, as far as I know….). I think my mom still has a copy of the CSR with my letter in a scrapbook that she keeps on me. Dottie West was on the cover.
In an attempt to relive the moment, I submitted another letter under my 6 year old brother’s name. This later was also printed, but it was heavily edited (perhaps they didn’t believe that a 6 year old actually wrote the part where I took the magazine to task for some now-forgotten transgression). He, too, got correspondence as a result. Most notably, he (or really, me; this gets confusing) struck up a short-lived correspondence with the mother of singer Jeannie C. Riley. Jeannie had had a major pop and country hit a few years earlier with the song "Harper Valley P.T.A."
I’ve written a couple of letters to magazines since then. I once sent a picture in to National Lampoon that had originally appeared in the Ashley County Ledger – it was a picture of an elderly lady proudly holding up a large gourd that she had grown. The gourd was shaped exactly like male genitalia, balls and all. As far as I know, it wasn’t published. And I once appeared on the front page of the Spectrum in the mid-80s, an "alternative weekly" that used to be published in Little Rock….and that leads to this story….