Fast Composer

The day the Japs hit Pearl Harbor, a breezy, hand-crunching Texan named Red River Dave (Dave McEnery) wrote himself a song, The U.S.A. Is Coming P.D.Q. Next day he wrote one called Bums Over Hawaii. For months thereafter, while the fit was on him, he wrote a song a day. Sample title: Fight for Your Country, Country Boy. He has had more than 300 songs published, gets about $100 apiece for them. Red River Dave thinks they were all good.

Last week, on a bet, he set out to prove that he could "compose" 50 songs in one twelve-hour day. He turned up in the studio of San Antonio's Station WOAI at 8 a.m., in a white Stetson, a green-and-yellow embroidered shirt, and hand-tooled boots. He brought with him a stack of pulp magazines, for inspiration. To make it look harder, he had a policeman chain him to a piano.

Within 15 minutes he had written the words & music of his first song, I Want to Take Care of Mother. By 11:45, when he went on the air for a broadcast, he had written 18, including Nuts to California ("You talk about your grapefruit, so full, so round, so big; they're the kind in Texas, that we feed to the pig."). Dave stopped only to take sandwiches and coffee. At 7:45 p.m.--15 minutes before the deadline--Dave finished his 52nd song. He called it It's Never Too Late to Forgive.

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