Mellencamp’s ‘Small Town’

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

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MELLENCAMP’S ‘SMALL TOWN’

EIGHTEEN times.

The other day when I heard John Mellencamp’s “Small Town” play on the car radio, I counted.

And I ran out of fingers, because he uses the phrase “small town” 18 times, ending most of his lines with those words.

It’s hard to miss the drift of that song.

Now I realize that he’s using repetition for emphasis, but still, a listener (me, for instance) wants to shout at Mellencamp, “Get a thesaurus!”

I sometimes use the technique of repetition myself. But when writing, one tries not to annoy the reader and doesn’t overwork any particular word or phrase, giving each one some breathing room.

But in this particular case, with this particular phrase, I do understand Mellencamp. I have struggled with the “small town” battle many times myself.

Because, what else do you call a small town besides a small town? The best alternative I’ve come up with is community.

In “Synonym Finder” by J.I. Rodale, I’ve looked up the words village and hamlet to check for other small town options. And there I found: community, burg, pueblo, dorp (dorp?), settlement, municipality, jerkwater town, and hick town.

Village and hamlet are nice sounding words. But how many towns in Kansas seem like hamlets to you? Hamlet is a little too cozy, a little too New England for our open topography.

Even village doesn’t seem like a Great Plains kind of a word.

And it’s better to reuse the same word than to try to force one that sounds awkward, one that doesn’t seem compatible with the piece you’re writing.

Mellencamp’s song wouldn’t be the same without using the phrase small town. “I was born in a village” just doesn’t cut it.

So that’s why, like John Mellencamp, I tend to overuse the words small town and community. Nothing else sounds right.

By the way, how small is a small town? Is it no larger than 500 residents? 1,000? Less than 2,000 people?

About four years ago, Verna Lee Penner of Inman compiled a list of Kansas towns according to population. The numbers have likely shifted, but at that time, Kansas had about 335 towns with fewer than 500 people.

Ninety towns had a population between 500 and 1,000; and 80 towns claimed they had between 1,000 and 2,000 residents.

Add up the towns with fewer than 2,000 people and Kansas has about 505 of them.

One writer who knows small towns from the ground up is Haven Kimmel. She has published two memoirs about her childhood in the small Indiana town of Mooreland: “A Girl Named Zippy” and “She Got Up off the Couch.”

In the preface of that second memoir, Kimmel describes her hometown of Mooreland as a “… paradise for a child. It was small, flat and entirely knowable.”

She wrote, “When I say the town was small, I mean 300 people. I cannot stress this enough.” Then she referred to a town of 6,000 as a “wild metropolis.”

“Once a woman told me that she had grown up in a small town of 15,000,” Kimmel said, “and I was forced to turn my head away from her crazy geographic assessment.”

Yes, the term small town is relative. It depends on who is talking or who is singing.

I’m thrilled that Mellencamp writes music about small-town America. I wanted to learn about the place he mentions in that song, the place he was born in 1951, the place where he was raised.

He’s from Seymour, Indiana.

I’ve been unable to determine the town’s population in 1985 when the song was released, but the numbers that I’m finding on the Internet show that Seymour currently has about 19,000 residents.

Small town? Please.

Copyright 2008 Cheryl Unruh