There is nothing I love in this Pandemic, filled with heartache and uncertainty, than listening to @MartySmithESPN break down why George Strait's "I Can Still Make Cheyenne" is his finest song. And it's true beyond compare.

So let me tell y'all a story...

I'm a half black, half Puerto Rican man born and raised in North East Indiana. There is literally nothing country about me outside the whole of living in the Midwest by default. I'm about as urban as a man of color in the Midwest can be.

But rising and thriving on a steady diet of hip-hop, R&B and just enough Rock, there's this small part of me that has a soft spot for country music, something that I absolutely grasp the irony of.

Once I moved to Bloomington, IN for the second time in 2004 to finally finish my college degree at THE Indiana University (GO HOOSIERS), I found myself gravitating towards people who didn't look like me, and from there making some actual and surprising friendships.

Because my life isn't entertaining unless its filled with Irony, I decided to, at the age of 26, join a fraternity. Now that's a whole other story for another time, but I did join Chi Phi Fraternity, Iota Delta Chapter, a house that wasn't filled with the most elite people.

But you know that didn't matter, because while we may not have been the most popular, we had a good time, and we knew how to party our tits off.

The house was, as we put it, filled with "Jews and Jaspers," meaning that 1/2 the house consisted of Jewish kids who didn't quite make the cut in the traditional Jewish fraternities, and "Jaspers," a bunch of kids from Jasper, IN, a southern Indiana enclave, that was just that

Anyway, naturally, the Jaspers were natural fans of country music, and every Thursday night when we were having Whiskey Night, out came the Johnny Cash and George Strait. It wasn't long before I was using Limewire to download my own cache of Strait songs.

By the time I graduated from IU in 2008, I had my own cadre of hillbilly friends who liked to drink whiskey and listen to Strait. I didn't think and I still don't think that someone that looks like me would ever be all that welcome at any George Strait concert without stares.

Hell, I realize that might be a bias of my own, but it never stopped me from growing to love George Strait's music, most of which I could actually sing pretty well. Imagine that. So one night I can think of in particular still sticks to me this day.

I was out drinking at a lodge on the west side of Bloomington with a couple co-workers, and the lodge absolutely bent on the old, white and absolutely country side, but Bloomington is an enclave of blue in a sea of red, so even the hillbillies are more progressive than the norm.

It was Karaoke night there at the lodge, and because I liked to show off just how much of a singer I am, so I went up to put in for a song. Reading the room, which was full of older white folks in their 50's and 60's, I decided to do the thing I had never done: sing George Strait

So I put in for "You Look So Good In Love," a song I sang a hundred times or more in the shower or halfway down a bottle of Jack Daniels. I figured, "What the hell?" So I get on the small stage, and start singing away.

Not to toot my own horn, but I was actually in the zone. I was hittin' the notes and doin' the thing, and all of a sudden, all these old white people started getting on the dancefloor and actually dancing. I saw old couples embrace and dance along to a song I knew they all knew..

But it was ME SINGING IT. Here I am, this big old AfroRican, singing a country music song and I had a dance floor full of people who may or may not ever let me in their homes and they were having a good time. The song finished, and people actually clapped and whistled...