Back in the early 80s when I first moved to Philadelphia, I had a friend who was an Episcopalian priest. 

That was a period when, as the song goes,

New friends pour
Through the revolving door

Anyway, although he was a priest, he and I never discussed religion, because although I loathe every form of superstition and supernatural belief, I’m generally not the person to raise the subject, and as he never raised it, neither did I. If you don’t shove your supernatural beliefs in my face, I won’t subject you to a reality check. Politics the same. If you don’t show me yours, I won’t show you mine. (The one exception being that I might wear a revealing T-shirt occasionally. Just ignore it, if you don’t want to talk about it.)

One time he (the priest, that is) talked me into going to a folk singer’s concert. I still have the program so I can name the singer and even the date. Bryan Bowers in concert on the autoharp on January 10, 1981.

It’s not a concert I would have gone to left to my own devices.

But I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.

As it turned out, completely unbeknownst to me, but apparently my priest friend was well aware of it, Bryan Bowers had recently been run out of a town in Kansas when he sang the song “The Dogs They Had a Party”.

The lyrics are set to the tune of the hymn “The Church’s One Foundation”, and some folks in that Kansas audience took offense and accused him of blasphemy or some such.

Well, as Bowers was winding down his performance on that cold January evening in Philadelphia, someone in the audience requested that he perform “The Dogs They Had a Party”. So Bowers explained he was reluctant to perform it, and he described what had happened to him in Kansas.

At which point someone hollered, “This isn’t Kansas!”, and the whole audience applauded.

Faced with such an overwhelming response, Bowers must have felt he had no choice, so he launched into the song, which received a huge favorable response from the crowd.

I’ve searched on YouTube, but I can’t find a version of that song as performed by Bowers, so here is the next best thing. Just so you know, my priest friend didn’t to take offense at the song; he was laughing as hard as everyone else. The lyrics are entirely secular; they explain a peculiar behavior that most dogs exhibit.

But as this post has been about Bryan Bowers, I felt I ought to include something by him, so here he is.