‘6 Feet Apart Or 6 Feet Under’: Singing The ‘C-19 Blues’

When the coronavirus crisis started heating up weeks ago, Bob L’Heureux was texting with his bandmates in The All Mighty Cowboys about whether to meet for practice. Sure, someone said, so long as we stay six feet apart. That gave Bob an idea for a song.

“I just started writing the song,” L’Heureux said. “It was all written within just a matter of minutes.”

He wound up with a country song titled “C-19 Blues” that’s about love and longing in the age of social distancing. The central lyric is “Six feet apart or six feet under.”

L’Heureux’s band didn’t get together in the end. So he turned to his family and recorded the song with his wife, Marta, on bass and son, Jackson, on lap steel.

“That was the reason why we recorded it as a family. Because we’re here together, we got nowhere to go, and I thought it’d be just a really fun song for the family to record,” he said.

Right now, L’Heureux’s off from work as a residential contractor, so he’s got time for creative pursuits and thinking. He said he may have scribbled down “C-19 Blues” in a few minutes, but as he considers it more, he thinks the lyrics have a deeper meaning than he may have realized at first.

“It sort of comes out of that country tradition of love and longing and loyalty—being together and staying together, even though things are tough,” he said.

L’Heureux said he’s getting positive feedback about the song from people online, but he doesn’t expect he’ll turn to the coronavirus much more for artistic inspiration.

If he does, he says, it will be after the pandemic’s passed and people are ready to come together again, in-person, to enjoy some good company and good music.

Read the rest of the rest of this story at The Public’s Radio’s website.