Friday nights can be long and hard at The Sandbar. It's the end of the work week and everyone just wants to unwind, including our staff.  Fridays are almost always busy, from five o'clock until the last person is shown the door at two a.m.  By the time all the customers are gone, the employees are ready to relax.  Cryin' Fridays was born out of this need, and it was a tradition for a long time.

I've tried for years to get the "official" story on Cryin' Fridays, and I've tried to get the staff members involved to write a guest post. I haven't been very successful on either front. Apparently the first rule of Cryin' Fridays is that you don't talk about Cryin' Fridays. So, here's what I know and remember about it.

It all started many years ago.  The jukebox had virtually no country music, and certain members of the staff were longing for some Willie, Waylon or Hank.  Some of the guys started bringing in their own CD's to listen to while they cleaned the bar (this was, of course, before the iPod craze started). They started putting together their own mixes. They started asking if new music could be added to the jukebox- which doesn't really happen much.

Dave K, Scottie Mack and Ken were three of the core members of the Cryin' Fridays crew. Once the bar closed down on Friday nights, they were cleaning to the sounds of a fiddle and lost loves. Sound a bit depressing? Perhaps, but of course the Sandbar crew made it fun.

Have you ever seen Ken dance around the bar, acting out imagined scenes from "Pancho and Lefty" I mean "Old El Paso?" (Thanks, astute employee Danny, for the correction.) Or Scottie Mack, two-stepping all over the place while restocking the cooler and taking out the trash? It's entertainment, that's for sure.

We still have CD's with the Cryin' Fridays mixes somewhere- last I knew, we were up to four or five editions. Some of the songs have made their way to Dave's iPod, so if you ask him nicely, he might just play a cryin' tune for you on a Friday night.