With his big hat and catchy tunes, George Strait was my gateway drug into what the old joke calls my two of my favourite types of music – country and western.

Like everyone else I knew, I loathed country music when I was growing up, and all the way through my 20s.

There was nothing as cheesy and uncool as “country-and-western” – as it was only ever called – with its sentimental songs, oom-pah rhythms, embroidered shirts and fringe jackets, cowboy boots and big hats.

Until one day in the late Eighties when my friends Steve England and Jo Hagan converted me by starting a club night called Son of Redneck. Neither of them were obvious choices to be playing country music.

We used to hang out together at punk gigs and Steve still wore the leather jacket, razorblade earring and ripped jeans, while Jo was a black man whose family came from South Africa. Not exactly cowboy material.

Steve introduced me to a world of country music beyond and before my ken, particularly the roots recordings of pioneers like Jimmy Rodgers and Hank Williams and Roy Acuff, the outlaw country of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, the Texas honky tonk greats like Buck Owens, Hank Snow and Lefty Frizell, and the western swing of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.

In fact, Steve would end up moving to Austin, Texas, where he took up the pedal steel guitar.

Long before that he made me a sampler tape, which I still have, to introduce me to “proper” country music. Among the many gems there was this classic from 1987 by George Strait, a Texan who helped bring country music back to its roots with songs like this one, and has sold 100 million records doing it.

It’s got a great tune and it’s a lot of fun for anyone who loves wordplay, each of his old girlfriends matched to a different town – Rosanna in Texarkana, Alison in Galveston, sweet Eileen in Abilene – with the classic comic pay-off line so beloved of so many old country tunes: “All my exes live in Texas… that’s why I reside in Tennessee.”