"Black Gold"

Come and listen to a story ’bout a man named Jed
A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed,
Then one day he was shootin’ at some food,
And up through the ground came a bubblin’ crude!
Oil, that is; black gold, Texas tea.

- From The Ballad of Jed Clampett

Those of us old enough to have savored the cultural delights of network TV between 1962 and 1971, will doubtless remember the Beverly Hillbillies. Perhaps you can still sing along with the Ballad of Jed Clampett (above), which recounts the saga of those lovable mountain folk who parlayed an accidental oil fortune into a posh Beverly Hills address where they never quite fit in with their uppity neighbors. The decade-long TV series ran out of gas, ironically, just as Texas oil production peaked and began a long, slow decline, passing the mantle of power to OPEC, the Clampetts of the Arabian Desert.