Song of the Day 8/12: Johnny Horton, “North to Alaska”

What’s left of Donald Trump’s brain? There already were blank spaces where common knowledge should be, but yesterday’s senior moment was a doozy.

I get that he says dumb stuff about drug prices dropping 1,000%, because math is hard and he’s never shown any aptitude for it, hence the bankruptcies. But I did think he’d remember that Alaska is an actual U.S. state, considering that it repeatedly voted for him.

I was wrong. Referring to his upcoming meeting with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, slated for Friday in an unknown location in the Last Frontier, Trump said the meeting would be in … Russia. If the man had brain worms they’d starve to death.

Alaska joined the union in 1959. Maybe Trump missed it – he was in military school at the time, so he probably wasn’t aware of all the media attention it got. Hollywood wasted no time in exploiting the territory’s history, particularly its turn-of-the-century gold rush, producing films like “North to Alaska,” one of John Wayne’s rare comedies, the next year.

“Snow pictures,” basically Westerns set in the North, were popular from the silent era on, and “North to Alaska” played on most of the genre’s tropes for laughs. Veteran Hollywood director Henry Hathaway complained the title made it sound like an adventure film, but Fox had already commissioned country star Johnny Horton to write the theme song. He’d had a No. 3 country hit earlier in 1960 with “Sink the Bismarck,” written to promote an earlier Fox film, and an Alaska-themed No. 1 in 1959 with “When It’s Springtime in Alaska (It’s Forty Below).”

Both the film and the record proved popular, but they got an unfortunate boost when Horton, 35, was killed in a traffic accident a week before the film’s release. The single hit stores three months earlier; soon after Horton’s death it became his third and final No. 1 country hit.

Horton’s close friend Johnny Cash gave one of the readings at the funeral. Cash dedicated a cover of “When It’s Springtime in Alaska (It’s Forty Below),” recorded in the 1970s, to “a good old friend of mine.” It was posthumously released on “Personal File” in 2006.