My taste in music ranges from long-haired to long-haired, depending on the season.

Take the winter months – preferably, take them away – when “Breakfast with Bach” becomes my morning companion, and the classical sounds waft through the house like smoke from downdrafts in the chimney.

Or, later, driving under the spell of Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff, Mozart or Schubert. Snow and wind may be pelting the car, but inside, especially when at a stoplight, my hands try to emulate Leonard Bernstein as he conducted his final concert of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.

The breadth, the power of the music, makes the cliched hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I’m nearly overcome and dizzy from nodding and swaying my head in tempo.

But not so much as in summer when the car radio blasts country music, and my hair flies every which way with the windows and sunroof open, and I’m singing along to “My Baby Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy.”

Trucks zoom by at 75 miles per hour but can’t drown out the country tales of cheating hearts, lost love, prison blues, gambled money, broken promises, one-night stands and lonely beds.

In the heat of the summer, I just can’t get enough of someone crying in his beer, regretting in woeful whines the hard luck weighing him down like cowboy boots in quicksand.

Fumes from the diesel fuel and dust from the highway may sting my eyes, but my ears are tuned to an old Roy Orbison rendition of “Meanwoman Blues” or a Willie Nelson “Blackjack County Chains.” Something about the hot air, the steam coming off the pavement and my hair sticking to the sweat on my forehead makes me bounce to the beat of “Good Hearted Woman.”

For a moment, I am really blond, not gray: a blonde, as the joke goes, who thinks Roe vs. Wade was the decision George Washington had to make before crossing the Delaware.

Maybe if the air conditioning had worked and I’d gotten a much-needed haircut, I would have reverted to classical stations where announcers speak in golf-tournament-type whispers; then my musical trip would have been soothing and serene.

Instead, it was enjoyably boisterous, being as guitars, fiddles and harmonicas sound good only at high volume. And it brought back memories of rodeos at the fairgrounds and of the annual tobacco spit at Billy Joe Compton’s pond in Raleigh, Miss.

Just goes to show, “It’s Funny How Time Slips Away.” And, it’s proof that beneath the long hair, some of us in the summertime have slightly red necks.