Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music - Hardcover

Jennings, Dana

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0865479607 ISBN 13: 9780865479609

Verlag: North Point Press, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

A celebration of country music from the 1950s through the 1970s traces the contributions of such figures as Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Loretta Lynn; evaluates the genre as a reflection of rural America; and considers how the form shaped the author's identity and sense of family.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dana Jennings, a native of New Hampshire, is an editor with The New York Times. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Sing Me Back Home

Hillbilly Fever

Country Music, 1950-70

Listen!

Country music is the backfire of a rattletrap pickup truck creaking down a dirt road and the lowing of a lone cow. It's music for scouring junkyards, setting out to the porch, and shooting horseshoes. It's tar-paper shacks, shoveling chicken shit for a living, and chugging cheap whiskey. It's TB music, orphan music, and outhouse music. It's potato-sack dresses, loyal three-legged dogs, and water lugged from the well.

Listen now!

Country is the incandescent keening of Hank Williams and the preternatural harmonies of brothers like the Monroes, the Delmores, the Stanleys, the Louvins, and the Everlys. It's the hick jazz of Bob Wills, Spade Cooley, Moon Mullican, and the Light Crust Doughboys. It's Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, the fore-mothers and forefathers of commercial country music, being discovered in Bristol, Tennessee, in 1927. It's the bleak chasms ofJohnny Cash and the deep pop of Patsy Cline, and the feisty example Patsy set for her musical heirs like Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. It's Hollywood's singing cowboys--those primal "Hat Acts"--like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, and unexpected yet essential black men like DeFord Bailey and Charley Pride, and Ray Charles and Chuck Berry; if you don't think Chuck Berry is country, give a hard listen to "Maybellene" and "Johnny B. Goode." It's the fierce 1950s honky-tonk of Webb Pierce, Lefty Frizzell, and Faron Young, and the fine Cajun pining of Harry Choates and the Kershaw brothers, Doug and Rusty. It's Waylon, Willie, and the boys. It's the blackface minstrelsy of Emmett Miller and the pill-fueled brilliance of Roger Miller. It's consummate git-tar pickers like Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, Hank "Sugarfoot" Garland, and Grady Martin, and that Bakersfield, California, riot sparked by Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, and Wynn Stewart. And, yeah, country music is that greasy punk from Memphis-by-way-of-Tupelo, Elvis Aron Presley, breaking the sound barrier.

I said, "Listen!"

It's two-stepping rats, poverty-stricken existentialists, and gravel roads that wash out each and every spring. It's patches on the knees of your britches, voices coarse as rasps, and a Depression that lasted thirty or forty years--now that's a Great Depression. It's music heard from the back of flatbed trucks at Laundromats, drive-in movie theaters, and quarter-mile stock car tracks. It's living for overtime up the mill, and living for your weekend case of Schlitz down home. It's tremoring at the kitchen table at four in the morning, in the grip of a George Jones moaner, as you wonder where the years of your life have flown.

Are you listening?

It's crazy arms and cold, cold hearts, heartaches by the number and setting the woods on fire ... It's the wreck of the Old 97, awreck on the highway, and that honky-tonk angel who made a wreck out of you ... It's waltzing across Texas in thrall to the "Tennessee Waltz" and the "Kentucky Waltz" ... Seeing the light, preachin', prayin', singin', and hearing Mother pray ... The great speckled bird and the bird of paradise that flies up your nose ... Pistolpackin' mamas, daddies that walk the line, and being your own grandpaw ... Mountain dew, white lightnin', and whiskey rivers ... Slippin' around, backstreet affairs and dim lights, thick smoke and loud, loud music ... Six days on the road, sixteen tons, and being busted ... Waiting for a (mystery) train, the Fireball Mail and the Golden Rocket, the Wabash Cannonball and the Orange Blossom Special ... Being king of the road on that Lost Highway where there's a tombstone every mile ... Wildwood flowers, tumbling tumbleweeds, and flowers on the wall ... Rough and rowdy ways and walking on the sunny side ... Hungry eyes watching the ring of fire on which you keep your skillet good 'n' greasy ... Drivin' nails in your coffin and slapping down cash on the barrelhead ... Bloody Mary mornings and blue suede shoes, heartbreak hotels and jailhouse rock ... Being so lonesome you could cry, cry, cry.

Listen!

With the deepest country music, there are no casual listeners because the music is curse and redemption, the journey and the homeplace, current events and ancient tales. The very best country music is prayer and litany, epiphany and salvation. That's why it's still with us.

Country music made between about 1950 and 1970 is a secret history of rural, working-class Americans in the twentieth century--a secret history in plain sight. But, too, much of it is music that has endured, music full of wit and wisdom that has made the cultural migration from being "just" country music made by a bunch of hillbillies to being, simply, American music.

 

 

Commercial country music was whelped, came of age, and eventually thrived in the twentieth century. The traditional take on that century--the American Century--canonizes the United States as it soars in an unrivaled arc, with the occasional glitch like the Depression, the world wars, and institutional racism. Even so, convention has it, Americans gladly climbed aboard the Capitalist Express, a glorious train that only made stops at gleaming stations like Prosperity, Happiness, and Satisfaction.

Country music has a different story to tell.

Country music knows broader and deeper truths about the twentieth-century American Dream, universal truths that resonate well beyond the music's original audience. Country music knows that the Great Depression didn't conveniently end the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, but instead lingered like an economic malaria in some regions deep into the 1960s ... and later. Poverty never goes out of style, as Hurricane Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans painfully reminded us.

Country music knows that the dark heart of the American Century beat in oil-field roadhouses in Texas and in dim-lit Detroit bars where country boys in exile gathered after another shift at Ford or GM. Bobby Bare might've pleaded in "Detroit City" that he wanted to go home. But we all knew he wouldn't, that he couldn't. Country profoundly understands what it's like to be trapped in a culture of alienation: by poverty, by a shit job, by lust, by booze, by class. Country music knows that even in your hometown you can be a rank stranger.

If you truly want to understand the whole United States of America in the twentieth century, you need to understand country music and the working people who lived their lives by it.

Country music is a key to unlocking the lives of the rural white working poor from 1950 to 1970. People who, when the paycheck shriveled up and blew away in the middle of the week, had to beg a half gallon of milk and a loaf of bread on the cuff at the neighborhood grocery store. People for whom country music was holier than church. Because if there's a song that kills you, that brings tears to your eyes most every time you hear it--Loretta Lynn's "Coal Miner's Daughter," let's say--you always carry a vital remnant of that song within you. And to own a record that killed you where I grew up was to reclaim a part of yourself that daily circumstance had erased; for a couple minutes you could forget that you were two months behind on the rent and that the light company was threatening to shut the electric.

That song is a divine spark in your starved soul, a healing presence. I find it impossible to conjure my dead without conjuring remnants of country songs. Hearing an old country tune is always a return to the homeplace, and listening to a classic country singer is like catching up with an old friend.

Decades before celebrity journalism turned its cynical eye on country musicians, "knowing" your favorite singer was...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: North Point Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0865479607
• ISBN 13: 9780865479609
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 257
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Uwe Hübener; 26632959738; uhuebener@gmx.de; ; Waldstraße 4; Berzhahn; Rlp; 56459; Deutschland