The same is true, even more emphatically, of a song that many people believe is the best Hank ever wrote. It began as a few scrawled lines on a scrap of paper, and at first he didn’t know quite what to think of them. He took them to a songwriter friend named Jimmy Rule to ask if they made any sense. Rule assured him they did, and with a little coaching and polishing from his publisher, Fred Rose, Williams achieved a nearly perfect evocation of loneliness. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” was a watershed song for country music - sixteen lines of metaphor and imagery that comprise not the straight-forward story line of an old-fashioned ballad, or even Williams’s usual description of a particular situation, but rather a haunting word picture of an abstract feeling.
The silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky and as I wonder where you are I’m so lonesome I could cry.
The quality of the poetic components varies a little from verse to verse. But all of it works and, in the last verse especially, the technique is as sophisticated as any you’ll find. The metaphor of a sky being lit by silence is precisely the way it strikes the brain—hearing and sight are at work simultaneously, blended at the moment of perception.
And there are the smaller things. The sky is purple instead of dark, black, or something more obvious, and there is the subjunctive verb in the title of the song—the singer isn’t crying, but he could—which suggests a kind of strength and endurance that is all the more lonesome because the feeling is bottled inside.
As Hank himself once said, “It was not too bad for an Alabama hillbilly,” and yet his songs appeared so simple that a lot of people who should have known better were inspired to travel his road. And that, unfortunately, is the other side of the Hank Williams legacy. Several generations of country musicians have set about copying the twang and the tear in his hard-edged voice, and the unobtrusive technique of his gut-level songs. In many cases they have succeeded, or come pretty close, but in a larger sense of course they’ve failed. For imitation is the antithesis of creativity, and creativity was what the Hank Williams tradition was all about.
There were at least a few people around Nashville who were able to grab hold of that understanding, amid all the swirling debates about what was country music and what wasn’t, and whether anything could really be country in a suburban nation homogenized by prosperity and television. One of those people in the 1970s was Waylon Jennings, a tough but gentle west Texas good ole boy who cut his musical teeth as the bass player for Buddy Holly.
Jennings’s rock ’n’ roll background cropped up often in the beat of his music, but never in his voice, which had as much pure-grade country soul as any voice could have. He had become, by the middle of the decade, the most prominent of an ill-defined class of innovative musicians around Nashville—a rough-hewn, sometimes inarticulate bunch who were serious about their music and bristled at the still widely held assumption that if you didn’t sound a lot like Hank, you were somehow doing violence to the tradition of country music.
In his words and his actions, Jennings refuted that notion. He boycotted the Grand Ole Opry because they wouldn’t let him use a full set of drums, recorded songs by Bob Dylan and other non-country writers, and made pioneer appearances at such big-city night spots as the Troubadour and Max’s Kansas City.
And yet, for all of that, he was as much preoccupied with the roots of country music as any other performer. The fans instinctively understood that fact, and those who poured in for his concerts were not only the younger and shaggier believers who had rallied to the cause in recent years, but also the older, more crimson-necked fans—who, like the young, recognized Waylon as one of their own. And if there was ever any doubt in their minds, all they had to do was listen to his songs—his ode to Bob Wills, written on a plane between Dallas and Austin, and even more important, his Top Ten philosophical hit about the legacy of Hank: Lord, it’s the same old tune, fiddle and guitar/Where do we take it from here?
Jennings performed that song nearly everywhere he went, and on a swing through Atlanta in 1975, he grabbed a few minutes backstage to talk about the thoughts behind it. “The key idea is expansion,” he said. “That’s what all of us are talking about. Hell, Hank just didn’t live long enough. He’d be the most progressive guy around today. And Bob Wills was playing with a twenty-one-piece band, with horns and all that stuff - back in the forties, man. So the music keeps expanding. You look at any of the giants - Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, Hank Williams - they all understood that, and all of us oughta be understanding it today.”
The problem, in Jennings’s view, is that the powers that be in Nashville have a history of timidity about change or expansion beyond a polishing of yesterday’s rough edges. Frustration over such closed-mindedness became an obsession with Jennings, and eventually he banded together with a fellow nonconformist named Tompall Glaser to do battle with record company execs in the cause of greater independence.
To everyone’s amazement, their efforts paid off. “About two years ago [in1974], I got the absolute musical freedom to do whatever I want,” said Waylon, and the results from the very beginning were spectacular. Record sales exploded, his concerts were packed, and he was named country music’s top male vocalist in 1975.
Waylon, in a sense, seemed a little bit bewildered by the sudden admiration that came his way, and the hard and fast living it has helped thrust upon him. It unleashed some of the vagaries of his volatile personality—a darker, moody streak that coexists stubbornly with his fundamental decency. He and Glaser had a falling-out in 1976, and wound up wrangling through lawyers about how to dissolve their business liaisons. But musically, all that was beside the point. Jennings et al continued to embody a well-rooted willingness to change that, at least for a while, kept country music from going stale.
Nobody embodied that willingness more thoroughly than Tompall Glaser. Even though he was never as popular as Jennings, Glaser struck out on the most radically creative direction of all. He decided to fuse the sound of the blues with the sound of country, which was not in itself unique. What was unique was that Glaser approached the task in the most obvious way—by putting together a band that consisted of both blues and country musicians.
The idea jelled several years back when he wandered into the New York club Max’s Kansas City to catch the closing act of a high-powered rhythm and blues singer by the name of Bobby Blue Bland. Anchoring the band that night was lead guitarist Mel Brown, a native of Jackson, Mississippi, who had grown up on a steady diet of delta blues and had retained his affinity and fascination with the roots of Southern music. Glaser was stunned by the skill of Brown’s picking, and after the show he called him aside, told him what he had in mind, and asked if he would be interested in coming to work in Nashville. Intrigued, Brown agreed to think it over, and about two years later he called Glaser to say he was ready. He brought with him drummer Charles Polk, another Mississippian, and together with Glaser and three top Nashville pickers, they embarked upon the task with an idealistic fervor.
“It just made good sense,” explained Mel Brown. “The roots, you know, are the same—hard times are on both sides. It’s just that he [Glaser] is the only cat with enough nerve to do it this way. ’Stead of a white cat playing the blues licks, he has me and Charles.”
By the spring of 1976, the blend had evolved well enough to go public with a new album and a major national tour. Reviewers, even in the highbrow New York Times, were ecstatic, and the crowds became downright unruly as they cheered and clapped and clamored for more. The scenes may not have rivaled, say, the Hank Williams debut at the Grand Ole Opry, but in places like Atlanta, Norfolk, and Chicago there were the same ripples of excitement as the fans realized they were hearing something fresh, different, and yet identifiably country.
One crucial test was Atlanta. The crowd that balmy mid-March night consisted entirely of the hard-core faithful, undiluted by the sprinkling of college kids and other young people who would turn out in other c
ities along the way. Mel Brown was vaguely uneasy, realizing that the time was not long past when such an assemblage might have waxed nasty at the sight of a couple of bear-sized black men playing the blues in a hillbilly band.
But on this particular night, the mood was friendly. The applause built steadily as Tompall opened the show with a Tom Paxton folk song called “The Last Thing On My Mind,” ran through a couple of straight country numbers, and then moved from center stage to let the band members do an instrumental and display their talents. The showstealer was Brown, bending over his guitar in rapt concentration and sending out a series of intricate, quick-fingered blues runs that drew half a dozen rounds of applause even before the song was finished.
Glaser lounged to one side, grinning, his elbow propped on an amplifier, and then moved back to the stage and broke into the old Jimmie Rodgers song, “T for Texas, T for Tennessee.” There was symbolic significance in the choice, for Rodgers is legendary for his own peculiar blending of country and blues—his twelve-bar stanzas, repeated lines, and guitar runs borrowed from the black railroad workers he had known in Mississippi.
In his early teens, Rodgers had landed a job carrying water to the depot workers in Meridian, and he was inevitably there during break time, when they retreated to their banjos and guitars. He learned to play both instruments during those years, and he also learned songs and fragments of songs that he would use later on in his recording career.
Because of recurring bouts with tuberculosis, Rodgers left railroad work after fourteen years, determined to make it as a professional musician. After knocking around for a couple of years, he landed a job in 1927 singing blues and mountain ballads at radio station WWNC in Asheville, North Carolina. In July of 1927, he learned that Ralph Peer, then of Victor Records, would soon be in the nearby town of Bristol, Tennessee, monitoring recording sessions for aspiring hillbilly singers.
Rodgers hustled over, got recorded, and when his music became moderately popular over the next few months, the Victor people decided that they had signed a potential star. They brought him to the company studios in Camden, New Jersey, for more extensive recording sessions, and it was on the first session that Rodgers cut “T for Texas, T for Tennessee.” The song proved to be significant for him in a number of ways. It was a hit, for one thing. But more important in the long run, it also marked the first time that he used his patented “blue yodel”—a homespun bit of vocal gymnastics in which he allowed his voice to warble from octave to octave, producing the pained and lonesome sound that was to become his trademark.
Tompall Glaser, whose whiskey tenor voice is not well suited to yodeling, doesn’t sing the song in quite the same way. But the fact that he does it at all underscores what he regards as a deeper kinship between himself, Rodgers, and some of the other unorthodox musicians who have come along from time to time in the history of country music.
The liner notes of his first album in 1976 sum it up very well. “Tompall does not break down tradition when he brings a new idea or arrangement to the studio or stage,” the notes affirm. “He does not break down tradition any more than Jimmie Rodgers did with his blues, Hawaiian instruments, and the use of Louis Armstrong on sessions. Or any more than Ernest Tubb did with his electric guitar or Hank Williams with a sound that changed all music or Johnny Cash with his protest songs or Waylon Jennings with his rock beat. There may be a break from traditional form of expression, but there is no break from the tradition of looking ahead and trying new ideas.”
“Hell,” agreed Tompall, “what we’re doing’s not radical. We’re just going after the entire spectrum of our roots, and the roots of country and the roots of blues are the same. It’s going to be fun to live it and put it together.”
That view of country music became common around Nashville sometime early in the 1970s—the assumption that the Nashville sound is closely related to a number of other musical traditions, including blues, rock, and even the folk-protest sounds of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. That assumption wasn’t new, but it had become submerged beneath the rhetoric and the reality of all the political and social forces that were affecting country music between the mid-fifties and seventies.
For a time at least, the rediscovery of common ground became a pivotal motif in country music, and as much as anything else, it was responsible for the renewed power and the broadened appeal of the country tradition. The thing that tied Roy Acuff to Willie Nelson, or Tompall Glaser to Charlie Daniels, or Kitty Wells to Emmylou Harris, was that they were all concerned in one way or another with getting back to the roots.
3
The Estrangement of Country & Folk: Losing Sight of the Common Ground
He’s a poor man ’cause mining’s all he’s known and miners don’t get rich loading coal . . .
—Hazel Dickens
The roots. They run deep into the life-style of places like Clark County, Kentucky, an ancient aggregation of coal-country foothills and rolling bluegrass farmlands. In the western reaches of the county, perched on a hilltop overlooking the Kentucky River, is the pale green cabin of Asa Martin. He built it himself in the early sixties and, for a few years at least, it served as the haven he intended—a secluded home base for some serious bass fishing down on the river, and maybe a little neighborly guitar-picking later in the evening.
Eventually, however, they found him. Some professors from the West Coast stumbled upon the fact that he was still alive, and they reacted with all the gleeful disbelief of prospectors in the presence of a fist-sized nugget. The professors were writing the story of old-time, country-folk music, and Asa Martin had been a part of that story off and on for the past fifty years—ever since the mid-twenties when he and Fiddlin’ Doc Roberts met in a Winchester barbershop, got to talking and picking, and decided on the spot to put together a band.
That decision soon led them to the “WLS Barn Dance” in Chicago, to shows of their own at WHAS in Louisville and WLW in Cincinnati, and finally to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. In between, Asa recorded more than six hundred record sides and wrote some enormously popular songs, including “Hot Corn, Cold Corn,” made famous by Flatt and Scruggs, and “I’m Going Back to Alabam’,” recorded by everybody from Martin, himself, to Pat Boone.
Asa was recording again in the 1970s. The music was in his blood, and at age seventy-five, he had the look of a man who was happy with his life. His frame was gaunt and bent with his age, but his sun-tanned face—uncrinkled except around the eyes and the smile—exuded the kind of serenity you see among people who have found little reason for regret.
As Asa settled back into his lived-in easy chair and began to reminisce, the memories were still sharp, as he pulled out the tattered old scrapbook with the yellowing handbills and newspaper clippings, and the promotional fliers with the dates and titles of many of his records. “Here’s an old one,” he said, fumbling with a flier dated January 15, 1930, affirming that among the latest batch of Gennett Records was “Down on the Farm” by Asa Martin. The song, which he sang for a visitor with an a cappella approximation of the original, tells the story of a young man returning to the old home place, where the memories flood his brain and a stranger greets him at the door. “I learned that from Mama,” he said. “Back around 1904, I guess it was. She used to sing it around the kitchen. Music was a big pastime back then. That was before it went commercial, and it played a big part in people’s lives.”
That fact was impressed upon people like Ralph Peer, who came South in the twenties to record the Appalachian musicians, and Cecil Sharp, the English musicologist who traveled to the mountains a few years before Peer in search of old British folk ballads that had survived in the NewWorld. He found them all right, but he found a few other things that he had not been expecting.
One of those things, he later explained, was the bearing of the people—a kind of sturdiness and self-containment coexisting with the poverty and isolation; a sharp contrast, he concluded, to the sh
uffling obsequiousness of many British peasants. But the most striking thing was more simple and more directly related to his musical mission: it was the fact that everybody made music; everybody.
Sharp and others have concluded from that fact that music in the mountains served a far more crucial function than simple entertainment. “It was,” says Loyal Jones, an ardent folklorist at Berea College in Kentucky, “the literature of the people. Just as the ballads had been an important form of literature in the British Isles, they also served a similar function here.”
In addition, the late Buell Kazee, a preacher and legendary banjo picker who cut fifty-six record sides back in the twenties, maintained that in the days before psychoanalysis and all the other sanity-preserving sciences and pseudo-sciences of the present, music was a way of preserving equilibrium.
Asa Martin agreed with that assessment. He remembered boyhood hikes down the narrow, tree-choked hollow just south of Winchester, when he and his family would lug along their guitars, and the neighbors would do the same. They would all rendezvous at a little weather-beaten church, sparsely equipped with poplar-bench pews, and they would sing for hours—religious songs mostly, but others as well: fiddle tunes and Old World ballads, and the indigenous compositions of tragedy and hard times.
There was an entirely different feel at such gatherings from the mood today at the dozens of old-time music festivals that are beginning to crop up throughout the South. When a quarter of a million pot-smoking, bare-breasted, stringy-haired young people will descend upon the hamlet of Union Grove, North Carolina, to revel in the music of mountain-grown fiddlers, it is obvious right away that something is different.
It’s true that on the surface what’s going on appears to be a remarkable resurgence of tradition, a modern communion with the spirit of the past. But in a fundamental sense, it isn’t. And the difference is not simply the age, appearance, and life-style of the fans, but rather their relationship with the music. For example, when Doc Watson, the virtuoso guitar-picking native of Deep Gap, North Carolina, came down from the hills for a recent bluegrass festival in Charlotte, he found himself confronted by thousands of wildly appreciative people—but they were so appreciative that their adrenalin levels were a little abnormal, and they swarmed toward the stage, shrieking and clapping and obliterating the lyrics and the musical subtleties that are, in Watson’s view, what the music is all about.
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