That night, three out-of-state idealists, white Unitarian ministers, after leaving a local restaurant made a wrong turn and got lost. Suddenly they heard white men calling after them, “Hey, you n——s.”11 They were attacked with clubs, and thirty-eight-year-old Reverend James Reeb from Massachusetts died from head injuries two days later.
President Johnson called Reeb’s wife, now a widow with four children, to offer his condolences. Protests increased across the country, though some blacks were upset that a white death generated bigger demonstrations and media coverage than Jackson’s death the previous month. On March 13, Governor Wallace arrived at the White House. LBJ put his arm around him, asking the governor how he wanted to be remembered by history. Wallace still wouldn’t agree to protect the marchers.
On March 15, LBJ went on TV to address the nation from Capitol Hill, in a joint session of Congress. Outside, civil rights protestors sang “We Shall Overcome.” “I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy. I urge every member of both parties, Americans of all religions and of all colors, from every section of this country, to join me in that cause. At times, history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”
Johnson announced that he was sending forth a bill to remove all restrictions used to prevent blacks from voting. “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
SCLC activist C. T. Vivian recalled, “I looked over … and Martin was very quietly sitting in the chair, and a tear ran down his cheek. It was a victory like none other. It was an affirmation of the movement.”12
The restraining order on the march was removed the next day. Johnson sent three thousand National Guardsmen to protect the thirty-two hundred activists walking out of Selma and toward Montgomery on March 21. Threats against King prompted many marchers who shared King’s build to wear similar blue suits to confuse potential assassins. When the roads narrowed to two lanes, only three hundred people were allowed to march for the next four days, because that was the maximum number of people the Guardsmen felt they could reliably protect.
The marchers covered between seven and seventeen miles a day, singing and clapping to spirituals such as “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round,” sometimes in the rain. People waved and brought them food and drink; the marchers slept in black farmers’ fields. When they arrived in Montgomery four days and fifty-four miles later, on March 25, more than twenty-five thousand people had joined them for the final leg of the journey.
King gave a speech on the steps of the State Capitol Building, a few hundred feet from the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where he had begun his ministry in 1954. The church was where the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott had been headquartered, after Rosa Parks set off a chain reaction by refusing to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus.
SCLC cofounder Rev. Joseph Lowry would later say diplomatically of King’s singing ability, “His gift was speaking more than singing,”13 but the musicality of King’s cadence, in the black southern preacher tradition, made him the most memorable orator of his century. He would regularly incorporate the lyrics of hymns into his sermons, and the ancient call-and-response tradition was alive in him and in men such as Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who stood beside King at the Capitol that day, echoing his lines with “Yes, sir,” and “Speak, sir.” King’s deep vibrato and sustain on key words—“letting the worrrrrrrlldddd know”—and his repetition of key phrases turned his speeches into a cappella blues spirituals.
King exhorted the crowd to remain committed to nonviolence in order to win the friendship and understanding of the white man, and not to seek his defeat or humiliation. Looking forward to a society at peace beyond color, he soared into one of his greatest speeches, “How long? Not long!” He quoted William Cullen Bryant’s poem “The Battlefield” (“Truth, crushed to earth, shall rise again”) and paraphrased the Bible’s Galatians, about reaping what one sows, as well as mentioning abolitionist Theodore Parker’s aphorism that the arc of the moral universe was long but “bends towards justice.” His speech climaxed as he shouted the lyrics of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” into the roar of the crowd. Julia Ward Howe had written the song in 1861 by refashioning the melody of “John Brown’s Body,” a song in honor of the white abolitionist, into a marching song for the soldiers of the Civil War. In alluding to it, King was implying that the March from Selma to Montgomery had finally achieved what Brown started 106 years before.
King later remarked in his Annual Report at the SCLC’s Ninth Annual National Convention on August 11, “Montgomery led to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960; Birmingham inspired the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Selma produced the voting rights legislation of 1965.”14
Despite the victory in Montgomery, the KKK wasn’t about to fade away. The night of King’s speech on the steps of the State Capitol, members of the Klan murdered white female activist Viola Liuzzo, a housewife who had come down from Michigan to help with the march. When the Klansmen saw her driving black marchers back to Selma, they chased her down and shot her in the car. One of the Klansmen was revealed to be an FBI informant who did nothing to stop the murder, so Hoover and COINTELPRO spread the rumor that Liuzzo was a Communist who had left her kids to have sex with black men.15 The FBI’s role in the smear campaign was revealed in documents obtained in 1978 through the Freedom of Information Act. The killers were given a standing ovation at a Klan parade on May 3, 1965, but were sentenced to ten years seven months later. That same month, the three white men who beat James Reeb were acquitted of murder.
In April, the Staple Singers picked up on the theme of “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round” with “Freedom Highway.” They recorded the song, and the rest of the album of the same name, backed by a full gospel choir, in Chicago’s New Nazareth Church, with the congregation clapping along.16 In the title track, an exasperated Mavis Staples boomed that the whole world was wondering what was wrong with the United States, but gave props to LBJ for saying, “We shall overcome.”
Pops’s “Why (Am I Treated So Bad)” was inspired by the time the National Guard stopped Little Rock black students from entering a white school despite the Supreme Court decision that segregation was unconstitutional. The song became one of King’s favorites. Thereafter, whenever the Staple Singers opened for King, the civil rights leader would ask, “Stape, you gonna play my song tonight?”17
II
SPRING
5
Nashville versus Bakersfield
Nashville’s Roger Miller and Bakersfield’s Buck Owens fight for the country No. 1 spot in March, while the Outlaws take on Music City and Johnny Cash self-destructs.
Like Motown writ large, Nashville (or Music City, as it was nicknamed) was a well-oiled assembly line. Producers got their songs from the publishing houses on Music Row and then brought them to life with a group of session musicians called the A-Team, renowned for their ability to cut three songs in three hours. The artists would perform at the Grand Ole Opry and then regroup at bars such as Tootsies or Linebaugh’s. After the bars closed, they could go to the home of Sue Brewer, dubbed the Boar’s Nest, where singer-songwriters such as George Jones, Faron Young, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson picked guitars all night long.1
The year’s quintessential country anthem came from Faron Young. “Walk Tall” tells the story of a convict looking back on how he ignored the wisdom of his mama and fell in with the wrong crowd. He vows he’ll make her proud once he gets out. Porter Wagoner’s “Green, Green Grass of Home” was another archetypal country ode, in which a man revisits his beloved hometown, and then wakes up and realizes he’s in prison, about to be executed in the morning.
The biggest country hit of the year was Roger Mi
ller’s ode to hobos, “King of the Road.” (Hobos loomed large in country music, as did truck drivers. They were both descendants of the drifting cowboy.) After its release in January, the song spent five weeks on top of the country chart, and it made it to No. 4 on the U.S. pop charts—and No. 1 in the United Kingdom. As a thank-you to the Brits, Miller penned “England Swings” in the same gently rollicking manner.
Alternately dubbed the “hillbilly intellectual,” “cracker-barrel philosopher” (Life), and the “unhokey Okie” (Time), Miller cleaned up with six Grammys for “King of the Road,” including Song of the Year, Record of the Year, Best Country Song, Best Country and Western Male Vocal, Best Country and Western Single, Best Country and Western Album (for The Return of Roger Miller)—and even Best Rock and Roll Male Vocal and Best Rock and Roll Single, which betrays the age of the Grammys voters. But though Miller was a favorite on the talk show circuit, he had peaked. Like innumerable contemporaries of his in country and rock, he was undone by pills.
To a large extent country artists were in their own self-contained universe, though Nashville executives such as Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley strove to cross over with the “Nashville Sound.” They stripped out the banjo and replaced the fiddle with violins, as in the urban pop of New York. They moved away from cowboys singing in the nasal “high lonesome” style and concentrated on polished crooners, backing them with vocal groups such as the Anita Kerr Quartet. Eddie Arnold was the most successful with this formula, making it to No. 6 on the pop charts with “Make the World Go Away.”
The Nashville Sound did to country what Motown did to R&B: made it slick. Also, just as that slickness created a space for Stax Records as the gritty alternative to Motown, so Bakersfield, California, rose as the earthier rival to Music City.
In the Great Depression, Oklahoma was hit by drought, and many farmers left the Dust Bowl to become farmworkers in Bakersfield, 110 miles northwest of Los Angeles. Bakersfield was just north of Weedpatch Camp, the labor camp built by the federal Farm Security Administration immortalized in John Steinbeck’s epic novel The Grapes of Wrath. Bakersfield was close enough to Hollywood for session work but far enough away that the residents could develop their own unique form of entertainment. They embraced the steel guitars and fiddles Nashville had left behind and added the loud twang of electric Fender Telecasters. The music was designed for dancing in the clubs and fused Western swing and honky-tonk with rockabilly’s backbeat.
The king of Bakersfield, Buck Owens (born 1929), was originally a Capitol Records session man for rockabilly artists Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson. In the mid-1960s he enjoyed a streak of fifteen No. 1 singles on the country chart and was the James Brown (“hardest working man”) of country, playing hundreds of shows a year. He had his own publishing company and booking agency, and started buying radio stations.
Owens kept the music flowing with sparkling singles such as “Buckaroo” and his March album I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail. Its title song is a typically wry vignette about a guy struggling to keep up with his club-hopping woman. The album also includes “Crying Time,” which Ray Charles covered at the end of the year. A decade earlier, Charles had outraged purists by combining gospel with R&B into soul, but when that was no longer controversial, he turned his attention to an even more radical experiment: fusing soul with country. Charles took “Crying Time” to No. 6 on the pop charts, No. 5 R&B, and No. 1 easy listening. “I’m crazy about Buck,” said Charles, who won two Grammys for the song.2
Owens and the Beatles were label mates at Capitol Records, and Owens added the Beatles’ version of “Twist and Shout” to his set. He and guitarist-fiddler Don Rich would imitate Liverpool accents for between-song banter, and wore Beatle wigs when their band, the Buckaroos, played Carnegie Hall.3 The Beatles in turn picked up all Owens’s albums when they came to Los Angeles, and started writing their own country-rock songs, such as “I’ll Cry Instead,” “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party,” and “I’m a Loser.” The pinnacle of the Beatles’ country exploration would be Ringo Starr’s cover of Owens’s “Act Naturally.” The song’s theme of movie stardom fit for the Beatles’ second soundtrack album, Help!, released in August.
When Owens acknowledged publicly that he liked the Beatles, he later recalled, “People would say, ‘You shouldn’t be sayin’ that. You should be talkin’ about country music.’ And I said, ‘Why not? It’s the truth! Why can’t I say I’m a Beatles fan?’ I used to get criticized for that.”4
When Owens covered Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee” on I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail, country doctrinaires began questioning his authenticity, again, in an echo of the attacks Dylan would soon endure for playing rock. But Owens took the opposite tack of the defiant Dylan. In March he bought an ad in the Nashville paper Music City News that read, “I shall sing no song that is not a country song. I shall make no record that is not a country record. I refuse to be known as anything but a country singer. I am proud to be associated with country music. Country music and country music fans made me what I am today. And I shall not forget it.”5
But like a skilled lawyer, he later clarified, “I see [the song] ‘Memphis’ as bein’ rockabilly. I didn’t say I wasn’t gonna do rockabilly. I just said I ain’t gonna sing no song that ain’t a country song. I won’t be known as anything but a country singer. I meant that, I still mean that. Listen to the lyrics. If they’re not country lyrics … the melody … if that ain’t a country melody. The only thing was, a black man was singin’ it, a black man who I was a big fan of. So, my famous saying for my little pledge—I didn’t date it. I really meant it at the time. I don’t mean for it to be taken lightly.”6
Merle Haggard was Bakersfield’s brooding flip side to Buck Owens’s crowd-pleaser. Haggard’s youth had been filled with the kind of tangles with the law that gangsta rappers would later try to make press releases out of. He was repeatedly sent to detention centers for truancy, petty larceny, writing bad checks, and burglary. He would often escape and live out his future hit “I Am a Lonesome Fugitive,” fleeing by train or hitchhiking to a new locale, where he would work odd jobs. After trying to rob a Bakersfield roadhouse, he ended up in San Quentin Prison. He was tempted to make one final escape—he’d heard his wife was pregnant by another man—but finally decided to stay put. The fellow convict he was going to escape with got out, shot a cop, and was executed. Haggard was further inspired to get his life together when Johnny Cash played the prison.
When Haggard got out, he started writing his own tunes, and briefly served as Buck Owens’s bassist, giving Owens’s band the moniker the Buckaroos. Haggard recorded the duet “Just Between the Two of Us” with Owens’s ex-wife Bonnie—she and Owens had split back in 1951—a songwriter and country singer in her own right. The two won the Academy of Country Music Award for Best Vocal Group of 1965 and were married on June 28. Haggard also won Most Promising Male Vocalist and formed his own group, the Strangers, named for his Top 10 country hit of the previous year, “(All My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers.” Bonnie served as the group’s backing vocalist. The band’s self-titled debut album was released in September.
The most surprising country debut of the year was Charley Pride, a Mississippi-born black man whose sharecropper father thought the blues were immoral and turned his son on to the Grand Ole Opry and Hank Williams instead. Pride was a pitcher in the Negro League and other minor leagues when country artists Red Sovine and Red Foley heard him singing and hooked him up with producer Chet Atkins, who got Pride signed before telling the label that he was black. Pride’s manager, Jack D. Johnson, suppressed all pictures of the artist for two full years.
Pride’s first RCA session in August yielded “The Snakes Crawl at Night,” backed with “Atlantic Coastal Line.” The A side title sounded like it might be a polemic against the Klan, but it was actually in the country tradition of a man murdering his cheating wife. The B side was a beautifully detailed hobo song sung in Pride’s warm baritone.
When Pride
walked out onstage in the redneck clubs, you could cut the tension with a knife. But the unflappable Pride would say, “Howdy, folks, I know I’ve got a mighty dark suntan, I got it picking cotton down in Sledge, Mississippi. I hope you don’t mind if I sing a few country songs for you.”7 And after launching into Hank Williams’s “Lovesick Blues,” he’d have the audience in the palm of his hand.
Pride’s big break would come the following year, when singer-songwriter Willie Nelson brought him on a package tour. Some club owners in Klan-heavy counties received death threats, and had to hire police officers to guard the stage. Nelson said that while facing down one rowdy crowd as he introduced Pride, “I knew something special was called for at that moment, so I grabbed Charlie and laid a big kiss on his lips, and once the crowd recovered they listened to Charlie and went crazy over him.”8
Nelson had written a number of classic country hits, including Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and Faron Young’s “Hello Walls,” but his own singles couldn’t get higher than country No. 43. At the time, he still acted the hillbilly, but his music reflected a jazzy influence as he mostly talked the lyrics of moody pieces such as “Night Life.”
Nelson had cut his first record nine years earlier. One of the Nashville artists with whom he would later form the Outlaw country movement, Waylon Jennings, had been kicking around almost as long, but Jennings was lucky just to be alive. In 1958, fellow Texan Buddy Holly had produced Jennings’s “Jole Blon” and “When Sin Stops (Love Begins)” and then picked him to play bass for his Winter Dance Party Tour. Holly arranged for a tour plane, but Jennings gave away his seat the night the plane went down and claimed the lives of Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens. “The day the music died,” Don McLean called it in his elegy “American Pie.”
1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Page 8