Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  “So what is your next single?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “After what happened with the ‘The Fever’…” He shook his head. “You spend a lot of time trying to surround yourself with people you trust, but I’m not sure if I can trust anybody these days. I’m still trying to figure that out.” He picked up a bottle of Evian and walked through the door.

  “Ladies and gentlemen…” Porter Wagoner stepped to the center of the Opry stage and grabbed a portable microphone. He was wearing his fabled magenta rhinestone jacket with the flashy inner lining that says HI! The audience usually loves it when he flashes the lining, but at that moment the crowd couldn’t care less. The fans had already begun to squeal. “He’s the biggest star in country music today and one of the most decent men I’ve ever met. Please welcome my friend Mr. Garth Brooks…”

  The stage of America’s longest-running radio program is unlike any stage in the world. Its slick floorboards are hardly extraordinary. Its sound system is not unusual in the least. Along its base sit sixty-three 40-watt lightbulbs and at the rear stands a sixty-by-thirty-foot painting of a bright red barn. But what makes the atmosphere of the stage so electric—so unexpectedly exhilarating—is its casual informality. When Garth walked onto the stage for his first time in a year, the audience burst to its feet. Old men. Young women. Mothers and grandmothers all spontaneously left their seats, hobbled, hopped, or skidded toward the stage, took photographs, waved, offered up little envelopes and gifts, and generally acted as if the reigning master of American music was coming directly into their living room. It wasn’t the applause that was a surprise or even the cameras flashing. (Though how many theaters still allow that?) It was the complete lack of pretense or even showmanship. Garth took several steps toward center stage, removed his hat, and bowed to the audience. He collected up several of the gifts, waved to the balcony, then slowly made his way toward the microphone.

  Meanwhile behind him another and, in many ways, more extraordinary aspect of the Grand Ole Opry was being played out. When Garth walked onstage from the sizable offstage waiting area, about a dozen of the people who had been waiting with him—including the manager of the Opry, Sandy, and even me, pulled along unknowingly—walked onto the stage with him. The manager just stopped behind the drummer. Sandy, who effortlessly transformed herself from sassy equal to dutiful wife, sat on a stool behind the backup singers. And I, feeling awkwardly out of place, hurried to sit down on one of the four old pews from the Ryman that had been placed for hangers-on in front of the red barn backdrop. An elderly couple welcomed me with a nod as we all watched Garth make his way to the honorary six-foot circle of maple that had been transferred from the Ryman and embedded in the floor. It was as if we were settling in for an afternoon hayride to no particular destination. Finally, after what probably wasn’t very long but seemed like forever, Garth arrived at the microphone with the call letters WSM on the placard around its stand, hunched his shoulders in that earnest way that only serves to heighten his pent-up energy, leaned forward on his Justin toes, and began to sing his own sermon for the night, the tale of a woman whose husband dies on a rodeo bull and who then kills herself on the “Beaches of Cheyenne.”

  Garth wasn’t halfway through the song, though, before the members of the audience slowly built up the courage to resume their own intimate exchange with their leader. Some did listen to the song. Others closed their eyes and nodded along. But a surprising number just continued calling out greetings, snapping pictures, and generally ignoring this much-ballyhooed “only Nashville appearance of the year” by the “bestselling artist in American history.” The truth is, they didn’t appear to want to hear him sing at all. They certainly didn’t want to listen to his band. They wanted to talk, to tell him things, to chat, and to call out declarations of love that were deeply meaningful to them at that moment. “I love you, Garth!” “Nice shoes, buddy!” “Do you like my coat?” “Say hi to Taylor.” All in the middle of one of the most desperate songs he has ever written.

  Finally the song ended and the declarations could be unleashed even more. Garth, naturally, soaked in all this affection like a sponge. He waved to the audience, giggled at some of the questions, and picked up a few more of the stuffed animals (for some reason, they all seemed to be green). Then, in an extraordinary exchange that long afterward came to epitomize, for me, the odd intimacy that country music superstars share with their fans, a man halfway up the orchestra section in the most expensive ($17) seats, lifted his voice above the crowd.

  “My wife loves you, Garth!” he called, and the people around him giggled. Garth, who was just preparing to launch into his second song, stopped, smiled in the man’s direction, and called out, “What’s your wife’s name?”

  “Karen!” the man replied with gusto.

  “I love you, too, Karen,” Garth said, and you could hear the women swoon. A moment passed, then Garth continued. “And by the way, what’s your name, sir?”

  There was a pause. “Brian,” he said. Now you could hear laughter; he had the men as well.

  “Well, I love you too, Brian.”

  He nodded for the drummer to start.

  Though it seems anachronistic today, it would be hard to overstate the importance of the Grand Ole Opry to the identity of the American South. While not the first Saturday night barn dance, nor initially the most prominent (that honor belonged to WLS in Chicago), by the late 1930s the signal of the Grand Ole Opry reached over thirty states, helping it to become the defining cultural program for millions of rural Americans, many of whom walked miles to their neighbors’ houses to hear their favorite show or rigged radios up to truck batteries. Those performers fortunate enough to be invited to join the broadcast—Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Minnie Pearl, Bill Monroe—saw their careers rise with the success of the show. By the mid-1940s, Roy Acuff had become so well known as a result of his appearances on the Opry (as well as a few movies that spun out of the show) that Japanese soldiers trying to psych out American soldiers fighting in the Pacific shouted, “To hell with Franklin Roosevelt! To hell with Babe Ruth! To hell with Roy Acuff!”

  Central to the success of the Opry, and to the music it helped promote, was an overwhelming sense of place. Especially after the show moved to the Ryman Auditorium in 1943, with its upright church pews in front, cramped dressing areas in back (which spawned the habit of wandering onstage), and internationally acclaimed lack of air-conditioning, the Opry oozed humid huckleberry tradition through every staticky receiver it reached. “You listen to the Opry, and pretty soon you have a place in mind,” wrote Garrison Keillor in a famous New Yorker profile, “a stage where Uncle Dave sang and told jokes and swung the banjo, where the great Acuff wept and sang ‘The Great Speckled Bird,’ where Hank Williams made his Opry debut with ‘Lovesick Blues’…where Cousin Minnie Pearl calls out, ‘Howdee! I’m just so proud to be here!’ And eventually, you have to go and be there, too.”

  Even as late as the early 1950s, when Paul Hemphill, a Birmingham teenager and later a Nashville chronicler, made his first trip to the Opry, it was a moment of transcendence for the lifelong baseball and country music fan. “Mama and my sister made up fried chicken, potato salad, and beans on the night before,” he wrote, “and all during the five-hour ride to Nashville the next day in our new Dodge Coronet sedan—over twisting asphalt back roads my father knew like the back of his hand, Daddy keeping the car radio tuned to country stations, so as to heighten the anticipation—I tingled. ‘Wonder who’ll be there. Hank? Naw, they had to fire him for something. Little Jimmy Dickens really that little? Wish I had an autograph book.’” And when he finally arrived on Fifth and Broadway: “That imposing shrine of fierce redbrick that is the Ryman Auditorium might as well have been Yankee Stadium.”

  But within months of Hemphill’s visit to Nashville, the importance of the Opry started to erode. Elvis Presley, told to return to truck driving after his only Opry appearance in 1954, landed the first blow with his upstart rock ‘n�
�� roll revolution. The rise of television (so key to Elvis) further undermined the centrality of radio, not to mention the front-porch tradition it represented in the South. “Within a year after that visit to the Opry,” Hemphill recalls, “my father was buying our first television set. That black-and-white nineteen-inch screen brought promises of another world into our living room in Birmingham—California beaches, New York skyscrapers, Yankee Stadium, the Rockies (much more impressive than our Appalachians), the World Series (So why go watch the Birmingham Barons play?)—and for the next twenty years, I would try to cover up my roots and engage in a quixotic search for those promises.”

  A decade and a half later, when the Opry finally succumbed to reality and sought relief in the suburbs, die-hard fans proclaimed the end of an institution. “As I awoke, slowly, on Saturday morning,” Garrison Keillor wrote of the day the new facility opened, “it dawned on me that I didn’t know where Opryland was, or how to get there. By midafternoon, I knew that Opryland was eight miles from the hotel by freeway and six by river, either way as practical as the other. There was no bus to Opryland; a rented car could be returned on a Sunday only at the airport, and I was leaving on the Sunday train; the route by road was not direct, one would have to hitch two or three rides to get there; and my boots weren’t made for walking.”

  The Opry, and with it an important part of the Old South, seemed to be waning. And though many lamented this passing, others—myself included—did not. As a child growing up in the Television Era South, the Opry, and the country music it represented, embodied a South I didn’t like. Far from anchoring me to a timeless past, to me it symbolized the tyranny of place, a set of shackles that beautifully rendered a bygone region. Like Garth, I was a rock ‘n’ roll or at least a Top 40 kid, waiting up on New Year’s Eve to see which sentimental seventies hit would be number one for the year. I can still remember the seminal day I received a copy of Elton John’s “Philadelphia Freedom” for our junkyard jukebox. It was my older brother’s favorite and thus mine as well. As a fifth-generation Georgian with parents educated outside the South, living in a neighborhood with carefully cut lawns and driving to school in a station wagon, I found Billy Joel more relevant than Lefty Frizzell. Hank Williams was not my guiding light; Patsy Cline was hardly my mother’s milk. If anything, like Paul Hemphill, I couldn’t wait to escape the South after high school and seek my destiny in the larger world.

  It didn’t work. In fact, no sooner had I left the South than I realized I was bringing more of it with me than I was prepared to admit. It wasn’t that I had a secret hunkerin’ to eat pork rinds and drink Jack Daniel’s. It wasn’t even that I had a deep-seated desire to reembrace my childhood days of honeysuckle wine and BB guns. That wasn’t my desire because that wasn’t my South and because that South doesn’t particularly exist anymore anyway. My desire was for something more complex and more contemporary. I was holding on to the thinnest of narrative threads in my life. The part of me that wants, despite the headlong advance of cynicism and despair, to hold on to a storyline that seems somehow bedrock. It’s that part of me that brought me home to the South, and, I believe, it’s that part of the country that has also brought it home to the South at this time in our history.

  It was almost a decade after leaving home that I first started listening to contemporary country music. At first it was just curiosity calling. Like millions of Americans, I couldn’t help noticing that a new kind of sound had started coming from the radio—a little louder, a little faster, with familiar drums, less twang, and, for the first time, the hint of an edge. Some friends dragged me to see Mary Chapin Carpenter perform in Washington, D.C. I saw Garth Brooks swinging from a rope on television and he reminded me of a rock star. The Judds seemed to be everywhere, and at least one of them (Was it the mother or the daughter?) sure could sing. The emergence of this new breed of country music was interesting to me for another reason: It seemed to lack the dusty old icons that made the Opry so offensive to Southerners like me, especially those of us who worked on computers, watched “Saturday Night Live,” and tried our hands at using chopsticks. “I try to think about Elvis / Memphis / Oprah in the afternoon,” Patty Loveless sang in one song, “…Sushi bars and saxophones.” Say what you will about old-fashioned country music, but it’s hard to imagine Hank Williams, Sr., watching Ricki Lake and nibbling on pickled ginger. The Land of Cotton was at last forgotten; the Confederacy would not rise again.

  I, for one, was delighted. I love the South. I love the attachment to home, the sticky weather in summer, the storytelling, the slightly ribald humor. But I also love sushi bars, saxophones (I tried to play one once, but wasn’t very good), as well as, on occasion, Oprah in the afternoon. To me the best of contemporary country music speaks, at its heart, to both these elements. With its playful wit and unflagging directness (“If you have to explain a country song,” an executive in Nashville once told me, “it’s not a good song…”), the strongest music coming out of Nashville these days captures the new hybrid that has been emerging across America out of the combination of rural and urban motifs—the mix of apple pie and neon, if you will; the blending of dirty fingernails with designer shoes. More to the point, I loved that this ideal was being created not in Hollywood or Greenwich Village, but in a relatively isolated creative community in a six-square-block area of middle Tennessee, which only a few years earlier had still been offering up “Hee Haw” to the world.

  Once I started exploring country music, I found that I was not the only one who had been attracted by its changing face. By 1993, 42 percent of Americans were listening to country radio every week, twice the number of a decade earlier. According to the Country Music Association, these listeners included a third of all Americans who owned a home, 40 percent of single adults between twenty-five and thirty-nine, and half of all Americans who owned a snowmobile. With 2,642 radio stations programming Nashville’s latest, country had become the dominant radio format in the United States, reaching 20 million more people a week than its closest competitor: adult contemporary. Moreover, these new fans were spread out in all regions. In 1994, country radio was the top-rated format in 55 of the nation’s largest 100 cities, including Baltimore, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Seattle, San Diego, and Washington, D.C. A million people a week were listening to country radio stations in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.

  Country fans, meanwhile, were more educated than either adult contemporary or rock audiences. According to the Simmons Study of Media and Markets, 36 percent of country music fans had postgraduate degrees, as compared to 30 percent for adult contemporary and only 22 percent for rock. They were also wealthier. Forty percent of individuals with annual incomes over $40,000 listened to country music, as did a third of individuals who earn over $100,000 a year. This money had completely changed the record business. In 1995, country album sales, which accounted for 18 percent of the market, surpassed $2 billion a year, three times their total in 1990 and twenty times what they were in 1970. In 1985, ten new country albums went gold—sales of half a million units—while seven went platinum, meaning they topped 1 million. In 1995, fifteen albums went gold, twenty-six went platinum, five reached 2 million, four reached 3 million, one passed 7 million, and one, Garth Brooks’s No Fences, topped 10 million units.

  America, as Bob McDill wrote, had “Gone Country.” And though McDill’s song, which Alan Jackson took to number one in early 1995, actually poked fun at country’s trendiness, the trend was still real. In less than a decade, the once ridiculed world of Nashville had become an unlikely focal point of American pop culture, a new patron city for the American dream. What had been a quaint, listless corner of the entertainment industry overnight exploded into the mainstream American music. Moreover, just as rock ‘n’ roll foreshadowed many of the changes in gender and race relations that followed in the sixties, country music in the nineties—with its themes of family and renewal—became the clearest reflection of many of the conservative ideals that were just beginning to surface in Amer
ican life. In short, country music, once the voice of a distinct minority in America—working-class Southerners—had become the voice of the new American majority: middle-class suburbanites. No longer about one particular place, country music had become about every place.

  Eventually I decided that the best way to understand this community would be to move to Nashville and try to become as much a part of it as I could. As a Southerner and, by that point, a frequent visitor to Nashville, I knew enough not to be surprised by the absence of hay bales and corncob pipes. I also knew enough not to be shocked when I met more people from North Hollywood and the West Village than from Southern Alabama. But what did surprise me was the magical and welcoming way in which the city opened up to me. Before coming to Nashville, I thought that the stars and the industry would remain steadfastly aloof to an avowed outsider. What I found was the opposite. Once people realized that I did not have an agenda, that I was not some disgruntled rock critic trying to infiltrate the community and serve up another hatchet job about the industry and its fans (“You be the judge,” Rolling Stone wrote several years ago. “Garth Brooks is at the top of the pop music charts. At the same time, the nation’s verbal SAT scores plummeted to an all-time low. Can anyone save our children?”), the town embraced me. Sure, they wondered what I would write. Certainly they feared an exposé. But still they talked with me, openly and honestly. They invited me backstage. They invited me to travel with them on the road—in the bus or on the jet.

  In the course of making those travels, I tried to answer the question of what the changing nature of country music said about the changing nature of America: our values, our culture, our shifting sense of place. Nashville these days is exhilarating. It’s certainly rapidly changing, but it’s also, I believe, vitally important. It is impossible to understand the maturing, tradition-craving, socially conservative America of the moment without understanding the chief expression of many of those views: country music. And, as I discovered, the best way to understand that music is to understand the people—colorful, intense, at times calculating, even gothic—who have made the music the centerpiece of their lives.