Nowadays, it’s hard to hear the exquisite close harmonies of Ira and Charlie Louvin without thinking about the way that changes in historical perspective alter a listener’s impression of any musical performance. When the brothers from Knoxville, Tennessee sang in the 1950s and 60s, their lyrics–many of which were didactics and cautionary tales affirming the necessity of strict Christian morality–may have heartened true believers offended by the individualistic, secular ethos of nascent rock and roll. In those days, perhaps it was even possible to take their magnum opus Satan is Real on its own terms–as an earnest meditation on temptation, sin, and redemption.
While the musical purity of their harmony-propelled numbers for guitar and mandolin remains intact, today it is nearly impossible to listen to the Louvin Brothers without smirking at their dogmatic, sensationalist, and explicitly closed-minded take on Christianity. Nor is it easily to ignore the contradictions between the implicit humility of their homespun vocals and the arrogance of their loftiest moral sentiments, or between their unflinching behavioral imperatives and Ira’s own caustic mean-streaks tinged by his racism and severe alcoholism. The brothers’ decision to depict a devil with horns and a pitchfork on the cover of Satan on Real now seems like kitsch comedy.
Listening to a song like “Broadminded,” approximately 50 years after it was originally recorded therefore demands a multi-layered process of contextualization. To these ears, precisely because time has rendered quaint and hopelessly idealistic the Louvin Brothers’ line-in-the-sand preaching , it has ultimately turned their sentiments poignant. When the brothers sing “That word broadminded, is spelled S-I-N, I read in my bible, they shall not enter in,” and Ira’s mandolin echoes, the Louvins convey a sense of moral certainty that is not oppressive, but liberating. It fails to oppress because the Louvins lost the struggle–closedmindedness is today’s black sheep; it liberates because it is great music born out of ideological rigidity–suddenly a rare commodity in this age of irony, cynicism, relativism, and doubt.
perhaps you might find this article to be of interest.
http://www.killingthebuddha.com/dogma/high_lonesome.htm
also, it is liberating because it is a struggle for truth in the face of their (especially ira’s) inability to live up to the standards to which they aspired (the ‘line in the sand’). it is interesting to think about the context of charlie’s recent song “ira” since he fired ira from the band in the 60’s for drunkenness and has a history as a staunch christian tee-totaler who has been married to the same woman for >50 years-ish… and that persona also by the way provides something of a basis for the willie nelson style of gospel singing as exemplified on the album which i assume is the namesake for your blog…