Dear Readers

Apologies for the lack of words this week. The man at the Apple store who informed me that my laptop would have to be shipped off for extensive repairs didn’t mean to take the music away, but alas this was the outcome. The ideas are percolating. Rap music as roots music; the new reality TV show Nashville as launching pad for a full-scale reassessment of contemporary country music; a search for the soul of Jerry Lee Lewis. Sit tight.

Back Door Man

I am the blues. So said Willie Dixon, with the title of his 1970 album and later, his 1990 autobiography, and he was right each time. Songwriter, producer, bassist, and occasional singer, Willie Dixon was to electric Chicago blues what Harlan Howard was to honky tonk country music: he was a man whose behind-the-scenes contributions to his idiom were every bit as substantial as the more visible offerings of the stars who turned his songs into anthems. There are countless blues primers, but for Chicago-style from the 50s and early 60s, few come close to Willie Dixon’s The Chess Box. The two disc-set is packed with blues standards written, produced, or played on by Dixon and performed by the likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Little Walter.

Disc two is a personal favorite that hits the ground running with a one-two punch: Wolf’s rendition of “Spoonful” followed by Otis Rush’s “You Know My Love.” ‘Spoonful’ is a remarkably evocative word to associate with love and each of its connotations–nourishing, petty, enriching, small–comes out, as Wolf howls intensely and stunningly lyrical guitar lines swirl about his every word. But just when you think the best is behind you, Otis Rush’s severe voice follows the sneaky baseline introduction of “You Know My Love.” When he wails “You know my love, You know my love, you know my love has never died,” it’s impossible not to know the truth of every word. Recordings like these are the blues at its best–moments infused with such raw emotional power that they transform resignation into affirmation.

Wedding Vows

When my sister was married this past weekend, I fulfilled her request to perform an original composition at the ceremony. Partly because the song I wrote had some of the colloquial simplicity of a country song I got to thinking a lot about my favorite country wedding songs. There is, of course, Gram Parsons’s “$1000 Wedding,” an affecting tale of abandonment at the altar. There is also Kitty Wells’s “I Gave My Wedding Dress Away,” an even harder hitting number about a woman who loses her groom to her sister. My favorite country wedding, however, actually takes place–and it does so inside Hank Snow’s two and a half minute “Marriage Vow.” The lyric is full of simple lines like “will you protect her and honor her name?” and “I whispered I do and I’d do it again,” and Snow’s nasal croon sounds quietly determined. Combine that with a tasteful fiddle introduction, plaintive guitar strums and gorgeous Hawaiian-style steel guitar and you’ve got a classic country ballad.

 

Along with Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb, Snow was one of the great original honky tonk singers. Despite hailing from a conspicuously atypical hometown for a country singer, Nova Scotia, Canada, Snow recorded many country hits in the early 50s. Perhaps his most significant role in popular music history was not as a singer, however, but as a man who helped shape the formative years of Elvis Presley’s music career. Initially Snow affected Elvis by securing for him a spot at the Grand Ole Opry. Not long after that, however, he inadvertently set in motion Elvis’s shift away from country music and toward massive crossover success by introducing him to a then unknown booking agent: Colonel Tom Parker.

Long Black Veil

This morning I was listening to David Gray’s new live covers album when I was suddenly transfixed by his rendition of the oft-recorded country ballad “Long Black Veil.” I was already familiar with the song via the version on Music from Big Pink, the debut record by the Band, but as I listened to Gray’s version I realized I had never really listened to the words before–at least, not closely enough to hear the darkly funny story they tell. Taking in the tale for the first time, I was also amazed at how eerily similar it felt to watching the movie Blood Simple, the Coen brothers’ debut, and my entertainment of choice the previous evening.

Hitchcockian in its methodical intensity, Blood Simple is a twisted and twist-filled story of the betrayals, confusion, and murder that surround a wife’s infidelity. Written by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin and originally recorded by the honky-tonk hero Lefty Frizzell, “Long Black Veil” is the story of a man who accepts a death sentence for murder rather than reveal his alibi because at the time of the killing he was in bed with his best friend’s wife. Told by the executed man, “Long Black Veil” is, like Blood Simple, loaded with a cruel irony that’s only enhanced by its dreamy, timeless quality.

Johnny Cash’s version from Live at Folsom Prison, probably the most dramatic version I’ve heard, is punctuated by a cackle from Cash after he sings “I spoke not a word, though it meant my life, I had been in the arms of my best friend’s wife” and thinks he hears someone in the audience applaud. It’s the kind of laugh I imagine took hold of Joel Coen the first time he watched the Blood Simple credits fall to the sound of the Temptations’ “It’s the Same Old Song”–or, better yet, his original selection, the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer.”

Hats Off to Hank (And Del)

Most fans of early rock and roll remember Del Shannon for his distinctive style on two sizable hits, “Runaway” and “Hats Off to Larry.” Few likely realize, however, that Shannon’s brooding tenor was respected enough, and prolific enough, to earn him the kind of cult following necessary to substantiate massive archival reissues such as Bear Family’s Home And Away: The Complete Recordings 1960-1970. Or could guess, for that matter, that Shannon was a country-rocker well before Gram Parsons donned his first Nudie suit.

When I stumbled upon 1965’s Del Shannon Sings Hank Williams while browsing the digital music aisles recently, I was as pleased as I was surprised. While my knowledge of Shannon at the time didn’t extend far beyond his biggest hits, I was enough of a fan of his wide-ranging and powerful voice to give the record a close listen. What emerged was a revelation. Much like Hank, and Jimmie Rodgers before him, Shannon was blessed with a voice capable of turning high-pitched moans into poetry. On Del Shannon Sings Hank Williams, he does just that, adding his own singular melancholy to Williams’s universal tales of heartache.

Less nasal than Williams’s, Shannon’s voice was similarly mature beyond its years. If Shannon’s renditions fail to match the originals, they nevertheless transport the songs to a new context that to these ears foreshadowed, if not influenced, the path that Parsons and the Byrds would take up three years later. Cleaner guitars and vocals, slightly more substantial percussion, and the occasional rich low note from Shannon’s virtuosic range all make the performances more accessible without compromising their expressiveness.

Sadly, Shannon shared with Hank not only a love for country, but also a tragic end to life. Shannon lived considerably longer than Williams, who succumbed to a deadly combination of morphine and whiskey at age 29, but Shannon too died abruptly when he committed suicide in 1990.

Music City, USA

Last Friday, my father and I made our annual music pilgrimage, this year traveling to Music City, USA. From the hundred-degrees-and-humid open air of Nashville to the chilly, air conditioned halls of country music history and back again, we trekked through the Country Music Hall of Fame, RCA Studio B, Ryman Auditorium, Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, Ernest Tubb’s Record Shop and the Musicians Hall of Fame. And, of course, we took the long cab ride from downtown to Opryland to see Porter Wagoner emcee country music’s most famous revue. In just a day and a half, we immersed ourselves in the more than eighty-year history of the white man’s blues.

Country music is a cult of tradition and nowhere is that more apparent than in the city that propelled it into the mainstream of American culture. Strewn with honky tonks and gift shops, Broadway, like Beale Street in Memphis, is not just aware of its own history, but trapped by it. The history is so rich that it seems to obstruct the future; on a typical walk down Broadway, one is likely to hear, as I did just days ago, a hodgepodge of middling contemporary “hot” country numbers and competently performed classics emanating from the dozen or so watering holes on each side of the stretch. Not surprisingly, but nevertheless regrettably, the latter batch are almost invariably more compelling.

“Sing Me Back Home: A Journey Through Country Music,” the permanent exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame, tells a similar story. Visitors on the front side of John Conlee’s “Thirty,” will be surprised to see that Garth Brooks, the biggest star in country music history, and the man who once drew more than a quarter of a million fans for a concert in Central Park, is represented by little more than a small placard in the museum. His career is thus placed on roughly equal footing with that of such relative obscurities as the Delmore Brothers. To be fair, few artists are accorded extraordinary prominence in the museum, and those who are–such as Porter Wagoner–seem to have obtained such placement by the available quantity of their own memorabilia (a plentiful supply of Wagoner relics is currently supplied by the Frist Center). Still, it’s telling that the past fifteen years of country–by far the most commercially successful for the music–are recounted in a single glass display case.

Even at the Opry, a venue so populist that interruptions for radio broadcast advertisements feel like down-home fun, contemporary country music is the misfit cousin in the stage show’s extended family. If Sawyer Brown rocked the hardest on Friday night, it nevertheless occupied an uneasy place in the show, for more reasons than just the contrast between the animalistic gyrations of front-man Mark Miller and the stationary performances the elder statespeople of country who preceded him. The irony, of course, is that while the hot licks of testosterone-driven “hat” singers may be the exception in Opryland, the Opry has itself become the exception in the broader market for country music nationally. And that truth makes the Opry itself a much more tentative enterprise. Large-looming is the question of how a familial, traditional music community and community music can thrive when the public face of its craft becomes utterly divorced from its roots. Country’s inner circle may be in tack, but, increasingly, contemporary country music seems only tangential to it.

Country purists seem, to this observer, not so much ashamed of so-called “hot” country–although they clearly view it with great ambivalence–as they are unsure about how to place it in the history of a tradition that it ignores in some respects and defies in others. Though it has been inconsistently achieved, authentic emotional expression has nearly always been the backbone of the country music ideal. When the music has diverged too far from that purpose (as it did at the height of the Nashville Sound), enterprising reformers–from the Outlaws of the 70s to the new traditionalists of the 80s–have helped reign it back to roots. The problem for Brooks’ still dominant arena era is that its excesses remain essentially unchecked. The No Depression movement has offered a more honest alternative to mainstream country music and achieved a meaningful connection with country’s historical tradition. But for all its merit, this alternative music has remained simply that–an alternative; it has failed to connect with the core followers of that tradition. Powerful a voice as each is, neither Jay Farrar nor Jeff Tweedy seems poised to ever be a populist in the mold of Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, or George Jones.

And this is why, for now, the fate of country music in the new century is uncertain. The question is not whether CMT and Toby Keith are ruining country music but whether a talented new generation can rewrite country history in a way that recognizes and redresses their sins, while still granting them their due in the annals of the great tradition. The question is the same as always: Can the circle be unbroken?

The Portrait Artist

I may have heard Hank Williams and Robert Johnson years earlier, but my love affair with American roots music didn’t begin in earnest until I encountered a much less imposing voice: Peter Guralnick.

Even among those who speak with the pen, Guralnick is soft-spoken. He is also the most honest and loving music writer I have ever read. What is most remarkable about the numerous profiles Guralnick has written of country and blues artists is that they are simultanously truthful and affectionate. The foremost writer on American vernacular music earned his position in large part by listening to the artists he admires, and, to the greatest extent possible, letting them speak for themselves.

I wish I could write about the man who may be my favorite author as skillfully as he has written about his many heroes. Maybe, someday, I’ll get a chance to interview him and write the profile he deserves. (If I do, I’ll fulfill a modest dream, much like Guralnick did when he got the chance to talk to Sam Phillips.) Until then, however, with only scant biographical details and hearsay to rely upon, the best I can do is to recommend his books.

While he is probably best known for his two volume biography of Elvis Presley, Guralnick’s body of music writing consists mainly of much shorter pieces, such as those collected in Feel Like Going Home and Lost Highway. Those two works and the long-form book Sweet Soul Music form a trilogy on country, blues, and soul music that is remarkable in both its breadth and depth.

I begin with Guralnick not only because my experience with roots music begins with him but also because it is with the spirit of Guralnick’s writing in mind that I embark upon this new trial in my own journey as a music writer.