There are people who think God doesn’t like country music, but I tend to think he does.
–Country singer Mark Collie
It was Reinhold Niebuhr who suggested that American history is best interpreted through the category of irony. His argument was so suggestive that it was adopted and exploited by a parade of leading historians–from Perry Miller to C. Vann Woodward to Henry May, right on down to Martin Marty in our own day. And if this shotgun matrimony of incongruities, the passionate love-hate affairs of American virtues cohabitating with the vices they deplore most, captures something fundamentally true about the (formerly slave-holding) Land of the Free, then nowhere is it easier to be found than in the quintessentially American art form of country music.
Designating country music an art form straight-away lands us, like Dorothy deposited in Oz by a tornadic dream, deep in the territory of irony. Three-chord song structures, keening steel guitars, rednecks singing out their noses–you dare to call this art?
Even Nashville, as synonymous with country music as any place on earth, has doubted that it might be so. Blessed with several strong universities (preeminently Vanderbilt and Fisk), Nashville has long styled itself “the Athens of the South.” In 1943 the governor of Tennessee denounced Roy Acuff and his Grand Ole Opry for making the state the hillbilly capital of the United States. Little matter: Acuff was then so astronomically popular and so prototypically American that the Japanese, in their banzai charge on Okinawa, cried out, “To hell with Roosevelt; to hell with Babe Ruth; to hell with Roy Acuff!” The fiddler impresario responded to the governor’s anathema by himself running, twice, for the office.
There is much to be said about the aesthetic status of country music, but mainly I want to concentrate on ironies inherent within the art itself. It is, in fact, no small part of the art of country music that it teems with ironies both delicious and vexing. The three books here under review especially equip us to appreciate ironies pervading two key themes that run, root to stem, through country music: race and religion.
On the matter of race, Mississippi-born pastoral theologian Tex Sample provides us with a blunt but inarguable summary: “Without black music, country music would simply not be country.” Sample cites a scholar who says country’s “sound, structure and text: are all indebted to African Americans and their gifts. Country’s harmonic origins lie in the blues. Its dramatic employment of stringed instruments (flatpicking and sharp, fluid fingerpicking) traces back to black musical culture.”
In fact, black mentors stand behind nearly all the truly great country artists. Jimmie Rodgers, long hailed as the Father of Country Music, in his earliest years listened to black railroad crews who worked in unison by chanting under the lead of a caller setting the cadences. (Nicholas Dawidoff reports a former worker who remembers “sexy calls” were most effective: “Some callers would talk about the lingerie that a woman wore. Now that caused the crew to really shift that track.”) As a young adult, Rodgers spent many of his recreational hours in black neighborhoods, frequenting billiard halls and blues-playing juke joints. In his heyday, Rodgers’s music was so transparently African American that some worried about him as “a white man gone black.” At least in terms of his repertoire, there is no evidence Rodgers ever tried to disguise the connection. He is most famous for a series of 12 “blue yodels,” and his “Blue Yodel No. 9,” recorded in 1930, features no less than Louis Armstrong on trumpet.
Contemporaneous with Rodgers, and equally important to the history of country music, was the Carter Family. The “family” consisted of an eccentric, preoccupied Virginian named A. P. Carter, his wife Sara, and their guitarist-niece Maybelle. The Carters recorded dozens of timeless songs (“Keep on the Sunny Side” would be among the most familiar, but my own favorite is the haunting “Hello Stranger”). Most of these were gathered by A. P., who often disappeared on monthlong song-hunting forages throughout the Appalachians. As Dawidoff notes, “A. P. had an excellent ear for affecting music, but a poor memory for melody.” To compensate, he took to traveling with black blues singer Lesley Riddle. Riddle not only helped Carter take down songs: he taught A. P. many of his own and coached Maybelle in the strikingly plaintive guitar style that subsequently molded generations of pickers.
Such recounting could go on at length. Hank Williams learned guitar from a black man. Bob Wills’s Western Swing–a wondrously odd music that initially struck my pretentiously hip teenaged ears as ridiculous but eventually won me over with its sheer, infectious fun–melded fiddle music and Dixieland jazz, as well as Wills’s deep love of the blues of Bessie Smith. (One of our very finest living musician-songwriters, Merle Haggard, was mentored by Wills and prefers to call his own work “country jazz.”) Bill Monroe pioneered bluegrass out of an amalgam of fiddle shuffles, gospel hymns, and jazz (whence bluegrass’s yen for improvisation), and perfected his mandolin technique with the tutelage of an African American guitarist whose syncopated licks, Dawidoff says, helped “make old-time string-band music into something livelier and more complex, shaping his notes into sophisticated rhythm structures that experts will be hashing over for generations.” Young Johnny Cash, bored with a job selling appliances door-to-door in black Memphis, met a retired street sweeper and banjo picker named Gus Cannon. Most days, rather than hawking vacuum cleaners, Cash brought along his guitar and jammed on Cannon’s porch.
But–and here is the irony–despite this monumental legacy, African Americans and African American concerns are glaringly scarce in country music. Tex Sample cites one careful study confirming that “Of the thousands of songs on the country music hit charts since World War II, probably no more than twenty mention race in any connection.” Only two black artists have achieved visibility. Deford Bailey performed on the Grand Ole Opry during the twenties. Decades later, Charley Pride recorded a string of hits. Yet his first three singles were released without any accompanying publicity photos, and when Pride walked on a Detroit stage for his first concert he was greeted by stunned silence that was broken only after he joked about his “natural tan.”
The racism marring country’s ethos–and racism, I am afraid, is what it must be called–can be explicit. Charlie Louvin, one-half of the brotherly duet whose vocal harmonies are spine-chillingly beautiful, can still offhandedly refer to scrub pine trees as “nigger pines.” Charlie’s late brother Ira alienated Elvis Presley, with whom the Louvins were touring in 1955, by screaming at him that he was a “f—in’ white nigger.” Mostly, though, country music’s racism is a racism of forgetfulness and neglect. It reflects, I suppose, the wider racism of the white, working-class, southern culture from which it sprung, tortured and almost hopelessly complicated by the familiarity and proximity of a people and a culture to which it owes so much but, in its own economic and psychological insecurity, also fears and feels it must denigrate.
This is, of course, finally no excuse. Reinhold Niebuhr seized on irony to interpret American history exactly because it preserves an important capacity for self-criticism. So those of us who love to promote the art need to forcefully remind ourselves that behind the lily-white face of country music courses black blood and pulses glorious black soul.
Most country singers learn how to sing in church. George Jones picked up his first guitar chords in a Pentecostal Sunday school and for a while traveled with an evangelist as a child singer. Young Emmylou Harris sang duets with her father in church. Of the present-day stars in Lesley Sussman’s Yes, Lord, I’m Comin’ Home!, 14 had strong Baptist upbringings, four Pentecostal, and four Methodist or Nazarene.
Yet, as they mature and decide to pursue careers in music, country artists’ venues inevitably and, at best, ironically include not just sanctuaries but honky-tonks. Sussman says, “playing gigs in South Oklahoma beer joints” made Toby Keith “feel as if he was betraying [the] spiritual values” of his Christian raising. Mark Collie tells Sussman, “You’re faced with all your church learning and then you’re going out and making a living playing in roadhouses and bars. It’s very strange. I would be singing in the roadhouses on Saturday night and then playing the revivals on Sunday afternoon. Many a Sunday I felt like the preacher was speaking directly at me.”
So country artists ricochet between the carnal passions of Saturday night and the spiritual ecstasy of Sunday morning. A few notables have tamed this charged dialectic and managed stable personal lives: Dawidoff remarks that Kitty Wells, the first successful female solo performer in country music, “was a devoted wife and mother who didn’t drink or smoke, took a Bible with her on the road, and carried herself, the popular Tennessee governor Frank Clement observed, in ‘the finest tradition of Southern womanhood.’ ” Wells and her (only) husband have been married six decades. But many other artists have struggled, on sometimes nearly mythical scales of self-destruction, to balance the Bible in one hand and the bottle in the other.
Hank Williams wrote classics like “I Saw the Light” that still ring out at southern gospel sings, but perished from hard living and heartbreak at age 29. Carter Stanley (of the Stanley Brothers) made gospel songs the keystone of his career but drank himself to death by age 41. George Jones amazes his friends and fans, who have literally given him up for dead more than once, that he is still alive in his sixties.
Yet the uneclipsed standard-bearer in this grim litany of tortured souls is perhaps Alabaman Ira Louvin, who finally, and one can’t help but think mercifully, died in a car wreck in 1965. Raised with brother Charlie in Pentecostal fervor, Ira was to his last years telling a local preacher he would perform one more concert, then take to the road as an evangelist. He penned exceedingly preachy songs like “Broadminded,” which inveighed against social dancing and drinking: “That word broadminded is spelled s-i-n / I read in my Bible, ‘They shall not enter in.’ ” Trussed on a rack with the church stretching from one end and the honky-tonk from the other, Ira would perform in a bar, revile himself for it, then drink himself into a stupor. In unremitting turmoil, he was given to violence and repeatedly stomped mandolins to pieces. He attempted to strangle his third wife with a telephone cord. She got loose and emptied a .22 pistol into Ira. He survived, and a newspaper quoted her afterward as saying, “If the son of a bitch don’t die, I’ll shoot him again.”
Ira had a high forehead with a widow’s peak, an aquiline nose, crazed eyes, and a maniacal open-mouth smile. The cover of the Louvin Brothers’ Satan Is Real album features the siblings in a mock hell, with flaming rocks and a cardboard Satan looming behind them. Baby-faced Charlie has his arms extended with palms open, gesturing from the right side across the scene as if to say, “Ain’t this a silly picture.” Ira, though, appears positively possessed and faces the camera with arms out and fingers curled, beckoning the viewer into the torment. He is scarier, by far, than anything else in the picture.
True, all kinds of great music marinated in misery. The travails of classical composers such as Mozart and Beethoven are well known. Many jazz geniuses have passed short, stormy lives, such as Bix Beiderbecke, who died at 28, and Charlie Parker, who never made his thirty-fifth birthday. But perhaps no music so consistently and starkly juxtaposes the sacred and the profane as country.
The progressive country songwriter Butch Hancock wryly provides Dawidoff some clue to this irony: “In Lubbock [Texas] we grew up with two main things. God loves you and he’s gonna send you to hell, and that sex is bad and dirty and nasty and awful and you should save it for the one you love. You wonder why we’re all crazy.”
More seriously, Tex Sample challenges the church to put aside its tendencies to sanitize life and mount superficial moralistic facades that obscure unpleasant realities from view. Indeed, it disappoints to hear many of Sussman’s subjects insist that they became truly Christian only after they stopped singing about suffering. Susie Luchsinger (Reba McEntire’s sister) says, “I’d never been really happy singing country music. So much of it was about turmoil and fear.” The talented songwriter Paul Overstreet, according to Sussman, now “leaves it to others to write lyrics about cheating hearts, Sunday morning hangovers, and breaking up.” Red Steagall unwittingly reveals how far such attitudes are from genuine Christianity, remarking, “I just wish that everybody could have a positive attitude whether they believe in God or not.”
A good deal of excellent country music need not offend even the most avid reader of Norman Vincent Peale or the most naive champion of family values. Country songs are forever remembering Mama and harking back to home and the old ways. At their best, these songs reinforce foundational virtues and poignantly invoke healing tears.
But not all country music is informed by the power of positive thinking. I wonder if Sussman’s subjects, God bless them, have stopped reading the Psalms or Jeremiah or the Passion accounts in their Bibles. If the Christian tradition is any guide, it is not always wrong or “unhealthy” to grieve or cry out in anger or admit one’s sinfulness. I would like to think that, before they grew up and began dragging their guitars and broken hearts into barrooms, country singers gleaned something of these verities in their little rural churches. Isn’t it possible, even likely, that George Jones–who Frank Sinatra once called “the second best male singer in America”–first learned something about the artful acknowledgment of suffering at the foot of the cross?
In any event, he learned it somewhere. Dawidoff is at his considerable best in describing Jones’s visceral vocal prowess on his performance of “A Good Year for the Roses.” The song is the lament of the survivor of a shattered marriage morosely surveying his home for signs of his departed wife. As Dawidoff writes, “The vocal effect is like a human bagpipe–the slow release of a deep, mournful sound. He gives you the picture of a man who senses he is about to be unhappier than he has ever been, and will be for a long time. Someone who understood no English could hear Jones sing this song and would know instantly what it is about.”
And if that isn’t art, art doesn’t matter.
Rodney Clapp’s latest book is A Peculiar People: The Church As Culture in a Post-Christian Society (InterVarsity Press). He dedicates this essay to his late father-in-law, Jess Baldwin, and his dance band, the Sundowners.
Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.
Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 8
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