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Letters From Little Rock |
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a semi-regular column
Letters From Little Rock is my column on whatever topic strikes my fancy at the time. Check in as often as you like, but I make no promise as to when new columns will appear. I hope to add a column on a weekly basis, but honesty compels me to admit that I might not even maintain a monthly schedule. April 11, 2004 Spent a lovely weekend with myself. I made use of my three-day weekend to do nothing in particular except get bleary-eyed drunk while listening to old country albums of mine Friday night. I'm not a particular fan of most contemporary country music. There are exceptions, but very few. For me the country music of the Nineteen-Eighties sounded an awful lot like the rock and roll of the Sixties. The country of the Nineteen-Nineties, by contrast, simply sounded awful. In some way Garth Brooks represents a turning point for me. Despite the fact that the arrangements on his recordings are top-notch, and despite the fact that he has an above average vocal range and a much more polished and controlled delivery than most of his contemporaries, I simply loath his music. He is most emblematic of the time when country music became the most radically anti-government music recorded during my lifetime and narrowed its point of view to one of anti-social individualism. The typical country song of the Nineteen-Fifties or of the Nineteen-Sixties was built upon what we think of as fairly traditional topics: the workingman, the love of country, the celebration of rural life, and, perhaps most typically, the sanctity of marriage. Granted, a lot of those songs about marriage were about broken marriages, but they were about tragically broken marriages, not about gleefully abandoned marriages as is typically the case now. All of those tear-jerkers clearly placed a great deal of value on the love lost, else why opine, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry"? Obviously there are numerous examples and counter-examples that could be brought to bear in a long-winded exposition of why I feel country music these days is a profoundly negative idiom with detrimental effects on its listeners who seem only to want their most negative impulses reinforced (The dynamic between the music and its audience really does bear a striking resemblance to that between gangsta rap and inner city audiences.), but I'm not that interested in contemporary country music. No, when I get bleary-eyed drunk on a Friday night, it usually involves sitting in the living room with all of the lights off, and giving my nearly extinct stereo a good workout. The needle's a little worn, I have to wear headphones because the dogs took out the speakers about eight years ago, and the volume knob is so full of dust and rust I have to spend five minutes just getting sound in both ears, but outside of that she's cherry. Most of my old albums are things my parents bought years ago and that I rescued from oblivion during several moves when I was a teenager. There are quite a few that probably haven't been listened to in twenty years or more, but a small group of them get pulled out several times a year so I can get quietly drunk and miserable in the comfort of my own home. Now you might wonder why so many of those albums aren't mine. Simply put, people my age generally bought cassettes, because they were more convenient to tote around. Plus, you could play them in the car. I do have a few record albums that I purchased with my own money over the years, but they are an odd assortment and I won't enumerate them here. The albums I most frequently break out for my dark of the night listening pleasure are, in no particular order, The Best of the Statler Brothers, Grand Old Country (an eight record Reader's Digest Boxed set from about Seventy-Three, or Seventy-Four), The Best of Glen Campbell, Amazing Love-Charley Pride, Wolf Creek Pass-C.W. McCall, and Songs of the Caribbean-Harry Belafonte. How'd Belafonte get on that List? Well, same way everyone else did; I heard it a lot when I was a kid and now it's a part of my nostalgia mechanism. I know it's not the list of albums a fan of Miles Davis and Bob Dylan should come up with. As a matter of fact right now as I type this I'm listening to Jazz with Bob Parlocha but on the in my cd changer I have Hank Williams Sr., Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Vivaldi's recorder concerto's and Johnny Cash's ballads of the True West. There really is no reason not to enjoy excellence no matter the form it takes. The Reader's Digest box set is kind of the Ur-text of my musical tastes. It has quite a few different themes running through it. Each record has its own theme. Some of them have a theme for each side: one side of one record is entirely Johnny Cash and the Carter Family the other side is Tammy Wynette and George Jones, another record has ballads on one side and instrumental standards like Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Dueling Banjos on it. I must have listened to some of these sons a thousand times when I was a kid. We had a fairly old record player back then, its guts were filled with tubes and things that were kind of exotic and science fictiony to a five year old. I was allowed to use it by myself at a fairly young age and spent a lot of time with that particular album. I'm surprised looking back to see that I liked songs like Delta Dawn and Sunday Morning Coming Down as much as I did when I was only five or six. I don't think there was much I could relate to in lines like, "the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad so I had one more for dessert." Fact is, I still don't like beer, but that line still means something personal to me in a way that all of the facile jingoistic posturing of contemporary country doesn't. Still, there is something about that batch of songs that has something to do with the interest I have in Johnny Cash to this day. Sunday Morning Coming Down is a classic Kristofferson song given its classic interpretation by Cash. The slice of life vignette is the kind of Sunday morning a lot of Saturday night partiers are familiar with; a little empty, a little discontented, maybe a hint of regret on the mind, "…And there's nothing short of dying that's half as lonesome as the sound of the sleeping city sidewalks and Sunday morning coming down." Kristofferson wrote a lot of songs about his life and wild times, but never another that was quite as succinct and universal. That box set also had some Marty Robbins classics on it, songs like El Paso, My Woman, My Woman, My wife, a White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation. He's kind of faded from the popular consciousness but he was one hell of a singer and one of the great storytellers country music ever produced, equally at home writing ballads of gunfights and desperadoes in the old west or rockabilly or a love song with pop appeal. I've heard My Woman, My Woman, My Wife at least a hundred times and it still gives me a deep sense of the pain and loss some people have to bear, and hint about the source of the strength they find in each other. There is also a touch of the awe people feel when confronted with the question of death. That bit about, "when she reaches that river is still quite touching to me. And, of course, there are numerous story-songs that I listened to as a child not quite knowing who was being talked about or what historical events were being referenced, songs like: Battle of New Orleans, P.T. 109, The Death of Hank Williams (At the time I probably had no idea who Hank Williams was.), Saginaw Michigan, and-oh hell-too many to really recount here. The thing is it's more than simple nostalgia that makes me drag out those albums again. They really were better, more personal, and for all their overt simplicity, much deeper songs. To cap off this bit of pointless rambling, I'll point out that we now have a classic country station in my area. I thought this would be a good thing. They actually have the Eagles and Elvis Presley as part of their classic country programming. It sure is a funny little world sometimes.
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