The Passions of the Common Man
“If all our national archives except country music went up in smoke, then what has happened to America in 50 years—its changing sexual mores, its growing madness—would be perfectly preserved.”
(Page 2 of 4)
You won’t find many poor old ma or dear old dad songs anymore. Members of a long-mobile and shifting society no longer feel guilt in pulling up their shallow roots and going out to seek their slices of life’s pie. People still write songs of home and family, sure: Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Dolly Parton’s “In the Good Old Days when Times Were Bad,” Johnny Cash’s “Picking Time,” Merle Haggard’s, “Mama Tried.” For the most part, however, these are songs of nostalgia, not of repentance. They even contain notes of relief at having escaped the farm or the factory. Parton: “No amount of money could buy from me/ memories that I have of then./ No amount of money could pay me/ to go back and live through it again.”
Among Progressive country or “redneck rock” poets, even mother isn’t to be taken seriously anymore. David Allen Coe has made a hit of Steve Goodman’s “You Never Even Called Me By My Name,” in which the last verse pokes fun at a mother who just got out of prison and gets hit “by a damned old train.” Ray Wylie Hubbard’s “Up Against the Wall Redneck” puts to shame all earlier mild protests against Momism:
Up against the wall Redneck Mother
Mother who has raised a son so well.
He’s thirty-four and drinking in a honky-tonk
Kickin’ hippies’ asses and raising hell.
“Wreck on the Highway,” popularized by Roy Acuff, was one of the first songs to note the impact—not always for good—of the automobile. It was composed in 1932, the year Ford introduced the V-8 engine. There is much of transition in the song, a sense not only of dangerous new forces to threaten us in the technological age but also a primitive fear of losing old values:
Who did you say it was brother?
Who was it fell by the way?
When whiskey and blood ran together
Did you hear anyone pray?
I didn’t hear nobody pray, dear brother.
I didn’t hear nobody pray.
I heard the crash on the highway
But I didn’t hear nobody pray.
The car—and especially the truck—has since figured prominently in hundreds of country songs. Indeed, truck-driving songs long ago became a genre into themselves. Realizing that much of the radio audience was composed of lonesome teamsters, songwriters were quick to glorify them, their myths, and their legends. Ghost drivers or ghost riders constituted a favorite theme: truckers who gave lifts to hitchhikers and were subsequently proved to have been killed so many years ago that very night. There also was an outpouring of songs wherein God or the Lord or other benign spirits safely passed truckers through blizzards, rock slides, or other road hazards.
Ironically, truck drivers recently have become so addicted to the more personal intimacies of Citizens Band radio—where they may broadcast in rough imitation of the commercial disc jockey talking to them out of Cincinnati or Omaha—that they pay far less attention to commercial stations. Country poets, however—true to the tradition of recording cultural changes and hopeful of big royalties should they artfully exploit the latest craze—are crashing the Top 40 charts by writing of outlaw CB caravans, lawmen who trap speeders through misrepresenting themselves on the CB band, of romances owing their beginning to CB radio contacts, and of a crippled boy who uses for his handle “Teddy Bear.” Within the past week, I’ve heard seven CB-inspired songs on a New York country station. All were simply terrible.
The train enjoyed a long run in country music and, though the day of the train is over, the train songs are not. Trains have provided handy metaphors in such songs as “Life’s Railway to Heaven,” from the distant past, to Kinky Friedman’s “Silver Eagle Express,” which is used for the hailing of memories and dreams. Jimmie Rodgers, known as the “Singing Brakeman” and often billed as the father of country music, almost wore out the train as subject matter—as did one Marion T. Slaughter, another Texan, who took the names of two Lone Star State towns to become famed as Vernon Dalhart. Early rain songs were about wayward men sleeping new water tanks while dodging heartless railroad dicks in hopes of flagging a freight bound for some vague better place. In country songs trains were ridden by orphans in search of their roots, soldiers bound for battle, sons returning for funerals, misfortunates being transported to prison. Trains were almost universally the inspiration for songs of melancholy—perhaps it had something to do with that forlorn whistle—with only a few, such as “Fireball Mail” or “Wabash Cannonball,” stressing that certain exuberance to be found in speed and its kindred exhilarations. A few songs celebrated grinding wrecks or such glorious heroes as Casey Jones, who stayed with their doomed locomotives to the fatal last, and stout-hearted men (John Henry) who drove the steel over which the trains rumbled and roared and caught the fancy of a young and growing nation.
So quickly have trains receded into the cultural past, however, that Guy Clark’s “Texas—1947,” celebrating when the first diesel came through a small Texas town, now qualifies as pure nostalgia. It was a big event indeed when the first streamliners came through not long after the end of World War II, causing schools to turn out and old men to leave their dominoes; no one then knew how quickly the new supertrains would be rendered obsolete by the burgeoning airline industry. Clark told it this way:
Look out, here she comes, she’s comin’.
Look out, there she goes, she’s gone.
Screaming straight through Texas
like a mad dog cyclone.
Lord, she never even stopped
But she left fifty or sixty people
still sittin’ on their cars
Wonderin’ what it’s coming to
and how it got this far.
What it was coming to was the airplane—and quickly. Somehow, though, the airplane has yet to catch on in country music as a romantic vehicle. Maybe it is all that tasteless food or the sense of isolation in a pastel cocoon that Norman Mailer or somebody has compared to the nursery. At any rate, the airplane has been confined to a supporting role in the making of folk heroes (“Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight” or “The Lone Eagle” in celebration of Lucky Lindy), the machine being strictly secondary to those human units who mastered it or went down in flames. It is given only brief, perfunctory mention in war songs: the renowned combat pilor of World War II, Colin Kelly, is lavishly celebrated in the ballad bearing his name, but his plane isn’t memorialized. If anybody wrote a song honoring the Enola Gay, which dropped The Bomb on Hiroshima, it mercifully has escaped my notice.
Similarly, Willie Nelson in “Bloody Mary Morning” wryly takes note of modern air transportation while flying down to Houston, but forgetting her is the real reason for the flight—and the song.
Well our golden jet is airborne as
Flight 50 cuts a path across the morning sky
And a voice comes through the speaker,
Reassuring us flight 50 is the way to fly.
And our hostess takes our order,
Coffee tea or something stronger,
To start off the day.
Well it’s a Bloody Mary morning
‘Cause I’m leavin’ Baby somewhere in L.A.
“Biggest Airport in the World,” was inevitable, with songwriters rushing to capitalize on it almost as rapidly has Hollywood jumped on the slogan “Remember Pearl Harbor” (more than half a dozen motion picture companies had filed their claims by mid-December 1941). The airport song, however, isn’t really about the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport or about airplanes. It’s a spoof about a good ol’ boy who, stood up by a painted lady who’d promised to fly with him to El Paso and get married in Mexico, sings of how the poor darling must be “lost and crying in the biggest airport in the world.” Airplanes, somehow, are just not taken seriously by our country poets.
Songs of homesickness retain a high degree of popularity. There are literally thousands, mourning the loss of those old cotton fields back home, of the lone prairie, of those special nooks and crannies of one’s beginnings. One wonders how long this can survive: how will the suburban-based songwriters of tomorrow, today growing up in bald settlements with no history, find anything to lament in their pasts? Only in recent years have country artists registered the disillusions of urbanization: “New York City Blues,” bemoaning how cold-hearted are the people who populate the place, and “Streets of Baltimore”—recounting how a tired factory worker is dragged from bar to club by a wife whose head has been turned by the big city. But these must take a backseat to “Detroit City.” The latter is the saga of a country boy stuck on an automobile assembly line, and it spoke to the heart of every Clem or Rube sick of walking on concrete and bathing in neon. It’s full of the loss of great expectations, of a rootless and empty life, of people attempting to keep up a front:
Home folks think I’m big in Detroit City
From the letters that I write they think I’m fine.
But by day I make the cars, by night I make the bars.
If only they could read between the lines.
I wanna go home, I wanna go home.
Oh, how I wanna go home.
Until the recent advent of the redneck rockers, or the so-called “outlaws” or “cosmic cowboys,” country songs were notorious for their political conservatism. Many expressed sentiments that might have come straight from the bar talk to be found in Midland’s Petroleum Club. Tom T. Hall lamented, “Too many do-gooders and not enough hard-working men.” Hippies, longhairs, dopers, and peaceniks caught it two times from Merle Haggard—in “Okie from Muskogee” and in “The Fighting Side of Me.” Guy Drake’s “Welfare Cadillac” expressed the malice indigenous to those who see the unfortunate as leeches or con men:
My Library
