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 3 of 4)
I know the place ain’t much,
But I sure don’t pay no rent.
I get a check the first of every month
From the federal government.
Every Wednesday I get commodities
Sometimes four or five sacks.
Pick ‘em up down at the welfare office
In my welfare Cadillac.
Roy Acuff, twice a conservative Republican candidate for governor of Tennessee, checked in by knocking old-age pensions:
When her old-age pension check
Comes to her door
Dear old grandma won’t be
Lonesome anymore.
She’ll be waiting at the gate.
Every night she’ll have a date
When her old-age pension check
Comes to our door. . .
There are more antifeminist songs than not. Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys recommend that you should “Get Your Biscuits in the Oven and Your Buns in Bed”; Bob Luman reckons that “Lonely Women Make Good Lovers”; Tammy Wynette advises the ladies to “Stand by Your Man” and Tompall Glaser has offered Shel Silverstein’s “Put Another Log on the Fire” in which the male chauvinist orders his girlfriend to perform errands including fixing a flat tire, washing his socks, and patching his old blue jeans—“and then come and tell me why you’re leaving me.” Loretta Lynn, of all people, has fired back at the chauvinists with her mild “One’s on the Way” (about the dissatisfactions of a pregnant house-wife) and her more direct “The Pill.” Even Tammy Wynette, playing the other side of the street for a change, warns her wandering man in “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad”:
I’m gonna be the swingingest swinger you ever had
If you like ‘em powdered up, painted up, then you oughta be glad.
‘Cause your good girl’s gonna be bad.
The popularity of our wars (or the lack of popularity in recent years) has been faithfully reflected in country music. Only “The Ballad of the Green Berets” made it as a pro-war song during the Vietnam misadventure, and it was written in 1963 before people began to realize what a quagmire was in the making. There were lesser, minor pro-war songs later along in that war—but, significantly, the public did not take to them. Nor did Korea songs achieve popularity. “A Dear John Letter,” in 1953, told of a soldier “overseas in battle” who received a letter from the girl back home saying she’s soon to wed another—but it didn’t even refer to Korea specifically. Floyd Tillman’s “Cold War,” while using the term as a metaphor, is just another he-she song having nothing to do with formal battlefields. Unless memory fails, no songwriters saw glory in the battle of “Frozen Chosin” or tried to make a folk hero out of the captured General Dean; nor did they lash out at the 21 American “turncoats” who originally refused repatriation. In war, as with the racial troubles of America, country songwriters have followed the policy of saying nothing at all if they couldn’t say something good.
World War II, however, was a “happy” war. Though I’ve since read historians who made me aware of a certain body of opposition to that venture, I was unaware of anything but an enthusiastic and patriotic approval at the time. This universality of opinion was registered in the country music of the period. Indeed, before the firing of the first American shot, World War II began to be propagandized with a ditty entitled “I’ll Be Back in a Year Little Darlin’.” The song was in response to the peacetime draft, which passed the House of Representatives in 1940 by but a single vote. Young eligibles would receive a year of military training, then be discharged to stand by as citizen-soldiers in the event of hostilities:
I’ll be back in a year little darlin’.
Uncle Sam has called and I must go
I’ll be back never fear little darlin’.
You’ll be proud of your soldier boy I know.
I’ll do my best each day for the good ol’ USA
And I’ll keep Old Glory wavin’ high.
I’ll be back in a year little darlin’.
Don’t you worry darlin’, don’t you cry.
Literally hundreds of country songs came out of World War II. Among the most popular: Floyd Tillman’s “Each Night at Nine,” in which he asks his love to remember him faithfully at that hour each night; Ernest Tubb’s treatment of “Filipino Baby” (about leaving a sweet dusky island maiden behind) and its cousin “Fraulein” (leaving a German beauty behind); and the song Tubb wrote with Sergeant Henry Stewart, “Soldier’s Last Letter,” written to Mom from the battlefield just before the Axis baddies did the soldier in. These were songs largely of glory and ore—a little mushy romantic interest aside—and were as inspirational to teenage Texans as those Hollywood war movies in which Erroll Flynn blew up half of Nazi Germany and then swam to attack a U-boat armed only with the knife between his teeth.
In recent years, especially among the musical “outlaws” and redneck rockers, songs of social protest have gained a new acceptance. (It is interesting to speculate whether the present conservative mood in the nation may send country music backlashing to the days when old-age pensioners and welfare loafers were considered fair game.) Tom T. Hall obliquely put down racial prejudice in “The Man Who Hated Freckles”; Merle Haggard’s “Irma Jackson” is a protest against ancient taboos frowning on interracial marriages, of all things; Billy Joe Shaver’s “Black Rose” laments the splendid misery of not being able to give up a minority-group lover. Steve Fromholz’s “Lanky Southern Lady” may be read by some as being about a midnight freight ride in Texas—and by others as about making it with a dusky lady. A 1967 song, “Skip-A-Rope”—enjoying a new popularity in these post-Watergate years—is of children at play chanting of things they’ve learned from the grownups:
Cheat on taxes. Don’t be a fool.
What was that they said about the Golden Rule?
Never mind the rules. Just play to win.
And hate your neighbor for the shade of his skin.
The hardest hitting of the social protesters, however, may be John Prine. He appears to have sat down with a list of the nation’s sins and social ills and then dashed off appropriate poetry with the notion of shaming us all. His “Illegal Smile” knocks the absurdity of harsh pot laws; “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You into Heaven Anymore” is against yahooism and xenophobia; “Hello in There” is about the cruel fate of abandoned old people who look out on the uncaring world with “hollow ancient eyes”; “Muhlenberg County” should please environmentalists, with its tale of a father telling his son it’s too late to return to the old homestead “down by the green rivers where Paradise lay” because “Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.”
Prine attacked the Vietam War by presenting a veteran by the name of “Sam Stone,” who returns from battle a junky:
Well, the morphine eased the pain
And the grass grew ‘round his brain
And gave him all the comfort that he lacked
With a purple heart and a monkey on his back.
There’s a hole in Daddy’s arm
Where all the money goes
Jesus Christ died for nothin’ I suppose.
Sweet songs never last too long
On broken radios.
These themes are from Prine’s first album and date back almost five years. His later work seems further off the social mark. Or is it just that, by now, almost everyone among the redneck rockers has preachified the social gospel? One would not be too surprised should super-square old Ernest Tubb come out with a dope song in which he confesses sniffing glue.
If John Prine has been the stolid social conscience among country moderns, then Kinky Friedman must win the crown for sheer irreverence—not, however, for irrelevance, although his flashy swaggering prompts some to dismiss him as a clown or a novelty act. Friedman easily offends because he’s about as subtle as a ballpeen hammer. His “Ballad of Charles Witman” never will win the Good Taste Award:
There was a rumor about a tumor nestled at the base of his brain.
He was sitting up there with his .36 magnum, laughing wildly as he bagged ‘em.
Who are we to say the boy’s insane?
His “We Deserve the Right to Refuse Service to You” takes on the redneck owner of a “bullethead cafe” as well as a rabbi concerned with the social niceties: “Your friends are all on welfare./ You call yourself a Jew?/ We reserve the right/ to refuse services to you.” “They ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore” might be the theme song of the Jewish Defense League in its declaration that “We don’t turn the other cheek the way we done before.”
When Friedman’s first album was released a few years ago, and I told my Eastern friends about him, they winced at the name of his group: Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. Yet, I am told, Jewish recording company executives wept on hearing the beautiful “Ride ‘Em Jewboy,” which in traditional country terms harks back to the pogroms and horrors of anti-Semitism:
Ride, ride ‘em Jewboy
Ride ‘em all around the old corral.
I’m, I’m with you boy
If I’ve got to ride six million miles.
Now the smoke from camp’s arisin’.
See the helpless creatures on their way.
Say, old pal, ain’t it surprisin’
How far you can go before you stay?
Don’t you let the mornin’ blind you
When on your sleeve you wore the yellow star.
Old memories still live behind you.
Can’t you see by your outfit who you are?
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