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 4 of 4)
For all the songs about doping, drinking, poor exploited lettuce pickers, black lovers, or mass murderers, however, the country staple remains he-she songs. Though there are “happy” love songs, those of unrequited love long have prevailed. Perhaps this is because it’s somehow easier to write about losers than winners, of attritions rather than gains: there simply is more drama in it. Or perhaps the explanation is even simpler: more people lose than win, in love as in everything else, and these statistics lend themselves to easy identifications with songs of broken hearts. Besides, a good tearjerker goes better with beer drankin’.
In the long ago, country songsters were careful to leave the reasons for their heart’s disaffections decorously vague. One had to read between the lines to understand why Ernest Tubb was “Walking the Floor over You” or had “A Worried Mind” or felt he’d been “Born to Lose.” When I first heard those songs piped into Eastland County from KGKO-Fort Worth (where Tubb sang five mornings a week for $75), I figured ol’ Ernest to have had the bad luck to run into a show-off like Lloyd Sharp. We were in the fourth grade then and I expended recess and the lunch hour winking at Lena Ruth Green, who sometimes thrillingly reciprocated. Then one day, curse it, during the class volleyball game, somebody hit the ball so hard it lodged in the rafters of our creaky old school gym. Lloyd Sharp skinned off his tenny shoes and climbed to dangerous heights, the class holding its collective breath; by the time he’d rejoined mere earthlings every girl in the room—including Lena Ruth—had near-fatal crushes on him. I mooned around with the sweetass for the longest time, taking comfort in Ernie’s songs of heartbreak and figuring that maybe he, too, had run afoul of an erring volleyball. Whether or not the country poets of the forties and fifties spelled out the miserable specifics, we knew they’ve been did bad wrong.
The tone of many songs of love lost bordered on the accusatory: candy kisses mean more to you than any of mine; you’ve a cold, cold heart; I’m a fool to care when you treat me this way, or tell me those lies; if you loved me half as much as I love you, then you wouldn’t worry me the way you do. Some were vaguely threatening in predicting that day of pluperfect justice when thoughtless heartbreakers would get their proper comeuppance: you can pick me up on your way down; you’ll be sorry you made me cry; your cheatin’ heart will tell on you. The spirit of such songs of vengeance sustained me during that period when I prayed each night to my Texas Baptist God that the heartless Lena Ruth might sprout unsightly freckles on her flawless face and that Lloyd Sharp might be permitted to grow crops of warts on his nose and brow.
As late as 1948, though hinting at back-street affairs and mourning the dangers of honky-tonk angels, country songsters found it prudent to advertise doing the “right” thing in the end. You just didn’t leave Momma and the babies back then, no matter how high your carnal fevers, if you came from the country culture. Divorce still constituted a permanent family blot. Those who wrote the hit “One Has My Name, the Other Has My Heart” well understood conventional rural mores:
One has my name/ the other
has my heart.
With one I’ll remain
that’s how my heartaches start.
One has brown eyes/ the other’s
eyes are blue.
To one I am tied/ to the other
I am true.
One has my love/ the other only me.
But what good is love/ to a heart
that can’t be free?
So I’ll go on living
my life just the same.
While one has my heart
and the other has my name.
Even when one split the family blanket, recriminations were required. “Married by the Bible, Divorced by the Law,” a 1952 song, perhaps was a subtle suggestion that Ike deserved the presidency because he’d stuck it out with Mamie where Adlai and Ellen Stevenson had not been able to honor the conventional. Maybe it was OK with the judge—that song said—but celestial beings retained a stony disapproval.
In 1949 Floyd Tillman wrote what may have been the first really out-front diddling-outside-the-home song in “Slipping Around.” Even then, he paid tribute to the fear and retaliations of neighbors and kinfolk by hoping that some acceptable social solution might be found:
Though you’re all tied up with someone else
And I’m all tied up, too,
I know I’ve made mistakes, dear
But I’m so in love with you.
I hope some day I’ll find a way
To bring you back with me
Then I won’t have to slip around
To share your company.
Seventeen long years later, in 1966, the real-life realities were better faced. Mel Tillis’ “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” was revolutionary in that it actually admitted the wife of a paralyzed war hero could, and did, harbor sexual considerations outside the capabilities of her disadvantaged husband. Significantly, it was written about “that crazy Asian war”; in a more popular war the wife would have been required to remain stubbornly loyal.
Among current hits is “That’s What Made Me Love You,” which minces few words about heat and hair and hands.
Tonight in a pouring rain
in a motel in Dallas
That’s what made me love you.
That’s what made me love you.
Champagne in a Dixie Cup
You had a little, I had too much.
That’s what made me love you . . .
In a hundred years I’ll think back
And I’ll have memories of
a box of candy and a wilted rose
Wrinkled sheets and wrinkled clothes.
That’s what made me love you.
That’s what made me love you.
The full impact of that song hit me recently as I scarfed the well-done house cheeseburger in Baird, Texas—only eleven miles from my place of birth—and an acned young waitress sang it out while serving up cornbread and blue plate specials and giant glasses of iced tea. Old nesters in railroad caps and cowboy khakis, their wives wearing pink rubber hair curlers and hoglike jowls, failed to faint dead away or scowl in protest. And I thought: Good God, Lawrence, country songs are allowing that folks are doing it for nothing more than mere fun and they don’t have to walk the aisle, birth babies, or experience Old Testament guilt in payment of the favor. Hail, boy, them’s my kinda people. . .
Yes, the music has changed. So have those who write it and sing it and play it. Most of all, perhaps, the folks who listen to it—the fans—have changed. It wasn’t all that long ago that country music was confined to Southern outback and deserved its designation as “hillbilly” music. Such rustics as remain in an urban America continue to pat their feet to it, but they no longer retain exclusive rights.
A decade ago, Texans and others of a certain educational level or upwardly mobile class were a bit ashamed of the music they’d cut their teeth on. They might turn their car radios down at stoplights so others in traffic wouldn’t hear them culturally slumming, no matter how many secret chords their native music touched in their souls. For if country music had escaped its hillbilly taint, if people no longer though of it as being fit only for the ears of mountaineers or farmers, it continued to be thought of as limited to working-class folk: those who manned the assembly lines, drove dump trucks, sweated in the oil patch. Radio piped the music to all parts of the country (and, on Armed Forces Radio, to many parts of the globe); recording companies discovered a booming market in country and western. World War II, bringing Northern soldiers down into the South and sending guitar-strumming Southern boys into Yankeeland, aided the cross-pollination. Still, the image remained of the music being for those who wore dirt under their fingernails.
Folksingers and bluegrass pickers began to receive enthusiastic welcomes on college campuses in the Fifties, and a new generation—getting into the Memphis blues sounds of Elvis, of Guy Mitchell’s rock-a-billy techniques, of the licks provided by Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis—opened their minds and hearts. Willie Nelson helped pave the way by bringing together the ropers and dopers, and, though purists have begun to gripe about all the so-called cosmic cowboys and fake rednecks resulting, there can be no doubt that the Austin “outlaw” movement taught the young and the educated to appreciate the old country licks while educating the natural rednecks to accept, in song, ideas they might have lynched you for if otherwise expressed. There are still fine performers and songwriters like Billy Joe Shaver, with his eighth-grade education, but there are also musicians who trained at North Texas State’s music department or even—as with Kris Kristofferson—brought along Rhodes Scholar credentials. The Top 40 charts continue to lean toward the basically traditional, even if the he-she songs are bolder than before, and when Willie Nelson cracks it, he’s more likely to do so with an oldie like “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” than not. But the outlaws and the redneck rockers, dealing with new mores and formerly taboo subjects, have won powerful cults who fill up the halls to hear them perform-and who buy their records even if they receive fewer deejay spins than the old country traditionalists. There is a grand mixture now of styles and content, and while it may lead to disputes among modernists and traditionalists over matters of purity, there’s an overall higher degree of tolerance for the musical diversities.
A few weeks ago I stopped in the Grand Tavern in Mingus with one of my daughters and my eighteen-year-old son. It was a hot afternoon and sweltering, one of those days when the old nesters gratefully repaired to the shade and sipped beer and found it taxing to talk very much. The locals examined us—bearded and booted and long-haired—and offered information grudgingly until my son, Bradley, introduced his guitar, and before long the old nesters were tapping their feet and crowding around and buying beer while he sang of desperados waiting for a train, of having the London homesick blues, of a gal who ain’t going nowhere she’s just leaving, of a good-hearted woman in love with a good-timing man, of Mister Bojangles, of a brand of dope called Panama Red. It broke the ice and opened up the tale-tellers and brought about a community rather than remote, detached islands of men and women. We stayed two hours and left with warm invitations to return ringing in our ears. As we left I said to my son, “Well, do you think they’re ready for ‘Asshole from El Paso?’”
“Maybe not today,” he said. “But next week, next month . . .”
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