The music boiled in our blood the week around: through the hot work of the grain harvest, in the fearful soul-searching of midweek prayer meetings, up and down endless rows as we picked cotton nobody had the money to take off our hands. Our songs commemorated the people and places we knew: whiskey widows, sisters menaced by the wicked cities of the American hinterland, deep mines, and company stores they recounted our pitifully few conquests and reflected our impoverished and isolated lives. We rootless or ruined children of the Thirties identified with the drifting hobo or a silver-haired daddy left somewhere behind. Country music was born in the early Twenties of a mixture of gospel airs, folk songs, English ballads, and soul (or “race”) music, but this native American art form soon came to be associated with the Great Depression-the first universal experience to be shared after the country music genre came into its own.
Too bad Faulkner couldn’t strum.Ī little history may be in order. The larger human themes are there-the crazy convolutions of the human heart as it encounters new places and homesickness and poverty and unrequited love and other pains leading to excessive applications of whiskey or, lately, dope. With one notable exception-that of our ugly racial prejudices and the resultant upheavals-our country poets, perhaps even more than our novelists, have written from the gut of those basic preoccupations of farmers and housewives and working stiffs. The theory is offered that should all our national archives except country music lyrics somehow go up in smoke, then what has happened to America within the last fifty years at least-its shift from an agrarian to an urbanized society, its changing sexual mores, its growing sophistication as well as its growing madness-would still be almost perfectly preserved.
Simply put, content is more important than melodies or rhythms. The continuity of country music is best appreciated when one considers its lyrics, rather than its diversities in singing styles or instrumental licks. For the fact is that all of these, and others-from Fiddlin’ John Carson, who in 1923 recorded the first “hillbilly” song, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane,” to the newest would-be cosmic cowboy looking for his big break in Austin-have been, or are, part of an ongoing evolutionary process. We accomplish little more than wasted energies in debating whether Jerry Jeff Walker or Dolly Parton deserves the larger accolades when judged on more than their chest measurements.
This, I like to think, is not so much because of a lack of character as because of catholic tastes developed over more than forty years of country music exposure. I like Waylon and Willie-but I also respond to the corny likes of Red Foley, Roy Clark, Cowboy Copas. I can weep along or cheer when Ernest Tubb walks the floor over you, when Kinky Friedman pays tribute to that asshole from El Paso, when Patsy Cline falls to pieces, or when Buck Owens and his Nasal Passages celebrate being together again. Though Olivia Newton-John sounds as though she were shifting a mouthful of plum pudding, and Loretta Lynn as if she just rode into town on a load of turkeys, even they have their respective partisans among experts: each won plaques and scrolls this year. Ray Price or Eddy Arnold, with all those syrupy violins singing behind them, do not necessarily set my teeth on edge, though my friend Buck Ramsey of Amarillo-who chords a little guitar when there are no musicians in the room-never fails to howl how they are frauds, if not felons, for their crimes against traditional country licks.
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