“For the past hour,” Hay is reported to have said in introducing Bailey’s number, “we have been listening to grand opera. But from now on we are going to hear the Grand Ole Opry”—which is what it has been ever since.
Virtuoso instrumental performances by people like Bailey, the Crook Brothers, the Fruit Jar Drinkers, and Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith dominated the Opry in its early years. One of the few performers whose singing was as important as his picking was a zesty old banjoist named Uncle Dave Macon, who often performed with the able backup support of Sam and Kirk McGee. Macon had turned pro in 1918 when a farmer paid him fifteen dollars to play for a party, and his reputation had grown steadily between that time and his first appearance on the Opry in 1926.
Many of his songs were compositions he had picked up just before the turn of the century from laborers in the mines, railroad yards, and riverboat docks throughout the upper South. The tunes were almost invariably up-tempo and escapist, but the lyrics—especially in songs like “Buddy, Won’t You Roll Down the Line”—contained some undisguised social commentary on the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the workers of the South.
Macon died in 1953, and with his passing the Opry lost its most important link with the past. The subject matter and the sound of the music began to change, to lose at least a little of its edge, as vocal performances and backup instrumentation became more and more polished, and the formulas for commercial success became more and more apparent.
Lovesick singers had already begun to overshadow the other Opry acts, beginning with the arrival of Roy Acuff in 1939 and continuing over the next several decades with the appearance of sophisticated country crooners like Eddy Arnold and Jim Reeves. Uncle Dave Macon, however, was survived by a few of his early-day cronies, and a stubborn handful—Herman Crook, Claude Lampley, and Sam and Kirk McGee—were still alive and picking when the Opry moved to its new location.
The oldest of the old-timers was Sam McGee, who in 1974 was living outside Nashville on a five-hundred-acre cattle and tobacco farm that he still worked himself. The road leading to it wound its way randomly around the steep Tennessee hillsides, constantly and casually doubling back on itself, until finally you arrived at a rust-spattered mailbox jammed into a milk can with the words “Sam F. McGee” hand-painted on top.
Inside the sturdy stone farmhouse the rooms were moderately cluttered with the trappings of his work—two guitars and a banjo stashed away in the living-room corners, an ASCAP silver service award “for over a half-century of constant and heart-rendering contributions” hung on the wall, and records strewn on the dining-room table. Next to the living-room fireplace was a smaller table with a Bethlehem manger scene permanently in place and an unframed, autographed picture of George Wallace leaning next to it.
On the day after the Opry left the Ryman, McGee leaned forward in his creaky old rocking chair and began to expound in his genial and self-effacing way on the changes he had seen. “It’s just so different today,” he said. “You have about fifty musicians for every one we had back then, but you know I honestly believe the music in those days was better. You had nothing but the pure sound. Now you have all sorts of drums and amplification and all that. I don’t know, I may just have an old fogy attitude, but I do know I still get a lot of letters from people asking, ‘Why can’t we get more of the old style country music like you play?’
“Back then, you didn’t figure to go into music as a profession,” McGee continued, warming to the subject, his clear eyes taking on a sparkle as the recollections came back. “No, in those days people just played for the love of music. During those first few shows, the solemn old judge [George Hay] couldn’t pay us anything because the program wasn’t making enough money. We didn’t care. We loved the music and we knew he would do the best he could if the program survived.”
By the time the Opry was doing well enough to spend forty-three million dollars on the new Opryland complex, its executives were paying McGee an average of thirty-six dollars a Saturday night, and so he still made his living, as he always had, from farming.
He generally played two slots on each Opry show—one as part of a group known as the Fruit Jar Drinkers, and the other in a featured performance with his brother, Kirk. The McGees often played their original compositions, and on Grand Opening Night at the new Opry house they chose a quintessential country song called “When the Wagon Was New,” which celebrates a simpler time when people were in less of a hurry and money was only a means to an end.
Sam and Kirk pioneered their own picking style, and among the more serious connoisseurs of musical talent it is the object of considerable awe. Most scholars agree that Sam McGee was one of the most influential guitarists in the history of country music, but a few people around the Opry will tell you that among the program’s current executives, he and his brother were not exactly considered hot commercial property. That assessment showed in a variety of ways.
For example Sam McGee, who believed that many of his fans were old people and farmers, who preferred to go to bed early, had been pleading for years for an earlier slot on the Opry, but without any success. “I hope if I live to be old enough, I’ll get it,” he confided in 1974.
But McGee never did. With his request for an early spot still pending, he was killed in a tractor accident in 1975.
Two other old-timers, Ed Hyde and Staley Walton, died about the same time, and in a way their passing was even more revealing than McGee’s. Hyde played fiddle, and Walton guitar, with a veteran group called the Crook Brothers. A few weeks after they died, the group’s leader, seventy-six-year-old Herman Crook, went to Opry manager Hal Durham to tell him who he wanted as a replacement for Hyde.
“Well, he [Durham) told me they weren’t sure if they were going to replace him or not,” Crook remembered bitterly, a few months after the conversation. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I said, ‘You mean you’re not going to let me have my fiddle player?’ Well, ’course I had to have a fiddle player, and eventually they did let me have the boy I wanted. But I never have gotten anybody to play the guitar. Only guitar player now is old Mr. [Bert] Hutchenson, and he’s eighty-three. I reckon they’re just kinda waiting for us to die off. Seems like, anyway.
“I don’t want anybody to boost me up,” he continued, talking backstage at the Opry, staring down at the rough wood floor. “I just want to be treated right. Right is right anywhere. It reminds me of a man raising up his children, and maybe they go against him, forget their parents. That’s kinda how it’s been.
“Fellows like us,” he concluded, “oughta be right in there. We were the backbone of the Opry. I’m worried that when we go, our music will too.”
It might. For country has always been an accurate reflection of the society around it, and that society has changed a lot since the glory days of Herman Crook and Sam McGee. But there are two ways the music can reflect the society: it can mirror its mass-produced and synthetic qualities, or it can penetrate deeper, to the joys and anguish, the sorrows and peculiarities of the modern time. Country music today is doing both. There is a rebellious class of musicians around places like Nashville, Austin, and Bakersfield, California—a feisty, sometimes temperamental bunch, who write with poetic fervor about nearly every aspect of the human condition: war, peace, growing old, dying, loneliness, love, tolerance, prejudice.
By the mid-seventies the best of these entertainers—people like Waylon Jennings and Tom T. Hall—had come to see the Opry as the classic victim of country music’s very popularity: a big-business, multimillion-dollar enterprise, curiously incompatible with the music itself, which has always sprung from the hopes and failures of a far different class of people.
A striking example of the difference in perspective between Opry fans and Opry executives (which illuminates, in addition, two divergent strains in American conservatism: one of them folksy and unsystematic, the other corporate and close-to-the-vest) occurred just b
efore Christmas of 1973. It centered on the unlikely person of Skeeter Davis, a wide-eyed, attractive blond and long-time Ryman regular, who produced some enormous hits in the early sixties. The effusive Miss Davis had been struck by the irony of the Nashville police having arrested a handful of local Jesus freaks who, in their starry-eyed seasonal zeal, had managed to aggravate a number of harried Christmas shoppers with persistent affirmations that Jesus loved them. When she performed on the night of December 8, Miss Davis told the applauding Opry faithful:
“I appreciate it, and a while ago, I sang my record and everything. But we’re having a great thing happening in Nashville. The Jesus people are here. They’re having Jesus rallies every night out at Second and Lindsey Avenue. And a while ago—this is something I just feel like I should share it; I didn’t ask our manager—but they’ve arrested fifteen people just for telling people that Jesus loves them. That really burdens my heart, so I thought I would come to the Opry tonight and sing. Here we are, celebrating Jesus’s birthday. He’s liable to come before Christmas, before Santa Claus does. That’s something to think about. I would like to sing for y’all this song.”
When she completed her reedy-voiced rendition of “Amazing Grace,” the fans responded with warm, sustained applause. But once the show was over, Miss Davis was abruptly suspended from the cast for criticizing the police and infusing the Opry with unwanted political controversy.
Not long after the Skeeter Davis episode and the Opry’s departure from the Ryman, the controversy grew even more intense when one of the program’s best-known contemporary entertainers, singer and songwriter Tom T. Hall, withdrew from the cast. In terms of the credibility of the Opry, his defection represented a stunning setback. By the 1970s, Hall had established himself as one of the great song-writers in the history of country music. He was a story-teller from the hills of Kentucky, best-known for songs such as “Old Dogs, Children, and Watermelon Wine”—the poignant, true-life account of a melancholy night in a near-empty bar, when an old black janitor wandered up to him and offered a piece of homespun philosophy: In a world full of trouble, the old man said, there were not many things that a man could count on “but old dogs, children, and watermelon wine.”
Hall was riding the popularity of such songs when he decided to resign from the Grand Ole Opry. He didn’t say much about his reasons at first, but six months later he told one reporter: “As soon as we moved to the new place, I immediately and instinctively did not like it. The Ryman was different. It was almost an ego trip, really, standing on the same stage where Hank Williams once performed, and knowing there were people out there who appreciated what you were doing, who had driven in some cases a couple hundred miles to see it.
“But the audiences now don’t know what they are looking at. The old-time acts are being put down and dismissed. They’re playing to people who don’t know what they are seeing, who stop in at Opryland on their way to Florida, and take in a performance of the Opry and think, ‘What the hell is this guy doing?’”
Hall offered his criticisms late in 1974, and he was certainly not alone in holding that position. Within a few years, however, there were diverse signs that the Opry’s leaders, stung by the persistent bad press, had begun taking steps to repair the image. They had added to the cast such widely respected performers as Ronnie Milsap, one of country music’s top male vocalists throughout the mid-seventies, and Don Williams, a mellow-voiced Texan whose folky, low-key ballads have made him one of the most universally respected performers in country music.
There have also been guest performances by country-rock rebel Charlie Daniels, and others known for their musical innovations. And George Hamilton IV, whose close affiliation with the folk and protest singers of the sixties raised some eyebrows in country music circles, rejoined the Opry in the 1970s after an absence of several years. “I find much of the same spirit and enthusiasm,” Hamilton said, “that made the Opry such a great institution in the first place.”
George IV was no Pollyanna. He knew that the Opry had had its problems, but like Hall, he believed the same commercializing pressures were at work in country music as a whole. Whether they would prevail or not remained to be seen, but as the 1970s drew to a close, there were some outstanding pickers and poets who were striving—on behalf of themselves and their musical genre—not to be ruined by commercial success. To understand the tension under which they labored, you had to go back about a quarter of a century—back to the days when the Grand Ole Opry was still at the peak of its popularity.
2
The Tradition-Minded Rebels: Hank Williams, Waylon Jennings, & Tompall Glaser
Tell me one more time, just so’s I’ll understand, are you sure Hank done it this way?
—Waylon Jennings
On the morning of August 11, 1952, Hank Williams was lying in the back seat of a Cadillac outside of WSM, drunk, depressed, and, as of a few hours earlier, out of work. He had just been fired from the Grand Ole Opry, and although another job was waiting at the “Louisiana Hayride” in Shreveport, Hank felt all the consolation that a deposed chairman of the board would find in knowing he could still be head cashier. The Opry, in those days, was the top of the country music heap, and Hank had struggled long and hard to get there.
Once he had arrived, he had taken the Nashville stage by storm, beginning with his first guest shot on June 11, 1949. People who were there that night maintain with absolute conviction that it was one of the most exciting moments in the history of country music. Such assessments can’t be measured, of course, but there is very little evidence to prove them wrong. Williams encored six or seven times, singing over and over again the song that brought him to the Opry in the first place, a Tin Pan Alley number called “Lovesick Blues.”
It was Hank’s first big hit, and in the hands of a lesser artist it might have been a mediocre song, filled as it was with uninspired couplets such as this one: “I’ve grown used to you somehow/I’m nobody’s sugar daddy now.” But when Hank would get to the chorus and let loose his yodeling moan about being lo-onesome, the people in the audience understood exactly what he meant, and the thunderous, foot-stomping ovations threatened to tear the tar paper right off the Ryman.
Hank projected that same kind of energy wherever he went, his six-foot, hundred-and-forty-pound frame taking on commanding and charismatic proportions as the applause reverberated through his head and lit up the grin on his high-boned face. At least that’s how it was when he was sober. When he was drunk (and he stayed that way a good part of the time during the waning months of his life), he couldn’t sing a lick, and half the time they would find him passed out in some hotel room, unable to appear at all.
When the cancellations became commonplace, the people at the Opry felt they had no choice but to drop him from the cast, and although Hank was determined until the end to make a triumphant return, he never did. He died, apparently from the accumulated effects of too much alcohol, a few hours into New Year’s of 1953—passed out in his car, as he and a young driver were heading for a show date in Canton, Ohio. He was twenty-nine.
The brevity of Hank Williams’s career has sparked continual speculations about how things might have been if he hadn’t been driven to the bottle by whatever it was that drove him. The point is obviously moot, and his biographer, Roger M. Williams (no relation), speculates plausibly that Hank’s drinking and his astonishing abilities as a songwriter may have sprung from the same inner agonies. Whatever it was that gave Williams his power of feeling, the songs that grew out of that power include some of the most impressive ever written, not only in country music, but in any other field as well. To this day, he is probably the most imitated singer and songwriter that country music has ever produced, and that fact has proved a double-edged sword. Hank wasn’t a bad one to imitate, but slicked-up carbons seldom have the freshness of original versions, and country music has had to contend with that reality for the last twenty-five years.
; At first glance, it seems a little strange that would be the case. As you read through the lyrics of a Hank Williams song, the words are so simple, so obvious—the vocabulary about what you would expect from a small-town Alabama boy who grew up during the Depression with an utter lack of interest in formal, or even informal, schooling. But if the songs themselves are uncomplicated, the emotions they captured are not, and that’s what gives them the kind of gut-stabbing realism that country music fans have always remembered.
One of Williams’s best-known songs, for example, is “Cold, Cold Heart,” which, on the surface at least, seems almost trite. It is the lament of a lovesick hillbilly whose woman is still hung up on a man who done her wrong. Very uncomplicated. But as the verses unfold, it turns out that the singer is not simply trapped in a wallow of self-pity. He is also hurt by the woman’s own unhappiness, which is genuine and multi-layered. Part of it stems from the simple fact of having been wronged by another man, but also, the song suggests, from the knowledge that life is passing her by while she is trapped by a grief and a repression of feelings that she can’t seem to control.
All in all, it’s a subtle and true-to-life twist on the unrequited-love genre, and yet it’s so simply done that you don’t have to think through it to appreciate it, any more than Hank probably thought through it to write it. The communication is potent, instantaneous, with no special need for critical analysis.
Watermelon Wine Page 3
