“Then I went on network TV and I was no longer in and out of jails, and I could look at Kristofferson songs with the mind of a performer or an artist; they became something I could sing without it hurtin’ so bad.”
So Cash took Kristofferson with him to the Newport Folk Festival, put him on his network show, and recorded “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” Roger Miller did “Me and Bobby McGee,” and soon afterward Kris began cutting his own albums for Monument Records and winning songwriting awards from the Country Music Association. He was on his way, and before long he had become the key figure in a crucial new trend for country music, a kind of broadening of both audiences and influences that has had a lot to do with where the music is heading today.
He wasn’t the only one, of course, and in fact he wasn’t even the first to hit it big. If you had to pick a breakthrough song, a lot of people in Nashville maintain that it was “Gentle On My Mind,” written by a lackadaisical Nashville disc jockey named John Hartford, who would probably have done a little better in radio if his mind hadn’t been constantly a-jumble with the snatches and fragments of songs that he was trying to whip into shape.
“Gentle On My Mind” was one that worked—a quintessential blend of influences that sounds in part like a Jimmie Rodgers hobo song, and yet has the kind of poetic imagery associated with Gordon Lightfoot or Joni Mitchell. In the song, a man is telling the girl left behind, for whatever consolation it would hold, you’re moving on the back roads, by the rivers of my mem’ry, and for hours, you’re just gentle on my mind.
The same combination of qualities was present in abundance in Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” Willis Hoover’s “Freedom to Stay,” and Billy Joe Shaver’s “Ride Me Down Easy.” And so the young writers began breaking down walls, drawing a more youthful and intellectual audience into the fringes of the country tradition. It was true, of course, that many of the newer fans were reluctant to admit what was happening. They might like Mickey Newbury or Kris Kristofferson, but they thought of them as folk or rock—anything but country—and the squeamishness wouldn’t end for several more years.
But the new-country writers were an affront to stereotyped expectations of all descriptions, and nobody relished that position any more than Mickey Newbury. He was dismayed by the fact that the fans of country music were reluctant to identify with the peaceful sentiments of a song like “Blowin’ In the Wind”—that many of them, being deeply mistrustful of the politics of Bob Dylan, refused to accept his music for the things that it said. But he also knew there were no monopolies on closed-mindedness, and he had, if anything, even less patience with the semi-hip coffeehouse crowds who regarded country music as some kind of boorish anachronism that was a little too hard on sophisticated ear drums.
One night in the late sixties, he was appearing at the Bitter End West in Los Angeles, and he began discussing such matters backstage with comedian David Steinberg. It was a time of frequent newspaper headlines about whites in newly integrated Southern schools insisting on “Dixie” as the school fight song, and blacks protesting because to them it was an anthem of white supremacy.
Newbury was annoyed because he saw nothing in the song itself that should make it the exclusive property of one-time segregationists, and on a whim he announced that he would sing it that night just to prove a point. The Bitter End’s manager, Paul Colby, was alarmed at the prospect—at first laughing nervously on the off-chance that Newbury was joking. But when he realized that the star of the evening was absolutely serious, he began explaining with rapid-fire urgency that “Dixie” was not exactly the type of song that a bunch of radicalized young Californians had turned out to hear.
No matter. Newbury was undeterred, and when he got onstage he ran through part of his normal set, and then with a gentle strum of his guitar, he began to sing the words,
“Oh I wish I was in the land of cotton.” But instead of belting them out in the rebel-yell style that everybody was accustomed to, he plucked the notes slowly on his old guitar, and his voice took on a rich, haunting quality that called up a different set of images—visions not of a mean-spirited South, but of a poignant South, a land caught in the grips of tragedy and suffering for 150 years.
There was power in the transformation, and it grew even stronger as Newbury shifted in midnote to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and then to an antebellum gospel song called “All My Trials.” Before the impromptu trilogy was completed, it had become one of the most supercharged events in the history of the Bitter End West. Every other sound in the room had vanished in the emotion of the moment. Odetta, the famous black folksinger, was sitting in the front row with tears in her eyes, and Newbury knew that he had accomplished his purpose and a great deal more.
Johnny Cash and others believe there was a special power about the new-country performers, unleashed by a fusing of traditions—the reunification of country and folk, and the sharing of wisdom that each had picked up during the years of estrangement.
Country music, says Cash, is by far the better for it, and a wide range of people agree with him. Bill Anderson, for example, a writer of deliberately unsubtle songs, believes that in the years following the appearance of Newbury and Kristofferson (whom he regards as two of the most influential songwriters ever) “country music has done the things that it’s always done even better.”
“Kristofferson,” adds Anderson in a search for the strongest superlative he can muster, “is the modern-day Hank Wil!iams. He has written about a half dozen perfect songs. And that, believe me, is a lot.”
But if country music was influenced for the better by other traditions, the reverse was also true. Joan Baez, for example, began recording in Nashville in the late sixties, and as much as any other folky (except perhaps Lightfoot or Tyson) she began doing what Charley McCoy calls “a real Nashville kind of session.” She used home-grown pickers like Norman Blake and Jerry Reed, and she began recording Nashville material—songs by Kristofferson, Steve Young, Willie Nelson, and Mickey Newbury, to name a few.
She also recorded her first hit single, a song called “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,”—which at first must have seemed wildly out of character to many of her fans. It’s a song about the fall of the South in 1865, and it laments the suffering connected with the Southern defeat—the emotional wrenchings, deaths, and physical privations associated with the losing of a cause.
It doesn’t deal with the question of whether the cause was just, and in that sense it’s far less political than many of the songs for which Baez is noted. And yet, in many ways it is one of the more eloquent antiwar numbers that she ever recorded—touching a level of feeling that is universally human and beyond political abstraction.
Nashville had that effect on a lot of protest singers. It offered a reintroduction to the decent simplicity of the country tradition, and to understand the importance of that reintroduction you need only listen to the sentimental but heart-felt lyrics of Joan Baez’s “Outside Nashville City Limits.”
She had written the song after a December drive in the country with Kris Kristofferson, in which she had wound up at the farm of Marijohn Wilkin. Marijohn had written a standard called “Long Black Veil” that Baez had recorded on an early album. It sounded like an old British folk ballad, but Marijohn and her husband, as Baez discovered, were alive-and-kicking Tennessee country folk—peaceful people, whose salt-of-the-earth values seemed strangely compatible with the radical visions of Joan Baez.
As Baez remembered the moment in a song, they went walking together through the Tennessee hills, talking about the beauty of the land, which was covered that day by a new-fallen snow. She was deeply moved by her hosts’ conversation—the depth and sincerity and simple goodness of it—and her eyes, she wrote, “kept brimming over” as they walked.
About the same time, she had a similar reaction to Earl Scruggs. They had met as mutual admirers at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival (shyly doing a duet
of “Wildwood Flower”), but it was only after Joan began her recording visits to Nashville that they began to find time for serious conversation. During one such talk, they began to discuss the war in Vietnam, and Joan approached the topic a little bit gingerly, understanding full well that a great many people in country music were vehemently opposed to her left-of-center views.
On the issue of the war, though, she was surprised to discover that she and Scruggs were in substantial agreement. He told her that he didn’t want his teenaged sons to kill or be killed in Southeast Asia, and that he would support whatever they decided to do about the war because they were his boys.
Scruggs underscored the point dramatically in 1969 when he joined Baez, Arlo Guthrie, and a few other champions of protest at the Moratorium March on Washington, demanding an end to the killing. Though he concedes that there may have been a few raised eyebrows among some of his Grand Ole Opry colleagues back in Nashville, Scruggs says today that he has no regrets.
“That’s not really my thing, protest marches,” he explains in the rich Southern accent he acquired as a boy in North Carolina. “But I had occasion back in the late sixties to talk to somebody close to President Nixon’s administration, and he told me it was worth thirty-thousand more lives to prolong the war until the 1972 elections.
“Well, I’m a patriot, and being critical of my country doesn’t come easy to me. But that just about made me sick. I believe a person should speak his convictions peacefully, and that’s what I did. I don’t know what people said behind my back, but as far as to my face, I never felt any repercussions at all.”
“I don’t think there were any,” says Scruggs’s Opry colleague Minnie Pearl. “People respected it. We knew Earl.”
What the Earl Scruggs episode indicated was that the politics of country music were a great deal more diverse than people like Joan Baez might have expected. They knew that the music—like everything else in America in the late sixties and early seventies—had become increasingly politicized, but the most common images were of country stars like Billy Grammer and Sam McGee campaigning ardently for George Wallace.
There were exceptions. Scruggs was one, George Hamilton IV was another (he did a concert for Robert Kennedy in 1968), and there was even a Nashville songwriter named Shirl Milete who wrote and recorded a sympathetic lament about draft dodgers fleeing to Canada. There was a good reason for Milete’s sympathies, for he happens to be a burly, tattooed good ole boy who believes very deeply that all war is wrong. On the basis of that belief, he refused to serve in Korea during the conflict there and subsequently did a stint in prison.
But obviously Milete was an exception—a fact underscored by the hard and cold reality that as far as he knows, not one single radio station ever played his record. Far more prominent were records such as Bobby Bare’s “God Bless America Again,” Bill Anderson’s “Where Have All the Heroes Gone,” and Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee.”
The latter song especially is a classic, uncompromising reaction to the feelings of antipatriotism that seemed to be rampant at the time. Haggard, like most of his fans, was deeply offended by such feelings—by the notion that a bunch of self-righteous kids who had never had to scratch, claw, or battle to make ends meet would smoke pot, burn draft cards, and generally reject—in the shrillest way possible—the values that seemed to glue the country together. To understand the depth of the reaction, you needed only to be in the crowd at a Merle Haggard concert and listen to the whoops of approval as his baritone voice began to belt out the lyrics:
We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee/We don’t take our trips on LSD.
About the same time, Bill Anderson came out with “Where Have All the Heroes Gone,” which bemoaned the absence of suitable example-setters for American youth, and contained some tough talking put-downs of longhairs, black militants, and assorted other radicals and dissidents. Like “Okie From Muskogee,” it was a smash, and Anderson, who grew up very Southern and conservative in the towns of Columbia, South Carolina, and Decatur, Georgia, was proud of it.
Gradually, however, both Anderson and Haggard began to mellow in their feelings, and by the mid-seventies, as the Bicentennial season rolled around, Anderson would wince a little when he heard his song on the radio, and he had stopped doing it in his concerts. In its place was a different kind of anthem, called “My Country,” which in its own way is at least as patriotic as “Where Have All The Heroes Gone?”
The newer song, written by New England songwriter Jud Strunk, begins about the way you would expect—with vignettes and word pictures about America’s beauty. But soon you realize that Strunk has woven a more complex tapestry, slipping in references to war, poverty, ghetto desperation, and political assassination—subjects that, until fairly recently, many country fans preferred not to dwell on.
Martin Luther King is extolled explicitly, and the conditions that impelled him to act are acknowledged freely. But the anthem ends on a note that leaves the crewcuts nodding in slow affirmation: “I may not stand for everything my country’s about,” it says, “but I do stand for my country.”
“I really love that song,” explains Anderson, “because it’s not so red, white, and blue that it turns people off. It’s not that I wanted to get away completely from the feelings in ‘Heroes.’ I still think America needs heroes. But I’ve changed. My thinking has changed too. Some of the things early in ‘Heroes’ generalized about long hair, for example. It put down some people a little too hard. I haven’t done it now in several years.
“I guess,” Anderson continued in the soft and sincere voice that’s become his trademark, “I feel sort of like Johnny Cash, who says he’s ‘born a little every day’ and that once he stops learning and changing he starts dying. I think you see the same kind of change in the country-music audience. The audience is broadening, for one thing; it’s pulling in more young people, thanks to performers like Kris Kristofferson.
“And the fan who has always been a fan, his horizons are broadening too. The truck driver today goes from Atlanta to maybe California, or Philadelphia, or Omaha. He doesn’t just haul a load of chickens to Macon. He’s seeing more and more of the country. It’s bound to have an effect.”
In short, Anderson concludes, partly because of the influence of young writers, and partly because of the times, country music has become intertwined with a bewildering set of changes on a number of fronts—politics, race, sex, religion, and the cultural gaps between traditional and newfound listeners. The way the music deals with all of those things is worth examining in some detail, beginning with one of the most profound and wrenching issues the country audience has ever had to face: the altered relationships between Americans who are white and those who are black.
The music, as usual, has proved deeply prophetic.
6
Black, Blues, & Country
The blues was one thing we both understood.
—Merle Haggard
Some years ago, a talented young Louisiana musician named Tony Joe White composed a song entitled “A Rainy Night in Georgia.” The first big hit recording of it was done by a veteran black singer named Brook Benton, and as he wailed out the plaintive lyrics about being lonesome on a rainy night, you could see in your mind an aging, nomadic black man leaning against the side of a boxcar in his tattered clothes and with a head full of memories. In 1974, the song was redone—by Hank Williams, Jr.—and the image is just as clear: of a white hobo traveling to who knows where on a midnight train.
Maybe you don’t think of blacks and country music together, but in the rural South the laments of blacks and whites have covered a lot of common ground. It probably should have come as less of a surprise than it did back in 1962 when Ray Charles, the acknowledged king of rhythm and blues, asked his producer, Sid Feller, to search out some quality country material for him to record. Feller, who had produced such Ray Charles classics as “What’d I Say” and “Geor
gia On My Mind,” was a little stunned and apprehensive, despite the fact that Charles had begun his professional career, at age seventeen, as the fill-in piano player for a little country band called the Florida Playboys.
All of that had been a long time ago, and in the intervening years Ray Charles had directed his considerable vocal talents toward expanding the audience for blues music from a relatively small collection of connoisseurs, who appreciated art for art’s sake, and ghetto blacks, who were simply the refugees from the tar paper shacks and cotton fields where the music had begun. The earlier blues musicians—people like Leadbelly, Blind Boy Fuller, the Reverend Gary Davis, Howlin’ Wolf, and Mississippi John Hurt—had all lived on the brink of poverty, some of them even on welfare, and with Ray Charles selling millions of records simply by sprucing up the rough edges, Sid Feller was profoundly skeptical of anything that smacked of new directions.
Nevertheless, he did as he was asked and came back with a collection of songs that included some of the biggest hits Ray Charles would ever record. And the ironic thing was that when “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” and “Busted” (written respectively by Don Gibson, Hank Williams, and Harlan Howard) began climbing their way to the top of the charts, nobody talked about Ray Charles’s changing tastes—and for a very good reason: He sounded almost exactly the same. His voice and his anguished interpretations were certainly no different, and the notes, chord progressions, and hard-time lyrics were remarkably compatible with those of his earlier records.
To Ray Charles, it was all very logical. “I’ve always loved Hillbilly music,” he explained recently. “I never missed the Grand Ole Opry when I was young. Hillbilly music is totally honest. They don’t sing, ‘I sat there and dreamed of you.’ They say, ‘I missed you, and I went out and got drunk.’ There are a lot of parallels between blues and country.”
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