Watermelon Wine

by Frye Gaillard

  “Parallels” is the precisely accurate word, for the two musical forms historically have been as similar and yet as separate as the two cultures out of which they grew. Country was the music of redneck soul, and though the hopes and failures that gave it its power were inescapably intertwined with those that nourished the blues, the entire history of the South—at least until very recently—has been an attempt to deny that fact. Country was white, and the blues were black, and never the twain shall meet.

  It is not surprising that it would be that way, for there have been few groups in American society who have been as openly hostile and fearful toward blacks as the traditional country-music audiences: Southern rednecks and working-class whites in the big cities of the North. But even in the years of peak segregation, the separation was never as complete as the mythology insisted it was. It was simply that cultural exchanges and other interracial dealings were carried out with such discretion and anonymity that whites were almost certain to come out on top. In the field of music, for example, such country notables as Merle Travis, Jimmie Rodgers, Chet Atkins, and Hank Williams all learned their music from obscure black men, whose obscurity was not the least bit lessened when their pupils went on to prominence.

  The situation today, however, has begun to change. Musical segregation, like segregation in other spheres, is breaking down rapidly, and scenes like Dobie Gray or the Pointer Sisters playing to standing ovations at the Grand Ole Opry or going on tour with Tom T. Hall are becoming more and more commonplace. The Pointer Sisters’ “Fairy Tale” hit the top of the country charts in 1974, a year after black singer Charley Pride had earned more money than any performer in the history of country music. In addition, the list of black singers who have recorded country material in their own styles is long and impressive, including among others in recent years Gladys Knight, Joe Simon, Brook Benton, Bobby Blue Bland, and, of course, Ray Charles.

  And in the 1970s, the cultural exchanges went both ways. White country singer Freddy Weller had a major hit with Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land,” and Mickey Gilley did well with the old Sam Cooke song, “Bring It on Home to Me.” A number of country artists have done the songs of the late Ivory Joe Hunter, a black writer in Memphis, and during Hunter’s long bout with cancer there was a benefit concert for him on the stage of the Opry, featuring Loretta Lynn and Isaac Hayes.

  This blending of black and white musical traditions implicitly alludes to what the lyrics of growing numbers of country songs are beginning explicitly to affirm: that Southerners are Southerners, and people are people, and skin color is not the most relevant distinction.

  Perhaps the most poignant expression of this emerging point of view, and one that seems to appeal most effectively to the innate, down-home decency that dwells in much of the country-music audience, is Tom T. Hall’s musical recitation, “I Want to See the Parade.” The narrator of the story is a redneck who, out of sheer curiosity, had ambled on down to the site of a civil rights demonstration. As he was standing on the street corner, reflecting on the outrageousness of it all, he overheard a little girl behind him saying that she wished she could see the parade. He lifted her up in order to improve her vantage point, and when he did so, she hit him with a question that took him by surprise. “Mister,” she said, “why does my daddy hate all those people going by?” As the redneck began to answer the question, he noticed that the little girl was blind, and when he looked around for an answer, “it was pretty hard to find.”

  “And that night,” said the redneck, “I took a good look at myself, and this is the prayer I prayed: I said, ‘Lord, I want you to hold me up. Cause I want to see the parade.’”

  It is a simple but powerful piece of poetry, though in the real world, of course, the kind of enlightenment Hall describes is usually more evolutionary than instantaneous. It is often the product of a whole barrage of psychological influences, some of them subtle, some of them not so subtle, blending together over a period of time. One of those influences that worked its quiet and unobtrusive effect on the mindset of country music fans was the appearance in the mid-sixties of a new and very special superstar. Charley Pride, a free-spirited fugitive from the cotton-picking delta town of Sledge, Mississippi, burst upon the country scene at a time when many of his fans-to-be were frightened, uptight, and bitter about the civil rights revolution going on around them.

  Pride, however, was uniquely equipped to soothe those fears. For one thing, his mellow, sunburned voice could just as easily have belonged to any of the fairer-skinned good ole boys who grew up down the road. And in addition to that, he had a certain aura, a sort of inoffensively perverse determination to do his own thing regardless of what others might say or think.

  “I guess it’s kind of funny, me being up here with this permanent tan,” he would tell the Caucasian hordes who turned out to hear him never dreaming, from the sound of his recorded voice, that he was anything but one of them. And they would always relax, enjoy the show, and go out and buy more Charley Pride records.

  Pride never meant to be a crusader, never intended to offer a self-conscious challenge to a bastion of whiteness (any more than he intended, a few years later, to strike a blow for social justice when he moved into an all-white, upper-class neighborhood in the suburbs of Dallas). But neither was he an Uncle Tom. He kept his dignity, and it probably did his audiences good to be confronted by a talented, self-contained son of Mississippi whose skin happened to be a different color from theirs.

  Whatever the effect on his fans, the whole situation hasn’t done Pride any harm. Country music has made him a lot richer and more famous than most of the home folks back in Sledge, and he’s still modest enough to retain some feelings of gratitude—especially when he compares his situation, as he sometimes does, to that of DeFord Bailey.

  Bailey, a black harmonica player, and one of the best who ever lived, was born at a bad time and became a star in country music about forty years too soon. He joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry soon after its founding back in 1925, and was one of its most popular performers for sixteen years. In 1941, however, he was dropped from the cast on the dubious grounds that he hadn’t written enough new songs (a fact that hadn’t disturbed the Opry’s executives until after they bought stock in a new song-licensing company called BMI).

  For the next three decades after he left the Opry Bailey didn’t perform very much, and made his living instead by shining shoes on a Nashville street corner. But the city fathers urban-renewed his shoe stand a few years back, and Bailey, then in his late seventies, spent his days in an antiseptic, old folks’ high-rise near the vacant lot where the stand used to be. He said he still played his harmonica a lot—“just about the same way some people smoke cigarettes.”

  It was not easy in the later years of his life to persuade DeFord Bailey to talk about the music industry that shafted him. He would sit there, dressed in his stiffly pressed blue suit, his felt hat, and his spotted tie, and he would parry every question expertly—always polite and smiling, but always noncommittal, unless he had seen some concrete reason to trust you. Few writers other than a young Vanderbilt University history student named David Morton were able to establish such trust with Bailey, and when I took my own stab at it, I didn’t come anywhere close.

  But with Morton’s help, I did manage to pull out one answer that may shed some light on the way Bailey thought. Asked if he would consider performing again, on the Opry stage or elsewhere, Bailey replied with a smile: “If they’re talking right.”

  The topic of conversation he had in mind was money, and although there were a number of negotiations in the 1970s, most of them didn’t get anywhere. Bailey passed up a chance to cut an album with Pete Seeger even though he was offered a flat fee and a royalty percentage considerably in excess of the going rate. He turned down an offer to appear at the prestigious Newport Folk Festival, and soon after that, according to David Morton, Bailey was offered twenty-five hundred dollars to pl
ay three songs in the Burt Reynolds movie W. W. and the Dixie Dancekings. He turned it down on the grounds that it wasn’t enough.

  “I don’t want to give the impression that Mr. Bailey has been terribly difficult to deal with,” said Morton, who became Bailey’s friend, apologist, and unpaid manager. In fact, however, that impression was pretty close to accurate, and the reason would seem to be this: DeFord Bailey spent sixteen years as one of the biggest stars of the Grand Ole Opry, and throughout his tenure the Opry executives regarded him simply and explicitly as the institution’s “mascot.” He knew he was among the greatest harmonica players ever (“I was a humdinger,” he admitted with a smile), and that knowledge was curiously liberating. He had nothing to prove and no apparent hunger for fame or money. If you wanted to hear him, then—simply as a matter of principle—you could pay his price. If you did not want to pay his price, there were no hard feelings but you were not going hear him, and that was that.

  It all sounded terribly arrogant, and it was. But most arrogance is tinged with a kind of feisty, uncertain quality, and Deford Bailey’s was not. He was one of the most gentlemanly, self-bemused, and delightedly self-assured people in the state of Tennessee. And he was also nobody’s fool. He had learned from his own experiences, and perhaps he had learned as well from the experiences of another black Nashville singer named Cortelia Clark, whose story was one of the most ironically tragic in the history of Nashville music.

  Clark was a blind Negro street-singer who spent a good part of his life on a downtown Nashville sidewalk, rasping out the blues while he played guitar and sold pencils for whatever amount people chose to drop into his tin cup. In 1967, however, when Clark was an old man, a young music producer named Mike Weesner came up with the idea of having him do an album. Arrangements were made with Chet Atkins of RCA, and the album, entitled Blues in the Street, was cut. It was a masterpiece. Critical acclaim was so high that Clark won a 1967 Grammy Award, and for at least a brief moment his name glittered in lights.

  The only problem was that the album didn’t sell. Clark made little money from it and soon found himself back on his downtown sidewalk selling pencils, his music nearly drowned out by the onrushing traffic. I was a reporter for the Associated Press when Cortelia Clark was killed in a fire at his home a couple of years after his award. He was buried obscurely, at a rain-spattered funeral attended by only a few of his close friends. The poignancy of it all was a little overwhelming, so I worked at some length over a story about his life and teletyped it to the New York A.P. office for distribution over the national wires.

  A few minutes later, the phone rang. It was the editor from New York. “Jesus Christ,” he snapped in his nasal, Manhattan twang. “What do you think we’re running—an obituary service for beggars?”

  One person in Nashville who was particularly struck by the irony of Cortelia Clark’s life was Mickey Newbury, a singer and songwriter then in his mid-thirties, who after years of quality work had begun to inch his way into the big time with such compositions as “An American Trilogy” and “San Francisco Mabel Joy.” Newbury was raised on country music in the dusty back streets of Houston, Texas, but he was young enough when he came to Nashville to have absorbed some other influences as well, among them Bob Dylan and the protest singers of the 1960s, and such relatively obscure blues musicians as Percy Mayfield and Cortelia Clark.

  “I used to stop and listen to Cortelia,” Newbury remembered years later. “I didn’t know him well, never even knew his last name, but I admired him. I was out of town on the road when he died, and I just happened to be going through some old papers when I got back and stumbled on the story.” Newbury said he mulled over the tragedy for quite some time, and his mulling finally produced a song that was one of the best of an emerging genre in country music: songs about the shared wisdom of blacks and whites in the rural South.

  There are other examples: Tom T. Hall’s recording about an aging black janitor who had come to see, in the course of his life, that the only things in the world worth very much at all are old dogs, children, and watermelon wine; Alex Harvey’s composition about a “share-cropping colored man” who had befriended and cared for a little orphan white boy when no one else would do it; Donna Fargo’s “Honey Chile,” which speculates about what was once the most morbidly unthinkable possibility in the Southern subconscious: that if Jesus were black, there would be a whole bunch of Christians more deeply concerned about their immortality.

  One other song in the same category is worth special mention because of the artist who sang it. A few years ago Johnny Russell, a fat and funny guitarist with a pleasant, powerful voice, turned out a song entitled “Catfish John,” which told of a much-maligned friendship between a young white boy and a former black slave who had once been swapped by his owner for a Chestnut mare. It was Russell’s biggest hit until 1974, when he released a record with the absolutely on-target, good-ole-boy country title of “Rednecks, White Socks, and Blue Ribbon Beer.”

  The song, which is set in a redneck bar, celebrates the way of life that its title connotes, and on the surface it is the sort of record that causes people like George Wallace and Richard Nixon to claim country music as their own special turf. Rednecks are simply assumed to be patriotic all-American vote fodder for conservative politicians, and any affiliation of Redneckism—which Russell’s song is—therefore is assumed to be a plus for the forces of reaction.

  The most eloquent advancement of that theory came in a Harper’s Magazine article in 1974, when a writer named Florence King condemned “Rednecks, White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer” as a “truculent hymn to the twice-turned jockstrap that could someday become America’s ‘Horst Wessell.’ The sullen defensiveness,” she wrote, “becomes social dynamite when combined with the aggression inherent in songs of the Down-Home Patriotism category.”

  Richard Nixon phrased it a little differently in a Grand Ole Opry appearance a few months before his resignation, but his view was essentially the same. “In a serious vein for a moment,” he said, “I want to say a word about what country music has meant to America. First, it comes from the heart of America. It talks about family. It talks about religion. And it radiates a love of this nation—a patriotism. Country music makes America a better country.”

  All of that is true as far as it goes, but people like Florence King and Richard Nixon are inclined to overlook at least one crucial point: that the patriotism of country music is no longer the utterly uncritical variety that both of them seem to believe it is. Country fans have experienced enough of the American dream to give them hope, but they have also felt the sting of its failings, have lived through Watergate and a recession, and the result is a peculiar set of populistic confusions. Merle Haggard may have written such intolerant anthems as “Okie From Muskogee” and “The Fightin’ Side of Me,” but he also wrote “If We Make It Through December,” a fatalistic ballad about Christmastime factory layoffs, and “Hungry Eyes,” a militant description of life in a migrant labor camp, where he spent a good part of his youth. For Haggard is, in a way, a distant soul cousin of Woody Guthrie, the radical dust-bowl poet who came from the same Okie background—in fact from the same area—southeast Oklahoma—from which Haggard’s folks fled when the Depression hit bottom in 1935.

  Guthrie’s gut-level radicalism grew directly from the desperate circumstances of his people, but despite all that, there was a stubborn, it’s-my-country-too kind of patriotism that was subtly embedded in songs like “This Land Is Your Land.” Haggard came along a generation later. He could remember the desperate times, but he also knew that they were on the wane, and his music swung like a pendulum between those two realities.

  His breast-beating patriotism stirred the crowds, and well it should have. But it never could obliterate a sense of being in it together with the traditional victims of America’s failings—a feeling he captured with stunning, apolitical eloquence a little while back with a song called “White Man Singing
the Blues.”

  The song affirmed the brotherhood between whites and blacks on the same side of the tracks, “where people have nothing to lose,” and it was not the first time that Haggard had taken on the issue of race. In 1974 he released a song called “Irma Jackson,” which dealt explicitly with one of the biggest taboos of them all—interracial love—and vehemently condemned society’s lack of color blindness. “Of all the songs I’ve written,” he said, “this one may be my favorite because it tells it like it is. I wrote and recorded it some time ago, but didn’t release it for one reason or another, possibly because the time wasn’t right. But I feel it’s right now.”

  Whether it was or not was difficult to prove. For one thing, “Irma Jackson” was never released as a single, so its marketability on its own was never tested. But there are other people in the country-music field who share Haggard’s opinion that times have changed, and one of those who shares it most passionately is a Nashville songwriter named Bobby Braddock.

  Braddock is a quiet and unimposing reconstructed Southerner with faded jeans, a scraggly beard, and high and noble hopes for the future of his homeland. Professionally, he doesn’t venture very often into the world of social commentary. Probably the most famous song he has ever written is the Tammy Wynette hit “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” which is best known to non-country music fans as the record an angry Jack Nicholson flung across the room in the movie Five Easy Pieces. Braddock is one of those gut-level, and sometimes hard-core, country writers whose work has been on the charts pretty consistently for the last half a decade.

  In 1974, however, Braddock wrote a song that is a little bit different from his usual fare. For one thing, it flopped. At least the Bobby Goldsboro single on it did. But it is one of those engaging message-of-hope songs that has attracted the attention of a wide array of artists. Among those who have recorded it, in addition to Goldsboro, are Tanya Tucker, the one-time teenage country idol whose diverse following has more than its share of bib-and-overalls Grand Ole Opry types, and Mariane Love, a talented, up-and-coming vocal stylist, who is black, beautiful, and a singer of the blues.