The song that all these people found it possible to identify with and that eventually became a top-twenty hit for Tanya Tucker is called “I Believe the South Is Gonna Rise Again,” and this is the way Braddock tells it:
I believe the South is gonna rise again/And not the way we thought it would back then. He could envision, he said, a brave new day of brotherhood and justice—and therefore of new Southern pride.
Such visions were fairly new to Bobby Braddock. His father was a citrus grower in central Florida, and Braddock grew up believing the things that the sons of modest privilege are supposed to believe in his part of the country. It wasn’t that he consciously hated anybody, but he was unsympathetic to the changes that were taking place around him, and as late as 1968 he voted for George Wallace for president.
Precisely what changed him he isn’t sure. The My Lai massacre began to undermine his hawkish views on Vietnam, and about the same time he began to rethink his opinions on other subjects as well. But more than anything else, Braddock believes, it was simply a different day. There was a different feeling in the air, a kinder and more mellow milieu that made it easier for the basic redneck decency in his corner of the world to make its way to the top.
And though Braddock really didn’t think about it much at the time, there was also the quiet example of his friend and fellow songwriter Don Wayne, who was regarded by almost everyone who knew him as one of the gentler spirits on the country music scene. Wayne was the poorly educated son of a transplanted sharecropper who had migrated from rural Tennessee to the big city of Nashville, seeking refuge from the hard-time Depression days. Wayne says he has a lot of memories from his boyhood, and one of the clearest is of his mother cooking for eight kids and singing blues songs she had learned from black neighbors up the road.
In the prime of his career, Wayne was a slight and slow-moving man with a shock of sandy-blond hair, a thin and easy smile, and an unusually quiet and introspective manner. He had been a songwriter since his early twenties, producing a respectable amount of material for albums and six or eight big hit singles. The biggest of those, “Country Bumpkin,” came in 1974 and, helped by Cal Smith’s earthy-rich rendition, was named country music’s Song of the Year.
Wayne, however, was philosophical about awards and commercial success, realizing that both are ephemeral and believing that some of his best songs have been some of his biggest flops. One of those, which was cut in the late sixties by a talented but still obscure session musician named Weldon Myrick, was a ballad called “The Family Way.” It tells the story of Aunt Elly Mae Jones, a black midwife who helps a frightened little white boy come to grips with his mother’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy. “Now don’t be harboring bad thoughts at your mother,” she says. “A human is a human and a saint’s mighty hard to come by.”
The song was fiction, but it came directly from Don Wayne’s experiences, and there was something almost primordial in the Southern-ness of it: the back-country anguish, the unmet puritanical ethic—and, of course, the wisdom of Aunt Elly Mae Jones.
Aunt Elly Mae was no doubt responsible for the wretched air play the song received, for she can be as disconcerting to a lot of blacks as she is to many whites. The only problem is that she is real. Her relationship to white people is flawed, of course—she gives a lot more than she gets, and even the gratitude is tainted by paternalism and inequality. But she has been around as a dispenser of strength and a symbol of shared humanity ever since antebellum times. Don Wayne simply appreciates her a little more than most people do.
“I guess one thing I’m trying to say,” he explains simply, “is that blacks and whites have always been able to get along better than most people thought, if only we’d take note of one basic fact: we’re all human, and we’re all in it together. I’ve long thought that one reason black music and white music are so much alike is that the people are. They have the same wants and needs, and I think a lot of people are finally coming to understand this.”
Implicit proof of Wayne’s point came in 1975 in the form of a hit record called “Mississippi, You’re On My Mind.” It was a haunting sense-of-place song in the tradition of John D. Loudermilk’s “Abilene” or George Jones’s “Memories of Us,” but there were several peculiarities that made it distinctive.*
The first was that it was written by a young white Mississippi-bred draft dodger named Jesse Winchester, who fled to Canada during Vietnam and was still in exile when he wrote the song. The second was that the biggest hit version was done by Stoney Edwards, a good country singer who happens to be black; and the third was that the song was a smash hit in Mississippi.
Whether the traditional fans of country music were familiar with all those facts is open to question. Quite possibly they weren’t, but that’s beside the point. For as the politicians were debating issues such as amnesty and civil rights, Jesse Winchester, Stoney Edwards and the people of Mississippi were conspiring to demonstrate a truth that’s worth grabbing hold of—that the things people have in common are a lot simpler and yet go a lot deeper than all the swirling abstractions that divide them. Jesse Winchester doesn’t try to say in his song whether Mississippi is a good place or a bad place. It’s just his place, and he missed it.*
* Sense-of-place songs abound in country music. Some others that have struck home in recent years include Linda Hargrove’s “New York City Song,” John Loudermilk’s “Tobacco Road,” and Joan Baez’s rendition of “Sweet Sunny South.” In addition the country rock group Brush Arbor recently came out with a medley consisting of the old Asa Martin hillbilly song “I’m Going Back to Alabam’” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s rock hit “Sweet Home Alabama.”
7
Loretta & the Pill: The Changing Relationships Between Men & Women
The feeling good comes easy now since I’ve got the Pill!
—Loretta Lynn
Spirits were high and flowing freely at the Charlotte Motor Speedway one crisp autumn night in 1975, as Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn belted out their hard-driving country hits before nearly fifteen thousand race fans. Twitty, the fifties rock ’n’ roller who turned country in the sixties and found his niche, came on first, wearing his lemon-yellow suit, his hair combed straight back and his spangled guitar strap turning back the glare of the floodlights.
There was something almost perfect about the setting: the crowd, full of close-cropped hair styles and freshly sunburned faces, watching in rapt appreciation, shrieking in continual bursts of recognition as Twitty ran through his earthy repertoire, some of it becoming so sexually explicit that almost nothing was left to the fans’ imagination.
They loved it when he finally came to one of his biggest and bawdiest hits in recent years, a crescendo ballad called “You’ve Never Been This Far Before.” There were rebel yells and catcalls that sounded as if they might have come from a high-school locker room as Twitty sang of “trembling fingers touching forbidden places.” And yet, despite the reaction they produce, there was a serious, almost somber side to Twitty’s songs—a sort of gut-level accuracy in his description of the guilt and confusion that often occur with early comminglings of love and sex.
“Yeah, it’s explicit,” he said in a gruff and hurried interview after the show, “and I caught a little flak for it. But I still think it’s one of the best songs I ever wrote. It’s real.”
The reality came from jumbled emotions that have always been there in abundance among the good ole boys that Twitty was singing to. Even as late as the 1970s, there was the nagging assumption that nice girls don’t and real men do, which can become a problem if you lose your grip on impersonality. The changing attitudes of the late twentieth century were a source of liberation, but there was a lingering fear, a counter consideration not easily shaken, that the Good Lord was up there somewhere, methodically taking notes in indelible ink.
A big problem for the Lord, however, was that he had recently lost a potent ally: the fear of pregnan
cy had given way to the pill; and that change had thrown the country music audience, and nearly everyone else as well, into one of the most profound fits of turmoil in the history of modern times. The separation of sex from consequence was unprecedented boost for the temptations of the here-and-now, releasing thoughts and creating options that were carefully repressed in times gone by.
Release was not liberation, however, and with it came a new set of problems that were chronicled with a kind of flawed and earthy eloquence in the lyrics of country music. Families were shaken, men and women were rethinking the whole range of their relationships, and Hugh Hefner’s predictions about how much fun it would be when contraception became a habit sometimes had a hollow and simplistic ring in the cold light of morning.
A Grand Ole Opry singer named Jean Shepherd caught the feeling not long ago with a ballad called “Another Neon Night”—a sort of feminine echo of “Help Me Make It Through the Night”—in which a liberated country girl finds that her sexual forays have failed their larger purpose. The song was not as big a hit as Sammi Jo’s “Tell Me a Lie,” which dealt with the same theme. But nowhere in all of country music has the pain of colliding values been expressed with any more power, as the woman in the song realizes with a sudden rush of shame: There’s someone lyin’ next to me and I don’t even know his name.
Songs that explicit have become almost the dominant genre of country music, which must be an eyebrow raiser to the God-fearing fans of yesteryear. But so it goes in the modern South: Baptist churches as abundant as they ever were, but massage parlors coming on stronger and stronger as time goes by. And like porno movies, country music sex songs don’t have to be artistic achievements in order to succeed.
Positive proof of that fact was offered a while back by a Nashville songwriter named Little David Wilkins, whose career refutes the idea that success and writing talent are necessarily connected. One of his first hits was a tacky little song called “Not Tonight I’ve Got a Headache,” which displays almost exactly as much subtlety and lyrical imagination as its title suggests. Wilkins came back a few months later with another Top Forty chart-buster called “Whoever Turned You On Forgot To Turn You Off,” clumsily written (at one point rhyming the words “lost,” “loss,” and “off”) and making no point except to affirm his own interest in another man’s sex-crazed castoff.
Little David, of course, was not alone in riding inane, sexually explicit songs to the top of the charts. The list is endless: Mel Street’s “This Ain’t Just Another Lust Affair,” in which the hero reassures the girl in his motel room that somewhere in her arms the feelin’ turned to love; or Billy Jo Spears’s female reversal of the theme, in which the whiny-voiced heroine is contending that “just because we are married don’t mean we can’t slip around;” or Gene Watson’s bedside temptation of a virgin, in which he tells her to “leave if you’d rather not lose what you came with, but stay and you’ll find this is where love begins.”
Kris Kristofferson is usually given credit for opening the floodgates, though the chances are that he didn’t have Little David Wilkins in mind when he did it. Songs like “Help Me Make It Through the Night” or “Me and Bobby McGee” obviously have a purpose beyond the titillating of fantasies and the padding of bank accounts. Kristofferson’s preoccupation was loneliness, which, in the real world, can become painfully interwoven with sexuality.
Actually, Kristofferson was not the only one around Nashville to make that connection. It was true that he was a rebel, and one of the norms he flouted was the tee-hee taboo about saying what you mean. But as Kristofferson was rising to prominence in the late sixties and early seventies, more traditional singers like Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn were also toughening up their acts and dealing with some pretty down-to-earth stuff.
It was 1969 when Dolly wrote “Down From Dover,” about a country girl with an out-of-wedlock baby on the way and a lover who had gone; and earlier still, Loretta Lynn had written “Wings Upon Your Horns,” about a young girl used by a leave-’em-crying lover (“When you first made love to me, I was your wife to be,” and so on). There were disc jockeys who were offended by such frank language from a sweet and sturdy native of Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, but Loretta Lynn has sailed on through such controversy to become one of the most important country singers today—at least in part because she personifies the stirrings among a large and crucial segment of America’s female population.
Hers has been, to say the least, an unlikely odyssey. She grew up in eastern Kentucky, a few miles south of Paintsville, in a one-room cabin where she shared a bed with four other children. It was coal country, a rugged and spectacular land where questions of survival were never very far from the surface.
Today the land and the people are scarred by too many losing battles against the whims and greed of distant corporations. But in Loretta’s childhood, the spirit was different. The Depression came quietly, as the dogged menfolk scratched and battled, trying to draw crops from the coal-infested earth. At night they descended beneath it to work the graveyard shift in the mines, while the women stayed home to nurse the babies, wash the clothes, and read the Bible by the light of a candle.
Eventually the Van Lear Coal Company pulled out, leaving Butcher Hollow, as Loretta puts it, “not much more ’n a ghost town today.” By then she had long since gone.
At the age of thirteen she met Mooney Lynn (nicknamed in honor of a home-brewed mash) at a schoolhouse supper where he had decided to sample one of her pies. Unimpressed with her abilities as a cook, Mooney nevertheless struck up a relationship that led, a month later, to a proposal of marriage. Loretta’s parents, Ted and Clara Webb, were singularly unimpressed with the whole idea, but youthful unions were not uncommon in that part of Kentucky, and before long the Webbs relented.
A few weeks later, Loretta and Mooney were off to nearby Chandler’s Cabins for their bewildering teenage wedding night, and the following year, at the age of fourteen, Loretta gave birth to her first baby girl. Three more children had followed by the time she was eighteen and at first, she maintains, her naivete was such that she didn’t even know what was causing them. She was five months pregnant the first time around before she knew what was wrong.
After leaving Kentucky, Mooney and his bride made their way to Washington state, where the early years of the fifties were spent in a one-on-one war against poverty. Mooney hired on as a lumberman and Loretta supplemented the family income by picking strawberries in the migrant labor fields.
It was during that time that Mooney bought her a used guitar, and she spent her spare moments singing and picking and composing songs. As the fifties drew to a close, she made a record called “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” and she and Mooney traveled the country in a beat-up Ford to promote it. Fifty thousand records later, her career began to take off and she found herself in Nashville.
The songs she wrote and sang drew their power from a number of sources, including the years in Washington where Loretta—like so many of her fans of today—had lived within the traditional expectations about a woman’s place. But if her outlook had been unrebellious, she had also learned something basic back in the desperate warmth of a coal miner’s cabin: a sturdy sense of self and self-preservation that she has carried with her ever since. And with her budding career setting off an implicit erosion of at least a part of her feminine dependence, a different kind of spirit—a sort of don’t-tread-on-me undercurrent—began to show itself in her music.
One of the first examples of that feeling was a song she wrote herself called “Don’t Come Home A’Drinkin’ With Lovin’ on Your Mind,” a wife’s-eye view of a hard-drinking husband that invariably strikes a responsive chord among the women in her audience. The Charlotte Motor Speedway audience in the fall of 1975 was no exception, and as the ladies cheered, the men responded in a different way—shouting good-natured taunts and propositions that Loretta fended off with an adept, tough-mouthed flirtatiousness, obviously enjoyi
ng every minute of it.
Later, as her bus rolled in for a follow-up concert in Greensboro, Loretta lounged back in her blue jeans, bare feet, and number thirteen football jersey to reflect on some of her songs. “A lot of women have lived it,” she says of “Don’t Come Home A’Drinkin’.” “I guess a lot of men have too, and ’course men ain’t the only ones who drink. But it’s a real song. All of my songs deal with something that’s real, and that’s why a lot of ’em get to be number one.”
Of all her number ones, however, the one the people scream loudest for wherever she goes is “The Pill,” her million-selling smash of 1975, which concerns exactly what its title suggests, and concludes with this happy affirmation: “Feelin’ good is easy now, ’cause I’ve got the pill.”
Loretta actually recorded the song around 1970 but kept it under wraps, waiting for the times to catch up. They never quite did. The record was banned on a dozen radio stations, giving it an aura above and beyond that of a story line that was racy enough to begin with. The woman in the song is an oft-pregnant housewife who is telling her good-timing husband that she now has the pill and therefore two can play at ’most any game in town.
Even in the increasingly raw world of country music, it was a little too much to handle in some quarters, especially with such a point-blank title. And yet it seems at least plausible that the male deejays who banned it were put off by something else as well—by the song’s explicit denunciation of the double standard.
Watermelon Wine Page 10
