“I’m ready to make a deal,” the woman affirms, “and you can’t afford to turn it down, ’cause you know I’ve got the pill.”
It was an effective piece of corn-pone protest, and it was not the first time that Loretta had tried it. Her best effort in that direction came a few years earlier, when a brilliant satirical writer named Shel Silverstein penned a song especially for her. It was a hard-hitting anthem called “One’s On the Way,” and to a certain segment of feminine society it said far more than a hundred issues of Ms. magazine or a year’s worth of speeches by Gloria Steinem. It told the story of a woman scrambling to keep up with the insatiable demands of her family—her brood of children and a husband wrapped up in a world of his own, and a middle American home in Topeka where marches in support of women’s liberation could have been happening on some other planet.
Loretta laughed and grinned uneasily when a reporter asked her about that song. Her own views, like those of many of the people who listen to her, were slowly evolving. But it was an unself-conscious evolution, unaffected by rhetoric or ideology, for protest movements were not her style.
“I sing about the things people go through,” she said, “and ‘One’s On the Way’ is something a lot of women experience. I think it’s trying to tell men, ‘I may not be a women’s libber, but this is how it is, and it’s not right.’ Women sit at home and they see the television shows, and the soap operas, and they know their own lives are not what they oughta be.”
“I’m not no libber,” she says with her perpetual grin. “But women have got to stick up for themselves. If they don’t, ain’t nobody gonna stick up for ’em. A marriage ought to be fifty-fifty, and most of ’em aren’t. Mine isn’t. A lot of women that don’t go in for women’s lib are starting to take up for themselves, and I think that’s good.
“Men don’t have to be threatened by that. But you know,” she says, dropping her smile for a moment, “I think a lot of them are.”
The music on the men’s side of the spectrum bears her out, at least in spots. There have been a lot of changes in the world since September of 1968, when Tammy Wynette recorded “Stand By Your Man” and watched it develop a fierce popularity—not so much among men as among women.
But the sense of duty has eroded noticeably in the years that followed, and for men who are unsettled by that reality and looking for reassurance, there was the message of Johnny Paycheck. Paycheck had made a career on songs of love gone sour, some of them innocuous, some of them wrenching and straight from the gut. But he turned polemical in the fall of 1975 with a record called “All American Man,” one of the most mean-spirited diatribes ever to come out of Nashville. It went far beyond the standard (and fairly harmless) “Ramblin’ Man” macho of people like Waylon Jennings, and what’s more, Paycheck clearly seemed to believe it.
“All you men out there, you gonna love this song,” he said in a husky-voiced intro that sounded like he was gearing up for a bar fight. “And about eighty percent of you women, you gonna love it too. But for the twenty percent that don’t like it, we wrote it just for you, darlin’.”
What he wrote is really pretty startling in the latter half of the twentieth century, but there wasn’t much way to miss the point. There were put-downs of women who work, who in fact do anything but marry and make love, and the bottom line was this: “American woman, why can’t you agree? God made man for himself, but he made you for me.”
Of course, the basic message—that women are here for men to use—lurks behind the lyrics of a number of country songs, just as it lurks in the psyches of those who listen. “Billy, please get me a woman, I’m tired, and I feel so alone,” sings Joe Stampley in a lonesome-truck-driver ballad. And as the song progresses, it becomes clear from the truck driver’s specifications that almost any woman will do, as long as she doesn’t make any demands for the future.
Whatever flaws of perspective the song may exhibit, however, it and most others like it lack the caprice of Paycheck’s record. There is something sad and real in the feeling, a sort of masculine vulnerability that is there in stark and overstated terms in nearly every song that Conway Twitty and the rest of them ever do. And you have the feeling as the good ole boys in the crowd whistle and guffaw and slap one another on the back that the frivolity is tinged with overcompensation—with a kind of communal understanding that everybody’s been there, and it’s a hell of a lot easier if you can somehow bury the feelings. But you can’t, of course, and the record companies know it, and the songwriters feel it, and it’s one of the things that makes Nashville unique and irreplaceable.
Obviously there are Nashville writers whose views about all of this are frankly commercial. They know what will sell, and they churn out the songs, two a day, chuckling to themselves all the way to the bank. But I think the cynics are in the minority. For one thing, there can be few people who feel the pain of changing values more than some picker-poet out on the road and growing old fast, while the groupies tempt him and his wife waits at home—maybe. About the only good thing about that scene for him is that the times and the FCC will let him say things now that he couldn’t say before. And so you have songs like Guy Clark’s “Instant Coffee Blues,” in which a lonesome lady and a road-weary traveling man are grappling, on more or less equal terms, with the emptiness that comes on the morning after:
It all goes down so easy but the next day is hell. . .
There is, of course, a happier side to country sex, and you find it in the gentle love ballads of people like Don Williams, a lanky Texan who can sing with understated power about relationships that work. But the dominant theme is pathos, and what emerges is a picture of men who are uneasy not only with the more assertive stance of women, but also with the kinds of casual and easy encounters that should have been the dream of every red-blooded good ole boy between Georgia and California.
And so you have songs like Bill Anderson’s “Somewhere Between Lust and Sitting Home Watching TV,” which must be a gut-rocker to every suburban husband whose eye has ever wandered; or the Mel Tillis hit called “Woman In the Back Of My Mind,” about a happily married man wrestling with the love that lingers from a relationship long since severed; or Tom T. Hall’s poignant ballad about a Cub Scout daddy who knows his mistress is waiting at a cheap hotel.
People live all of that, of course, and if country music is too riddled with contradiction to put it all in place, it can at least help them sweat out the pain. “How I love that hurtin’ music,” wails Hank Williams, Jr., “’cause, Lord, I’m hurtin’ too.”
8
God, the Gospel, & Country Music
Lord, it’s a strange place to pray . . .
—Shel Silverstein
It was a wilting July weekend in South Carolina, just outside the booming little town of Rock Hill. The crowd of more than ten thousand had begun arriving early in the week; there were farmers and plumbers and preachers and salesmen, the hard-core folk from the back country, settling in at the Carowinds Amphitheater for a reverent, week-long festival of gospel music.
Some of the biggest names in the business were there—like the LeFevres, the Kingsmen, and Coy Cook and the Premiers. And while it may be true that none of them would produce much awe outside of gospel circles, for the avid and the faithful it was roughly equivalent to seeing Elvis Presley, Elton John, and one or two of the Beatles all in the same week.
“It’s entertainment and it’s inspiration,” explained Harold Pigford, a strapping South Carolina fan with sweat beads popping out on his sun-reddened forehead. “We go to shows like this whenever we can.”
For Pigford and thousands like him the appeal of gospel music is simple and direct. Its message is unfailingly reassuring—an optimistic New Testament fundamentalism, nearly devoid of fire and brimstone terror, with Jesus the omnipresent soother of everyday travail. “My boat shall sail safely though the waves splash high,” the LeFevres sing onstage, belting it out with
a kind of high-pitched, hard-driving harmony that sets hands to clapping and shoes to tapping.
All of it is backed by the warbling melodrama of country steel guitars, and faint smiles of mellow satisfaction settle on the work-lined faces in the crowd. Even the restless, berry-brown children, tugging at the strings of their Carowinds balloons, can’t quite tear themselves away.
“It’s a time when people find themselves getting back to the basics,” says Jim Hamill, settling his two-hundred-plus pounds into a padded backstage chair, as the sweat trickled down from his close-cropped sideburns. “I think people are tired of put-ons and con jobs, and I’m talking about the whole overall picture, the feeling, the vibes you sometimes get in this country. I think people want something real, and that’s what this is—pure gospel.”
Hamill, a gruff and sincere musician from the foothills town of Hendersonville, North Carolina, is the lead singer for the Kingsmen, an Asheville group that won one of gospel music’s top awards in 1974 for its song, “When I Wake Up To Sleep No More.”
He is heartened, he says, by the growing commercial success of gospel music, and he attributes it to the fact that most Americans, beleaguered as they have been by problems ranging from war to Watergate, are searching for escape. He admits, of course, that there is a simpler factor as well: The people who listen to him most—the sturdy churchgoers of Bonifay, Florida, or Dalton, Georgia, or Cookville, Tennessee—have been the beneficiaries in recent decades of the inexorable, amoebalike expansion of the American middle class. They have more money now to spend on records.
But Hamill also believes that the influence of gospel music (and by extension, the Gospel itself) has grown steadily, even as the world around it has become increasingly secular in its apparent preoccupations. As evidence he cites the long-standing, undiminished and perhaps even growing influence of gospel assumptions on the larger and less particularized field of country music.
There is scarcely a country singer who hasn’t dabbled in gospel music at least upon occasion, and that includes even some of the most modem and rebellious. Kris Kristofferson’s “Why Me, Lord?” was by far the biggest hit he ever had, lingering on the Billboard charts for nearly a full year—which makes it one of the most durable and successful songs in the history of country music. And yet such spectacular success is really nothing new. Roy Acuff’s career was going nowhere fast until he stumbled upon “Great Speckled Bird,” and one of Hank Williams’s most famous songs was the gospel classic, “I Saw the Light,” written on a dismal Alabama highway just outside Montgomery.
But the link between gospel and country goes even deeper than songs dealing directly with the discovery of Jesus. There is often a religious factor in even the most earthbound country ballads (and most, of course, are emphatically immersed in the here-and-now). Sometimes you have to peel away the layers of meaning in order to find it, searching out the substance between the lines. At other times it’s far more obvious, with an acute sense of the Lord and his expectations lurking unapologetically near the surface. Bill Anderson, for example, handled the link graphically a few years back, when he wrote “The Lord Knows I’m Drinking,” a Top Ten hit detailing the sins and remorse of a high-stepping good ole boy who plans to have a heart-to-heart with God after one final round and a quick whirl with adultery.
Anderson’s song was recorded and carried to prominence by Cal Smith, a veteran balladeer whose twangy-rich baritone gives a distinctive stamp to nearly anything he sings. But the most striking aspect of Smith’s career, at least in recent years, has been his choice of material. Almost all the songs he has released have had some kind of theological dimension interwoven, often with considerable skill, into stories about the day-to-day existence of people on earth.
Perhaps the best-known example of that genre came in 1974, when Smith recorded “Country Bumpkin,” the tear-jerking story of a gutsy barmaid with a gift for looking life straight in the eye. During the course of the song, the barmaid meets and marries a hayseed yokel, bears his children, and then “forty years of hard work later,” dies—assuring husband and son before she goes that she will, in fact, see them later. The melodramatic story line escapes being maudlin by the finesse with which it was written, and somehow evokes a simple eschatology, a concern with ultimate destinies on earth and beyond that apparently got beneath the skin of the half million people who bought the record.
The target audience, of course, was hard-core country, and the theology simple and fundamental. There was a kind of cosmic optimism, a sunny and rocklike faith not only in the omnipotence of God, but in the certainty of a rosy future somewhere beyond the grave. Earthly optimism, on the other hand, was harder to come by, since life was never very easy or kind in the spawning grounds of the gospel tradition. Throughout the hollows of southern Appalachia, and the nooks and crannies of the deeper South, the obscure Calvinist sects—the Nazarenes, Pentecostals, and all the rest—grappled with the same assumptions that underlay the Negro spirituals of the nineteenth century: that life was what it was, and the future was frozen, and things wouldn’t improve until the coming of the chariot.
“This world is not my home,” they would sing, their a cappella voices taking on a power and a promise that would rattle the rafters, as the echo faded in the woods outside. But in the end, the hillbillies were wrong—or at least their vision became a little fuzzy when they tried to peer into future generations, for things have changed in the rural South. The economy has become more benign, and against that backdrop, the righteous certainty of old-fashioned gospel can shade unconsciously into a kind of modern-day smugness. The feeling is somehow different when the faithful arrive in fancy new cars.
Perhaps for that reason, a new and more humble gospel influence is emerging from a handful of talented young writers, most of them from Nashville. In Mickey Newbury’s “Lead On,” or Larry Gatlin’s “Help Me,” there is an implicit understanding that worldly pleasures and treasures are attainable, for both Newbury and Gatlin have experienced their share. But there is still a yearning and a sense of inadequacy, stemming not as it once did from the austerity of the present, but from the empty feelings that linger even after a thorough and conscientious sampling of the things the world has to offer.
Some of the best writers in Nashville have tried their hand at that theme, but none have succeeded any more simply or eloquently than Dolly Parton, who was voted country music’s top female vocalist in 1975 and who, by her own admission, has lived the contradiction between the lures and limitations of earthly pursuits.
She was born and raised in a rough-hewn cabin near the foothills town of Sevierville, Tennessee. There were twelve children, three of them older, reared by sturdy and moralistic parents, pillars of the local Church of God. The old farmplace yielded a reluctant living in the post-Depression forties, and Dolly can remember her share of nights without supper. But for the most part, she says, time has sweetened her recollections, and the things that stand out now are more idyllic—like Sunday School, and fireflies, and stolen kisses on the front-porch swing.
But girlhood was also a restless time. She hated school, loved to sing, and at the age of eighteen, with fantasies of stardom dancing in her brain, she struck out on her own for the big city of Nashville. She didn’t know anyone when she arrived, and in the early years the loneliness took its toll. But she received some early encouragement from Chet Atkins and Bob Ferguson of RCA, and three years later, in 1967, she signed on as the better half of the singing duo of Porter ’n’ Dolly.
She had a pure and spine-tingling voice, and a writer’s gift for word pictures, but there was also what she described as “my gaudy appearance and over-exaggerated features”—that is to say, the mound of blond hair that is not her own, and her awe-inspiring figure, which definitely is.
Because of that veneer, it was not until the 1970s that anyone outside a committed and longtime country following bothered to take her very seriously. But the message slowly spread
, and with people like Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris recording her songs and Rolling Stone, New Times, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine giving her rave reviews, Parton emerged as a country music icon.
She was happy about all that, of course, but for a young woman who was raised in the Church of God and who took its lessons as the gospel truth, the whole experience has generated its own set of doubts and confusions. “Being brought up the way I was, I was taught right from wrong,” she explains. “Whether you do right or you do wrong, you are conscious of right. I am too good to be bad, but too bad to be good, and one day awhile back I had religion on my mind. I know that I am not living as a Christian, and sometimes I think about it a lot. I don’t mean to overstate that, but I think to live as a Christian I would have to put as much into that as I do into my music; and I don’t. So I wrote this song, which deals a little with the pain of religion: ‘I am a seeker, poor sinful creature, there is none weaker.’”
She begins, reciting the words to one of the best and most important gospel songs in many a year. It is fraught with the kind of searching humility you would expect from a Christian with doubts about how to fit the pieces together, and coming to Jesus with an unadorned plea for help. “I am a seeker, you are a teacher. You are a reacher, so reach out.” There are affirmations about God and his ability to help, but no hard and fast predictions about what he will do—and even in Dolly’s conversation there are traces of doubt. “I think God understands,” she says, then adds after a pause, “I hope he does. If not, we all got a problem.”
The problem, she explains, is that we are living in an age filled with diversions and complex situations in which, in the words of Canadian songwriter Gene MacLellan, “we do what we must do.” The music of people like Dolly Parton has become influenced and driven by that reality—by the creeping secularism that affects nearly everyone’s life and self-definition. But there are many people who will tell you that the reverse is also true—that many of country music’s most secular songs have been influenced by a kind of persistent religiosity that is sometimes invisible on the surface.
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