One songwriter who subscribes to that theory is Larry Gatlin, an affable young expatriate from the west Texas town of Odessa, who got his singing start in a family gospel group. Gatlin has written his share of straight gospel numbers like “Help Me” and “It Must Have Rained in Heaven,” but he sees more similarities than differences between them and the underlying point of his song “Rain”—which isn’t, on its face, a song of God. On the contrary, it is desperate and earthy, the story of a wino’s death, inspired by the saga of Ira Hayes, the alcoholic Indian hero whom Johnny Cash had eulogized in song.
The dominant quality of Gatlin’s wino ballad, which was recorded in its most moving version by Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, is sadness. But sadness has a special meaning for Gatlin, containing, in its purest form, a kind of mystical quality that makes it, he says, one of the most positive forces in the universe.
“Sadness is a constant, recurring theme in country music,” he explains, “and I feel that if you are really sad, if you can evoke true, heartfelt sadness, it borders on compassion, a feeling of closeness for the person the song is about. Sadness is a gentle, creative feeling. It levels barriers, and helps let the caring and compassion flow, which is, to me, what it’s really all about.”
Certainly, Gatlin adds, those qualities were among the primary concerns of Jesus. If Gatlin is right, and it’s true that songs of compassion are inspired by a kind of religious by-product, then the inspiration is profound and widespread. Compassion has always been a trademark of good country music, embedded in the Christian culture from which the music emerged. You can see it in the earliest writings of A. P. Carter, the depression-era ballads of Woody Guthrie and Sara Ogan Gunning, and the gospel-flavored protest anthems of Johnny Cash. But few songwriters have mastered the art of compassion any more thoroughly—or underscored Gatlin’s point any more graphically-than a young Chicago hillbilly named John Prine.
Prine’s family had migrated north from the strip mine country of western Kentucky. Like most refugees from southern Appalachia, he was forced to cram a lot of tough living into his early years, and he grew up during the ferment of Vietnam. His songs draw passion from a number of sources. Many of the best were written during his years of obscurity, before the neon Chicago night in 1971 when friends persuaded Kris Kristofferson to wander down to Old Town for an after-hours visit to the club where Prine was playing. “By the time we got there, Old Town was nothing but empty streets and dark windows,” Kristofferson remembers. “And the club was closing. But the owner let us come in, pulled some chairs off a couple of tables, and John unpacked his guitar and got back up to sing.
“There are few things as depressing to look at as a bunch of chairs upside down on the tables of an empty old tavern, and there was that awkward moment, us sitting there like ‘Okay, kid, show us what you got,’ and him standing up there alone, looking down at his guitar like ‘What the hell are we doing here, buddy?’ Then he started singing, and by the end of the first line we knew we were hearing something else. It must’ve been like stumbling onto Dylan when he first busted onto the Village scene... one of those rare, great times when it all seems worth it.”
Prine’s selections that night were rough and gut-rocking creations—songs like “Donald and Lydia,” about the lonesome, desperate fantasies of a fat girl and her would-be GI lover; or “Hello In There,” the haunting story of two old people whose lives were slowly ebbing away. But perhaps the strongest song of all—and certainly the one that captured most thoroughly the Christian underpinnings of country compassion—was a bitter ballad called “Sam Stone.” It tells of a broken, strung-out Vietnam veteran who meets his end in an overdose, and leaves a wife and kids behind him. It’s an angry, disillusioned song expressing in the end a desperate kind of fear: Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose.
For reasons that had more to do with image than music, Prine has not gained widespread acceptance among the deejays and radio executives who decide what the country music audience will and will not be permitted to hear. It’s been a genuine loss, but because of the pressure of Kris Kristofferson, Tom T. Hall, Shel Silverstein, Johnny Cash, and a few dozen more, the early seventies were, nevertheless, a watershed era for strong country music.
Interspersed among the usual commercial pap were countless songs of hope and tragedy—of human, hard-living people grappling with nearly everything life can throw at you. There were songs of soldiers and winos, streetsingers and prostitutes, divorced daddies and homesick drifters, prodigal sons and unwed mothers. And there was even a Shel Silverstein opus entitled “Rosalie’s Good Eats Cafe,” which managed in the course of eight soul-racking minutes to be about nearly all of those things.
Many people believe it was the consummate achievement for Silverstein, a onetime Playboy cartoonist who began to dabble in country songwriting for the same reason he did nearly anything else: “to live an interesting life.” It didn’t take him long to master the art, for he had a remarkable mind hidden away in his clean-shaven head, and an uncanny eye for cultural detail.
The latter talent was never more evident than in his description of life after midnight in Rosalie’s greasy-spoon diner—a setting he used as a kind of Chaucerian framework device for portraying the real-life problems of people. Every verse described a different kind of tragedy, a different brand of poignancy; and by the time you finished listening to Bobby Bare’s soulful rendition, you couldn’t help but understand the Larry Gatlin theory of creative sadness—couldn’t help but feel a gut-level compassion for all those lost and wandering souls who had come together “at two in the morning, on Saturday night at Rosalie’s Good Eats Cafe.”
I don’t know if songs like that are religious or not. But I do agree with Gatlin and a host of other songwriters around Nashville who argue that people don’t write that way if they have a cynical view of the human condition. They don’t often think such thoughts, or feel such compassion, unless they believe deep down that life is more than a meaningless accident. And that belief, many theologians maintain, is the distilled essence of faith—the fundamental affirmation, not subject to proof or logic, that everybody either makes or doesn’t make sometime during the course of his life. It seems to me that the affirmations of people like Silverstein, Prine, Kristofferson, and Gatlin are pretty unmistakable.
That is not to say, of course, that the affirmations are conscious or conceived in these terms. In most cases I am sure they are not, for songwriters as a group are not given to cerebral ramblings. They write from the gut or the heart, but certainly not from the head, and in fact for the most part they are not even very righteous. How could they be? Their lives are energized and bounded by things like speed and whiskey and groupies and ego; the road and the one-night stands, the wild and disorienting gyrations between obscurity and fame, and the treadmill demands of piling hit upon hit to stay where you are. But intermingled with all of this are what Mickey Newbury called his “godlike thoughts”—perceptions that endure their earthly surroundings until they are put to music, emerging finally as a sort of cosmic and universal expression of sadness, compassion, or humble supplication.
It’s a bewildering process, and all the more so if you are caught up within it. Which is why, I think, so many songwriters and related rebels around Nashville eventually make their way to the log-cabin porch of Will D. Campbell. Campbell is a peculiar fellow, a Baptist preacher and sometime songwriter who is about as comfortable as anyone I know with the contradictions of human nature. His religion tells him, with a little bit of help from Second Corinthians, that everybody is reconciled to God, and from there it’s a minor metaphorical leap to a related conclusion: that there is no reason not to be reconciled to yourself. And so it’s not the least bit surprising to Campbell that treasures come in earthen vessels, or powerful poetry from a troubled mind, or that a song about a prostitute could have religious dimensions.
Because of his serenity in the face of the world’s bewilderin
g juxtapositions, Campbell has become a sort of brother confessor to all sorts of people. He worked with civil rights leaders in the South during the fifties and sixties as a staff member with the National Council of Churches. Later, as director of an outfit called the Committee of Southern Churchmen, he established a ministry to draft resisters in Canada during the sixties and seventies, and informally, on his own time, he is a sort of spiritual advisor to a few dozen country musicians.
His relationship with the latter group is something unique. They will wander his way from time to time—Jessi Colter, Waylon Jennings, or Tom T. Hall—sometimes dragging their guitars along, and they will all sit around on his porch while Will cusses and spits and prays and sings their songs. Though the relationship may appear one-sided, it is not. Will may provide the musicians with perspective and help keep them from going completely crazy, but he gets his share in return. For Campbell is captivated by country music. He is fascinated by the relentless accuracy of its humanity, the implicit intermingling of joy and pain and God and sin; and he has made use of its insights in his chosen profession.
One day in 1969, for example, he journeyed to the little town of Granite Quarry, North Carolina, for a religious ceremony of sorts, one which in a way summarized both Campbell and the peculiar religiosity of country music. His purpose in going was to be with the family of Bob Jones, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, on the night before Jones was to be shipped off to prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Campbell had developed a friendship with Jones that was odd in view of the philosophical gulf that separated them. But as a staunch believer in the gospel of reconciliation, he had grown to see the Klan as an alienated and troubled minority as much in need of his (or somebody’s) ministry as draft resisters or civil rights protestors.
So he went to Granite Quarry, and it was a strangely festive occasion, with all the kinfolk and Klanfolk assembled in the living room of Jones’s cinder-block home, telling stories and trying to be jolly and unconcerned. The whiskey flowed and the laughter continued until about two in the morning, when Campbell proposed Communion. “Hell, yes,” said Jones, “let’s have Communion.” So the people gathered in a circle, and Campbell unpacked his guitar, and said:
“I’m gonna sing a song that to me is the essence of the Christian faith. It’s called ‘Anna, I’m Takin’ You Home,’ and it’s about a whore and a lover who forgives her and takes her home. That’s what Christianity is all about—being forgiven and taken home to where you’re loved.” Then, strumming softly on his guitar, he began to pray. “Lord, ole brother Bob is going off to jail for a while. We gonna ask you to kind of keep an eye on him. Lord, you know he’s not a saint. And you also know that we sho ain’t. But the Book tells us that’s why you died. So that God and sinners could be reconciled. And we gon’ drink to that, and if it’s all the same, we gon’ sing our song in Jesus’ name:
“Anna, I’m takin’ you home...”
So whether it’s Will Campbell singing about a prostitute, or the LeFevres and the Kingsmen belting out a promise of life beyond the grave, country and gospel music speak to a wide variety of religious needs. Some are obvious, others are so unobvious that they are not even conceived as religious. But all are tied up with one thing that is, and always has been, the central preoccupation of country music: the human and imperfect grappling with the human and imperfect condition.
9
Putting the Audiences Back Together: Willie & God & the Austin Sound
Well, it’s T for Texas . . .
—Jimmie Rodgers
The whole thing might have happened anyway, even if Willie Nelson’s house hadn’t burned, but probably not in the same way. For as the flames licked into the autumn Nashville night back in 1971, it was the low point in a decade of frustration for Nelson, a highly successful songwriter who always thought he could make it as a performer but could never persuade the bigwigs down on Music Row.
So as the flames crackled around him, he darted into the house, salvaged a pound of top-grade Colombian marijuana, and pointed his car in the direction of Texas. He had been born there back in 1933, in a little wind-swept town called Abbott. And like most expatriates from the dusty reaches of the Lone Star State, he had never quite gotten it out of his system—even when things were going well and he was writing classic country songs such as “Crazy,” “Hello Walls,” and “Ain’t It Funny How Time Slips Away.”
Nashville and Willie just hadn’t been meant for each other somehow, and when he got back to Texas and began sorting things out, he caught the Lone Star fever again and decided to stay. Within a year of that decision, he found himself a kind of godfather figure in one of the most important developments, both musically and socially, in the latter-day evolution of rock and country music.
This development is the emergence in Texas of a musical form that goes by a variety of labels, “progressive country” and “redneck rock” among others. But whatever you choose to call it, it is essentially a fusion of rock and country sounds—and, more important, of rock and country audiences—that comes after a decade of polarization over everything from length of hair, to the color of skin, to the ardor of competing ideologies.
Slowly, in the last few years, the fusion presided over by Nelson and a handful of others has begun to spread, riding an impulse toward reconciliation and rippling westward in the direction of the Coast, then eastward toward cities like Charlotte, Atlanta, Nashville, and Philadelphia. The most tangible manifestations of the spread have been Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” and Michael Murphey’s “Wildfire,” a pair of hit singles that succeeded in both pop and country markets and between them have sold well over a million records.
But there are other manifestations as well: the rabid, packed-house followings of a hard-core country-rocker named Jerry Jeff Walker; the critical acclaim for the country-flavored big-band innovations of a group called Asleep At the Wheel; and the cult popularity of a new public television series, Austin City Limits, featuring the cream of the Texas crop and, beginning in 1975, shown in one hundred and sixteen markets from coast to coast.
There is a kind of metaphorical logic in the fact that Austin, a bubbling college town and capital city of 300,000 people, would find itself at the center of the ripple. For Austin, says Michael Murphey, the gentle spirit and respected intellectual of the city’s musical community, has always been a place of natural fusions. It lies atop a geological imperfection called Balcone’s Fault, which, according to the prevailing lay theorists in the area, is responsible for the area’s peculiar topographical character.
Austin is the point at which the countryside begins to change dramatically no matter which way you go—quickly evolving into treeless, cattle-producing prairieland as you move north or west, drying up into rocky hills and cactus-covered desert as you move south toward San Antonio and Mexico, and tangling itself into thick pinewoods and murky pockets of swampland as you move east toward Louisiana.
“And,” says Murphey, “there is a social and musical analogy. You have the Chicano influence coming up from around San Antonio. You have a lot of blues and even some Cajun music spilling over from Louisiana, a pretty large jazz following associated with the university, and north of here country music is incredibly popular. Culturally, you have blacks, Chicanos, and a variety of European heritages. And overlaid across all of this, you have the cowboy culture.
“Austin,” he concludes, “is the hub. It has a feeling of vitality that’s pretty hard to match.”
For the last forty years there have been people around Austin who felt that way, who appreciated talent for what it was and had the breadth of taste to revel in diversity. Chief among those people in the early years was a kindly old gentleman named Kenneth Threadgill, who transformed a filling station into a beer joint in 1933, and featured live entertainment once a week. Threadgill himself performed with the house band, a hard-country backup group that blended well with his Jimmie Rodgers style of
yodeling.
But he also opened his stage to anyone who wanted to play there, and by the time the sixties rolled around, it was an exciting place indeed. One of the people who got her start there, for example, was an ex-coed from the University of Texas, a troubled, dynamic young woman named Janis Joplin, who went on to become one of the genuine, hard-living heroines of the West Coast rock culture.
Despite the efforts of people like Threadgill, however, things began to go a little sour in Austin, as they did nearly everywhere else in the late sixties and early seventies. In the wake of Cambodia, Vietnam, and the killing of students at Kent and Jackson State universities, the nation’s mood began to darken, and Austin suffered as much as any place. More than some, in fact, for diverse and pluralistic cultures can become a hodgepodge of armed camps if you strip away the veneer of tolerance that prevails in happier times.
One of the people in Austin who understood all this, and had become deeply troubled by it during the early months of the seventies, was a bearded young lawyer and soft-spoken music buff named Mike Tolleson. Tolleson had become involved with a group of people who had opened a club and community center in August of 1970—a watering hole for local long-hairs that he called the Armadillo World Headquarters—located in a spacious auditorium a few hundred yards from the Colorado River.
The Armadillo had blossomed out of a search for a congenial headquarters for the struggling but talented rock musicians who abounded in the Austin area and were resisting the usual migration to the West Coast. Eddie Wilson, manager of a group called Shiva’s Headband, had happened to notice a vacant auditorium next door to a skating rink, and within a fairly short time he and some friends had transformed it into the Armadillo.
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