Watermelon Wine

by Frye Gaillard

  He concluded, not surprisingly, that there must be an easier way, and eventually he struck out for Nashville, seeking fortune and maybe a little bit of fame as a sessions musician in the city’s armada of recording studios. He hit town in 1967, and played on some memorable albums (Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, among others), but he never quite made it as a part of the Music Row in-crowd. Almost by default, he decided instead to become a star.

  It took a few years, and some experimentation with sounds, for the Nashville producers were steadfastly intolerant of the decibels and rough edges that make his music distinct. So he fled to Macon and cut an album called Fire On the Mountain. It sold a million dollars’ worth of records, chiefly on the strength of two country-sounding singles that have become, through the sentiments they express, the rallying anthems of the Southern rock movement.

  The lesser known of the two, especially outside the South, is a song called “Long Haired Country Boy”—a heartfelt description of a shaggy-headed good ole boy who, like Daniels, has lived through civil rights, Vietnam, rock ’n’ roll, marijuana, post-Beatlemania, and all the rest, and has emerged with a curious combination of values and lifestyles. The trappings are different: he smokes grass and lets his hair grow long, while his counterparts of ten or twenty years earlier might have been more into duck-tails and beer. But something more basic and Southern is still intact—an attitude, a sort of live-and-let-live affability that is tinged, nevertheless, with defiance: If you don’t like the way I’m livin’,/You just leave this long haired country boy alone

  “Yeah, that’s kind of my philosophy of life,” says Daniels with a tug at his sandy-blond whiskers. “I ain’t got no image to protect or none of that bullshit. We don’t wear no rhinestone Nudie suits; we don’t have to worry about nobody knowing that we drink or smoke dope. I don’t give a fuck, you know? The kind of people we appeal to don’t give a damn. I ain’t worried about the Baptists banning us, because they don’t come to see us anyway. We’re kind of a hard-livin’ bunch of people. I think that reflects in our music. We just are what we are.”

  That I-am-what-I-am-and-if-you-don’t-like-it-don’t-mess-with-me kind of defensiveness is probably one of the more staple characteristics of the Southern psyche, and has been ever since the days of the Civil War. It can be directed from person to person, or from classes of people to classes of people, or even (as has happened a lot during the last hundred years) from the South as a whole toward the rest of the country.

  Too many times, of course, it has gotten tangled up in defense of the wrong sorts of causes—slavery and segregation among them—but it always went deeper than the causes themselves, and it has in fact outlived them. The remorseful, guilt-ridden South that danced through the fantasies of homegrown liberals never really materialized, but what has begun to show itself instead is something considerably more substantial: a growing combination of pride and resentment, nurtured in part by the racially integrated order that is beginning to take hold in most of the South. We’ve been through a lot, people are saying, and have been compelled to change whether we wanted to or not. In retrospect, a lot of Southerners are glad about that, but they can’t help noticing that serious problems elsewhere became forgotten, somehow, in the moralizing over theirs; and all of it has left them feeling more Southern, and prouder of it, than they ever had before.

  When Charlie Daniels recorded his Fire on The Mountain album, he put some of those feelings into a song that became—particularly in the South—the biggest hit he ever had. The verses in “The South’s Gonna Do It Again” were essentially a celebration of the vitality of Southern music, but the chorus was more general, a reaffirmation of a new Southern pride.

  In 1976, it was that kind of risen South spirit that led many Southern rockers to an ardent support of Jimmy Carter’s presidential candidacy. Daniels and the others did several benefit performances each, seeking to raise money for the Carter campaign, and in gratitude Carter invited them to play at his inauguration.

  It was a peculiar scene at a Presidential ball—the big-band sounds of Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey giving way abruptly to the foot-stomping, whoop-em-up beat of Southern country funk. “I never supported a politician before in my life,” said Daniels. “But I was around Carter a little bit, and I said, ‘There’s an honest man.’ He was the first honest politician I ever met.”

  Reminded, however, that there were people who look askance at Carter because he’s from the South—who still associate the place of his birth with some dark and murky characteristic that can’t be trusted—Daniels replied with a spit in the direction of his styrofoam cup: “It’s time people quit thinking that.” Then after a pause: “Damn those sons of bitches. I don’t owe ’em nothin’. I’m proud of it. Proud of being from the South.”

  Charlie’s irritation comes and goes, depending on his mood. Catch him at a better time, or when he’s not being confronted with all the narrow-minded opinions that have been directed at his region, and he’s one of the gentlest and least pretentious people you would ever want to meet. But whatever his frame of mind, his pride in the South and his music remains intact. And that kind of pride is what gives Southern music its evangelical air.

  There is a shared sense of place that links musicians and audience before the first note is played. The music is part of the landscape, tangible as Georgia red clay and pervasive as Smoky Mountain mists. There are times (especially in the case of Charlie Daniels, Richard Betts, and the Marshall Tucker Band) when the sound is downright country—a testimonial to the renewed power of tradition among a generation in which you might not expect it.

  But even more obviously, the music of Daniels and the others represents the sound of change—the intertwined preoccupations with roots and with experimentation that have dominated the recent history of country music (just as a profound combination of nostalgia and future shock has dominated the lives of those who listen). Some of the musical changes have been highly creative, others strictly commercial. No one knows where the whole thing will lead, chiefly because, if you hang around recording centers such as Nashville for very long at all, you realize that the music is heading in a bunch of weird directions all at one time.

  11

  Back to Nashville: Commercialism & Creativity

  Will the circle be unbroken?

  —A. P. Carter

  It began as a gleam in John McEuen’s eye, a cheerfully presumptuous impulse that hit him backstage at an Earl Scruggs concert in 1972. Scruggs and his sons were passing through Denver on a tour of one-night stands, and McEuen, the banjo player in a Colorado folk-rock group called the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, was on hand to hear him.

  Like most other banjo pickers in the country, McEuen had long been in awe of Scruggs, the shy and soft-spoken North Carolinian whose three-finger picking style had revolutionized the instrument. McEuen had no way of knowing, of course, that the admiration was mutual, and he had no idea what to expect when, after a few minutes of chatting, he looked at Scruggs and blurted out with a forced casualness: “Say, would you be interested in doing an album with us sometime?”

  “He looked at me,” McEuen remembered later, grinning through his bushy black beard at the memory of Scruggs’s legendary humility, “and said, ‘Why Ah’d be proud to.’”And so it was that one of the most memorable albums in the history of country music got off the ground. It wound up with the title “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,” named for the old Carter Family classic, and by the time it was finished it included performances by Scruggs, the Dirt Band, Mama Maybelle Carter, Merle Travis, Doc Watson, Roy Acuff, and Vassar Clements. In addition, some of the younger Nashville sidemen were thrown in for good measure, and the result was a breathtaking display of acoustical country music.

  It had been a genuinely historic moment when the full array of pickers gathered at the Woodland Sound studios in Nashville—an unobtrusive oasis in a part of town that’s littered with strip-city filling stations, mote
ls, and fast-food restaurants. In those days there was an enormous gulf between the fans of Roy Acuff and the fans of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and in the end it was bridged by the simple expedient of mutual respect. Like some of the Southern rockers in Macon, and hard-living Charlie Daniels in Tennessee, John McEuen had a deep and long-standing appreciation of the roots of American music. “Those of us in the band,” he recalled later, “just wanted to give the older musicians credit for what they’ve done. We thought the younger generation of fans owed it to themselves, if nothing else, to get into the older forms of music.”

  All of that had enormous appeal for Scruggs, who had long been fascinated by the concept of musical cross-fertilization. Since taking to the road with his sons several years earlier, he had been experimenting with other sounds, blending his distinctive bluegrass style with everything from Memphis blues to Bob Dylan’s brand of urban folk. It was, in a way, the culmination of an itch that had begun back in 1960, when Scruggs had appeared one night with saxophone player King Curtis.

  “It was a real privilege for me,” Scruggs recalled in his Southern drawl that’s as slow as the drip of molasses. “We got to jammin’ some before the show, and Curtis was so great, I don’t know, I just really enjoyed it. I think it was the first time I really realized that the banjo could go well with other kinds of music.”

  That realization deepened as the sixties progressed and his sons—Gary, Randy, and Steve—grew older. The younger Scruggs’ were thoroughly versed in their father’s music. There was little of the expected teenage rebellion against it, largely because the family relationships were so close. But the boys were young enough to experiment seriously with rock ’n’ roll, and Scruggs was open-minded enough to respect their tastes.

  “I remember the boys brought the Byrds—Roger McGuinn and some of them—out to the house one time a few years back,” Scruggs recalls, “and they sounded so good. I think being associated with some of the younger musicians, it’s helped my picking get better and better. I was gettin’ pretty stale after doing straight bluegrass all those years.”

  Scruggs accepted the task of bringing together other participants in the album venture, including Maybelle Carter and Vassar Clements. In another of his characteristic bursts of bravado, McEuen had recruited Doc Watson, and once things began to take shape McEuen’s brother, William, worked through Acuff-Rose Publishing to secure the services of Roy Acuff.

  Not everyone was delighted with the idea at first. Acuff wasn’t, and he grumbled openly about the beards and long hair and other unorthodoxies of the younger musicians. “You’re supposed to know a man by the character of his face,” he said at one point. “But if you have got your face all covered up with something, well...”

  Acuff was still skeptical when he arrived at the studio, but after listening to a playback of Merle Travis and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band doing “I Am a Pilgrim,” he nodded his head and strode briskly to the microphone. John McEuen grinned and murmured to nobody in particular, “Well, I guess we passed the test.”

  Despite Acuff’s misgivings, most of the other performers found the whole undertaking an unmitigated delight. For Doc Watson and Merle Travis, especially, it was a significant occasion. It marked the first time that they had met, despite the fact that they are two of the most respected and influential guitar pickers ever to emerge from the mountains of Appalachia.

  “You know,” said Doc after the initial hellos, “I named my son (the great guitar player Merle Watson) for you and Eddy Arnold.”

  “That’s what I heard. I appreciate that,” replied Travis with self-conscious humility.

  “Well,” laughed Watson, “I figured that, uh, a little of that good guitar pickin’ might rub off on him.”

  “Look who’s talking,” said Travis, and with that they were off on a comparison of each other’s favorite songs. Bill McEuen quickly turned on the tapes to record the whole event.

  In all, the assembled musicians recorded thirty-seven songs for the album, the excitement building continuously as the time approached to do the title cut. When A. P. Carter wrote the song, back in the days when commercial country music was still in its embryonic stages, it was intended as a simple and heartrending ballad about a child’s reaction to the death of his mother. It is still that, but the chorus (which is where the song gets its title) has quickly become something more: an ode or anthem to the cause of musical continuity.

  Very few people—and least of all such creative musicians as Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, and John McEuen—expect the music to remain static. But everybody at the Woodland Sound Studios that day believed it ought to remain rooted, and as an album “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” throbs with the excitement of that feeling.

  It was a high point for Nashville, a living embodiment of the fervor and creativity that can flow from cross-fertilization. In the years since the session, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the Earl Scruggs Revue, and many of the other musicians who were there have kept the feeling alive, producing in the process some of the best and most imaginative music that they have ever made.

  Unhappily, however, there is also an entirely different result that can come from the mixing of country music with other kinds of influences. And three years after the cutting of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,” that other possibility revealed itself clearly at a posh uptown concert a few blocks east of Music Row.

  There onstage was Barbi Benton, Playboy centerfold emeritus and girlfriend of Hugh Hefner, clad, loosely speaking, in a halter-topped pants suit and belting out a medley of Hank Williams hits. As the strains of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “I Saw The Light” wafted across the hotel ballroom, a handful of well-rounded bunnies paraded through the crowd for the amusement of a few thousand disc jockeys, musicians, and assorted other lost souls who had wandered in off the streets.

  Somewhere out there in the rest of Nashville they were celebrating the fiftieth birthday of the Grand Ole Opry. But that historic event seemed a minor preoccupation at best at the Nashville Sheraton. “Looks like this year’s party is going to be even better than the last,” intoned Hefner, looking simultaneously suave and ill at ease as he took the stage in his blue-jean leisure suit. “We hope you enjoy yourselves.”

  Hefner had good reason to hope so. He had gone into the country music business a year or so before, and although Playboy Records was doing tolerably well for a new label, most of the artists it had signed were not exactly household names. So Hefner, like any good record executive, had seized upon the presence of a city full of disc jockeys rolling in for their annual convention and willing to celebrate pretty much whatever needed celebrating—from the golden anniversary of a cherished institution to the physical attributes of Barbi Benton.

  He rented himself a hotel, lubricated the scene with free food and whiskey, and paraded out his stable of singers. There was Brenda Pepper, a strapping Alabama lass, wailing out her own version of “When Will I Be Loved” and sounding remarkably unlike Linda Ronstadt. And there was Wynn Stewart, offering up his latest single—a friendly little ballad called “I Think I’m Gonna Kill You and Bury You in a Box About Half Your Size.”

  For people who were serious about their music, Hefner also brought on Bobby Borchers, a talented songwriter who had written “Jamestown Ferry” for Tanya Tucker; and Mickey Gilley, a charismatic crooner who plays the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis (which is no accident, since the two of them are cousins who grew up together).

  But most of all, there was Barbi Benton, wiggling most impressively to the hard-driving beat and insisting with a straight face that Hank Williams had become her idol. There was something implausibly tacky about that particular assertion in that particular setting, but who knows? Music makes strange bedfellows, and vice versa, and the sign on the wall had given fair warning:

  “This,” it said, “is Playboy Country.”

  Which was another way of saying that times have changed a lot in the home of t
he Grand Ole Opry. The music and milieu have taken on an uptown slickness that was never there before, and the fear is growing that the substance will soon be destroyed.

  Those fears reached almost hysterical proportions in 1974 when Olivia Newton-John was named country music’s Female Vocalist of the Year. Nobody would come right out and publicly assert that she didn’t deserve it. She had, after all, had several enormous and identifiably country hits, including “Let Me Be There” and “If You Love Me Let Me Know.” But there was a kind of saccharine and unfunky sweetness about her style and arrangements, and there was also her background—that of a good-looking Australian girl who knew so little about the legacy of country music that twenty years after Hank Williams’s death, she expressed an interest in meeting him.

  Roy Acuff, who was presenting the award, couldn’t even bring himself to pronounce her name correctly (it came out something like “Oliver”). And within a few days, a group of stars and semi-stars whose straight-country credentials were thoroughly in order formed an organization to preserve the purity. Inevitably, of course, there were sour grapes involved. Many of the people who supported the Association of Country Entertainers, as the new group was called, had had conspicuously less success in recent years than Olivia Newton-John.

  But there was more to the group than that. It had the backing of some of Nashville’s most thoughtful and successful musicians as well—people like Bill Anderson and Dolly Parton—and they were saying things that thousands of country music fans had been saying for years: Keep it country; don’t let it be ruined by success; don’t lose touch with your fans.

  Dolly Parton believes the whole undertaking was worth it in a way. It did at least raise the issue, forcing people to take note of the fact, as Chet Atkins put it, that “music dies when it becomes a parody of itself.” But in an absolute sense the goals of ACE were unattainable and unenforceable, entangling themselves in a knot of conflicting conclusions.