What do you say, for example, about Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, both of whom were regarded in the early stage of their careers as pop singers who did a lot of country music? That question, more than any other, was Dolly Parton’s imponderable, for although she was interested in limiting the diluting effects of outside influences, she also realized that Emmylou and Linda sang country songs about as well as anyone around.
She had, in fact, become friends with both of them, discovering that they all had far more in common than she had expected. For starters, they were all about the same age (thirty in 1977), and they all grew up with a deep and abiding appreciation of country music. But there were differences as well. While Dolly had grown up in Sevierville, Tennessee, in the final years of intensive Appalachian isolation, Emmylou and Linda had been raised in more sophisticated circumstances (in Birmingham, Alabama, and Tucson, Arizona, respectively), and their musical tastes had been affected by a bombardment of other influences.
Linda Ronstadt believes that diversity of influence has become a universal American experience, and the result, she says, is that the blending of country music with other forms of expression is an absolutely inevitable and irreversible result.
“There isn’t any country left,” she explained over the sound of her band tuning up before a recent show. “When they closed the Grand Ole Opry, and I know they didn’t really close it, but when they moved it out to an amusement park, that sort of officially closed an era. We’re all suburban. We all have TVs and radios, and we’re all exposed to a lot of different sounds.
“But there’s a great thing about this weird hodgepodge of music today,” she continued. “People don’t have to be so hung up on labels. I’m a pop singer, I guess, but I grew up with country music. I sing it, and it influences most of what I sing, but it isn’t the only influence. Music, to me, is music, and it’s either good or bad and you judge it on that basis.”
Good and bad, of course, are pretty amorphous standards, lying primarily in the tastes of the beholder. But the examples of Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris suggest that there may be a little bit more to the issue. For there is a crucial difference, it seems, between the two of them on the one hand and Olivia Newton-John (and certainly Barbi Benton) on the other.
The difference is that Ronstadt and Harris are remarkably thoughtful and conscientious musicians who have made it a point to understand the heritage of American music—especially country music—and tap into its ongoing vitality. Emmylou, especially, has immersed herself in the Nashville music scene, becoming almost reverential in the presence of such veteran performers as Porter Waggoner, Dolly Parton, and George Jones. She has come to understand the soulful tradition on which they draw, and the understanding shows.
To appreciate the effect of such a deep-seated musical identity, you need only to spend a few hours at an Emmylou Harris concert and revel in the magnificently expressive qualities of her shimmering-vibrato voice. At times she sounds like the quintessential female shit-kicker as she moves through songs like Merle Haggard’s “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down” or Wayne Kemp’s “Feelin’ Single, Seein’ Double.”
“It’s just an old drinkin’ song,” she says in introducing the latter number, which tells the story of a mischievous married girl who gets drunk, engages in some unintended amorous pursuits, and emerges with no regrets at all. Emmylou grins when the song is over, and says in a soft, shy voice, “It don’t mean nothin’.”
Plenty of her songs do mean something, however. She is at her best when she’s doing sad and easy love songs about believable relationships—Susanna Clark’s “I’ll Be Your San Antone Rose,” Paul McCartney’s “Here, There and Everywhere,” or her own “Boulder to Birmingham,” which she wrote about her friend and musical soul-mate Gram Parsons. Her voice, in those situations, alternates between a belting sort of power and a fragile, throbbing clarity that is all her own.
There just isn’t anybody, in fact, who sings country songs with any better feel or any more feeling; and it’s not even a matter of talent—at least not entirely. Olivia Newton-John, for example, is a competent performer, who does no real violence to the country tradition. But she can’t pour out the emotion of Ronstadt or Harris, because she simply doesn’t have the feel—the instinctive, deep-down grasping of where the music has been.
Barbi Benton takes the problem a step further. She not only lacks the feel and the background, but she is also remarkably devoid of talent. She owes her career almost entirely to the monied status of her boyfriend and to today’s high-powered production techniques, which can make the featured performer, if necessary, a less integral part of the recorded result.
That is a crucial change for country music. There was a time when, if you were bad, you sounded bad and there was no way around it. It is ironic that one of the people most responsible for changing that hard and cold reality, and opening the floodgates of modern mediocrity, is one of the most talented musicians ever to come through Nashville—a guitar-picking expatriate from the southern Appalachians by the name of Chet Atkins.
Atkins became the man in charge at RCA’s first Nashville recording studio in the mid-fifties, and quickly began raising eyebrows and setting trends with his pop-oriented productions of such country stars as Jim Reeves and Don Gibson. Blending influences was something that came naturally to him, for his whole career as a guitar picker had been one uninterrupted burst of mongrelization and nonconformity.
He was, to be sure, a country guitarist—simply because he had in fact been a country boy, a shy and malnourished mountain kid, raised amid grinding poverty in the whistle-stop town of Luttrell, Tennessee.
During his boyhood days most of the mountain musicians played guitar with a pick. But early on, Atkins chose to pluck the instrument with his fingers—initially because of the influence of his stepfather, who didn’t know any better. Later, he heard Merle Travis finger-picking on the radio, and made a conscious decision that he, Chet Atkins, would play the guitar that way from that day forth.
Atkins was restless with any one influence, however, and drew his early musical inspiration from all kinds of other sources, including Jimmie Rodgers, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Benny Goodman, and the other pop artists he could hear on the radio. In the forties, after he had turned professional, Atkins also became caught up in classical guitar—fascinated by Segovia and a musician’s musician from France named Django Reinhardt. Meanwhile he kept in determined touch with country music, at one point playing rhythm guitar for the Carter Family, and later doing backup work for the likes of Hank Williams.
Because of such a background, it was predictable that he would experiment a little when RCA picked him as their man in Nashville. Some of the experimentation came on the rockabilly sessions with Elvis, and later the Everly Brothers, but it also spilled over into acts considered more country. He put a bass drum on Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Oh Lonesome Me,” and slicked up the production considerably nearly every time he went into the studio with Jim Reeves.
In Reeves, Atkins knew he had the kind of polished and mellow entertainer who could cross over into the pop market, and so he intentionally made some compromises in the purity of the product, using symphonic-sounding violins and leaving out the more earthy and backwoodsy sounds of fiddles and steel guitars.
“We were consciously trying for pop sales and... at that time you couldn’t get a record played pop if it had steel on it,” Atkins told Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo in a lengthy interview in 1976. “That only happened a few years ago when Dylan came in with steel. But I always tried, like with Reeves, I tried to make good records that had a pretty sound.”
Generally, he succeeded. But he also opened the door to other possibilities, and the ultimate result was the uptown Nashville Sound—the big Nash-Vegas productions laden with orchestral strings and backup voices that sound about as country as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And for that, Chet has apologize
d.
“Of course I had a lot to do with changing country[music],”said Atkins in an interview with People magazine, “and I apologize. We did it to broaden the appeal and to keep making records different, to surprise the public.
“I hate to see country music going uptown,” he continued, “because it’s the wrong uptown. We’re about to lose our identity and get all mixed up with other music. We were always a little half-assed anyway, but a music dies when it becomes a parody of itself.”
No doubt the apology was straight from the heart, but Atkins is also intelligent enough to know that there were forces far larger than himself behind the slickness and commercialism that have become some of the key characteristics of modern-day Nashville. Commercialism feeds on itself, and when the city’s music industry began pulling in more and more profits in the fifties and sixties, the business interests downtown became slowly and dimly aware of an eye-opening truth: They were sitting—all too passively, they soon concluded—on an untapped vein of prime vinyl gold.
Tourism, the city fathers realized, was a largely underutilized resource, and for obvious economic reasons that’s a situation nearly any place wants to correct. If you don’t mind your streets being littered with camera-clicking outsiders, the tourist trade represents a remarkably enticing opportunity to pad your city’s coffers with somebody else’s money.
It wasn’t that Nashville didn’t have any tourists. For years the Packards and pickup trucks had rumbled in from the hill country and battled for parking space near the Ryman Auditorium. But all of that was simply a quaint and rustic prologue to the interlocking Jet Age visions of the Chamber of Commerce, the policymakers at radio station WSM, and a spin-off booster group known as the Nashville Plus Steering Committee.
The Chamber of Commerce had long been interested in a downtown Hyatt-Regency-type convention hotel. WSM was hatching plans to replace the dilapidating Ryman with something more spectacular, and the Nashville Plus Committee had begun to envision a face-lifting of Music Row, centering on a four-lane thoroughfare to channel the curiosity seekers through what had always been a fairly nondescript area. Since the membership of all three groups was inclined to overlap, the compatibility of the projects soon became apparent; and following a determined and high-powered push, their goals {and plenty more besides} have become a reality. The tourists are flocking in like sheep, and they are not the only ones who are impressed by what they see.
“Man,” said a young songwriter named Vince Matthews, as he strolled along Music Row a few months back, “all us hillbillies have come uptown, you know? Or maybe I should say that uptown has come to us.”
But as Matthews well knows, there are some problems there for people who are engaged in his line of work and who are serious about their craft. The commercializing forces can be a little devastating when they are really unleashed, for the common denominator of slickness—whether of the music or the landscape—is an overriding concern for what the masses will want. The concern is inevitable for a business executive, but it can be hard on the dreams of the hungry young picker-poets who wander into town with their guitar cases strapped to their backs and a handful of songs wadded away in their jeans.
Geoff Morgan has been luckier than most. He is an example of a young man learning to cope. But the tension that he faces, like a lot of those who made it before him, is that it’s entirely possible to cope too well—to adjust too completely to Nashville’s commercial expectations.
Morgan arrived in the city in 1973—a young, redheaded Connecticut Yankee with a winning smile and loads of talent. He settled in and then began the timid and uncertain process of knocking on doors and pushing his songs, including one called “Son of the Father,” which may be the definitive composition about a near-miss family relationship. It tells the story of a father who works to feed his family, and a son who continues drifting away. The melody is sad and moving and strong, and with Morgan’s country-clear, Willie-Nelsonish kind of voice, it’s an honest-to-God tearjerker in the best sense of the term. The only trouble was that because the subject matter was not very commercial nobody showed much interest in recording it—or any of Morgan’s other stuff for that matter—until he signed a writing contract with Pi-Gem Publishing.
Pi-Gem was run by Tom Collins, who was best known in those days as the producer who helped make Ronnie Milsap a superstar. Collins is a pro. He knew what would sell, and sought to generate the same instinct in Morgan. He may well have succeeded, for within a short time after their association began, Morgan wrote a hit for Dickie Lee, a former rock singer trying to salvage a career in country music. The record, called “Busiest Memory In Town,” became by far the biggest seller that Lee had had since his star began its current ascent.
The other thing worth noting about the song, however, is that it’s not really that good. It’s not bad; it’s just not the kind of thing that a person with Geoff Morgan’s ability ought to be very proud of, and in fact he’s not. But nearly every day he heads for his homemade studio around nine in the morning and quits each afternoon about five—writing an average of two songs a day, many of which are about as noteworthy as “Busiest Memory.”
It’s not that Morgan has sold out. He is a sharp fellow with few illusions, and he has come to see success in the music business as a matter of hard work as well as native talent. He is willing to pay his dues, he says, and work for the day when he is established enough to do what he wants.
Morgan may have the talent to pull it off, but some of his more artistic songwriting compatriots (Guy Clark, Steve Earle, and Robin and Linda Williams, among others) are worried about him. They are convinced that in poetic, if not commercial, terms, he’s playing with fire. They say that his have the ring of famous last words, and in his case especially, they are afraid of a waste.
My own view is that Morgan will be okay. He is one of the more impressive singers and writers to come along in a while, and he ought to be able to survive a temporary flirtation with formula. But whatever happens to Geoff, there are other people around Nashville whose careers are an implicit affirmation of the power of the country tradition. They are people like Vince Matthews—fire-in-the-belly songwriters who are tempted and buffeted by the lures of commercial success, but who cling with instinctive (and maybe even unintentional) tenacity to their own brand of artistic integrity. They may be crazy, often are; but as Johnny Cash once said of Vince, they write what they live and live what they write. And in an odd and fragile way, they are the modern-day hope of country music.
12
Vince
That great speckled bird sang her song in his ear
Whisperin’ words of magic that only Vince could hear . . .
—Larry Wilkerson and Shel Silverstein
It was a rainy Nashville night, the dregs of winter, as Vince Matthews and his Budweiser stumbled down a back-alley stairway and ducked into the automobile of a friend. Vince was entering that happy stage of inebriation in which his tongue is unleashed on a variety of philosophical rampages, ranging from the evils of Richard Nixon to the trials and tribulations of writing country songs.
The latter subject is actually most interesting to him, for, like most people, Vince finds himself one of the world’s more fascinating topics of conversation. Unlike most people, he is probably right. He has been knocking around Nashville for a dozen years, writing songs that run the gamut from terrible to poignant, and building (sometimes consciously) a richly deserved reputation as the quintessential crazy, mixed-up, manic depressive, unlucky, when-you’re-hot-you’re-hot, when-you’re-not-you’re-not kind of songwriter who is still hanging in there and no doubt will be as long as he’s breathing.
“You gotta live it, man,” he said with slurry-tongued sincerity as the car bounced gingerly along the alleyway potholes. And with that he launched into the story of how he once hitchhiked to Chicago with five dollars in his pocket, arrived with only one, and passed three days in a drainage
culvert wondering how to spend a lonesome dollar bill.
Eventually he said to hell with it, and threw it away. After miraculously failing to starve, he somehow wound up in Nashville again, where he wrote a song about the whole experience. Johnny Cash heard it, recorded it, and before long “Wrinkled, Crinkled, Wadded Dollar Bill” had made it to the country music charts, and Vince became temporarily rich. “I think,” he said, as his mind wandered reluctantly back to the present, “that it’s called casting your bread on the water. At least that’s what Jesus called it.”
The parallels between Jesus and Vince are not overwhelming, however. He has a lot of traits that Jesus no doubt would have admired, but throwing away the dollar was more an offering to art than to religion, and in an odd sort of way it typified Matthews’s whole career. There is nothing he loves more than a wallet full of money, but he has steadfastly refused to become a slave to its pursuit. And the refusal has kept him pure—a personification of the uncommercialized side of country music.
Matthews was born in the west Tennessee town of Waverly on May 3, 1942, and spent his teenage years listening to the rockabilly outpourings of Sun Records in Memphis and trying his hand at some amateur songwriting. Some time around his twentieth birthday he headed east to Nashville, and he cut a pretty impressive figure when he hit town—a bright and energetic young man, with the high Cherokee cheekbones and the jet-black hair of a forgotten Tennessee ancestor.
He had little trouble landing a job in an advertising firm, then later in the office of a commercial artist. But a friend named Bill Brook (who had written a song for Chubby Checker) showed him how to approximate the A, E, and D chords on a guitar, and on the same afternoon Vince sat down and wrote twenty-eight songs. They were terrible. He was hooked, however, and kept on dabbling until finally, in the late winter of 1963, he helped compose a maudlin ballad called “Hobo and a Rose.”
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