by Tom Piazza
Now I reminded him of the conversation, made a little speech about my rationale for the choice, during which he looked blankly at the bottles, and then I handed the bottles to him, feeling proud of myself.
“I drink Seagram’s 7,” he said. Then he walked across the kitchen, stashed the bottles in a cabinet, and that was that.
The interview started slowly. We discussed a few things perfunctorily for a while (Do you have a favorite country singer? “George Jones.” Why? “ ’Cause he’s the best.”). He also said he liked Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and Marty Stuart. His favorite guitarists were Chet Atkins and Doc Watson. Not Merle Travis? I asked. “Well, yeah, I would have to say Merle Travis. Put Merle Travis in there . . .”
Before long, though, he steered the conversation to what turned out to be his main preoccupation: the fact that he has never been invited to join the Grand Ole Opry. His exclusion clearly causes him pain; he has various theories about why he has been passed by, but he has not given up hope of being asked. He produced letters from a number of people in and out of the music business in which they sang his praises and expressed wonder that he wasn’t on it. It is obviously the great frustration of his life. To grasp why, one has to realize that to someone of Martin’s generation, who grew up listening to it on the radio, the Opry was country music. All the greatest stars were on it; it was the pinnacle of exposure and prestige. Being on the Opry was tantamount to being in a family; being asked to join was the final seal of approval on a performer, an entrance into a pantheon that included all of one’s heroes—Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, Ernest Tubb, and on and on. Martin has been lobbying for his inclusion for years, and we talked about the question for a good while before I could lead him on to other things.
Once we got past the topic he relaxed a little and actually started to be fun company. He has a good sense of humor, which balances out his tendency to talk about how rough he’s had it. He really started to warm up when he talked about hunting. A perfect day, he said, is one on which he can “get my beagle dogs and take ’em out and run ’em and just enjoy their voices.” It turns out that he has named most of his hunting dogs after other country singers. “My beagle dogs,” he said, “are named George Jones, Earl Scruggs, Little Tater Dickens, and Marty Stuart. My coon dogs are Tom T. Hall, Turbo, Cas Walker, Cas Walker Jr. . . .”
“Turbo?” I said.
“He’s named after that motor in them hot rods; we say his voice sounds like Number Five just went by.” Martin then did an eerily realistic dog bark—guttural at first, then quickly louder and tapering off, like a loud car passing really fast. “I go out huntin’ sometimes with Marty Stuart [referring now to the man, not his canine namesake]. Earl Scruggs just called the other day; he just had a quadruple bypass operation. Little Jimmy Dickens goes hunting rabbits with me. Ain’t nothin’ no better than a rabbit fried in a skillet, good and brown, and make gravy in the skillet, then make you some biscuits, then you can just tell Kroger’s what to do with their steaks.” At this he laughed a beautiful, infectious laugh.
“Country music,” he said, “what makes it is you’re singing by the way you’ve had to live. And if you had a hard life to live, then you sing a hard life song. Then you turn around and sing about how good you wish it could have been. When I sing, whether it’s recording or at a show, or just sittin’ down here with you, I give it all I got from the heart. And if it’d be something sad in there, I’ve hit that sad road. ’Cause I used to be barefooted, no shoes on my feet, had no dad when I was four years old, nobody to give me a dollar to go to a show. Had to walk five miles to town to see a show. We’d get one pair of shoes when it frosted, and time it got warmin’ up your toes was walkin’ out of ’em. You wore ’em day and night and everywhere you went.
“In writin’ songs,” he went on, “you gotta have something good to write about. You can’t just sit down and say I’m just absolutely gonna write a song out of nowhere—and that’s just about the way the song sounds. It has to hit you.”
Referring to a recent song he had written, he said, “That song started and I’m sittin’ on the damn commode—all reared back and I start in to write that thing. And I’ve heard a lot of people say that’s where it started, on the commode. Well, I’ll tell you, the best place to read the newspaper, get you a glass and sit on the goddamn commode and read and read and read and enjoy it better’n anything in the world.” Again he laughed and laughed at this. He was so out front with everything, and I decided I really liked him, even if he was hard to deal with.
I asked him if he had a favorite time in his life. He thought for a second and said, “I was glad that Bill Monroe hired me, but sometimes that was rough there. Traveling six in a car, with the bass tied on top, used to sleep on each other’s shoulders, that was the pillow, worked seven days a week, seven nights . . . I guess for enjoyment, when I had Paul Williams and J. D. Crowe with me, on the Louisiana Hayride, and in Wheeling, West Virginia. We could really sing it, really pick it; we had it down just right. J. D. Crowe was fourteen years old. I learned him how to sing baritone and how to tone his voice in with mine. Paul, too. We slept in the same house and could rehearse and get it down like we wanted to.
“Seems like that’s when I liked to sing, and . . . We’d ride along in the cars and sing our songs and enjoy it, get it to soundin’ good. In those days everybody liked to sing, and liked to hear that harmony, liked to get it better so they could make more money. Playin’ in them little bars for five dollars a night and tips. And sayin’, ‘Oh, God, please help me get good enough to get out of here.’ And mean that. Now the boys meet me at the festivals backstage, we show up—“Are you in tune?” “Yeah, let me see if we are”—go on, do the show, and go off . . . It just ain’t as good as it was then. And I hate to say this, but it never will be, because it’s run different. Most of the bands don’t even travel in the same car and come to the shows together. They come with their girlfriends, or their wives, or whatsoever, so it’s a girlfriend deal, it’s not a professional deal. And it shouldn’t be like that; business should be business. If you’re gonna make a living at it.
“They’re payin’ big money, though,” he said, with a tinge of bitterness audible now. “But there’s little rehearsin’. No rehearsin’, to tell you the truth. My band don’t know what it is to rehearse. If they get out there the night before I do, or stay a night after, they might jam out there and play everything in the world, but there’s no rehearsin’. Nothin’ serious. You can’t go into a job just laughin’ and having fun and expect to show what you’re doing. If you’re driving a bulldozer you’re liable to run over something. You got to have your mind down to the business. And I’ve been told this many times: ‘You just take your music too serious.’ I don’t see how you could be too serious about somethin’ that’s gonna feed your family and make you a living the rest of your life. I don’t see as you could get too serious about that.” At my expression of surprise, Martin said, “The man who said that couldn’t pick. A man that don’t wanta get serious about somethin’, he don’t wanta get good. Am I right?” He was, of course, right, but the pressure behind the way he said it spoke of some buried frustration, a sense of injustice, of not being sufficiently recognized for his own abilities while standards were falling apart all around him . . .
As I was thinking this, he looked at me and said, “But the biggest thing I have been asked by the public is, ‘Why ain’t you on the Grand Ole Opry? Why can’t we hear you on the Grand Ole Opry?’ I just laugh back and I say, ‘Well, I guess I just ain’t good enough.’ ”
He showed me a photo of a plaque commemorating his induction into the International Bluegrass Music Association Hall of Honor, which he was very proud of. Then we started to wind down. We had gotten along well, after all, and I liked him. He was opinionated as hell, cranky and overbearing, but he was honest and had a great sense of gusto for life, and real passion about his music. He was himself, nothing else
, and that alone is hard to come by. Still, I felt we had only scratched the surface, and I wanted to see him in some other context if possible, get a feeling for how he related to other people. He said he enjoyed our conversation, and we talked about getting together again later in the weekend, since I was staying in Nashville until Sunday.
At one point I mentioned that I was going to try and get to see the Grand Ole Opry, and he cautioned me to get my ticket quick if I didn’t have one already. Then he suggested that we might go together.
“Really?” I said.
Sure, he said, they all knew him backstage, and we could just go inside that way.
I didn’t want to scare him off by seeming too excited about the idea, but it was perfect. He asked me to check and see who was going to be on the Opry, which runs on Friday and Saturday nights, and we agreed to talk about it the next day.
On my way out, walking through the den, Martin gave me two of his cassettes out of a couple of big cardboard boxes, and sold me two more at ten dollars apiece. Then he pointed out a selection of mesh caps in various colors, emblazoned with a “Jimmy Martin—King Of Bluegrass” logo. I chose one in burgundy with gold lettering, which I thought was a bargain at five dollars. Now I had the rest of the day to look around Nashville.
Roughly speaking, Nashville today is at least two towns. First, and best, is downtown, where you can find the old Ryman Auditorium (home of the Grand Ole Opry until its move to suburban Opryland in 1974), the original Ernest Tubb Record Shop (where they used to have the post-Opry broadcasts on Saturday nights after the crowds left the Ryman), Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, and other landmarks. Downtown is the province of the ghosts who make country music something worth thinking about seriously—Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, Lefty Frizzell, and on and on. It attracts the hipper tourists, and musicians with a sense of tradition, as well as quite a few aging, struggling characters in denim, Western shirts, and cowboy boots.
Farther west, along Broadway, lies Music Row, the heart and soul, if you can call it a soul, of New Nashville, where you find the big music publishers, record companies, ASCAP headquarters, the Country Music Hall of Fame, and gift shops owned by Barbara Mandrell, George Jones, and other luminaries. Music Row can be a little rough on you if you think country music is still about deep, soulful expression from the hills and honky-tonks. The Country Music Hall of Fame, for example, is a lot of fun for anybody with an interest in country music, full of great artifacts and video installations. But most of the Hall of Fame’s visitors waltz past the rare Hank Williams photos and Uncle Dave Macon videos vacant-eyed and clueless, in order to gape at the Reba McIntyre and Garth Brooks exhibits. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it is a clue to the sensibility of the New Nashville’s bread-and-butter constituency.
Music Row contains no shadowy cubbyholes full of interesting stuff, the way old downtown does. The senior citizens who get off the tour buses in matching warm-up suits don’t want shadowy and interesting; they want bright and aggressively heartwarming. They graze happily among the T-shirts and souvenir spoon rests and coffee mugs at Barbara Mandrell’s store, where a Christmas-sale sign reads, SPECIAL: NATIVITIES 25% OFF, which just about says it all, and at the George Jones Gift Shop, where rows and rows of glass display shelves under bright fluorescent lights are crammed with frilly dolls, little ceramic figurines, souvenir spoons, salt and pepper shakers, coffee mugs reading “I’m not grouchy—I’m constipated . . .”
All of which, I thought, helps explain why Jimmy Martin might be anathema to New Nashville. Imagine the souvenir-spoon crowd listening to him sing “Steal Away Somewhere and Die.” Not likely. Yet all the garishness and bad taste is no aberration; it’s part of the fiber of the world that country music serves. You can’t really separate one from the other, any more than you can just forget about Martin performances like “I’d Rather Have America” and “Daddy, Will Santa Claus Ever Have to Die?”
That night I had dinner with a friend, a well-known songwriter and performer who has lived in Nashville for almost thirty years and was part of the so-called New Breed of younger figures who shook up the town in the late 1960s. My friend is actually something of a connoisseur of Jimmy Martin stories, and he added a few to my stockpile, including one about a trip, involving Martin and a couple other musicians, to see Clint Eastwood’s movie Unforgiven. At one point in the movie a small country shack came on the screen, and Martin supposedly stood up at his seat and hollered, “That shack there is just like the one Jimmy Martin grew up in, back in Sneedville, Tennessee, that y’all been asking me about, folks.” Everybody in the theater turned around wondering what the hell was going on, while Martin’s companions sank low into their seats.
After we laughed about this, my friend went on, “But, at the same time, I’ll never forget once we were having this benefit concert for a local band who had had an accident on the road and needed money. The whole bluegrass community had rallied to their support and held a benefit concert, which Jimmy hadn’t been invited to appear on. Late in the evening, though, he showed up backstage anyway, real quiet, with a big jar, like a Mason jar, full of coins and bills. He had had a show earlier that night and he had collected all that money from his audience himself, and he wanted to contribute it. It wasn’t a showy thing at all; he just gave it and left quietly.
“Another time,” my friend went on, “the son of some dear mutual friends of Jimmy’s and mine had died under extremely tragic circumstances, and one of the visitors during the worst of this episode was Jimmy. He walked in and he had obviously been crying beforehand. He had some little plaster statue he had bought for them, maybe it was a Madonna, and as soon as he got in, he just let it all out, crying and saying how sorry he was that it had happened and how much he loved them . . .” My friend stopped talking for a moment, and I realized he was trying to keep from crying himself. “He only stayed for about five minutes,” he went on. “But of all the visits during those days, that’s the one that was maybe the most moving.”
He kind of shook his head. I could relate; even in the short time I had spent with Martin I could see those disproportions—the deep loneliness and the huge ego, the self-assertion and the sensitivity and the defensiveness. When I mentioned the possibility that I might go to the Opry with Martin, my friend looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “If there’s any chance of doing that,” he said, “don’t miss it. Something interesting will happen.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
2.
That was last night. Earlier today Martin and I talked on the phone and he said he wanted to go; he told me to get dressed up (“not like what you come to see me in yesterday”) and meet him at his house at six o’clock. My first stab at doing that, ten minutes ago, was unsuccessful, and I had to call him from the gas station to get him to let me in. From the sound of his voice he’s in no shape to go anywhere, but he insists he wants to go.
Now, as I pull up to his house again, I finally see him, in my headlights, struggling to open the screen door, and I turn my lights and motor off. He’s yelling at the dogs, and they quiet down. I get out of the car, but he has already disappeared back into the house. I follow, groping my way through his den in the dark.
The only light on in the house appears to be the overhead one in the kitchen. As I enter the room Martin is sitting down in his chair at the kitchen table. He’s wearing his blue jumpsuit, and his eyes are unfocused.
“I’m higher than a Georgia . . . kite,” he says. “I know what they’ll say . . . ‘Jimmy Martin’s been drinkin’ again . . .’ But I don’t owe them anything.” He looks up at me. “Do I?”
I can see his eyes pull into focus. “Where’s your Jimmy Martin cap?” he says, squinting at me.
“I left it back at the hotel,” I say. His eyes narrow into slits. “I can borrow one of yours,” I offer, “if you want me to wear one.”
“You got one of your own, didn’t you?”
“You said on the phone you wanted me t
o get a little dressed up, so—”
“So it’s fuck Jimmy Martin.”
Silence.
“Listen,” he says, steadying himself with his forearm on the table. “If I give you the keys to the limo . . . will you drive? Can you drive the limo?”
The limo?
“Jimmy,” I say, “why don’t we just take my car—”
“NO,” he says, his voice rising. “We’re takin’ the limo, with ‘Sunny Side of the Mountain’ along the back and everything. They’ll recognize it. They know me. Can you drive it?”
“Why don’t we—”
“We’re takin’ the limo,” he says. “We can drive right inside. Whoever says hello says hello.” He stands up, unsteadily. “Me and you are goin’ to the Opry,” he says. “Did you get you a drink?” he says.
“No,” I say.
“Well, go and git you one. Right there.”
“Where, Jimmy?”
“In the cabinet,” he says. I find the cabinet he’s indicating, and inside it the bottle of Knob Creek I gave him yesterday, with about an inch and a half of bourbon left in it.
“Me and you are goin’ to the Opry,” he says, shuffling past me and leaving the room. “Don’t drink too much.”
I’m standing here and I don’t know what to do. I’m almost overwhelmed by a feeling of not wanting to be here. The single overhead light, this chaos, the malevolent magnetic field he generates. I want to get out. But at the same time, it’s Jimmy Martin . . .
Now I hear a grunting sound coming from a small room off the kitchen. I say, “Are you okay, Jimmy?”
“Come see what I’m doin’.”
I walk back to the garage end of the kitchen and look in the doorway to where he is, and it’s his bedroom, small, barely enough room for the double bed on which Martin is sitting, utterly transformed. His hair is neat and he is wearing black slacks, a fire-engine-red shirt buttoned at the neck, and white leather boots with little multicolored jewels sewn on.
