by Tom Piazza
Not to be placated, Martin goes on, “You let me down.”
“I couldn’t sing it that high, Jimmy.”
“You didn’t hurt me,” Martin says, “about making money. I made it.”
“That’s right, you sure did,” Skaggs says. Then, wearing a Mona Lisa smile and nodding politely, he says, “Good to see you guys,” and steps away.
Skaggs and his band rehearse a few numbers now, and Martin stands watching them, and they sound good, especially the banjoist and the lead guitar player, who is astounding. Jimmy stands listening, more or less unimpressed. At one point a short man in a white cowboy hat and blue cowboy suit comes over and it turns out to be Little Jimmy Dickens, one of the legends of the Opry, and the two of them stand there with an arm around each other’s shoulders, watching Skaggs’s band rehearse, and I’m glad Jimmy’s found a port in the storm.
Now I kind of pull back and listen; I just want to enjoy being here a little bit. If Martin can survive being that much of a pain in the ass to someone, then he can probably weather just about anything. A while goes by, and then quicker movements begin to thread through the crowd, among the laughter and the picking, and someone calls out, “Five minutes till segment,” and it’s getting time for the Opry to start.
We move to the backstage area, the wings; the backup musicians are taking their places, and the backup singers are gathering around the mikes, the curtain is still closed, and the band hits a fast breakdown song, and before I know it the audience is visible, and cheering, and Porter Wagoner is leading things off, a gleaming white silhouette in front of the yawning cavern of the audience, a glowing nimbus around him and his bejeweled suit.
The first act on the bill is Little Jimmy Dickens himself, who hits the stage like a bomb going off, gyrating and singing “Take an Old Cold ’Tater and Wait,” which has been his Opry signature tune since the 1950s; his guitar is almost as big as he is, and he shakes so much that he looks as if he’s wrestling an alligator. After Dickens leaves the stage, to huge applause, Wagoner talks to the audience a little, then introduces Skeeter Davis, who sings her old hit “The End of the World.” During each tune, the upcoming performers gather behind the curtain just off to the side of the stage to watch the act preceding them.
Everybody does one song apiece, eighty-year-old Bill Carlisle comes out and does an act combining singing and high-jumping, and it’s a good variety show, but as I stand and watch I can’t help thinking that it’s almost as if Jimmy Martin would be too strong a flavor to introduce into this stew, like uncorking corn liquor at a polite wine tasting. The performers appear one by one, as if they are making cameo appearances in a movie about the Opry, and I can’t see Martin fitting into it. Anyway, in his frustration he does everything he can to make sure he won’t get on. He lashes out almost as if he’s trying to give himself some sense that he’s the one in control, that he’s the one on the offensive, and not just sitting there helplessly. Whatever his reasons, he is doing exactly what he needs to do to keep himself off the Opry.
During Jimmy C. Newman’s number, it occurs to me that Martin has been very quiet. He was talking to someone for a while, but now he is standing at the theater rope that demarks the small area of the wings where the performers are about to go on, and he has been standing there silently for quite a while. I look at him, and his gaze is fixed straight ahead, and I’m thinking something doesn’t look right, maybe it is just the difficulty of watching the party going on around him, but I say, “Hey, Jimmy—everything okay?”
No answer; he keeps staring straight ahead.
“Jimmy—is everything all right?”
Now he turns his head just a little in my direction and squints as if to say, Hold on a minute, I’m thinking about something.
Then, nodding in the direction of a small group of people standing just offstage behind the curtain, he says, “Go over there and tell Bill Anderson to come over here. I’m going to knock his ass right off him.”
“What are you talking about?” I say.
“Will you just go over there and tell him to come here and we can go outside—”
“I’m not going to do that,” I say. “Hold on a second—hey,” I say, trying to get his attention. “What happened?” This is not cool; Anderson is one of the Opry’s biggest stars and has been since the mid-1960s. What this is about I have no idea.
“He talked to me in a way I don’t like to be talked to, and I’m going to knock his ass off. I’ll go over there myself . . .” And he moves as if to climb over the theater cord, and I grab his arm and say, “Hold on, man, what are you doing? You don’t want to do this. Hey . . . Jimmy . . .” People are starting to notice now.
“I will,” he says. “I’ll knock him down right here—”
“Hold on, man,” I say, under my breath. “You don’t want to do this. Don’t”—here I have an inspiration—“don’t lower yourself into that. The hell with Bill Anderson,” I say, laying it on thick. “What does it matter what he says? Come on,” I say, “let’s get out of here, okay? I’ve seen enough . . . I’m bushed . . . Let’s get out of here and have a drink . . .”
It’s too late, though; as I’m saying this, Bill Anderson walks past us with a couple of other men, not looking at us, heading toward the greenroom, and Martin lunges toward them. I step in front of him to hold him back, and as I do this I can tell that it is some kind of charade, because he doesn’t struggle. As soon as the group passes Martin hollers out to the people who have been watching, “He walked right by me . . . If he hadn’t a-been holdin’ me back I woulda knocked his ass off,” and meanwhile someone out onstage is singing about yet another Lonely Heartbreak, and it occurs to me that it will be a miracle if they ever even let Jimmy Martin set foot backstage again at the Opry after this, much less perform. Calling someone an asshole is one thing, but moving on someone in front of witnesses is another. I’ve got to get him out of here, and I say to him now, “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here, screw Bill Anderson anyway,” and he kind of nods.
But before I can pull him away he stands for a long moment looking out toward the stage, and the singer and the audience. Impatient to get him out before something worse happens, I, who have come to the Opry very late in the game, say, “Come on, Jimmy, let’s go.” Then Jimmy Martin, who might well be taking his last look at the biggest dream of his life, turns around and walks out.
I spent Saturday tooling around the city, buying CDs and souvenirs and just looking around, with the previous night looming in my mind like a weird nightmare. I called Martin in the afternoon; he had a hunting buddy over visiting him and he sounded rested and happy.
On Sunday morning I called again to say good-bye, and he volunteered to come down and meet me for breakfast at the Hardee’s by the Holiday Inn. While I waited for him I tried to think if there was anything I wanted to ask him that I hadn’t already asked him, but there wasn’t.
He arrived late—car trouble, of course—in the limo, and we had breakfast. Martin ordered fried chicken. We talked for a few minutes about different things, but what was most on Martin’s mind was a set of videotapes of stars of the Grand Ole Opry he saw advertised on television and which he thought I should get. “All of ’em is on there,” he said, “Rod Brasfield, Minnie Pearl, Roy Acuff, Uncle Dave Macon,” and on and on, and he talked about each one lovingly, especially Brasfield, a comedian whom Martin called “the best thing ever to hit Nashville.” Martin wasn’t making a nominating speech for himself this morning; he was just thinking about the people who made him want to do what he has been doing for almost fifty years, with an enthusiasm that reached back to the little shoeless kid’s awe and love for those voices coming out of the radio. “Get ’em,” he said, “if you wanna see the real thing—the real thing,” he said, with lots of meaning in the emphasis.
Eventually it’s time for me to go, and we head out into the bright morning. Before I go, though, he wants to tell me a joke. “There was this guy, said he could go around and talk to stat
ues in town, and they’d talk back to him. So one day he walked up to this one, and, God, it was a big ’un, and he says, ‘Old man statue, this is so-and-so.’ The statue said, ‘Yeah, glad to meet you.’ So he says, ‘Listen, what would be the first thing you would do if you could come alive for a hour?’ And the statue answered him back, said, ‘Shoot me ten million pigeons . . .’ ”
I don’t know if he means this to be a little parable of our couple of days together—I doubt it—but it occurs to me that it works as such, and I laugh along with him.
Then Martin, in his blue jumpsuit, black nylon windbreaker, and dirty white mesh cap, gets into his limo, which starts up with a gurgling roar, and I watch and wave as he backs her out, wheels her around, and rides off into the distance up Old Hickory Boulevard in a midnight-blue blaze of country grandeur, the goddamn KING OF BLUEGRASS himself.
From the Oxford American’s First
Annual Music Issue, 1997
Jimmy Martin, RIP
He was one of a kind. He insisted on his own way, as a singer, guitarist, bandleader and as a man in the world, and he respected others who insisted on their own way. Especially he loved and respected the musicians whom he felt had carved out an unmistakable place of value for themselves in the world of country music and bluegrass—Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs, Hank Williams, George Jones, Roy Acuff, and most of the other members of the earlier generation of Grand Ole Opry stars. Implicitly and explicitly, he numbered himself among them, and he was right to do so. He reserved expressed admiration for a relatively small handful of younger performers—Marty Stuart, Tom T. Hall, a few others.
Jimmy Martin, the self-crowned “King of Bluegrass,” who died of bladder cancer on May 14, 2005, at the age of seventy-seven, was larger than life, and he will turn out to be larger than death, too. He was incapable of the kinds of dissembling, duplicity, politenesses, and homogenization that make for a smooth career in today’s Gentleman’s Business of country music, where every outlaw has his own hairdresser. He did everything to the hilt, whether it was telling a joke, hunting, eating, feeling sorry for himself, or playing music. Above all, playing music. He had a kind of contempt for half-measures and timid souls, and his first project would be to try and find out how steady you were on your feet.
He took things seriously, including fooling around and cutting up. He didn’t like ass-kissers, politicians, wishy-washy types. He wasn’t above trying to ingratiate himself with people who might be able to do him some good; he just wasn’t very good at it. He wanted to be remembered as one of the greats; he was inordinately proud of his induction into the International Bluegrass Music Association Hall of Honor, and it was the frustration of his life that he was never invited to be a member of the Grand Ole Opry. It was the Opry’s loss. When it seemed that the world wasn’t going to rush in to build him a monument, he did it himself; several years before his death he designed and erected his own tombstone in a Nashville cemetery, taller than he was standing, a stone’s throw from Roy Acuff’s somewhat more modest plot. He had himself photographed in front of it, and he put the photo on the front of one of his CDs.
The documentary film King of Bluegrass is worth seeing, but you could easily come away from it thinking that Jimmy Martin was a more or less normal person, just with the color turned up a little high. He wasn’t. He was, to quote his friend Marty Stuart, “part preacher, part prophet, and a card-carrying madman who is completely filled with the musical holy ghost.” That spirit erupts like a genie from every recording he made. He found a way to discipline his turbulent and sometimes anarchic soul through music, and his musical reputation is going to continue to grow. Jimmy Martin will be remembered long after many of his contemporaries. In an age dominated by spinmasters and bean counters, Jimmy Martin was the unvarnished Real Thing. Wave good-bye, and holler.
From the Oxford American, 2005
Carl Perkins was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. He came to New Orleans in 1996 to film a promotional video for his about-to-be-published autobiography and its companion CD. He was warm and genuine, utterly without star pretensions of any sort, and a living product of the fleeting era after World War Two when country honky-tonk music, bluegrass, and Memphis blues got real friendly and produced rock and roll. Included here are two pieces on him: a profile that appeared in the Sunday New York Times, and a remembrance that appeared in the Oxford American after Perkins’s death in 1998.
The Gillian Welch essay was another of my Oxford American columns, and is more or less self-explanatory.
The Lost Man of Rock and Roll
It is just after twelve noon, an October Saturday in New Orleans. Carl Perkins, composer of the song “Blue Suede Shoes” and the original rockabilly singer and guitarist, waits outside a small guitar store in an ordinarily quiet uptown neighborhood for filming to resume on a promotional video for his new CD. He flew down this morning from his home in Jackson, Tennessee, where he has lived for the past forty-five years. He takes all the flurry of activity in stride, joking with crew members and photographers, harmonizing on country songs with onlookers, and telling stories.
At sixty-four, Perkins is slim and handsome, with sculpted cheekbones, a prominent chin, easy smile, and a curly, steel-grey toupee which is the topic of frequent jokes by its owner. He wears blue jeans, a tight, ribbed crewneck shirt, thick aviator glasses, and, yes, blue suede shoes.
“Back in the days when that song was popular,” he says, in a thick Tennessee country accent, lighting a cigarette as cameramen and technical crew members swirl around him, “somebody would always come up with a camera and want a picture of themselves stepping on the shoes. I used to carry a wire brush in my back pocket so I could reach down and brush ’em back to life. They sold the brush with the shoes.”
From the street, someone passing on a bicycle stops and yells, “Hey! Carl Perkins! How’s it goin’?”
Grinning widely, gesturing around at all the activity, Perkins says, “Well, country as I am, I don’t really know. It seems like it’s rocking right along.”
Things are, indeed, rocking right along for Carl Perkins right now, although he seems admirably unimpressed by that fact. Mr. Perkins is, in a sense, the Lost Man of early rock and roll. He was there in Memphis at the Creation, the Big Bang of rock, a contemporary of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis when country music, Southern gospel, and blues fused into a new hybrid. His 1956 song “Blue Suede Shoes” became as much of a rock-and-roll anthem as “Great Balls of Fire” or “Roll Over Beethoven.”
Yet as the rockets of Jerry Lee and Elvis and Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly shot off into the great American night of legend, Mr. Perkins spent decades touring the middle and the bottom of his profession, battling alcoholism for long, honky-tonk years and searching for an ever-elusive follow-up to his big hit.
Now, with a just-published autobiography, entitled Go, Cat, Go!—the title comes from the famous refrain of his most famous composition—and a new CD of the same title—including Perkins duets with everyone from his old Sun Records labelmate Johnny Cash to Beatles George Harrison, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr, to Tom Petty, John Fogerty, Paul Simon, and Willie Nelson—Carl Perkins seems poised on the brink of a long-overdue rediscovery.
Mr. Perkins was the archetypal rockabilly. He spent his early years in a Lake County, Tennessee, shack without electricity or indoor plumbing; he acquired his first guitar from an older black neighbor who traded it to the boy for a couple of dollars and a one-legged chicken named Peg.
He emerged from that background into a post–World War Two milieu in which country people were gravitating to large towns and small cities. “It was a time in America when the war was over,” he says, during a break in the weekend’s filming. “People were happy. And it was a time when black and white were fusing musically. See, there was a little circle in West Tennessee, where we combined the blues influence coming up from Mississippi, and the bluegrass from out of Kentucky, but I don’t think none of us even ever
quite knew what it was. It didn’t have a name; we called it feel-good music. A few guys got brave enough to get out and start playing it in the honky-tonks.”
Perkins formed a band with his two brothers that became extremely active in the area around Jackson, playing a mixture of country and rhythm and blues material for dancing. The honky-tonks were rough places where the atmosphere was suffused with the highly charged possibilities of both physical love and violence, and the demands they placed on musicians were straightforward and unequivocal: stimulate dancing and drinking. The honky-tonks may seem, in retrospect, an unlikely setting for the complex, introspective, often sentimental man one meets today, yet they were the crucible that shaped both the band’s sound and Perkins’s emerging songwriting talents.
Spurred by a chance meeting with Elvis Presley, who had just made his first recordings for Sam Phillips’s Sun Records, Perkins and his band headed for Memphis, hoping to audition for Phillips. He persisted despite initial rebuffs, eventually got Phillips to listen, and in October 1954, three months after Elvis’s debut, Perkins cut his first record. The two tunes, both Perkins originals, were a beautiful, Hank Williams–ish country ballad called “Turn Around” and the jumping “Movie Magg,” a quintessential rockabilly song about the exhilaration and dangers of courtship. The recordings gained the band important local exposure, and Perkins often found himself on the same concert bill with Presley.
Even today, Perkins is awestruck by Presley. “He was the first boy I heard on record playing the songs the way I always done. I think Elvis was the complete entertainer. I believe when Elvis was born, God said, here is a messenger, and I’m gonna make him the best-lookin’ guy, and I’m gonna give him every piece of rhythm he needs to move that good-lookin’ body on that stage. I was fightin’ a battle workin’ with him, knowing I looked like Mr. Ed, that mule, and here was a guy that could go out and clear his throat and have ten thousand people scream.”
