Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

Meanwhile, at exactly the same time country music was spreading across the nation, the industry was consolidating in the one city perhaps most hostile to it: Nashville. Country is centered in Nashville today for three basic reasons, all of which came to a head in the 1940s. The first was money. Before the war, ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, the performing rights organization that collects royalties for music publishers, mostly ignored Nashville songwriters. When ASCAP raised its rates in 1941, though, a rival organization, Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI), rose up to challenge it. BMI not only broke the monopoly, but also welcomed country writers into the fold, thereby allowing more money to stay in Nashville. The second reason was geography. In the mid-1940s, several producers began cutting records in Nashville to take advantage of the growing number of musicians in the area who were drawn by the Opry. Musicians preferred Nashville, as opposed to, say, Atlanta or Dallas (which also had Oprylike programs), because of its central location. Thirty states are within six hundred miles of Nashville, a number that’s significant because it’s the amount of territory a bus can cover overnight. In the early fifties, Owen Bradley, a former WSM engineer, set up a studio in a Quonset hut in a rundown neighborhood not far from Vanderbilt and around the corner from the studio where Wade Hayes would record his albums. The Quonset Hut, as it was known, became the magnet for a ramshackle collection of recording studios, labels, and management offices that opened up shop in converted Victorian homes and consistently unattractive stucco low-rises in what came to be called Music Row.

  The third reason the industry gathered in Nashville was music publishing (the term comes from the era when music was “published” in sheet form). As with other forms of music, publishing has always been the linchpin to country music—as opposed to, say, records—because songs have the ability to make money years after they are first recorded. They can be cut—or “covered,” as the term goes—by other artists; or they may be used in television shows, movies, or commercials. In 1942, Fred Rose, a songwriter with a Tin Pan Alley background, moved to Nashville from Los Angeles because his wife, a Nashville native, was homesick. With Roy Acuff he founded a publishing company that coddled Nashville artists precisely because New York companies had so ignored them. One Acuff-Rose song in particular, “The Tennessee Waltz,” first recorded in 1948 and recut by Patti Page in 1950, sold 4.8 million records in a single year, earned them $330,000, and single-handedly paved the way for Nashville’s mainstream success. By 1960, Broadcasting magazine reported that one half of all American recordings came from Nashville. The city that liked to portray itself as the “Athens of the South” was now home to 1,100 musicians, 350 songwriters, 110 publishing houses, and 35 recording studios. The industry that liked to think of itself as a hillbilly family business now brought in over $40 million a year.

  The presence of all that infrastructure dramatically changed the industry. Suddenly making money—feeding the beast, as it were—became central to Music Row. This was particularly noticeable during the first big bust that hit country music: rock ‘n’ roll. When Elvis Presley burst onto the music scene in the mid-1950s he immediately sucked fans away from country. As Bob Luman, later a Nashville recording artist himself, recalled of first seeing the King:

  This cat came out in red pants and a green coat and a pink shirt and socks, and he had this sneer on his face, and he stood behind the mike for five minutes, I’ll bet, before he made a move. Then he hit his guitar a lick and broke two strings. I’d been playing ten years and hadn’t broken a total of two strings. So there he was, these two strings dangling, and he hadn’t done anything yet, and these high school girls were screaming and fainting and running up to the stage, and then he began to move his hips real slow like he had a thing for his guitar…That’s the last time I tried to sing like Webb Pierce and Lefty Frizzell.

  For many more, it was the last time they wanted to listen to Pierce and Frizzell. Audiences, particularly young people, abandoned country in droves. Radio dropped country for rock. Even the Grand Ole Opry lost half its audience. This left Nashville with a choice: Adapt or close up shop. The result was the Nashville Sound, the first significant attempt to tinker with country music to make it more appealing to a mainstream audience.

  Stretching throughout the 1960s, the era of the Nashville Sound (the term refers to the new sweet sound of country records; country without the twang) is still viewed with deep ambivalence. Some see it as a brilliant adjustment, or “Chet’s Compromise,” after Chet Atkins, the virtuoso guitarist and RCA executive who added strings, drums, and creamy background “ooohs” to the records of Jim Reeves and Don Williams. Others viewed it as abandoning tradition. Both Reeves and Patsy Cline, for example, began singing honky-tonk and wearing Western clothes, but soon drifted into evening wear and cocktail-party stylings. What was clear is that country music had (at least temporarily) abandoned its dusty boots for a new uptown image. Commercially, it worked. The number of radio stations playing the music soared from 81 in 1961 to 606 in 1969. By 1970, country music was earning $200 million a year, five times the amount of a decade earlier. Even the stuffed shirts of Belle Meade could no longer ignore the reality of the new money machine of Music Row: Country had not only come to town, it was reshaping it year by year—one guitar-shaped swimming pool at a time.

  In the winter of 1970, a group of prominent Belle Meade women set up a meeting with Buddy Killen, a former Opry bass player turned music publisher who was one of the first Music Row parvenus to attempt to penetrate Nashville’s standoffish elite. “When I first came to Nashville, there was an attitude toward country music that if you don’t feed it, it will go away,” Killen remembered. A big man with a deep voice and large rings on his fingers, he sat behind his white wooden desk, his cowboy boots splayed out on his white plush carpet. “People were ashamed of country music. They just made excuses for us.” Killen, though, craved the acceptability and made a point to go out and cultivate contacts in Belle Meade. “When I built an eighteen-thousand-square-foot home in Franklin, suddenly I became very visible,” he said. When he started spreading his money around to local charities, he also became socially desirable.

  On this day, though, Killen’s visitors wanted him for another reason: his access to Hollywood. The women asked him if he would help them get some entertainment for the Swan Ball, one of the most prestigious events in the South, a white-tie extravaganza held every spring in Belle Meade. “You know, Bob Hope or somebody like that?” the women said. “Bob Hope? Are you kidding?” Killen said. “You’re sitting here in Nashville, surrounded by the hottest names in the country, in a city the rest of the world is begging to get into, and you want me to bring in Bob Hope?” Chastened, the women asked what he would do. “I’ll get you a country act,” he said. “Oh, no, my mother would kill me,” one of the ladies said. “Oh, no,” Killen responded, “your mother will love you.” “Do you really think so?” she asked. “Yes,” he said, “and so will everyone else.” The following June, under twinkling white lights and flowing canapes, Johnny Cash, the man in black, a relentless yokel from Kingsland, Arkansas, made his first-ever trip to Belle Meade. “And the people went absolutely nuts,” Killen recalled. “From then on, a country music performer played the Swan Ball in alternating years.”

  As comical as it must have been, the Belle Meade debut of Johnny Cash, deep-voiced, darkly sexual, and by his own account high on drugs for most of that decade, was only the most symbolic of gestures that were begrudgingly uniting Nashville. Though many socialites still feared a takeover—residents in Sarah Colley’s enclave of Oak Hill, for example, rose up in arms when Webb Pierce charged tour buses admission fees to see his guitar-shaped pool—town elders eventually realized that expanded tourism meant expanded coffers for everyone. In 1967, the city donated land on Music Row for a Hall of Fame. In 1969, Nashville’s morning paper, The Tennessean, hired its first reporter to cover the music industry. And in 1972, National Life (whose owners were Belle Meade socialites) spent $66 million to
build the Opryland theme park. The big breakthrough came in 1975 when Robert Altman released his satiric film Nashville. Some hated it. “When you show the anatomy of a man,” said producer Billy Sherrill, who walked out, “you should try to show something beside his tail.” Others adored it. “I thought it had great depth,” Buddy Killen said. Minnie, as usual, split the difference. “Part of it made me very sad, but sometimes I laughed so hard it hurt.” But in the end it did make money, which always impressed Nashville, and it did generate attention. By the mid-seventies, 7 million people a year were visiting what Altman called America’s “new Hollywood.”

  Nashville, indeed, was increasingly given over to Hollywood theatrics. In the 1970s, the rest of the country finally realized that country artists, and their fans, were no longer toothless, penniless hillbillies. If anything, country had now penetrated the leading edge of American pop culture: middle-class youth. Whether it was young rockers drawn in by Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson (a Rhodes scholar), or folkies attracted by Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons, and even Bill Monroe, mainstream Americans were beginning to embrace this once déclassé form. This new love affair with country reached its peak in 1980 with the release of a spate of Hollywood cornbread: Willie Nelson’s Honeysuckle Rose, Dolly Parton’s Nine to Five, and Loretta Lynn’s Coal Miner’s Daughter. The most important of all was Urban Cowboy, a brilliant honky-tonk travel poster starring Debra Winger and John Travolta, at the time the undisputed icon of American pop chic, who in three years had gone from the lighted dance floor of Saturday Night Fever to the mechanical bull of Gilley’s nightclub. If Vinnie Barbarino could wear a cowboy hat with a feather in it, could America be far behind? The answer was a deafening “Yee-ha!” The number of country radio stations doubled between 1978 and 1982 to 2,100. Record sales, which had hovered around 10 percent of the market, soared to 15 percent, or $400 million a year. The New York Times’s Stephen Holden went so far as to claim that country had “supplanted rock for the time being as the dominant commercial mode of popular music.”

  Then came the megabust. Predictably, the national fascination with all things Texan proved to be a fad. When the public went searching for new sounds and found none, they quickly abandoned country. Audiences dropped, and in 1986 album sales shrunk to around 9 percent of the market, their lowest level in twenty years. A front-page story in The New York Times, this time by reporter-critic Robert Palmer, declared country music was dead. Ironically, this happened at the exact moment that Nashville and Music Row were, at last, achieving a kind of social detente they had been inching toward for years. In the wake of Urban Cowboy, Nashville gave up all pretensions of calling itself the “Athens of the South” and fully embraced the nickname that Music Row had been using for decades, “Music City, U.S.A.” (ironically, the term comes not from country music but from the Fisk University Jubilee Singers, who were so successful touring Europe in the 1870s that Nashvillians who visited the Continent after them were asked, “Are you from the ‘Music City’?”). The chamber of commerce even replaced the Parthenon as its public manifestation with a much more fulsome image: Dolly Parton’s profile.

  If Dolly was the public face of country music in the eighties, though, Minnie was still its heart (as for other similarities between the two, Minnie once said of Dolly: “I wear a hat so folks can tell us apart…”). If anything, Minnie’s stature had only been growing since she began devoting herself to charity work and acting as an adopted auntie to many younger stars. “I’m living the life now of a suburban matron,” she said not long before bouts with breast cancer and a stroke that would eventually claim her life. “I learned to play bridge. I’ve gone back to tennis. And I have ladies over for lunch and make homemade mayonnaise.” That transformation, like so many she had made over the years, was in perfect tune with the times. In her latter years, Minnie Pearl became a symbol not for the rigidity of class differences—as she once had been—but for the gradual blending of such distinctions into a broad middle class with a generic set of ideals. As her chaplain, speaking at her funeral, quoted Sarah as saying late in her life of the fictitious town where Minnie Pearl lived: “‘Grinder’s Switch is a state of mind—a place where there is no illness, no war, no unhappiness, no political unrest, no tears. It’s a place where there’s only happiness—where all you worry about is what you’re going to wear to the town social, and if your feller is going to kiss you in the moonlight on the way home. I wish for all of you a Grinder’s Switch.’”

  That redefinition of the idealized country locale from a place full of rural rubes, looked down on by socialites like Sarah Colley, to a place full of all-American wholesomeness, inspirational even to middle-class suburban “matrons,” is what paved the way for country’s expansion. That change was reflected in country’s hometown. In the 1980s, not just Music Row but Nashville as a whole would plummet into a recession that would reshape the entire city. The town’s insurance and banking companies were snatched up by larger concerns, crippling the elite. At the same time, a new influx of middle-class musicians from across America would all but pave over country’s rural roots (“Vince Gill’s different from Hank Williams,” one Belle Meade socialite said to me. “He knows how to use a fork…”). In time both the city and country music would be reborn in the 1990s in a reconstituted, tube-sock form that, a generation earlier, neither Sarah Colley, with her silk stockings, nor Cousin Minnie, with her cotton leggings, would have recognized. Social standing, once the defining distinction of Nashville, had all but been eliminated. In its place, the city was becoming a living experiment in the new American reality—one in which roots were replaced by rootlessness, class background by social mobility, and being Southern by being, well, American.

  Indeed, it was only fitting that the emblem for this Nashville—the New Nashville as it would be called—would be a man from Oklahoma who had little in common with the social pedigree of Sarah or the rural charm of Minnie, yet whose suburban, all-American background would become the perfect symbol for the new middle-class ascendancy in the South, as well as America. He was a man who wasn’t particularly country at all, but who was enough of a good ol’ boy to name his first daughter Taylor Mayne Pearl Brooks, after the woman who had first reached out to embrace him when he began to redefine what would forever be her town.

  VERSE II

  FIVE

  THE HAT

  He wasn’t wearing his hat. He wasn’t wearing boots either. He didn’t have on jeans. Instead, he was wearing sweatpants—dusty red and fading—and a boyish black parka. His hightops were sloppily tied. Though it was just before dinner when Garth Brooks strolled up to Gate C-5 at Nashville International Airport, he looked as though he had just gotten out of bed. His lips were puffy, his eyes distracted. He hadn’t shaved in several days.

  “Hey, look! Everything I have on is free!” he boasted, boylike, when asked about his baseball cap.

  “You mean Nike gives you free stuff?” His fresh-from-the-box sneakers were neon yellow and white.

  “I’ve been courting them,” he said, suddenly grown-up again. “They’re very friendly, but all they sponsor is athletes now. I want them to do a campaign: ‘Music Is a Sport.’”

  That campaign, of course, would star himself.

  We headed for the plane. His publicist and road manager walked several paces ahead. It was midwinter by now. Garth had fully reemerged into view—battered by some of his negative press, but still pushing forward to promote his new album. In a breathless span of several weeks, he had traveled to London, Dublin, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, back to Los Angeles, and now back to Washington, this time for an appearance on “Larry King Live!” Though he cultivated his image in these appearances with military precision (he would take several shirts from talk show to talk show so he would always appear fresh), away from the lights he was surprisingly easygoing. There was no groveling entourage here. No pretense. He had a blue collegiate backpack over his shoulder and was carrying his publicist’s flowered garmen
t bag in his hand. The one hint of his John Wayne-like power: Under his arm he balanced a black plastic version of a nineteenth-century ladies’ hatbox.

  “A friend gave it to me,” he explained. “I use it on trips like this.”

  “What if you didn’t have it?” I asked.

  “I suppose I’d just wear the hat,” he said. “But the problem is, people are attracted to it. It’s almost like a magnet. People come up and want to talk to it.”

  “To ‘it’?” I asked.

  “Yeah, to it,” he repeated. “To that person.” He raised the box in the air. “‘GB.’ I don’t mind, really. I love it. It’s my chance to meet one-on-one with the fans. But they have to get where they’re going.” He gestured toward Karen, his publicist, and Mick, his road manager. “And this attracts too much attention.”

  This was a black beaver Stetson, size 7 5/8, which in a manner more reminiscent of Greek mythology than contemporary American cynicism had come to embody the larger-than-life figure that Garth had managed to turn himself into. In the span of half a decade, Garth Brooks had completely rewritten the rules of Music Row and taken country music to its highest point in history. Riding his coattails, country’s sales now topped $2 billion a year, three times what they were in 1990 and five times what they were in 1980. With ticket sales and merchandise, Garth Brooks made more money in each of the early years of his career than the entire industry made in 1970. He did this in large part by creating albums, designing concerts, and devising a persona that all reinforced a single image: Garth was a contemporary cowboy. He was humble, courteous, hardworking, and fundamentally ail-American. He sang about cowboys. He dressed like Gary Cooper. He wore a hat.

  In time his round-’em-up, let-’em-rip persona became so all-consuming that even Garth went so far as to give it a nickname, “GB,” in an effort to distinguish it from himself. But just by creating that nickname, then by referring to it as if it were a prop, Garth risked sounding a little, well, odd. “Garth is not difficult to understand if you look at him as two different people,” Garth—or was it GB?—wrote in his tour book at the start of his career. “There’s GB the artist and Garth the lazy guy just hanging around the house. Here’s how the two differ: GB likes the view from the edge; Garth hates heights. GB loves to try new things; Garth is a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy…GB loves the control, the responsibilities, and the duties that come with the road. Garth enjoys being lazy, dreaming, and other senseless things that people call foolishness.”