Dreaming Out Loud

by Bruce Feiler

  In that way, Raul and his band became a perfect expression of the New Nashville, where angry young men seem to come to grow old. Whereas once he seemed revolutionary, Nashville’s answer to the Rainbow Coalition (as a first-generation Cuban-American, he was the first Hispanic performer to have notable success in country since Freddie Fender rode “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” to a brief run in the seventies), now he became nostalgic. Music might not be able to save the world, but it could capture the idealized America he had envisioned as a child. “I’m a huge fan of the early sixties,” Raul told me, referring to the music of his idols—Bobby Vinton, Herb Albert, Keely Smith, Perez Prado—as “the music of dorks.” “I would like to bring back some of the values we had then, some of our goals. People seemed to have a hope back then. But it has to be subtle, not slapping you across the face, like my earlier material. That’s the difference. We are ‘entertainers,’ after all.”

  Accepting that equation is what kept them in Nashville. Others who pushed the envelope in country—Lovett, Griffith, k. d. lang—were ultimately pushed out of town, left to peddle their music from the chancier realms of Los Angeles or New York. For better or worse, those artists refused to subscribe to the mainstream demands that country radio imposes and that country labels demand. That was the fatal flaw of Nashville in the mid-nineties: Having achieved the breadth of market it had sought for so long, it no longer seemed capable of accommodating the breadth of its own audience. That the Mavericks, even the defanged Mavericks, were able to persevere through this system, mixing their rock ‘n’ roll heroics with a retro-country message (“I want to tell people to lighten up,” Raul told me. “Have a drink. Have a smoke. It’s not going to kill you. Relax…”), offered a faint ray of hope: Perhaps Nashville might be able to produce a music broad enough in its origins to reflect the country as a whole.

  Later that night, in a windowless club in Belfast, I watched with heart-pounding delight as six hundred people stood shoulder to shoulder and shrieked their way through the Mavericks’ crotch-grabbing version of Johnny Cash’s seminal hit “Ring of Fire.” For a second, I thought my eyes would burn, the energy in the room was so intense. And for an instant, I believed that Nashville might, someday, realize its dream of producing “America’s Music.”

  That feeling didn’t last long. A month after the Mavericks made their triumphant tour through Europe, Cleve Francis prepared to take the stage of the legendary Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia, for his valedictory concert. “My lifelong dream wasn’t to become a musician,” Cleve told me just hours before the show. We were sitting in a diner across the street from the club, eating salads and vegetable soup. Five years earlier, the forty-five-year-old Cleve had left his cardiology practice in Virginia and moved to Music City for a shot at becoming the first African American country artist in over a generation. He was handsome—a shorter version of Denzel Washington—with a gentle voice and a cropped goatee.

  “My lifelong dream wasn’t to become a doctor either,” he said. “I just wanted to be successful. My family was poor. I had no intention of being poor. My family was uneducated. I had no intention of being uneducated. My family had never left the state of Louisiana. I had every intention of traveling. I guess you could say I’ve done everything I ever wanted…Oh, yeah, except be a successful country music artist.”

  For a time, it seemed as if Cleve might achieve that dream. After bankrolling an album on an independent label in the late 1980s, Cleve forked out $25,000 to shoot a video for the album’s first single, “Love Light.” Released in April 1990, the same month as “The Dance,” the video for “Love Light” surprised everyone by landing at number nine on CMT’s Top 10. Jimmy Bowen, by then at Capitol Records, saw the video and offered Cleve a deal. “Bowen deserves a lot of credit,” Cleve said. “He sat me down and said, ‘I don’t know if this is going to happen. It’s been a long time since a black man pulled this off. But you sound genuine to me.’” On the strength of the video alone, the album, Tourist in Paradise, earned advance orders of 100,000, an astounding figure for an unproven artist. Even more importantly, the press lapped up the story of the doc who chucked it all for his dream. There were pieces in The New York Times (“A Physician who Heals with Both Science and Art”), the Chicago Tribune (“Two Practices Make Perfect”), and USA Today (“Cleve Francis Is Feeling His Musical Pulse”). People magazine, topping even the best pun headline writers in America, ran a two-page story called “Country Doctor” (“Singer-cardiologist Dr. Cleve Francis can break your heart and mend it!”), which included a picture of Cleve in a lab coat over a hospital gurney holding a stethoscope to the heart of a six-string guitar.

  With all this momentum, he seemed like a sure bet. The album’s first single, though, failed to make it past the forties on the chart. His second single stalled in the thirties. Through two more albums and seven more singles, none would go higher. “I don’t want to sound like sour grapes,” Cleve said. “I know I had several strikes against me. I was older. I was a doctor. Many people thought this was a lark. But I also know that most people in control of the industry are between forty and fifty, and that’s an age where race comes into play. The fans didn’t mind. I’ve got rooms full of letters that prove it. But I talked to club owners who wouldn’t book me, fair organizers who wouldn’t have me, and radio programmers who said they wouldn’t play my music because they thought it was a joke: a black guy singing country music.” He paused to catch his breath. “That has to do with a lack of education,” he said. “We simply have a whole generation of people out there who don’t know the history of country music.”

  In one sense, Cleve was right. The history of Southern music is full of stories about the influence of blacks on traditional white music. In a TBS series on country music that aired not long after that night, legend after legend in Nashville’s pantheon stared into the camera and proclaimed their debt to blacks or black music. For some, the link was to the black church; for others, the blues. For still more, like Johnny Cash, Bill Monroe, and Waylon Jennings, the connection was to the entire culture of rural blacks that permeated the lives of rural whites. “I had this friend in the flats,” Waylon told me, referring to the black part of town where he delivered ice. “He taught me to move all my strings up on my guitar and put a banjo string on the bottom. That way you could push the strings and make a more bluesy sound. One day I was talking to my dad. I said, ‘Daddy, what would you think if you took the mix of country music with blues?’ He said, ‘It might be good. I know a lot of people who like blues.’ It wasn’t that long before I heard Elvis.”

  Today, thirty years after many of those legends were at the height of their popularity, the country music community is more removed from the African American community than at any time in its history. Despite three decades of improved racial integration in the South, as well as a decade of booming sales and audience growth, at the time of Cleve’s farewell concert there were not only no black artists with major record deals in Nashville, but also no black label executives, only one or two black songwriters, and only a handful of black backup musicians. With Nashville’s grip on the radio market and its prominence in the sales market, country was, by default, the largest segregated corner of American music. The question—why?—had haunted me from the first time I met Cleve and, by the time of his concert in Alexandria, had led me to perhaps the saddest recognition of what country music at century’s end had to say about America.

  The easiest explanation for Music Row’s white face would be to dismiss the industry—and its audience—as racist. Even a cursory examination of country music, though, suggests this isn’t so. First, country’s audience is far broader, far younger, and far better educated than it was in the past. If the American public will embrace Dolly Parton’s version of “I Will Always Love You,” Vince Gill’s duet version with Dolly, and Whitney Houston’s version, it’s hard to believe they also wouldn’t embrace it coming out of the mouth of a black country singer. Second, the executives who run Mu
sic Row these days are no longer country bumpkins. “I’m not saying that bigotry and racism don’t exist in our business,” said Tim DuBois, the head of Arista and a former official with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, “because they do. But I guarantee you that if there were a marketplace for a black artist, and if there were a talented person out there, few people in this town wouldn’t sign that talent.” In Nashville, the only thing more powerful than black or white is green.

  Instead, the real reason for the absence of blacks in country music is more subtle, though no less troubling. Although no one intended it, country music has become yet another example of a widening racial gulf in American culture, where blacks and whites choose to watch different television programs, read different books, and listen to different kinds of music. In other words, it’s voluntary segregation. In a world of choices, blacks have few reasons to pick country music. This is the conclusion Tony Brown came to after looking for a black artist for years. “It’d either be some black kid trying to sing like Charley Pride,” he told me, “only a really bad version of that. Or it’d be somebody who really sings like James Ingram, who decided he couldn’t make it in pop music, so he could make it in country. If you’re a young person with real talent, you’re going to be a pop star because that’s the biggest star. To be in country music, you have to love country music or you have to think it’s such a stupid industry and you’re so much better than it that they won’t know the difference.”

  Naturally, since blacks and whites had fewer options forty years ago, more people shared cultural traditions. Particularly in the rural South, the cradle of country music, blacks and whites lived and performed in close proximity to one another, promoting cross-pollination. “Thirty years ago, you could rarely meet a white Southerner who not only knew a black Southerner, but who loved one as well,” Alice Randall, the only African American songwriter to have a number one country song in the 1990s, told me. “For all the racial hatred, white Southerners had black people working in their homes, as baby nurses, as longtime servants, as illegitimate relations.” These two traditions, which had developed along separate but related tracks throughout much of American history, collided in the 1950s. The integration of black rhythm and blues into mainstream white culture—first with rock ‘n’ roll, later with Motown—mirrored many of the changes taking place in the civil rights movement. Suddenly blacks were not only influencing American culture, they were redefining American culture, particularly music.

  Nashville, meanwhile, which has a lower percentage of blacks than almost any other major Southern city (around 20 percent, as compared with over 50 percent in Memphis, Atlanta, and Birmingham; the reason: There were fewer plantations in the area), resisted many of these changes and clung to its more traditional (read: segregated) past. The leaders of the Grand Ole Opry in particular were reluctant to accept black influences into their music. “It was what they called ‘n-word music,’” Waylon told me, referring to the word he preferred not to use: nigger-bop. The Opry even banned drums from its stage. By doing so, Nashville turned its back on many of the central features of black music at exactly the moment they were penetrating American culture at large. At a time of youthful rebellion, sexual revolution, and black empowerment, country set itself up as America’s lily white, above-the-waist popular music. “One can find musical sources for that split,” Jim Ed Norman, the head of Warner/Reprise Nashville, told me, “but I can’t help but think there was some sort of sociopolitical context for that split as well. It had to do with what was symbolized, or insinuated, in the rock and rockabilly styles. I can remember riding in a car one time with an uncle, and there was a battle of the radio stations. He was clearly more comfortable listening to country music, and I noticed that any time anything stepped outside the boundaries, an insecurity rose up in him; it was safer and easier not to listen to that music.”

  No sooner had that split occurred than a complex economic system—record labels, charts, and radio stations—arose to service and, ultimately, to entrench this splintering. Ironically, the most prominent example of that splintering may be Charley Pride. Long before Pride emerged as a prominent country singer in the mid-1960s, blacks had been listening to and performing country music. Negro swing bands toured the Texas circuit. Harmonica player Deford Bailey was an early Opry star. Even Georgia-born Ray Charles put out several groundbreaking country records in the early 1960s in which he recorded country songs to R&B instrumentation. But Pride, a former player in the Negro baseball leagues, was the first to emerge as a superstar, helped by the fact that RCA deliberately withheld publicity photos from his early records. Still, it was not until he joked about his “permanent tan” that country fans accepted him, which they did warmly for two decades. What is striking about Pride’s career, though, is that he didn’t open a floodgate of African American performers. He was “no Jackie Robinson,” as Cleve had put it to me. He was an exception, not a role model. “Jackie Robinson was specifically picked to go into the major leagues because of the type of person he was,” Pride told me. “Nobody came to me.” If anything, blacks shunned him. “Not many of them bought my records or came to see me,” he said.

  Twenty years later, that creeping resegregation is almost total. Though many labels scrambled to find the “next Charley Pride,” none came close. Instead, the absence of even a negligible black presence on Music Row reflected the new middle-class reality of the industry. Whereas country was once concerned with the plight of rural whites and played directly into the homes of rural blacks, it became, over time, the near-exclusive purview of suburban whites. By doing so, it alienated blacks and became, in effect, the soundtrack of white flight—not angry at the world, just oblivious to it. Of course, there are blacks in the suburbs—about one third of all African Americans. And research suggests that as many as 17 percent of blacks do at least listen to country music. But those audience members are not being felt in the marketplace. “I’ve seen those data,” Tim DuBois said, “but I’ve also been to the concerts. Those people are invisible in the process.”

  Which is what’s so sad. At exactly the moment America was becoming more inclusive of African American culture, country music was becoming less so. Eventually even the music itself lost contact with its black roots. “Country basically is white music,” Tony Brown ultimately concluded. “Why would black people want to sing those straight notes? Why would a black person want to be in a format that gives any white singer who tries to do a little curlicue or deep groove so much grief? I work with artists, like Wynonna, who really draw from black music. But most people can’t. Reba would love to feel it, but she just can’t, and she doesn’t even know it. In the studio, when even a great hillbilly song doesn’t feel good, my terminology is: ‘It sounds too white.’ That means it has no feeling. To me, black music is about feeling, and white music is about no feeling.”

  That absence of feeling is one of country’s biggest drawbacks. As Alice Randall noted: “The black suburban experience is not the same as the white one. I have a child. My child goes to private school. She just spent the summer in France. But my child has been told by people that they would prefer she not be black. People have told her they would not have her over to the house to play. Some soft music that does not have a sense of the edge of life is not going to appeal to her. Her suburban experience is not one of ennui.” Perhaps that is the reason for the growing segregation. As the music has become more middle-class and the entertainment business more balkanized, country has assumed a position as the music of American bliss—a touch of regret every now and then, a hint of suburban angst, but, ultimately, an overarching sense of contentment.

  As Ed Morris, the former country editor of Billboard, summed it up for me: “Country is fundamentally based on the white experience. It’s about where whites live, what they read, what they see. And I don’t know if you should expect more from art. It’s putting a really heavy burden on artists to have them do what the culture at large hasn’t done. Sure, country music has failed, bu
t I don’t think the nation as a whole has done any better than we have.”

  Two hours later, Cleve Francis stepped to the door of the Birchmere’s spacious dressing room. He was wearing black boots, black jeans, and a black silk shirt. His vest was shimmering purple. Out in the audience, three hundred people, many friends, family, and former patients, crowded around neatly arranged tables with red-and-white-checked tablecloths. The atmosphere was jovial: local hero done good. Most did not know that at the end of the show Cleve would board a rented bus back to Nashville, pack his bags, and return the following week to his stethoscope.

  “To be honest, I’m a little relieved,” he said. “I know what I have to do. For me, it’s not to pursue this dream anymore. There’s just no point.”

  “And tonight?”

  “Tonight my thing is going to be just to entertain people. It’s not a Lenny Bruce thing where I’m going to go out and be political. I’m going to be true to what I do. History will judge Cleve Francis the singer, the philosopher, the scholar, the doctor.”

  “And what will history say?”

  “That he was good at what he did: singing lyrics, telling stories, and making people feel good.”

  VERSE IV

  THIRTEEN

  THE STAGE

  It was just before three o’clock in the morning when the giant corrugated metal door of Atlanta’s Omni Coliseum opened onto the foggy night. Outside, the first of ten brand-new hospital white tractor trailers was idling with its back panels facing the auditorium. Minutes later, the Peterbilt thirty-eight-foot truck inched its way into the building and a team of several dozen men swarmed around its doors. A few of the men did warm-ups. A handful smoked. One drank coffee. They were dressed in blue jeans, torn sweats, and shorts, with Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirts and Oakland Raiders parkas. They had on black Nike hightops, workboots, sandals. Each was sporting a well-used pair of gloves—woolen, stretched leather, canvas, mesh. And all were wearing a drop-dead I’m-a-professional expression as they freed the locks that turned the handles that opened the doors that were adorned with a frank admonition: NOT FOR HIRE. The only hint of celebrity on the trailers was a lavender circle on the back of each door inside of which was painted an understated purple g.