Last night’s episode of the Ken Burns documentary series Country Music had the rather pretentious (even for Ken Burns!) title “The Sons and Daughters of America” and dealt with the years 1964-1968. Of course the years 1964-1968 were also a fraught time for American politics and society — the world of the civil rights movement and its two big legislative successes, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (the latter of course since having been eviscerated by the U.S. Supreme Court, with the result that white Southern governments are once again massively denying the rights of Black people to vote, only now it’s the Republican instead of the Democratic party that’s the practitioners and beneficiaries of racism), the Viet Nam war, and the women’s liberation movement. The usual assumption of those of us who grew up in the political Left of the late 1960’s was that country music was on the Right side of all these issues — the show cuts off just before Merle Haggard records “Okie from Muskogee,” the Right-wing backlash song par excellence and a good enough song Leftist singer-songwriter Phil Ochs covered it and said that in Haggard the American Right finally had a songwriter as good as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan or anyone on the American Left. The truth as Burns presents it is a lot more complicated than that.
The main artists chronicled in this episode are Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn and the first major Black singer to perform country music exclusively, Charley Pride. The segments on Cash deal with his emergence as at least something of a political progressive with the 1964 album Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian; the back-breaking performance schedule that led him to become addicted to amphetamines; his struggle against that addiction (his fiancée June Carter got all his friends together and staged what would now be called an “intervention”) and his triumphant comeback with the 1968 album Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. I’ve long regarded the Folsom Prison album as a masterpiece for the same reasons Burns and his writer, Dayton Duncan, do: not only did Cash bring his entire touring troupe (including June Carter and her mom and two sisters — the second generation of the Carter Family — the Statler Brothers, who weren’t named Statler and only two of whom were brothers, and Cash’s former Sun labelmate, rockabilly star Carl Perkins) to the prison, he did not do his regular concert set. Instead, he cherry-picked his repertoire and played only songs dealing with crime and prison, subjects his audience could relate to — and if that weren’t enough, on the initial LP release he wrote his own liner note, a savage and surprisingly radical attack on the whole idea of prison:
Behind the bars, locked out from
society, you’re being re-habilitated, corrected, re-briefed, re-educated on
life itself, without your having the opportunity of really reliving it. You’re
the object of a widely planned program combining isolation, punishment,
training, briefing, etc., designed to make you sorry for your mistakes, to
re-enlighten you on what you should and shouldn’t do outside, so that when
you’re released, if you ever are, you can come out clean, to a world that’s supposed
to welcome you and forgive you.
Can it work??? “Hell, no,” you say.
How could this torment possibly do anybody any good? … But then, why else are
you locked in? You sit on your cold, steel mattressless bunk and watch a
cockroach crawl out from under the filthy commode, and you don’t kill it. You
envy the roach as you watch it crawl out under the cell doors. …
You’d like to say that you are
waiting for something, but nothing ever happens. There is nothing to look
forward to. You make friends in the prison. You become one in a “clique,” whose
purpose is nothing. Nobody is richer or poorer than the other. The only way
wealth is measured is by the amount of tobacco a man has, or “Duffy’s Hay,” as
tobacco is called.
All of you have had the same things
snuffed out of you. Everything it seems that makes a man a man — women, money,
a family, a job, the open road, the city, the country, ambition, power,
success, failure — a million things. Outside your cellblock is a wall. Outside
that wall is another wall. It’s twenty feet high, and its granite blocks go
down another eight feet in the ground. You know you’re here to stay, and for
some reason you’d like to stay alive — and not rat.
Indeed, the sequel to the story of Cash’s prison albums —
the one from Folsom and the follow-up from San Quentin that generated the
biggest hit he ever had, “A Boy Named Sue” — is that the American Left started
to think of Cash as “our” country singer (as opposed to Merle Haggard, “their”
country singer). He’d already been validated in our eyes by hanging out with
Bob Dylan (who duetted with him on the remake of Dylan’s “Girl from the North
Country” on the Nashville Skyline album;
Dylan also wrote a song for Cash, “Wanted Man,” that appeared on the San
Quentin album), and when “Okie from
Muskogee” came out Cash wrote an answer song, “What Is Truth?,” which directly
compared Richard Nixon to Pontius Pilate — and which he sang to Nixon’s face at
a White House concert at which Nixon had asked him to sing “Okie from Muskogee”
and a terrible Right-wing song called “Welfare Cadillac.” There’s also an odd
Cash story here I hadn’t heard before: apparently in the mid-1960’s, when he
and his then-wife Vivian Liberto (who, as her name suggests, was Italian and
therefore relatively dark-skinned and dark-haired) were photographed following
one of his busts for pill possession and a racist newsletter reprinted the
photo, claimed that Liberto was Black and called for a boycott of Cash’s
records because he was a drug addict (true, at least then) and he had a stable
of Black mistresses (definitely false).
The Country Music program also deals with a new style of country — or,
rather, a sort of punk-like return to the traditions — that came from
Bakersfield, California and started with Buck Owens. Owens came up playing bars
in the Central Valley of California that were a lot like the honky-tonks in
which Hank Williams had got his start (and had celebrated in song after song!):
small spaces crammed full of people who wanted to drink, dance and cut up. To play
for those audiences you had to be loud; you had to play with a strong rhythm
(which is why the Bakersfield bands included drummers at a time when the Grand
Ole Opry still frowned on them — and the drummers played in jazz style, often
driving the songs with cymbals rather than actual drums); and you couldn’t
engage in any of the pop pretensions of the “Nashville Sound.” The show
included a remarkable ad Owens placed in a country-music trade paper pledging
that “I will never make a record that is not a country record” — an obvious, if
veiled, reference, to the orchestral pop being churned out by the Nashville
studios with string sections and backup choruses — and ending, “Country music
and country music fans made me what I am today. And I will never forget that.”
The segment on Merle Haggard, the next great country singer to come from
Bakersfield, is especially revealing because it shows that he was one of the
most significantly proletarian voices in the genre. Haggard had been in and out of prison in his teens
— he worked up from the usual juvenile offenses to more serious crimes like
burglary — and because of his long record he got sentenced to San Quentin while
only 20. He’d already escaped from various juvenile facilities and plotted an
escape from the “Q” as well, only at the last minute the prisoner he planned to
escape with, John “Rabbit” Kendrick, told him to stay behind because Haggard
had real talent as a musician and he should wait to be released legally and
then pursue music as a lawful career. (Kendrick made his escape but shot and
killed a police officer and was ultimately returned to prison, and eventually
executed.) Haggard was also inspired when Johnny Cash gave a concert at San
Quentin in 1959 (so Cash didn’t
start doing prison concerts in the late 1960’s as we thought back then!), and
when he got out he worked his way up the ladder to a major-label recording
contract with Capitol and a series of records that at least vaguely alluded to
his past, including the death of his father when Haggard was just 9. Haggard
and his people worried about what the revelation that he was an ex-con would do
to his career — though when it finally came out it just added to his “outlaw”
image and mystique. The show also detailed the unexpected career of Roger Miller,
who began as a country fiddle player and bombed out on several labels until he
cut what he thought was going to be his last album (for Mercury’s Smash
subsidiary), which included a song called “Dang Me.” Then Miller left Nashville
for Los Angeles to pursue a career as a stand-up comedian — until, to his utter
astonishment, he heard “Dang Me” on the radio and suddenly realized that
without knowing it he’d made a hit record. He followed it up with “King of the
Road,” which in a way comes off as a surprisingly progressive song about
working-class misery (the singer is running a trailer park and is so desperate
financially he doesn’t even have the money to smoke), and his records pretty
much alternated between romantic ballads like “Little Green Apples” and novelty
songs. Miller was one of quite a few country artists at the time whose records
had such broad appeal they crossed over to the mainstream pop charts.
Another
singer profiled in the program was Loretta Lynn, who was actually mentioned at
the end of episode four traveling the country with her husband and their four
kids (later there’d be two more) to promote her self-produced record “I’m a
Honky Tonk Girl” — her answer record to Kitty Wells’ answer record, “It Wasn’t
God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels,” to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life” — a
scene that will be familiar to anyone who saw the Lynn biopic Coal
Miner’s Daughter, with Sissy Spacek
superbly acting and singing
Loretta Lynn and Beverly D’Angelo as her mentor, Patsy Cline. The treatment of
Lynn here shows little of her relationship with Cline, but it emphasizes that
she was the first woman country artist to write her own songs. The conventional
wisdom in the business had been that male artists could make careers out of
their own songs (as Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash had done) but
women couldn’t. Lynn not only defied the conventional wisdom but took such
pride in her songwriting she called one of her albums Loretta Lynn
Writes ’Em and Sings ’Em. What’s more, her
songs took an assertive, independent attitude towards men and relationships —
she wrote “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)” when she caught her
husband, Doolittle “Mooney” Lynn, cheating on her; she wrote “Don’t Come Home
A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” when he came home one night, drunk as a
skunk and smelling like it, and she found him so repulsive she refused to have
sex with him; and she wrote “The Pill” as a statement of women’s reproductive
choice after she’d seen so many women cranking out babies one after another and
sacrificing all their other ambitions to take care of them. “The Pill” was so
controversial that Lynn’s label, Decca, held it back from release for two years
— and when it finally came out it aroused the “moral” indignation Decca feared,
but it also won Lynn a lot of fans outside the country-music community and made
her a weird sort of feminist heroine.
The other story Burns and Dayton told of
a singer who broke down country music’s barriers was Charley Pride, the first
African-American singer who took up country music as his preferred genre. It helped that he had a warm, rich, romantic
baritone voice that anyone who heard it without knowing what he looked like fell in love with.
Pride’s managers and his record label, RCA Victor, treaded so gingerly around
the issue of Pride’s race that they didn’t send out the customary publicity
photographs with the promotional copies of his records, and as a result he
built up an audience of people who had no idea he was Black. Pride, who’s still
very much alive and was interviewed for this show, recalled being given an
informal list of the most racist people in the country-music world, and number
one on that list was the established star Faron Young — who’s depicted here
singing “Hello, Walls,” a Willie Nelson composition whose success in Young’s
recording launched Nelson’s career (and Nelson also recorded it himself as the
title track of his first album). Pride decided to beard the lion in his den; he
made an appointment to see Faron Young — and Young loved Pride’s voice, didn’t
give a damn about his color, and gave his career a major boost. Pride also
recalled a concert he gave in Detroit as part of a package show to some of
those audiences who’d heard his voice on radio but had no idea he was Black.
The announcer introduced him — “Ladies and gentlemen, Charley Pride” — and the
audience started applauding. Then the applause died down and was replaced by
shocked gasps as they got their first look at him. Then they started clapping
again when he began to sing and they apparently decided they still loved his
voice even now that they knew it was coming from a Black body.
Though Pride
still had some odd problems — including his record company forbidding him to
cover “Green, Green Grass of Home” because the song contains a reference to a
woman with blonde hair the singer intends to greet once he gets back to that
green, green grass of home (Nat “King” Cole had had to face a similar issue in
the 1950’s when he recorded “Lulu’s Back in Town” and got to the line describing
all the other women he’s going to forsake now that Lulu’s back in town — he had
to change “All my blondes and brunettes” to “All my Harlem coquettes”) — he
went on to a monumentally successful career that broke the color line Nashville
had put up after the Opry had been forced to fire its pioneering Black
harmonica player, DeFord Bailey, in 1941. The message of this episode of Country
Music seems to be that country music is
considerably more complex politically than the picture we had of it in the late
1960’s (when Richard Nixon’s ad team wrote a country song to promote Nixon’s
1968 Presidential campaign and found it hard to get country singers to perform
it because most were backing the racist independent campaign of George Wallace)
and wasn’t the Right-wing dead zone we all thought it was after hearing “Okie
from Muskogee.”
