by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night I watched the penultimate episode of Ken Burns’
fascinating Country Music documentary,
called “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?” after a song Waylon Jennings wrote for his 1975 album Dreaming
My Dreams that questioned the heavy-duty
commercialism of the Nashville scene and the way his previous albums had tried
to channel him into the typical Nashville format of the time. Indeed, the main
theme of this episode was the constant tug-of-war between Nashville executives
and producers — particularly Billy Sherrill, head of country music recording at
Columbia and architect of the so-called “countrypolitan” sound, a further
development of the string-heavy “Nashville Sound” that had come to dominate
country recording in the late 1950’s (though Columbia’s top country artist,
Johnny Cash, had been able to escape the big string orchestras and backup
choruses of the “Nashville Sound” because his records sold anyway) — and the
efforts of artists like Jennings, his friend and fellow Texan Willie Nelson,
and producer “Cowboy” Jack Clement (oddly Dayton Duncan’s script for this show
does not mention Clement’s past
as a producer and assistant to Sam Phillips at the nervy Sun Records label,
where he’d produced Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich — ironically Rich
was one of the artists Billy Sherrill grabbed hold of, shoved into the
“countrypolitan” mold, and had a huge hit with “Behind Closed Doors” that
cracked the pop market; Clement had produced Rich as a sort of white Fats
Domino while Sherrill made him a crooner) to break the mold and make their
music their own way. In 1972 Waylon Jennings fired his manager, hired a new one
and renegotiated his RCA Victor contract to win total control over his records
—including what songs he recorded and where he recorded them (before that RCA
had insisted that all RCA artists
had to record in RCA-owned studios; Jennings wanted to make his records in the
independent “Hillbilly Central” studio owned by Clement and Hazel Smith, the
woman who coined the term “outlaws” for country artists like Jennings and
Nelson who broke the Nashville mold and made their own music their own way) —
and the result that, freed from the constraints of the Nashville studio system,
Jennings’ record sales soared.
So did Willie Nelson’s after he left Nashville
altogether for his native state of Texas, settled in Austin, sang on the 1975
premiere of Austin City Limits
and became the headline artist at a raunchy, hippie-ish nightclub called
Armadillo World Headquarters. The version of Willie Nelson’s career given here
is the print-the-legend one which locates his artistic and commercial
breakthrough with his 1975 album Red-Headed Stranger, recorded at an independent studio in Austin for
merely $4,000 and his first release under his new contract with Columbia.
Actually, I’ve long regarded the album Nelson did just before Red-Headed Stranger, Phases and Stages, as Nelson’s masterpiece. Phases and
Stages is an audacious concept album about
a romantic breakup, told from the woman’s point of view on side one and the
man’s point of view on side two, and it was the album he had in current release
when he made the first Austin City Limits episode and stunningly performed two of the songs from the “man’s”
side, “I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone” and “It’s Not Supposed to Be That
Way.” Alas, Nelson had made it for Atlantic Records, and just as it was
released Atlantic decided to close down their country division and release
Nelson from his contract, so one of the monumental masterpieces of country
music went almost unheard. Fortunately Nelson had another concept album almost
as good in mind for his follow-up — even though when he sent the tape to
Columbia’s offices in Nashville Billy Sherrill proclaimed it unreleasable.
Eventually Sherrill decided to put it out with the expectation that it would
fail and Nelson would then become more tractable and make records according to
the standard commercial formulae — only Red-Headed Stranger became an enormous hit, stayed on the country charts
for over two years, crossed over into the pop charts, got a rave review from Rolling
Stone and turned Willie Nelson from an
obscure singer-songwriter into a national institution. Nelson got it again from
the “suits” at Columbia when he wanted to record an album of 1920’s, 1930’s and
1940’s standards — he’d had good response from audiences when he played Hoagy
Carmichael’s “Stardust” live and he thought he could sell an entire album of
similar songs and title the album Stardust. Columbia didn’t want to release Willie Nelson singing such old-fashioned
songs but the album was a hit and rekindled interest in the Great American
Songbook among younger record buyers. (When I saw the 1981 documentary on Chuck
Berry, Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll,
I was particularly struck by a sequence in which Berry, accompanied only by his
own guitar, sang the 1931 song “I’m Through with Love” — and I wondered why
Berry hadn’t recorded a standards album at a time when his career could have
used a major boost. Judging from that performance, a Chuck Berry standards album
in 1971 would have been an artistic triumph — and the success of Willie
Nelson’s three standards albums indicates a similar record from Berry might
have sold well, too.)
Other topics covered in this episode — which at 2 hours
and 20 minutes was considerably longer than the previous six, which had kept
themselves to two hours — included the emergence of Hank Williams, Jr. and
Johnny Cash’s daughter Rosanne as major artists in their own right. Williams fils got the same treatment from his mother, Audrey, as Ernest
Tubb had got from Jimmie Rodgers’ widow almost two decades earlier: she managed
his career, billed him as “HANK WILLIAMS Jr.,
with the “Jr.” in tiny type, and from age eight trotted him out on stage and
told him to sing only his daddy’s songs. Though this isn’t mentioned in this
film, while Hank Williams, Jr. was still only a teenager he was pressed into
service by MGM’s film studio (naturally he released his records through MGM’s
recording company, as his dad had) to be the voice double for Your Cheating
Heart, a biopic of Hank Williams, Sr. with
George Hamilton playing him on screen. Once Hank Williams, Jr. turned 21 and
legally became an adult, he fired his mom as his manager and insisted that he
was going to be his own man and sing his own songs (though decades later, when
he assembled a boxed set of his records, he called it The Bocephus
Box after the weird nickname his dad had
given him) — and the style he hit on was the so-called “Southern Rock” of the
Allman Brothers, Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Marshall Tucker Band, which makes Hank
Williams, Jr. a country innovator in his own right because these days almost all country records, especially by male artists, sound
like Southern rock. (Interestingly, the Burns documentary wraps up the story in
1996 and therefore ignores everything that’s happened in country music in the
23 years since then, which seems strange.) The show also covers the phenomenon
of country duets that sold a lot of records during the 1970’s, many of them by
artists who had independent reputations as solo acts: Conway Twitty and Loretta
Lynn (like Jerry Lee Lewis, Twitty had started as a rock act but switched to
country during rock’s brief fade in popularity in the early 1960’s before the
Beatles came over from Britain, revitalized the rock scene and made it bigger
than ever), Bill Anderson and Jan Howard, Kenny Rogers and Dottie West, and the
biggest joint act of all, George Jones and Tammy Wynette. They got married in
1969 after both having been married twice before, separated in 1973, reconciled
but finally divorced in 1975 — but they were both under contract to Columbia
(Wynette on the big label and Jones on its Epic subsidiary) and Billy Sherrill,
noting that their records together sold much better than each did separately,
kept throwing them back together in the studio even after their real-life
relationship definitively ended.
The show also profiled another artist who
emerged from under the shadow of a male collaborator into a huge solo career:
Dolly Parton, who was originally the protégé of old-time singer Porter Wagoner.
Though the two weren’t a real-life couple, Wagoner ruled Parton’s career with
an iron hand, keeping her under contract to appear on his own TV show (where he
introduced her with patronizing lines calling her a “little girl” and other
demeaning things) and recording duets with her as well as controlling what she
could record as a solo artist (Parton’s first single was the ridiculously
titled “Dumb Blonde,” to which Parton replied, “I’m not dumb — and I’m not
really blonde, either”). I had been under the impression that Parton’s
best-known song (though not in her own recording!), “I Will Always Love You,”
had been written years later for the film The Best Little Whorehouse
in Texas, but according to this show it was
written when she was about to leave Wagoner’s suffocating employ and strike out
on her own and was a statement of her profoundly mixed feelings about him and
the way he’d handled and mentored her career. Parton struck out on her own and
her first post-Wagoner hit was “Jolene” — a song which makes an interesting
counterpoint with Loretta Lynn’s “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man).”
Parton’s Jolene is woman enough
to take her man, but the song pleads with her not to. Then Parton took off with
the series of pop records that definitively broke her out of the country
stereotype — “Here You Come Again,” “Heartbreaker” and the title song from the
movie Nine to Five (a comic
masterpiece which did well the same plot premise the recent film Horrible
Bosses did wretchedly), in which she was
also one of the three female leads and held her own as an actress with the
other two, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin. Rosanne Cash’s career had some of the
same push-pull as Hank Williams, Jr.’s (though since her dad was still alive and
she was a different gender she at least escaped being cast as the Johnny Cash
lama the way Williams, Jr. had been cast as his dad’s!); she grew up mostly
with her mom but got to visit dad on his tours, and on one bus ride with him
she stated her intention to become a songwriter. Johnny Cash asked his daughter
about a number of classic songs, including “Wreck of the Old 97” (the very
first country song to be a hit on records — for Vernon Dalhart in 1924 — though
oddly the first episode of Burns’ documentary didn’t mention it!) and “Long
Black Veil,” and when she confessed she hadn’t heard any of the songs her dad was mentioning he made her a
list of 100 songs she should hear before starting her own career. The show
mentioned Rosanne Cash’s collaboration with and marriage to Rodney Crowell —
though it did not note that they
divorced in 1991 — and her brief move to Europe, where she made her first album
in Germany (haven’t heard it? Almost no one else has, either), her signing with
Columbia (her daddy’s label) and the explosive success of her second Columbia
album, Seven Year Ache.
The
overall theme of this episode of Country Music was the explosion in its popularity as, ironically,
it started breaking out of its ghetto; the transition of the Grand Ole Opry
from its original home at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium to a $65 million
“Opryland” complex outside the Nashville city limits that included a theme park
as well as a new state-of-the-art theatre (and the intriguing opening
performance at the new theatre, which began with a film clip of Roy Acuff and
his band playing “Wabash Cannonball” in the 1940’s and segued into Acuff and
his then-current musicians playing the same song live and not missing a beat in
the transition) was reflected in a transition in the music itself as well as
the way its performers presented themselves. Just a few years after the Byrds
had been booed off the Ryman stage for wearing their hair long, the Opry
audience regularly watched guys with long hair who dressed in casual shirts and
tight blue jeans instead of the outré suits of the 1950’s and 1960’s — and the music they heard transcended
the limits of traditional country into what has come to be called “Americana.”
One artist profiled was Emmylou Harris, who had begun as a coffeehouse folk singer
until she hooked up with Gram Parsons of the Byrds (during their brief country
phase) and the Flying Burrito Brothers, sang backup on his solo albums and
underwent what she described as a “conversion” to country music. Among the
songs Harris picked up on the country albums she started making in the 1970’s
was “Pancho and Lefty,” a story of a Mexican bandido and his white friend who turned him in and felt
guilty about it for the rest of his long life, written by an eccentric
Texas-born songwriter named Townes Van Zandt. Willie Nelson heard Harris’s
version and thought it would be a great title song for the album he and Merle
Haggard were recording together — he even woke Haggard up at 4 a.m. and
insisted on them recording the song then and there (Haggard thought his vocal
was terrible and asked Nelson for permission to redo it while he was fully
awake, but Nelson said no) — and the result was yet another one of Willie
Nelson’s unlikely 1970’s hits. (One of the great unfulfilled projects of Willie
Nelson’s career was a duets album featuring Townes Van Zandt with other
singers; working on a medical deadline because Van Zandt was terminally ill, he
got all Van Zandt’s parts recorded in time but couldn’t get financial backing
to bring in the other voices he wanted to pair with Van Zandt’s.)
