by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night KPBS ran the third episode of Ken Burns’
eight-part mega-documentary Country Music,
which I’m presuming took several years to produce since one of the interviewees
was Merle Haggard, who died in 2016 (and looks pretty much like death warmed
over here). This episode was called “The Hillbilly Shakespeare” — the titular
backwoods bard being Hank Williams, one of the three greatest solo artists
country music has ever produced (along with Jimmie Rodgers before him and
Johnny Cash afterwards) and a singer-songwriter who anticipated the soft-rock
guys of the 1970’s by writing songs based on his own personal experiences and
the emotions he felt over them. One day, when his wife Audrey refused to kiss him
(probably because Williams, a chronic alcoholic, reeked of liquor that night),
he stalked out and wrote a song about the quarrel called “You Win Again.” But
the show didn’t start with Williams and fortunately didn’t pretend that he was
the only significant country
musician of the years 1945-1953, the show’s titular chronology. (Williams’
recording career began in 1946 and ended with his death literally at the end of 1952, when he died in the back seat of
his Cadillac of an overdose of morphine and chloral hydrate while being driven
to a scheduled appearance in Canton, Ohio.) The show actually began with what
amounted to country music’s first tribute act: in 1936, three years after
Jimmie Rodgers’ death, his widow Carrie decided to resurrect him as much as possible.
She reached out to a young singer named Ernest Tubb who could do a reasonable
simulacrum of Rodgers’ throat yodel and went on tour with him — the posters
advertised “Mrs. JIMMIE RODGERS and Ernest Tubb” (which must have had a few
people scratching their heads and thinking, “Jimmie Rodgers? I thought he was
dead!”). Carrie Rodgers even let Tubb use Jimmie’s old custom-made Martin
guitar, which had “JIMMIE RODGERS” inlaid in mother-of-pearl on the fretboard
and the word “THANKS” printed on the back of the body so Rodgers could flip it
over at the end of the concert to thank his fans for their support. Tubb’s
career as the Jimmie Rodgers lama came to an abrupt end in 1940, when he
underwent a botched tonsillectomy — he kept his singing voice but lost the
ability to yodel — so he started writing and performing his own songs and soon
had a huge hit, “Walking the Floor Over You.”
Like Bob Wills’ “San Antonio
Rose” and “Mexicali Rose,” “Walking the Floor Over You” was covered by Bing
Crosby (backed by the Bobcats, the Dixieland band-within-the-band of the big
swing unit led by Bing’s brother Bob), and like the Wills covers, Bing totally
outsang Tubb but that wasn’t the point. The show quotes Tubb himself as saying
that the appeal of his records was precisely that he wasn’t that great a singer; he joked that his fans were the
women who played his records on jukeboxes and their husbands or boyfriends who
heard him and said, “I could sing
better than that!” The show also chronicled the career of Little Jimmy Dickens,
who was called that because he was only 5’ 4” tall (coincidentally also the
height of Charlie Chaplin) and he had to stand on a box when he sang duets with
a 6’ 2” partner; and Eddy Arnold, the first “country crooner” and one of the
three pre-Elvis clients of the notorious Col. Tom Parker. Parker had originally
worked in carnivals and managed animal acts; his first human client was Gene
Austin, the 1920’s superstar singer — his 1927 record of Walter Donaldson’s “My
Blue Heaven” was the best-selling record of anything until Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” 15 years later
— who hooked up with Parker in the 1930’s in an attempt at a comeback. After
Parker’s attempts to steer Austin to a comeback fizzled, he hooked up with
Arnold and his carny antics helped boost his career, but in 1952 Arnold fired
Parker and his only explanation was, “He’s a very loud man and I’m a very quiet
man.” Parker then managed Hank Snow and in 1955 he used his prestige as Hank
Snow’s manager to get Elvis Presley’s parents to agree to him as Elvis’s
manager, but Parker weaseled out of his deal to give Snow half of his profits
from Elvis in exchange for the boost he’d given promoting Parker to Elvis’s
parents, and for the rest of Snow’s life the mere mention of Parker’s name
would start him literally
screaming.
Getting back to Eddy Arnold, the quietude of his personality was
matched by the quietude of his music; while Hank Williams sang about cheating
lovers and cold, cold hearts, Arnold did warm ballads about smoothly
functioning relationships and was clearly influenced by Bing Crosby in the way
he phrased, though the presence of steel guitars and violins on his records
kept him rooted in the country tradition. The show also mentioned people they
had depicted in previous episodes, including Bill Monroe — who after the war
put together a hot bluegrass outfit featuring guitarist Lester Flatt and
virtuoso banjoist Earl Scruggs. Instead of the so-called “claw-hammer”
technique used by previous country banjo player, Scruggs developed a style of
picking with three fingers at once (a still photo of him shows him wearing ring
picks on all three picking fingers of his right hand) and was able to play
faster, flashier, more virtuosic runs than any previous banjo player. Monroe’s
mid-1940’s bluegrass outfit was hugely successful, but Flatt and Scruggs soon
left to form their own group (and ripped off Monroe’s instrumental “Blue Grass
Breakdown” for their first record, “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” a hit in 1947
and again 20 years later when it was used as the theme song for the movie Bonnie
and Clyde). Monroe’s response was to use
his clout with the producers of the Grand Ole Opry to keep Flatt and Scruggs
from getting booked on the show for at least two decades — one of Burns’
interviewees said of this, “Nobody knows how to keep a feud going longer and
stronger than a hillbilly” (which is certainly supported by the historical
record — do the names “Hatfield” and “McCoy” mean anything to you?).
There was
also a profile of the second generation of the Carter Family — sometimes so
billed and sometimes called “The Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle,” since
they consisted of Maybelle Carter and her three daughters, Helen, June and
Anita. June Carter is the best known of her generation of Carters because she
later married fellow country royal Johnny Cash — Cash’s touring troupe billed
some of the surviving Carters as “The Carter Family” and also included
rockabilly great Carl Perkins (composer of “Blue Suede Shoes” and a serious
rival to Elvis as the king of white rock in the mid-1950’s) — and the clips of
the second generation Carter Family shown here show a sweeter sound without
much of the original Carters’ pathos (even when they covered first-generation
Carter Family songs). The show mentions that to bolster their band
instrumentally, the second-generation Carters hired a hotshot young guitarist
named Chester Atkins, who later cut down his first name to “Chet” and became
one of the most sought-after studio players in Nashville — though the other
guitarists in Nashville originally tried to get him blacklisted and got the
owners of the Grand Ole Opry to make their offer to the Carters contingent on
their not using Atkins on the
Opry broadcasts. To her credit, Maybelle Carter told the Opry people, “You get
us with Atkins or you don’t get us at all,” and they held out for two years
until the Opry finally let Atkins
perform with the Carters on their sacred stage … where his jazz-influenced
style (like his friend Les Paul, with whom he made a late-career duet album
called Chester and Lester for RCA
Victor in 1978, he’d been influenced by jazz guitarists in general and Django
Reinhardt in particular) blew the other Nashville guitarists away, just as
they’d feared.
The show briefly mentions some of the other artists besides Hank
Williams who influenced the so-called “honky-tonk” style — Webb Pierce, Faron
Young and Lefty Frizzell (who gets somewhat short shrift — since he lived a lot
longer than Hank Willliams, Frizzell didn’t start the kind of legend Williams
did, but artists as disparate as Mose Allison and Willie Nelson have covered
his songs and he certainly counts as one of the greats) — and traces the
honky-tonk style itself to the closure of the big dance halls that had
supported both the big jazz bands and country-jazz “Western Swing” fusion
groups like Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys. Instead bands were forced to play in
small clubs where the patrons got so drunk they started fights — often over
women — and ultimately trashed the place. In many of the honky-tonks the owners
set up chicken-wire fences in front of the stage to prevent the musicians from
being injured by the chairs and bits of tables being thrown by the patrons.
Needing a way to be heard over the noise of the bar fights, the musicians in
these bands started using amplified instruments — much the way their confreres in jazz and blues were doing. One can trace the
electric guitar from Eddie Durham and Charlie Christian in jazz at the end of
the 1930’s to its adoption by blues musicians like Aaron “T-Bone” Walker (a
guitar student of Christian’s who switched from jazz to blues because it paid
better) and Muddy Waters in the 1940’s and its use by country musicians. It
also helped that instrument makers figured out how to make electrically
amplified pedal-steel guitars (though the first major musician to use one
wasn’t a country artist: it was the swing guitarist and bandleader Alvino Rey),
while the violinists started playing closer to the vocal mikes so their
instruments could be as loud as the guitars.
Of course Hank Williams’ saga is
the heart of this episode — his life was a harrowing succession of binges, pain
(he had a back condition since childhood that got worse when he had a car
accident on one of his long road trips), bad behavior, bitter fights with his
wives (Williams’ friends recall him often turning up literally on their doorsteps after Audrey or Williams’ second
wife, Debbie, threw him out), alcohol, drugs, problems with the management of
his shows (he first made it on the Louisiana Hayride, a would-be competitor to the Grand Ole
Opry that broadcast out of Shreveport and
had a reputation for booking edgier acts than the Opry did, including Williams
in 1948 and Elvis Presley in 1955) and great songs scribbled out on whatever
pieces of paper that came to hand, including the cardboard inserts that came
back with his shirts from the laundry. Williams couldn’t read or write music
(though his stage suit was prominently decorated with musical notes) and he
wrote songs by writing down the lyrics and keeping the melodies in his head
until he could get to a recorder and make demos. Williams’ songs crossed over
into other markets, and Tony Bennett had a number one hit with “Cold, Cold
Heart” even though he’s audibly uncomfortable with the song on his record. (One
of the best covers of Hank Williams during his lifetime was Jo Stafford’s
version of “Jambalaya” — it helped that Stafford was a Southerner herself and
she pronounced the word “bayou” correctly — it’s “BYE-yo,” not “BYE-you.”)
Like Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams
became an enormous star while living in almost constant pain and being well
aware that he couldn’t expect to live too long, and like Rodgers’ work there’s
a sense in Williams’ best songs that the Grim Reaper is standing over him,
ready to take him at any moment. It’s probably why most Williams fans prefer
his doom-laden ballads to his uptempo songs — though there were plenty of the
latter, including his early hit “Move It On Over” (Hank Williams, Jr. is
interviewed and demonstrates that the pioneering rock ’n’ roll hit “Rock Around
the Clock” is an almost total ripoff of “Move It On Over”) and “Kaw-Liga,” the
story of a romance between two cigar-store Indian statues (Williams had been
asked for a song about a romance between Native Americans, thought that was too
clichéd, and decided to make it a novelty about cigar-store Indians instead).
Indeed, when MGM Records issued Williams’ last sides after his death —
including the uncannily premonitory “Never Get Out of This World Alive” — for
their first release they marked “Kaw-Liga” as the A-side and “Your Cheating
Heart” as the B-side. The fans had other ideas: it was “Your Cheating Heart”
that became the hit and which MGM’s film studio used as the title of their
Williams biopic in 1964 (with George Hamilton playing him and Hank Williams,
Jr. as his voice double).
The “Hillbilly Shakespeare” episode ends with mention
of two records that served as an indication of how the role of women in country
music was about to change: in 1952 Hank Thompson recorded “The Wild Side of
Life,” a typical lament from the point of view of a husband lamenting that his
wife is leaving him to hang out at the honky-tonks and presumably pick up other
guys. A then little-known woman singer named Kitty Wells was angry at the
sexism (though that wasn’t a word yet) of Thompson’s songs and decided to write
an answer song from a woman’s point of view, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk
Angels,” which bluntly said that if your wife is running around on you, guys,
you have only yourself to blame: “There’s many times married men think they’re
still single/That has caused many a good girl to go wrong.” Wells’ record
actually outsold Thompson’s and laid the groundwork for the more assertive
generation of women country singers to come — Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Dolly
Parton — though as I noted in my comments on the previous Country
Music episode the first truly assertive
woman country singer was Rose Maddox of the Maddox Brothers and Rose (a band
which, like the current group The Band Perry, coupled male musicians who were
professionally competent with their sister, a woman who sang with deep, rich
intensity) — indeed The Maddox Brothers and Rose were my biggest discovery from
this show, a group mentioned on this show as pioneers of the flamboyant
pseudo-cowboy outfits that became de rigueur for country acts in the mid-1950’s and one I’d never
heard of before, but now that I’ve heard Rose Maddox’s voice leaping out past
the O.K. playing of her brothers I’ll never forget it and I’ll want to hear more
of it.
