by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Episode four of Country Music, Ken Burns’ eight-part mega-documentary (which goes on hiatus until
next Sunday and runs thereafter until the following Wednesday), was called “I
Can’t Stop Loving You” after the Don Gibson country hit that was covered by Ray
Charles for his 1962 album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (an oddly formal title for one of his greatest and
most heartfelt records, as well as a huge breakthrough for him that completed his breakout from the
rhythm-and-blues ghetto into the big white market that had begun with his last
studio album for Atlantic, The Genius of Ray Charles, and continued with his version of Hoagy
Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind” from his first ABC-Paramount album, Genius
Hits the Road). The show covered a
decade-long period of ferment for country music, and was bookended by the
deaths of Hank Williams at the end of 1952 and Patsy Cline on March 5, 1963 in
the crash of a private plane that also took the lives of two other country
stars, Hawkshaw Hawkins and Cowboy Copas. The parallels between that crash and
the one that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper four years
earlier are pretty eerie: not only were they caused by the same factor (a plane
flying under conditions that required navigation by instruments and a pilot
that didn’t have that skill), they took the lives of unique artists who, had
they lived, would have quite likely sped up the reunion of rock ’n’ roll with
the country side of its heritage that seemed like such a novelty when it
finally happened in the late 1960’s. There was even an interview with a later
country star who recalled seeing Cline in the next-to-last performance she ever
gave — which I couldn’t help but parallel with Bob Dylan’s statement when he
accepted his Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 1994 that he had seen the
next-to-last show Buddy Holly ever gave.
I kept score of the sheer number of
musicians mentioned on this program: Hank Snow, Chuck Berry (recording of
“Maybelline”), Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Ike
Turner and Jackie Brenston (recording of “Rocket 88”), Gus Cannon (Memphis Jug
Band, portrayed as mentor to Cash much the way itinerant Black musician Rufus
“Teetot” Payne had mentored Hank Williams), Rufus Thomas (recording of “Bear
Cat”), Wanda Jackson, Conway Twitty, Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly
(picture only), Brenda Lee, Ray Price, Marty Robbins, Louvin Brothers (Ira and
Charlie), Everly Brothers, Owen and Harold Bradley (producers), Boudleaux and
Felice Bryant (songwriters), Mel Tillis, Roger Miller, The Kingston Trio (won
first Best Country Performance Grammy for “Tom Dooley”), Lefty Frizzell
(comeback with “Long Black Veil”), Merle Haggard (inspired by a 1959 San
Quentin concert with Johnny Cash, which Haggard attended as an inmate), Willie
Nelson (sold his first two songs, “Family Bible” and “Night Life,” outright for
$200 and placed “Hello Walls” with Faron Young and “Crazy,” originally called
“Stupid,” with Patsy Cline), Jim Reeves, Jean Shepard (singer and wife of
Hawkshaw Hawkins, who was killed in the same March 5, 1963 plane crash as Patsy
Cline and Cowboy Copas), and Ray Charles (for his 1962 album Modern
Sounds in Country and Western Music and its
hit single, “I Can’t Stop Loving You”). The basic story the show told was the
galvanic challenge presented by the sudden emergence of rock in 1954 and the
cross-state challenge to the Nashville music establishment by the Sun Records
artists from Memphis, also in Tennessee but on the other end of the state and a
town on the Mississippi River. The Sun Records story is almost as well known as
the name of the biggest star it broke, Elvis Presley: in 1950 Sam Phillips and
his second cousin Dewey Phillips founded the Memphis Recording Service. They
offered portable recording equipment for people who wanted professional-quality
recordings of their weddings, funerals, lodge meetings or whatever; they
allowed people to make their own custom recordings in Phillips’ studio for $4 a
side; and they also recorded Black R&B artists and licensed their
recordings to other labels like Chess in Chicago and Modern in Los Angeles.
(Sometimes they licensed the same artists singing the same songs under
different titles to both Chess
and Modern — they did that with Howlin’ Wolf and precipitated a three-way legal
battle that resolved with Chess winning Howlin’ Wolf and Modern getting Rosco
Gordon.) In 1952 Sam Phillips decided to start his own label and sell his
records himself, and at first the Sun catalogue remained dominated by Black
artists, but Phillips told his friends, “If I can find a white artist who can
sing like the Black ones, I’ll make a million dollars.”
The white artist who
could sing like a Black one walked through the doors of the Memphis Recording
Service in 1953 and recorded an acetate of the Ink Spots’ hit “My Happiness”
and a country song called “That’s Where Your Heartaches Begin.” Sam Phillips
wasn’t there, but his assistant, Marion Keisker, was impressed enough with the
kid, a 19-year-old truck driver named Elvis Presley who was living with his
parents in a public housing project, that she took down his record on tape and
played it for Phillips later. The legend was that Elvis laid down that first disc
because he wanted to give it to his mother, but the Presleys didn’t own a
record player and it seems more likely that Elvis simply wanted to hear how his
own voice would sound on a record. Though there had been rock records before —
including Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” which as Hank Williams, Jr.
demonstrated on a previous Country Music episode is just a rewrite of Hank Williams’ first hit, “Move It On
Over” — Elvis created a sensation even though in the Sun years he was mostly
stuck on the ends of package bills headlined by established country artists
like Hank Snow. Snow was such a devotee of Jimmie Rodgers he even named his son
Jimmie Rodgers Snow, and he would stand up against the rock challenge in the
1950’s by embracing what came to be called the “Nashville Sound” — more on that
later. The other acts on those package tours found themselves having to cut
their own sets short because of the reception Elvis got from the audience —
which seemed to occur only on fast songs. This perplexed Elvis so much he asked
one of the other performers why the audience listened to his ballads politely
but went crazy when he did a fast song. “It’s the way you move, man!” he was told. Elvis’s smash success led to a
number of other artists coming to the Sun studios in Memphis and demanding
auditions. One of them was a former tenant farmer from Arkansas named Johnny
Cash; he’d grown up on a New Deal farming community in Dyess, Arkansas, and as
Colin Escott and Martin Hawkins noted in their book on Sun Records, the fact
that Cash grew up in an all-white farm community (like a lot of other New Deal
projects, it had to be restricted to whites so it would be approved by a
Congress dominated by racist white Southern Democrats) meant that his music had
fewer Black influences than Elvis’s (who’d grown up in cosmopolitan Memphis and
had hung out with B. B. King and other local Black artists) or his predecessors
like Jimmie Rodgers or Hank Williams.
Cash originally auditioned for Phillips
as a gospel singer, but Sam Phillips hadn’t been able to sell gospel music, so
he turned him down. Then Cash came back for a second audition and played “Hey,
Porter,” a song based on a poem Cash had written while a member of the U.S. Air
Force (he was actually named “J. R. Cash” on his birth certificate and the
“Johnny” came not from his parents but from the recruiting sergeant who signed
him up and insisted that the “J.” had to stand for something), and Sam Phillips signed him and recorded “Hey,
Porter,” backed with a quickly written song by Cash called “Cry, Cry, Cry” as
his first single. Cash had met his bandmates, guitarist Luther Perkins and
bassist Marshall Grant, when they were working in an auto garage in Memphis and
he was trying to sell vacuum cleaners door to door, and though it isn’t
stressed in this show Cash revolutionized country music by cutting out the
previously de rigueur instruments
like violin, mandolin and steel guitar. Though he wasn’t a rock singer — and he
knew it; he once said, “My voice is no good for frantic chanting,” and the one
rockabilly record he made, “Get Rhythm,” was a song he’d written for Elvis and
recorded himself only because Elvis turned it down — Cash stripped the country
sound to its basics and charted a way forward for country to keep going in the
face of the rock revolution. Though rock was essentially the child of country
and blues (and of course early country artists like Jimmie Rodgers had
themselves tapped into Black blues for the roots of their sound), so much so
that there was considerable overlap between the musicians and bands (Elvis got
his first sidemen, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, from a
country band called the Starlite Wranglers, and Bill Haley had two bands — the
Saddlemen, who played country; and the Comets, who played rock — but they were
the same people!), rock came close to wiping out the white country and Black
R&B sounds that had preceded and generated it. In the mid-1950’s the Grand
Ole Opry was often playing to half-filled houses and the number of radio stations
playing country music fell to about one-quarter of what it had been during the
late-1940’s boom.
Indeed, when the Grammy Awards were inaugurated in 1959, the
winner of the Best Country Vocal Performance was the Kingston Trio’s “Tom
Dooley,” a record by a group of white college-educated East Coast kids who’d
learned the song from a Black record from the 1920’s. (The song was based on a
real person, Tom Dula, but instead of being hanged by legal process the real
Tom Dula had been lynched.) Some country artists tried to ride out the rock
storm by playing and singing as they always had; some followed Cash’s example
and made their music simpler, more folk-like, driven by simple guitar leads and
often telling stories (like Lefty Frizzell’s “Long Black Veil,” which in 1959
gave him his first hit in eight years and became a standard in both country and
folk songbooks — Joan Baez, of all people, covered it and Johnny Cash played it
on his 1968 album Live at Folsom Prison, for which instead of just playing his regular concert set he
cherry-picked his repertoire and did songs about crime and prison his inmate
audience could relate to). Others moved their music towards the pre-rock pop
styles of singers like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, a style of singing that
had first come to the country world via Eddy Arnold. In the 1950’s record
producers Owen and Harold Bradley (brothers) opened a professional-quality
recording studio in Nashville to forestall a threatened move by Decca Records
to relocate their country-music operations to Dallas, and songwriters Boudleaux
and Felice Bryant (husband and wife) created material that would bridge the
gaps between country, pop and soft rock. Their first hit was the Everly
Brothers’ “Bye, Bye, Love,” and they quickly achieved a reputation as the go-to
writers for country artists looking for pop crossover material. Between them,
the Bradleys and the Bryants created what came to be called “The Nashville
Sound,” which was basically a twangy vocal and a discreet guitar overlaid on an
orchestra (multiple violins playing written symphonic-pop parts instead of the
traditional country fiddle) and backup singers (either the Jordanaires or the
Anita Kerr Singers, usually), a softer version of country that moved records
but didn’t really sound all that interesting or memorable except when a great vocal talent like Patsy Cline got in
front of the orchestra and poured her heart out with soul.
The show also
mentions Marty Robbins, though it doesn’t do justice to the quite remarkable
story behind his biggest record, Gunfighter Songs and Trail Ballads, and the huge hit single that broke from that album,
“El Paso.” Robbins had been born on the U.S.-Mexico border and the name of the
girl in “El Paso” came from a fellow student he’d known in the fifth grade.
He’d been signed by Columbia in the mid-1950’s and they’d positioned him as
their Elvis, giving him pop-rock songs like “A White Sport Coat (And a Pink
Carnation),” so when he told the company’s executives that he wanted to do an
album called Gunfighter Songs and Trail Ballads they told him that was way too purely “country” a concept to sell to the
crossover audience they’d been carefully building for him. Robbins was
insistent — either Gunfighter Songs and Trail Ballads would be his next Columbia album or they could
cancel his contract and let him go place it somewhere else. He recorded it, it
was a huge hit and “El Paso” became a breakout single even though at 4 minutes
30 seconds it was considerably longer than the songs AM radio usually played.
The latter part of the program focuses on Cline, her prickly relationships with
just about everybody — though,
like movie star Barbara Stanwyck, she was known for helping newcomers; both
Brenda Lee and Loretta Lynn had major career boosts from touring with Cline and
she also broke a new songwriter named Willie Nelson when she recorded a song
he’d originally called “Stupid” but at the last minute changed to “Crazy.”
Nelson had originally been so naïve about the ways of the music business he’d
sold his first two songs, “Family Bible” and “Night Life,” for just $200. When
he placed the song “Hello, Walls” with Faron Young, he offered to sell Young
all rights for $500. Young, to his credit, turned him down; instead he offered
to loan Nelson the $500 and
Nelson could pay him back from the royalties — which turned out to be enormous.
(“Hello, Walls” was also the title song of Nelson’s first album as an artist in
his own right.) Nelson was so grateful he went up to Young in the bar where
Nashville’s singers and songwriters hung out and gave him a full kiss on the
lips.
The show ends with profiles of its two most important artists, Cash and
Cline, telling the story of how Cash’s first marriage to Vivian Liberto (mother
of Rosanne Cash, who denounced the Cash biopic Walk the Line because of the way it depicted her mom) broke up
under the strains of his constant touring (and the prescription drug habit he
picked up to keep up his schedule) and his growing attraction to June Carter,
Maybelle’s daughter and part of the second-generation Carter Family that was
one of the acts in Cash’s touring company. As for Cline, I’ve written in these
pages before that, even though they worked in different genres, I think Patsy Cline was the real “white Billie
Holiday.” More so than the jazz singers who consciously tried for the “white Billie Holiday” mantle, Cline not
only phrased like Billie, stretching notes behind the beat and ending lines
with the “dying falls,” the downward glissandi that made the lyric sound like a long sigh, she also
had Billie’s knack for taking a sentimental song and cutting to its essence,
avoiding cheap “sobbing” tricks and singing straightforwardly — and thereby
making songs more heartbreaking than they were when singers milked them. One of
the most remarkable things about country music is that despite its reputation
(at least among people who don’t like it) for emotional excess — I once told my
husband Charles the old joke, “What do you get when you play a country song
backwards? You get your house back, your car back, your job back, your wife
back, and you sober up,” and Charles added, “Yeah, and your mother and your dog
come back to life” — many of the greatest country singers, including Jimmie
Rodgers, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn
and Dolly Parton, deliberately understate their vocals, singing in a straightforward matter-of-fact style that
projects their material powerfully and honestly.
