My Music: Story Songs (Why Not? Why Not? Why Not? Productions, TJL Productions, PBS-TV, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night KPBS showed an unusual program in T. J. Lubinsky’s “My Music” series – and for once he actually spelled “My Music” the normal way instead of mashing the two words together with a capital letter in the middle in the style made (in)famous by computer programs (“MyMusic”). The title was My Music: Story Songs, and the copyright date is 2019. It was something unusual for a Lubinsky show, and that is that it’s all composed of film clips from the past. Usually Lubinsky would stage live concerts with the surviving performers from whatever era he was paying tribute to (though some of his live shows have been rerun since the passing of some of their greatest talents, including Little Richard and James Brown). Sometimes he would intersperse clips of performances by deceased artists with the live playing by the still-living ones – with the ironic results that the dead artists, seen in clips from the peaks of their careers, would often come off better than the living ones whose voices had been worn down by the ravages of time.

One irony in previous Lubinsky shows was that in the footage from the concerts he staged especially for them, the Black singers almost always held up better than the white ones – which I take to be yet another consequence of the fact that virtually all Black pop singers, especially the ones who sang R&B or soul, had started as children in Black churches and had been properly trained by Black church choir directors, while a lot of the white performers had bought into the myth of the “untrained” Black soul voice and had tried to sing this sort of music without the proper technique. (You don’t sing as long as Aretha Franklin did, or as long as Tina Turner or Patti LaBelle have, without a properly trained voice for that sort of music.) This My Music show was different in that all the performers were white and all were represented by film clips, so Lubinsky was able to include anyone he wanted (and he could get the rights to – a fraught condition when you’re dealing with estates as fiercely protective of their legacies as Elvis Presley’s; the promotion for the four-CD set offered as a premium for joining KPBS included “Heartbreak Hotel,” but good luck licensing that, especially for what a PBS producer could afford to pay!) without regard to their current status as alive or dead.

It was also offered under the rubric “Story Songs,” though it’s hard to tell how you differentiate a “story song” from one that isn’t. It seems to mean a song with a discernible plot and a character that grows and changes, albeit not necessarily for good, through the course of the song rather than one that just states that the singer loves someone, or doesn’t love someone, or loves someone who doesn’t love them, or is loved by someone they don’t love in return. Of course, if any of those states changes – as they do in Cole Porter’s “I Loved Him, but He Didn’t Love Me” – I guess then you have a “story song.”) Not only were all the performers on last night’s show white, they all came from either country or folk – perhaps reflecting the descendance of both those genres from the British and Irish ballads of the 19th century – though the contents of the promo CD as listed in what started to look awfully like a K-Tel commercial indicated songs outside those styles, like Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia” (which would at least have given us a Black act; as it was this show was as white as a Georgia voter-suppression bill-signing ceremony!).

It began with Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 1955 version of Merle Travis’s “Sixteen Tons,” which has a fascinating history. In 1946 Travis had been commissioned by Capitol Records to do an album of work songs (back when an “album” was a collection of 78 rpm single records packaged in something that looked like a photo album; the name “album” stuck even after LP’s came in and an “album” was a collection of songs on two sides of one LP, sometimes with the exact same contents and cover art as a previously issued 78 album) but he couldn’t find any songs having to do with coal mining. (There was “Which Side Are You On?,” but it was a song about a labor struggle in the mining industry rather than the act of mining itself.) Travis, whose father had been a coal miner, decided to write his own and came up with “Nine-Pound Hammer,” “Dark as a Dungeon” and “Sixteen Tons,” which was released as a single and was a minor hit. Then Tennessee Ernie Ford grabbed it nine years later and had the biggest hit of his career even though the arrangement is a bit dubious (a single trumpet making beeps behind his vocal – it might have been ex-Count Basie trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, who played similarly on some of Frank Sinatra’s records for the same label, Capitol, in the 1950’s).

Then again Merle Travis’s own arrangement was equally odd, especially the jazz-inflected guitar breaks he played on the song just, I suspect, to show that he could. The singer who could really have justice to “Sixteen Tons” was Johnny Cash in his prime, with the rock-solid backing of his original Tennessee Two (electric guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant), but I discovered from Wikipedia that Cash didn’t record it until 1987 during his short and unhappy tenure with Mercury Records (where he ended up between 1980, when Columbia unceremoniously fired him after 22 years, and 1994, when Rick Rubin picked him up, signed him to his American Recordings label and made that stunning series of albums that gave Cash one of the greatest swan songs an important artist ever had). The next song was the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” – which a Time magazine cover story on the folk-music craze in the 1960’s gave credit for starting the folk revival (though in 1950, six years before “Tom Dooley,” the Weavers had had a huge hit in their cover of Leadbelly’s “Goodnight, Irene”), in a strange set which supposed to represent a prison cell in which the shortest Kingstoner played the hapless Tom Dooley on the eve of his execution. (The song was actually based on a true story, though the real protagonist was a Black man named Tom Dula, and he was lynched, not legally hanged as in the song.) The next song up was Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John,” which turned out to be a Paul Bunyan-esque tale of a huge coal miner (we were back in the mines again!) who single-handedly, Atlas-style, held up the roof of a collapsed mineshaft with his huge hands and saved the lives of 20 fellow miners at the cost of his own (that’s a “story song” if there ever was one!). I know all the Jimmy Deans out there can get confusing – the actor, the singer and the sausage maker.

The next song up was Marty Robbins’ “El Paso,” from his 1959 album Gunfighter Songs and Trail Ballads (the album he had to fight his record label, Columbia, to make; they were positioning him as a country-pop artist with songs like “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation,” and they thought an album called Gunfighter Songs and Trail Ballads was way too “country” for the image they wanted for him; of course, it became the best-selling album he ever had and generated “El Paso,” his biggest hit single!), which I hadn’t realized is a really grim tale in which Felina his Mexican sweetheart is a Carmen-style temptress who gets off on pitting the men in her life against each other. After that we leaped into the 1960’s for Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” – seen here in a TV performance in which her delivery is a good deal more halting than in her record; at first I wasn’t sure if she was having trouble remembering the words but then I realized she was acting the song in a far more openly emotional way than the almost terminal calm with which she’d sung it on the record). “Ode to Billie Joe” was also the first song we saw in color.

After one of the pledge breaks that are essentially interminable commercials for PBS and are the point of these programs, they showed Jeannie C. Riley doing “Harper Valley P.T.A.” – her one hit, though her delivery is so forceful it seems a wonder she didn’t have enduring success. It was a song that caught the moment of the 1960’s and its skewering of the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed “guardians of morality” rings all too true today. (Witness how many so-called “Christians”: endorsed the Presidential candidacy of Donald Trump – casino owner, philanderer, usurer, con artist – and the recent bill passed in the Georgia state legislature to make it as tough as possible for Blacks, Latinos and other non-Republicans to vote, which among other things makes it a crime to give water or food to people waiting in line to vote. One can readily imagine what Jesus would have to say about that!)

From one of the best songs on the show Lubinsky cut to one of the worst: Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey,” a thoroughly disgusting piece of bathos Goldsboro (who’d become known for tear-jerkers with an even worse song called “Molly,” in which he plays a veteran who returns home blinded by a war injury and apologizes to his wife for literally not being able to see her) came up with in which he offers his wife post-mortem apologies for every less than thoughtful things he’d done to her before she croaked. The Smothers Brothers once put Goldsboro on TV to do a straight version of “Honey” and then did a comedy routine that viciously skewered it, set in a “‘Honey’ Gift Shop” that offered replicas of all the props mentioned in the song, including potted plants (one of the song’s gimmicks is that the singer laughed at his wife when she planted a twig in their yard, and now it’s a full-grown tree) and model wrecked cars.

The next two songs were O.K. ballads that were hugely popular in their day – Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” and Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” (written by Jimmy Webb, who also wrote what was probably the ultimate “story song” of all time, “MacArthur Park,” which I have always thought almost terminally silly, though Webb once assured an interviewer was based on an actual affair he’d had with a woman with whom he’d gone for long walks with in MacArthur Park, which occasionally included them having sex there, and on one of their walks they did indeed stumble on a cake someone had left out there in the rain … ). After that came a song of unsurpassable intensity, Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” which gains it power partly because we all know it’s her own story (she was indeed a coal miner’s daughter who grew up one of many kids in a tumble-down shack in Butcher Holler, Kentucky – though “holler” is simply country-speak for “valley”) but also because she had one of those voices that just throbs with intensity. Like her mentor, the tragically short-lived Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn was the sort of singer that couldn’t sing without emotion if he’d tried; every word she sang vibrated with passion and truth.

Lubinsky wisely spotted this song at the end of his second set because nothing could have topped it, and when the show resumed it was to quite a different sort of “story song,” Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” (I was struck by how much his backup guitarist looked like John Lennon.) The next song was Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which in a way was a direct throwback to the original “story songs” from Britain and Ireland in the 19th century, which specifically and in great detail described real-life shipwrecks. Though the Edmund Fitzgerald was a modern enough ship that the video included footage of it being launched, sailing normally and later its wreckage (and the shot of its launch, in which it listed to one side and one wondered if it would capsize then and there – that should have been a warning that the ship was too damned big for its own good!), it was very much in the manner of a 19th century song about a maritime disaster.

The next song was Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle,” which I found myself responding to rather differently than I did when it was new – I associated myself not with the father but with the son whose dad would never spend time with him, and who rather bitterly got a pointless and soul-destroying revenge by turning his dad down when dad did try to reach out to him later in life. Then came Don McLean’s “American Pie,” the lengthy and rather bizarre, imagistic fantasy that’s sort of about the history of rock ’n’ roll that works off the idea that February 3, 1959, the day Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson were killed in a small-plane crash, was “the day the music died.” One person who felt particularly insulted by the song was Holly’s original lead guitarist, singer and songwriter Sonny Curtis (who fronted by far the best post-Holly edition of his band, The Crickets, and wrote “I Fought the Law” and “Love Is All Around,” the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song), who was bothered by the mythology created by McLean’s song and the film The Buddy Holly Story that he wrote an answer song, which he played with the surviving Crickets, called “The Real Buddy Holly Story” that ends, “Because the levee isn’t dry, and the music didn’t die, because Buddy Holly lives every time we play that rock ’n’ roll.”

It’s still a great and haunting song even if the imagery gets a little dense at times, and it’s been proclaimed tie first eight-minute song to become a single hit (it isn’t – it’s the Beatles’ “Hey, Jude”). That ended the main part of the program, but as usual with these programs they squeezed in one more song after yet another interminable and stupid pledge break (I’ve said it before, but when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tried to defund PBS and one of his arguments was that their pledge breaks were even more infuriating than regular private-TV commercials, he had a point) there was a clip of the show’s on-screen host, B. J. Thomas, doing a song of his called “Rock ’n’ Roll Lullaby” which was supposedly what his mom sang him to sleep with when he was a kid. Of course Thomas is best known for “Raindrops Keep Falling Off My Head,” the theme song from the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and my own personal favorite by him is the haunting ballad “Everybody Loves a Rain Song” (after his hit they kept giving him songs about rain the way they kept giving Judy Garland songs about rainbows after “Over the Rainbow”!), but it was an O.K. song.

Naturally in a show like this part of the fun is second-guessing the compilers and thinking of songs they didn’t include and should have – like Lefty Frizzell’s 1959 comeback hit “Long Black Veil,” Willie Nelson’s “Red-Headed Stranger,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” and Bruce Springsteen’s epic “Jungleland” – but overall this was a nicely moving show even if you had to sit through the treacle to get to the gold!