Game of Thrones, season 2, episodes 5-8: “The Ghost of Harrenhal,” “The Old Gods and the New,” “A Man Without Honor,” “The Prince of Winterfell” (360 Television, Grok! Studio, Home Box Office, 2012)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The last two nights Charles has been home because he hasn’t had to work he and I have continued our sojourn through Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin’s cycle of medieval fantasy novels and the TV series by David Benioff and D. B. Weiss based on them. So far we’re two episodes away from the finish of season two of this eight-season series, and as I’ve commented about previous episodes even though most of the series’ nine-year run (2011 to 2019) took place while Barack Obama was still President, the show almost perfectly fits the Zeitgeist of the Donald Trump era. The episodes we watched the last two nights were “The Ghost of Harrenhal” (one wonders whether the place name was a deliberate allusion to “Karinhalle,” the monumental estate Nazi second-in-command Herrmann Göring had built from the money, furniture and art he looted from Holocaust victims and occupied countries and dedicated to his late daughter Karin), “The Old Gods and the New” (it’s not clear what the mainstream religion of the Game of Thrones universe is, but the use of the name “Odin” associates the old gods, at least, with genuine Norse mythology and there are also practitioners of witchcraft and what would in our time be called New Age thought), “A Man Without Honor” (an odd episode title because just about everybody in Game of Thrones is without honor — indeed that seems to be the whole point of the show, and why it fits so well with the Zeitgeist of the Trump era) and “The Prince of Winterfell.”

“The Ghost of Harrenhal” begins with the bloody murder/execution of the Gay king, brother of the murdered Robert Baratheon. Robert was nominally the father of the current king Joffrey, a psychotic nerd played by Jack Gleeson in a way that makes it look like he’s auditioning for Caligula or Nero, but Joffrey and his sister are really the products of an incestuous affair between Robert’s queen, Cersei Lannister [Lena Headey], and her brother Jaime, pronounced “Jamie” [Nikolaj Coster-Walden][1], who’s imprisoned at the start of this run of episodes but who escapes by murdering his cellmate just when we’ve begun to like the cellmate — a typical Game of Thrones trick is to give us a character who gets killed off just when we’ve started to like him or her. Meanwhile, Jon Snow (Kit Harington) is lured into a trap by a woman knight and taken prisoner, then presumably executed by one of the many would-be kings who figure, like the historical Vlad the Impaler (the real-life Romanian warlord of the 15^th century who was the model for Bram Stoker’s vampire character Dracula — Vlad was also known as “Drakulya,” the Romanian for “little dragon”) or the more recent Saddam Hussein, thinks he can keep power by killing his subjects willy-nilly. This guy exhibits the charred bodies of Jon Snow and his crippled half-brother hanging from beams on the outside of the entrance to his castle, but at the end of episode eight we learn, to no particular surprise, that the bodies are really the two sons of the farmer the king had tortured to get the information as to where Jon and the boy were and that Jon and the boy are still very much alive. While all that is happening — one problem with following Game of Thrones is the way it seems to have been edited with a yo-yo, so just as we’re finally feeling comfortable that we know who’s who in one particular plot thread we’re yanked out of it and deposited into another one (no wonder so many people “binge” this series — it takes so long just to figure out who is who, how they relate to each other, and which side of the endless multi-player conflicts they’re on … this week, because part of the essence of Game of Thrones is how quickly and easily the characters switch sides and double-cross each other), so we’re constantly pulled away from the more interesting villains like Joffrey or Daenerys Targeryan (Emilia Clarke) to the relatively dull ones who do little more than clomp around in the snow or kill each other. 

In this sequence of episodes, Daenerys is in the city of Qarth (pronounced “Kath” for some reason) trying to enlist the aid of the merchants who have made Qarth the richest city in the Game of Thrones universe (and, interestingly, the only one in which upward mobility exists: at least two of the Qarthians tell Daenerys and us that they arrived in Qarth dead broke and built up huge fortunes as merchants). She’s referred to as the “Mother of Dragons” because she was able to get three 300-year-old dragons’ eggs to hatch and produce baby dragons, but she loses control of them and they slaughter a large number of Qarthians at the end of episode six. The writers and directors really tease us big-time with the dragons; after showing them as dragon cubs at the end of season one and in an episode earlier on in season two, they disappear from the action — apparently they’ve been kidnapped (how? They’re supposed to be invincible fighting machines!) and taken to the Land of the Undead, or something like that, in Qarth, and Daenerys has to risk her own life to go there and retrieve them — and so in the four episodes under review here we don’t see dragons at all even though we’re continually being “teased” about them. In one of these episodes Daenerys, after having turned down the suit of a large Black merchant who offered her an army and a fleet of ships to reconquer the Seven Kingdoms (it’s been established that the Targeryans were the ruling house of “Westeros,” the fictional setting of Game of Thrones that’s obviously patterned on the British Isles) if she’d marry him — she says she won’t marry someone just to obtain an armed force, even though she did that once before in the earlier episodes — she approaches the rich, effete white guy who’s the other self-made man in Qarth and who earlier complained that he couldn’t get to sleep until it was already daylight. Being me, I couldn’t help but start singing “Lullaby of Broadway” with suitably altered lyrics — “When a Qarth baby says goodnight, it’s early in the morning/Qarth babies don’t sleep tight until the dawn.” Daenerys (why do fantasy writers have to give their characters such indigestible names?) offers him a big share of Westeros’s riches in exchange for his help now, but he decides she’s too speculative an investment so he turns her down — and guess how he ends up? Right: a bloody corpse! 

I can see why so many people got addicted to Game of Thrones and how it became such a huge success, but aside from the sheer difficulty of remembering who’s who and what sides they’re on (which is why I gave up on The Lord of the Rings about a third of the way through the first book, too), I’m finding Game of Thrones pretty mind-numbing in the sheer brutality and amorality of its story. At least William Shakespeare, in his similar but at least nominally fact-based series of British history plays, gave us some people we actually liked and wanted to see prevail; Game of Thrones is essentially what the Shakespeare history plays would have been like if all the ruling-class characters had been like Richard III. It also doesn’t help — though this is so common a fault of medieval fiction (or, for that matter, medieval history) I really shouldn’t kvetch about it — that we don’t really get a sense of what life was like for the medieval 99 percent. Occasionally a commoner crosses the path of royal intrigue — like the poor farmer who gets tortured, and his sons get killed, by the warlord who wants to know where Jon Snow fled to — but he lasts only long enough to fulfill his plot function and then either gets killed or simply disappears. And while Game of Thrones has its share of sex scenes, they’re mostly as loveless and ugly as the rest of it — and they also make medieval clothes look considerably easier to take off than I’ve read elsewhere they were!

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[1] — Gee, when Wagner had brother and sister fuck he gave us Siegfried. When George R. R. Martin did it he gave us Caligula, or at least someone very much like him.

Country Music, part 4: “I Can’t Stop Loving You” (Florentine Films, Country Music Film Project, WETA, 2019)

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.

Country Music, part 3: “The Hillbilly Shakespeare” (Florentine Films, Country Music Film Project, WETA, 2019)

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.

Country Music, part 2: “Hard Times” (1933-1945) (Florentine Films, WETA, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched last night’s second episode of the Country Music documentary on KPBS, directed by Ken Burns and narrated by Peter Coyote (Burns’ go-to guy for narration since his previous one, David McCullough, stepped down) from a script by Dayton Duncan. The episode was called “Hard Times” and took the story of country music from 1933 — the depths of the Great Depression and the year Jimmie Rodgers died (a loss of overwhelming importance in the history of country music, so many of whose parameters had been basically shaped by Rodgers) — to 1945 and the end of World War II. These were also the years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, and Burns’ sound mix included clips from FDR’s surviving radio speeches to counterpoint his guarded optimism with the realities on the ground. There was a brief mention of Woody Guthrie (who isn’t generally considered a country singer but who came from the right background — rural Oklahoma — and who ripped off the melody of “This Land Is Your Land” from the Carter Family hit, “Little Darling, Pal of Mine,” though the Carters themselves had probably got it from a folk source), but the main focus was on the immense popularity of Gene Autry (who began as a contract artist for the American Record Company — owners of the Columbia and Brunswick labels in the 1930’s as well as a number of cheap labels like Banner, Conqueror and Perfect — ripping off Jimmie Rodgers and covering his songs for people who wanted Rodgers’ music but didn’t want to pay the 75¢ rack rate for Rodgers’ Victor releases) and his establishment of the “Singing Cowboy” genre; the emergence of the Grand Ole Opry program on Saturday nights from Nashville as the premiere radio showcase for country music (by the early 1930’s the Depression had decimated the record industry — though it would come back as the overall economy did — but most people still had radios, and since radio was free once you bought the set, people did most of their listening on it); the stardom of Roy Acuff (one of the most powerfully emotional of all country singer-songwriters — one can hear him as the way station between Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams — and who, like Autry, had an excellent business ense; he was able to build on the success of his songs and, with business partner Fred Rose, form Acuff-Rose, one of the largest and most powerful music publishing companies in the business and a key rival of Ralph Peer’s Peer-Southern); and the emergence of Bob Wills and the “Western Swing” style.

Wills took the traditional country-music ensemble — violin, banjo, guitar, bass — and added jazz instruments like trumpet, trombone, clarinet, saxophone and piano for an infectious sound. Some of Wills’ records seem like they’re at war with themselves, as the country and jazz instruments fight it out for dominance, and the brief allusions to Wills’ personal life (apparently at one point he went through five wives in six years, giving new meaning to the name of his band, the “Texas Playboys”!) made it seem as tempestuous as his music. Wills was known as a hard taskmaster with his musicians — like Benny Goodman, he had an intense ray-like stare he aimed at any band member who made a mistake — and he had quite a long career, making his very last album in 1973 (just a month or so before he died) with the country-revival group Asleep at the Wheel. Wills was a rarity in country music in that he was a bandleader who didn’t sing (he did sing occasionally, but most of the time he played violin and directed the band while professional singers of both genders did the vocals), but his records became famous for (among other things) Wills’ cries of encouragement and enthusiasm over the work of his musicians and addressing them by name during their performances. The first time he tried that during a recording session his producer stopped the take and said they couldn’t have that sort of thing on a record — and Wills said that if he couldn’t interject with his musicians on record the way he did on stage, he was walking out and taking the band then and there. The producer got the message, let Wills add his “Yee-haws” to his band’s recordings, and it became a famous trademark that added to the records’ sales appeal. Duncan’s narration claims that Wills had such clout commercially that he was able to bring his full band onto the Grand Ole Opry, including his drummer, as early as 1939. (Elsewhere I’d read that the Opry didn’t allow drums on its stage until 1959, and it’s known that when Elvis Presley did his handful of Opry appearances in 1955 drummer D. J. Fontana was forced to wait in the wings while Elvis and his other musicians, lead guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, performed. Elvis bombed so completely on the Opry that the show’s manager, Jim Denny, famously told him, “If I were you, I’d go back to driving a truck.”) Wills also helped bring country music to a larger audience when Bing Crosby covered his hits “San Antonio Rose” and “Mexicali Rose” (and it’s interesting to hear the straight-ahead on-the-beat phrasing Wills’ singers brought to these songs versus Bing’s superb laid-back style that derived from his days as Paul Whiteman’s jazz singer).

The show also covered the emergence of bluegrass as a sub-genre within country and credited the Monroe Brothers, Charlie and Bill, with inventing it (though I’d always assumed bluegrass was one of the folk precursors of country, along with hillbilly and cowboy music). The Monroe Brothers broke up in 1940 and the two raced to the Opry to see which one could get on the show first as a solo artist — Bill won the race and became one of the Opry’s biggest stars, though Charlie laconically commented to a friend, “He won’t last long, not when they find out how hard he is to get along with.” Monroe lasted into the 1990’s and most of what’s available by him on archive.org is live tapes from the last decade or so; he’s known not only for his own work but for Elvis having covered his song “Blue Moon of Kentucky” as the B-side of his first Sun Records single, “That’s All Right, Mama” (Sun Records owner Sam Phillips created a formula for Elvis’s releases on Sun of having a cover of a Black blues song on one side of the record and a cover of a white country song on the other), and there’s a marvelous performance on the Vanguard compilation CD of the 1960’s Newport Folk Festivals of Monroe performing “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” doing one chorus at the walking tempo of his original record and then speeding up for the second chorus to sound more like Elvis’s cover.

But for me the real revelation on this show was The Maddox Brothers and Rose, a group that began with a family of seven (dad, mom and five kids) who were living in Alabama on dad’s earnings as a factory worker in the 1930’s. They decided to go to California in search of greener pastures — figuratively and literally — and, with little conception of the distance involved, decided to walk there. They had got about 200 miles when some hobos ran into them and taught them how to grab rides in the boxcars of freight trains, and that’s how they finally got to the Golden State — only the only jobs they could get were as farm workers. Daddy Maddox announced that he was going to try for a career in music — he’d heard the country music radio broadcasts and decided he could sing that well — even though none of them had ever played before. Dad decided to become the bass player (I guess that seemed to him like the simplest instrument to learn) and his sons took up the other traditional country instruments, while Rose became the lead singer. Hearing her voice on these performances was electrifying; at a time when the mold for women country singers was Sara Carter’s and Patsy Montana’s — high, thin, pleading and verging on the edge of self-pitying bathos — Rose Maddox was the first woman country singer who really took charge. Her voice was bold, loud, assertive and pitched towards the bottom of the normal female range. To put it bluntly, there wouldn’t have been a Patsy Cline, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn or Dolly Parton if it hadn’t been for Rose Maddox, the foremother of ballsy female country singing. This morning I went looking for Maddox Brothers and Rose records on archive.org, and most of the ones I found were of sacred songs on the 4Star label (an independent company founded in Los Angeles in the late 1940’s that also recorded Cecil Gant and other pioneers of Black R&B), though there’s enough there to showcase how good Rose Maddox really was.

The show also deals with some of the politics within the music industry — at the end of 1940 the American Society of Composers, Artists and Publishers (ASCAP) suddenly and abruptly doubled the rates it charged radio stations for the right to play their members’ songs on the air. The radio companies refused to play the higher rates; instead they formed their own music licensing organization, Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI), and won a major coup when Ralph Peer’s Peer-Southern publishing company became a BMI affiliate so his songs could still be performed on the radio. With most of the composers of the “Great American Songbook” under contract to ASCAP publishers, the ASCAP-BMI conflict helped the causes of both country and rhythm-and-blues, musical forms the High Lords of ASCAP had decided were beneath their dignity — so radio stations that had turned up their noses at country and R&B artists now found themselves playing them just to have something they could legally broadcast. And Duncan’s narration makes the interesting claim that World War II broadened the market for country music; country players who enlisted or were drafted brought their instruments with them, staged jam sessions and exposed their Northern brethren to this sort of music. The show claims that by the middle of the war Bob Wills and the other country stars were outdrawing the big-band swing leaders like Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, and the ending set up the rise of the man Burns and Duncan call “The Hillbilly Shakespeare,” Hank Williams (who, ironically, would sweep away Western Swing and bring country back to its roots — his bands were back-to-the-basics ensembles of violin, steel guitar, bass and Williams’ own guitar), whose importance to country music is parallel to his contemporary Charlie Parker’s in jazz.

Country Music, part 1: “The Rub” (Beginnings-1933) (Florentine Films, WETA, PBS, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our main “feature” last night, which I was able to watch after Undercover Cheerleader (see below) because KPBS blessedly ran it twice, at 8 p.m. and again at 10 p.m., was “The Rub,” the first episode (of eight) in Ken Burns’ latest omnibus series about American life and culture, Country Music. I’m not a major fan of country music but I quite like a lot of it, and the closer it hews to the roots of the form — the Anglo-Saxon and Irish folk traditions that provided the basic foundation, the admixtures of Black blues and spirituals, Latino and Hawai’ian guitar traditions that got overlaid on them, and the fusion of hillbilly, bluegrass and Western music that fused into the style we usually call “country” — the better I like it. I get very impatient with people who flatly say, “I don’t like country music” (though that blanket dismissal is pretty close to the way I feel about rap) since there seems to me to be a beautiful bittersweet spirit in the best country music that I respond to. One thing I noticed about Burns’ first episode, “The Rub” — which he advertised as “Beginnings-1933” (1933 is the close of his story in this episode — he times it with the death of the paradigmatic country-music pioneer, Jimmie Rodgers, who arguably is to country what Louis Armstrong, with whom he actually recorded one song, is to jazz — and as Dayton Duncan’s script demonstrates, the roots of country music go so far back in American history that the first published country song dates to 1736, 40 years before the Declaration of Independence. One thing I find fascinating about this show is its proclamation that African-American culture is one of the roots of country music — a claim you could, come to think about it, make about virtually all American popular music. You combine Black music with the white marching-band tradition, and you get jazz. You combine Black and Jewish music, and you get Broadway and the “Great American Songbook.” You combine Black music with the British and Irish folk traditions, and you get country music.

Burns’ and Duncan’s ecumenicism about the Black influence on country music stands in sharp contrast to the “take” Burns took on the history of jazz in his mega-documentary Jazz, in which, under the lash of the reverse-racist theories of his two principal consultants, trumpeter-composer Wynton Marsalis (who rears his head in this show as well) and critic Stanley Crouch, he went out of his way to deny any creative role for white musicians in shaping jazz. (About the only white musicians Burns treated with any fairness in Jazz were Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman and Dave Brubeck — and I suspect the only reason Brubeck made the cut was that when Burns made the film he was still alive and agreed to be interviewed extensively for it.) PBS has told the story of “The Rub” at least twice before, in a bio-documentary about the Carter Family and the first episode of American Epic, a show from 2017 about the Black and white folk traditions record companies seized on in the late 1920’s to compete with radio — they looked for musics popular where radio hadn’t penetrated yet and sought to sell rural people, white and Black, phonographs and records by offering them the sorts of music they already knew, liked and often played themselves. “The Rub” shows a surprising degree of integration between white and Black musicians despite the harsh segregation laws that were supposed to prevent the races from mixing in public at all, including photos of Black musicians playing with otherwise all-white bands, as well as the wince-inducing phenomenon of blackface: white performers crudely made up to look Black and doing routines (including the songs of Stephen Foster, cited here as an important antecedent of country music as well as an early example of someone who was able to popularize a folk tradition and turn it into a marketable product) that depicted Black life in a stereotyped and bizarre fashion. Among the oddest aspects of how white performers depicted Black people to a white audience was their insistence that the Blacks had loved being slaves and had deep, abiding affections for their owners. (I just ate, and it’s a struggle to type that without puking.)

The one big mistake Burns and Duncan made is the total omission of Vernon Dalhart; Burns and Duncan mention “Fiddling” John Carson as the first country musician to make a commercially successful record (for the Okeh label, produced by Ralph Peer, in 1922), but they don’t mention Dalhart’s pioneering song “The Wreck of the Old 97.” Based on a real-life wreck of a mail train outside Danville, Virginia in 1903. “The Wreck of the Old 97” was first recorded by Dalhart for the Edison label in 1922, but it didn’t really take off until he remade it for Victor (backed by another song that became a country standard, “The Prisoner’s Song”) in 1924. (Edison’s record sold poorly because they were recorded “hill-and-dale” — the stylus moving up and down in the groove — instead of the more standard “lateral cut,” the stylus moving side to side. If you had a lateral-cut phonograph you couldn’t play hill-and-dale records on it unless you bought an adapter, which some third-party vendors sold.) Dalhart’s Victor record of “The Wreck of the Old 97” sold over a million copies and let everyone in the record business know that there was gold in them thar hillbillies. Ralph Peer was a visionary businessman who, after leaving Okeh in a salary dispute in 1925, set his sights on the biggest record company of all, Victor. When Victor’s executives told him they weren’t willing to hire him as a producer, Peer made them an offer they literally couldn’t refuse: he’d produce records for Victor and not take any payment at all for his work in the studio. Instead, he’d be compensated by being given the publishing rights for any copyrightable songs his musicians recorded. Peer formed a music company (called Peer-Southern and still run by members of his family) to hold the copyrights and collect money not only for the records he and his artists produced but for sales of sheet music and any cover versions recorded by other artists. This meant that Peer’s artists could only record either songs they had written themselves, public-domain folk material they had “tweaked” enough to render it copyrightable, or other songs from the Peer-Southern publishing catalogue.

In 1927 Peer organized a field recording trip to Bristol, Tennessee to get more records by Ernest Stoneman, who was then Victor’s top-selling country artist but didn’t want to come to New York or the company’s headquarters in Camden, New Jersey to record. In order to make the trip worth his and the company’s while — at the time recording equipment was incredibly heavy, massive, fragile and difficult to move — Peer decided to hold open auditions. At first he didn’t attract many artists, so he got an article written about his operation in a local newspaper bidding anyone who played “mountain music” to come out and try for a Victor contract. Towards the end of his Bristol sojourn Peer attracted the acts that would become the first country superstars: the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers. The Carter Family were a trio consisting of A. P. Carter, his wife Sara and her sister Maybelle (who’d married A. P.’s brother Eck), who had never performed professionally before and had always regarded music as something you made for fun on your front porch to relax after a long day of farm work. Ralph Peer heard something in Sara’s high, thin, plaintive voice that he thought would sound “authentic” and would sell. Jimmie Rodgers was a 30-year-old ne’er-do-well whose father was a railroad man who tried to get Rodgers work on the railroads as well; he briefly had the difficult job of brakeman when he wasn’t tearing off, touring with vaudeville acts and traveling medicine shows, and burning through his money almost as soon as he made it, much to the chagrin of his wife Carrie and their daughter Anita. Rodgers came to Bristol prepared to record a soap-opera lament called “The Soldier’s Sweetheart,” but he needed a song to put on the other side and he quickly concocted a lullaby called “Sleep, Baby, Sleep” in which he yodeled between verses. As things turned out, it was “Sleep, Baby, Sleep” that became the hit, and Rodgers yodeled on just about every subsequent record he made. Rodgers also suffered from tuberculosis at a time when that was an incurable death sentence, and his own awareness of the brevity of his life span haunts all his music. Rodgers took composer credit for most of his songs — sometimes along with Elsie McWilliams, his sister-in-law — and he became an enormous star with a huge following. He also made a lot of money, which he spent on fancy cars, designer clothes, a custom guitar with gold frets and his name emblazoned down the neck in mother-of-pearl (on the back side of the instrument he painted the word “Thanks,” offered to the audience who had made this possible) and a lavish home in Texas he called “Blue Yodeler’s Paradise” after the “Blue Yodel” designation Peer slapped on 13 of Rodgers’ songs.

I remember discovering Jimmie Rodgers through two RCA Victor reissue LP’s in the late 1960’s, playing through one of them (including the searing, doom-ridden “Barefoot Blues,” which he recorded in a final frantic week in New York because he knew he literally had just days to live and if he could complete his Victor contract in the time he had left his wife and daughter would get $2,500 in session fees they desperately needed) before I bothered to look at the photo on the album cover, then reeling in shock and saying, “This guy was white?” At a time when there were solemn debates in music magazines over the question, “Can white men sing the blues?” (white musician Steve Miller’s response was, “Why not? White people have problems, too”), here was a white man from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s who had sung the blues with the same passion, sincerity and soul of the great Black blues singers of the time. What’s more, Rodgers could sing anything: blues, pop, dance, Hawai’ian (the steel guitar became a paradigmatic country instrument because Rodgers liked Hawai’ian music and insisted on recording with Hawai’ian bands that used it), sacred (when Peer decided to pair Rodgers and the Carter Family together, the best song they made together was the hymn “The Wonderful City”) and all elements of the hillbilly-bluegrass-Western style that was coming together to form what we now know as country music. Between them, the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers laid the groundwork for virtually all of what country music would become — Burns underscores this by playing Rodgers’ record of “Muleskinner Blues” at the end of the program (after depicting Rodgers’ funeral train, which drew the same kind of turnout of people anxious to see it go by and say their farewell to him as Lincoln’s had 68 years earlier) and then cutting, over the final credits, to a sped-up but still within-the-tradition live cover by Dolly Parton — and though the Great Depression would hit the market for records in general (indeed, it virtually destroyed the U.S. recording industry, though the record market did eventually recover as the overall economy did), country musicians would find a home on radio and their music, rooted as it was in the lives of people who had always lived marginal existences, would speak powerfully to Depression audiences and keep the flame alive.

Undercover Cheerleader (Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 8 last night Charles and I watched Lifetime’s latest cheerleader movie, Undercover Cheerleader, and even more than The Cheerleader Escort this was an example of a Lifetime movie that would have been considerably better if the writer, Lauren Balson Carter, and the director, Danny J. Boyle (definitely not the Danny Boyle who made Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting, which is why he uses the initial to avoid confusion), had just known when to stop. The plot: Autumn Bailey (Kayla Wallace) has just been moved across the country from New York City to San Francisco because her mom — who’s raising her as a single parent (there’s only a passing reference to her father and screenwriter Carter makes it seem like he’s dead) — has just got her “dream job” as CEO for a tech firm. In her previous high school Autumn worked on the student newspaper and mom naturally assumes she’s going to do that here at Brookview High as well — but when Autumn shows up, the kids in the cheerleading squad tag her and decide that with her pert appearance and her dance background (she’s asked if Brookview offers dance and finds that cheerleading is the closest thing to it on campus) she’d be a natural.

Kara (Maddie Phillips), the editor of the school paper, and her sort-of boyfriend Max (Ryan Grantham) — who’s so short and boyish he comes up to about her shoulders, and he’s obviously got a crush on Kara that is totally unreciprocated (which made me wonder if writer Carter was warming up to make Max either Gay or one of those straight “incels” who gets mad to the point of homicidal mania at the girls who won’t date him and the cuter, butcher or richer boys they will date) — suggest that Bailey join the cheerleading squad but write a series of articles for the school paper, signed “The Undercover Cheerleader,” about the toxic aspects of cheerleader culture. The imdb.com page on this film is missing some key information, including who plays Bailey’s mother as well as two other important characters: Dot, the cheerleading coach, who runs the squad with so intense a level of discipline she makes R. Lee Ermey’s drill sergeant in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket seem warm and fuzzy by comparison; and a Black girl who has enrolled in Brookview specifically to become a cheerleader there because Brookview is noted for having won the cheerleading competition in their area five years in a row. This is depicted as a rare bright spot for them because the actual athletic teams the cheerleaders are supposed to be leading cheers for all suck. Bailey gets on the cheerleading squad partly because the bad girl, Jenny (marvelously acted by Samantha Schimmer), wants her there — “I want to keep my enemies close by,” she tells a friend — and she also meets Jordan Dunn (André Anthony), who takes a shine to her and invites her to a double date with Jenny and her football-player boyfriend, Bode (yet another actor regrettably unidentified on imdb.com, even though his crisis of conscience is well played and he’s almost as cute as the guy playing Jordan). We get the idea that Bailey is feeling conflicted between her role as the “undercover cheerleader” and her growing affection for her squad-mates (except for ice-cold bitch Jenny) and her sense of loyalty to them and also to Jordan.

One day Dot, looking for an excuse to fire the Black girl from the squad, makes her do a highly dangerous gymnastics maneuver even though the girl hasn’t trained in gymnastics, and though we don’t see it (obviously the folks at Reel One Entertainment didn’t have enough of a budget for a stunt double), the girl lands wrong and fractures her ankle. Bailey plans a party to raise money for her care — only the one available venue is her own home, which she can use because her mom is going on a business trip — and the plans for the party advance from a relatively decorous affair to a rave-style event with a beer keg and presumably a lot of pairing-off between the kids for sex. This is when writer Carter and director Boyle really start taking things off the rails: Bella (Samantha Corrigan), one of the suspects as to who the “undercover cheerleader” really is, gets run off the road by a motorcyclist as she’s walking home from the party. She’s O.K. but it later turns out that Bode did it at the insistence of cheerleader coach Dot, who wanted to scare all the cheerleaders so whichever one is providing the information to the school paper as the “undercover cheerleader” will stop. Later another cheerleader who’s suspected of being the leaker, Samantha (Mya Lowe), is also run down by someone riding a motorcycle, only as she falls she hits her head against a rock and dies from the injury. Bailey’s mom comes home early from her business trip because she’s naturally upset with Bailey for having a wild party in their home, after which someone was killed, though of course once she turns up and Bailey confesses to mom that her life is in danger, Mom instantly becomes supportive. At the scene of Samantha’s murder Bailey finds a broken-off rear-view mirror for a motorcycle, and then at Jordan’s place she sees a bike missing just that sort of mirror and concludes her boyfriend is the killer — only he isn’t; his dad had reported that bike stolen the morning of the incident.

Jordan and Bailey make up surprisingly quickly (given that she’s just accused him of murder) and they run through the various suspects, including Bode and also Max, whom Boyle has shown lurking around some of the scenes in a sinister fashion. Bailey appeals to her editor Kara for support — only [spoiler alert!] Kara turns out to be Samantha’s killer, though Carter isn’t all that clear as to her motive. It seems to have something to do with having hoped Bailey would be her friend in high school, only to see her drawn into the lives of the cheerleaders she was supposedly involved with only to write about and expose them. Kara feeds Bailey drugged tea and grabs a tire iron, apparently to hit her with it, but is herself brought down by the Seventh Cavalry-style appearance of Bailey’s mom. Six months later Bella, now out of school, is the new cheerleading coach and Bailey is still in the program, having decided she likes cheerleading and she likes being the girlfriend of a football player even better. As for Jenny, she gets her comeuppance by being kept on the cheerleading squad but only as the other girls’ water girl. We’d been seeing some better-than-average movies on Lifetime lately but Undercover Cheerleader is a return to their old slovenly ways: a silly plot way too dependent on coincidence, a level of emotional manipulation that starts at 11, anachronistic details (the double date involving Jenny, Bode, Bailey and Jordan takes place at, of all locales, a drive-in movie theatre — are there any of those left anymore?) and a ridiculous and head-scratching final twist that involves a seemingly level-headed character suddenly turning into a manipulative bitch. We didn’t even get any hot, lubricious soft-core porn scenes to relieve the dreary acid of human unkindness!

The Cheerleader Escort (Thrilling Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime premiere was yet another movie in their “Cheer, Rally, Kill” series of lubricious movies about cheerleaders (and I suspect the use of the word “cheerleader” in Lifetime movie titles is an attempt by this channel and the producing studios they contract with to get straight guys to watch by offering them sexy young sylph-like girls doing dance routines and thrusting their asses at the camera). It was called The Cheerleader Escort, and judging from the title and the overall concept — female college freshmen (shouldn’t that be “freshwomen”?) recruited into prostitution with well-to-do alumni to pay their tuition and other college costs without ending up in hock for life over student loans — I had assumed it was from Ken Sanders’ operation and would have been written by J. Bryan Dick and Barbara Kymlicka. Alas, Mr. Dick and Ms. Cum-Licker weren’t involved in this one — the film was directed by Alexandre Carrière from a script by Andrea Canning — though the story adhered closely enough to their formula it might as well have been. Our central character is Cassie Talbot (Alexandra Beaton), who’s learned to dance ballet, tap and jazz at the dance studio owned and run by her mom, Karen Talbot (Cynthia Preston, top-billed). Alas, mom and dad divorced well before the movie began and Cassie is dependent on dad’s coming through with alimony and child support payments to be able to afford to go away to college at Tate Riley University in Philadelphia (it’s an awkward name for a college and I was probably more irritated than I should have been that it wasn’t hyphenated). Dad came through with Cassie’s first-semester tuition but then disappeared, went “off the grid” and is now two months behind on the regular alimony and child support payments. Given the family’s last name one might suspect that’s because every month during the full moon he turns into a werewolf and goes around killing people, but instead it turns out he’s a compulsive gambler and that’s almost certainly where the money he’s supposed to be sending to his ex-wife and their kid is going.

Cassie rooms at Tate Riley with Alyssa (unidentified on imdb.com), an African-American woman she’s known since they were in grade school together, and of course we immediately assume she’s being set up for the part of The Heroine’s Black Best Friend who Stumbles Onto the Villains’ Plot but Gets Killed for Her Pains (though in fact Alyssa’s blessedly still alive at the end — does that count as a spoiler?). Alyssa and the school’s head cheerleader, Gabby Sanders (Joelle Farrow), suggest to Cassie that she try out for the cheerleading squad — Cassie protests that, though she did some cheerleading in high school, she’s “a little rusty,” but they insist that with her dance training she’d be a natural, and she makes the team, replacing one of three women who aged out and a fourth who was expelled from the squad for mysterious reasons that only get explained towards the end. At Tate Riley the cheerleaders are expected not only to do what their name suggests — to lead cheers on the sidelines of the school’s athletic contests (interestingly, like at least one other movie in Lifetime’s “Cheer, Rally, Kill” series the game they’re leading cheers during is basketball; I don’t remember basketball being a sport played during the fall when people have just returned to — or are starting — school, but since my own high-school days the sports seasons have so extensively blended into each other this may be accurate and my knowledge base may be dated) and do dance routines during halftime — but also entertain the alumni at private fundraising parties for the school. And, as Gabby quickly explains to Cassie when Cassie confesses she may have to drop off the cheerleading squad and take a job to stay in school, they do more than that: the cheerleaders also function as an “escort” service for the well-to-do alumni who want hot, nubile young female bodies to fuck and are literally willing to shell out thousands of dollars for the privilege.

Gabby is being more or less kept as a long-term mistress by businessman John Tanner (Victor Cornfoot), though of course he can only see her when his intensely suspicious and jealous wife is out of town. Cassie attracts the attention of criminal defense attorney Terry Dunes (Damon Runyan), who unlike most of the alumni “johns” has had the good sense to stay single so he doesn’t have to worry about a wife getting in the way of his fun and taking him to the cleaners financially in a divorce action if she catches him “cheating.” Cassie also has an age-peer boyfriend, Kyle Buchanan (Michael Conde, a tall, tousled-haired cutie who’s considerably more attractive than a lot of the nerdy guys who usually cast in these sorts of parts — I remember one “escort” movie from the Sanders-Dick-Kymlicka factory in which their casting director screwed up big-time by making the older man who was paying Our Heroine to sleep with her considerably sexier and more attractive than the age-peer would-be boyfriend who wanted her for free), who’s her study partner in calculus, but after a series of quasi-romantic dates she slips into bed with Terry, has a great time and even thinks it’s true love … until one night she spies a pair of red panties in his bedroom that aren’t hers and look way too small for him to say, “Oh, you’ve discovered my secret. I cross-dress.” In a plot gimmick so old it was used in the 1909 play The Easiest Way by Eugene Waller and David Belasco, also about a decent girl who gets drawn into a sex-for-money relationship and then has to face the crisis of conscience (go along with it to get the money to help her struggling family, or exit and save her reputation at the cost of leaving both herself and her relatives broke?), Cassie gets mysterious money transfers from Terry that pay for her second-semester tuition at Tate Riley and also bail out her mom’s struggling dance studio, making her reluctant to derail Terry’s gravy train no matter how scummy the relationship seems. Along the way we learn that the college’s cheerleading coach, Stephanie Dodger (Carolyne Maraghi, an ice-cold presence much like Alfred Hitchcock’s fabled blonde heroines), pretends to be independently wealthy but is in fact the cheerleaders’ madam, setting up their “dates” and living well off their proceeds.

Stephanie is more than the ring’s madam; she’s also its enforcer: when Gabby gets pregnant with John Tanner’s child and insists she’s going to have the baby, hit him up for child support for the next 18 years and blab to his wife if he tries to stop her, Stephanie breaks into her house (wearing the archetypal black hoodie it seems all crooks on Lifetime wear when they break and enter) and kills her by shooting her up with drugs, since the cover story is going to be that Gabby was a recovering drug addict who relapsed and O.D.’d. Cassie and her friend Alyssa (ya remember Alyssa? Actually I thought the actress playing Alyssa was hotter than any of the ones cast as the cheerleaders and I wished the writers had put her on the cheerleading squad) decide to investigate and go on social media to look up Monica Danforth (Julia Knope), who like Cassie wet to Tate Riley in hopes of becoming a veterinarian, got caught up in the cheerleaders’ “escort” operation, and dropped out when Stephanie paid her a large sum of money — enough for her to buy an interest in a horse stable and become its assistant manager (though about all we see her doing there is raking hay). Monica tells Cassie and Alyssa all, and Cassie and Alyssa work out a scheme with Cassie’s friend Kyle (ya remember Kyle?) to expose the ring. At another big alumni event during which the cheerleaders are set to perform, Cassie and Alyssa corner Stephanie in the women’s restroom and get her to admit her role in the scheme — while they’ve got their cell phone on and Kyle commandeers the mike to broadcast what Stephanie is saying, including the names of some of the johns (we see a great shot of a woman bolting from John’s table — his wife, obviously, about to deliver the divorce suit that’s going to break him financially now that her years-long suspicions have been confirmed), and Stephanie, who was there to get an award for her years of college philanthrophy, walks through the room with impeccable sang-froid after she realizes she’s been disgraced.

There’s a tag scene in which Cassie, Kyle, Cassie’s mom Karen and the accountant she’s dating — who thinks he can work out her financial problems so she can keep both the house and her dance studio without her scapegrace ex’s money — all meet for dinner and Cassie announces that instead of continuing at Tate Riley she’ll get a job and find a local college she can attend while living at home (though she promises she’ll still date Kyle). The Cheerleader Escort lives up to the promise of its title — though the sex scenes are perfunctory and awfully abbreviated (even though writer Canning wisely moved up the age of the cheerleader escorts from high school to college to avoid running afoul of all that Thought Police legislation about depicting adult males having sex with underage partners, she and director Carrière were obviously too scared of the moral Thought Police to get too engagingly lubricious in showing what was going on, so we get an awful lot of Lubitsch-style doors shoved in our faces just as things are starting to get interesting) — but it’s no more than a typical Lifetime formula movie and there’s little or no attempt to depict the class-struggle aspects of the plot. I’d have liked to hear some dialogue warning Cassie and Alyssa, when they threaten to go to the police, that the police are in the pockets of the 1-percenters who are the cheerleader-escorts’ customers — there are hints of that in Canning’s dialogue but it doesn’t become a plot point the way the power of the 1 percent (a phrase that’s actually used in this script) has in Restless Virgins and other more class-conscious Lifetime films. I liked The Cheerleader Escort but it wasn’t anything really special.