Farewells

I guess today is the day everyone starts in on what songs the documentary Country Music missed and who was slighted. I think they probably covered the scene as well as one in the space allowed and without causing eyes to glaze over. I suppose they regarded Glen Campbell as to "pop" but still I would like to have seen this classic  included.

They did mention Hank Garland as a session player and caught him in one shot of a Patsy Cline session. They made Marty Stuart into some sort of classic prophet and that's no problem. The few, the very few, people I know who are personally acquainted with the Bluegrass/Country scene don't have much good to say about him, but hey, that's inductive reasoning at its worse. Anyone "in the know" please chime in. I'm almost always wrong.

Anyway, it was a classic documentary, perhaps the best I've ever seen. Of course it had lots of actual footage with which to work. There was no way interview Joshua Chamberlain or one of his lieutenants live after Little Round Top, now was there?

At least one mention was of someone that I though I was the only one who had ever heard of. That, of course, would have been Nanci Griffith. She stole my soul years ago with this cover of a favorite Bob Dylan number. As my old friend Gary Toler once said of someone, "had [she] been an old sailor, she could have lured me off to sea." Connoisseur reviewer Jared Lawrence Burden once observed, “As she talks, the young men in the audience are wishing that Nanci Griffith were their girlfriend, the older men are wishing she were their daughter, and the women are wishing that theyou, too, could play guitar and sing.”

Anyway. There's an old story about two travelers crossing the desert who were told by a genie to fill their saddlebags with sand before going to sleep and they would awake in the morning "both glad and sad." They did as told, somewhat sleepily and half-heartedly. They awoke in the morning to find that the sand had turned to diamond overnight. Then they were glad for the presence of the diamonds but sad that they hadn't gathered more sand.

I'm both glad for the Country Music series for what it gave us, and sad that it's over and we must return to these troubled times. Maybe it both taught us a little about how to handle heartbreak, and offered us some hope. It's somewhat like my definition of a perfect visit to a friend. That's when you must leave, but you wish you had one more day to stay. That will always make you want to come back again.

Mixtures

Odd, but Country Music, the Ken Burns documentary, continues to amaze. From last evening’s episode, for example, I learned that the classic song Me and Bobby McGee, written by Kris Kristofferson, grew from his admiration of the 1954 Italian film La Strada (The Road) directed by Federico Fellini. Now that’s the magic of the whole Ken Burns series wrapped up into a single song. It's a country rock number written by a West Point instructor/Rhodes Scholar, based on an “artsy” foreign film, and turned into an immortal bit of Americana by a drug-crazed blues singer who rose to fame from  west coast hippie venues.

It just doesn’t get anymore entangled in modern cultural vines as that, now does it?

They say though, that the most moving songs, especially in the country genre, are those that make you feel they were written just for you. That’s Sunday Morning Coming Down for me. When I first heard it, I was stationed aboard the USS Hunley (AS31) in a desolate mooring five miles up the Cooper River from Charleston, South Carolina. Having finished a year-long tour in Southeast Asia at the invitation of my country, I thought maybe the Navy had wrung the last ounce of worth from me and that we should maybe part ways.

No such luck, they sent me to a worse berth. I had saved enough money overseas to buy an old Chevrolet car, though. So on Sundays, after a night “on the beach” in bars and cheap trailer parks, I’d drive into Charleston, careful to avoid direct contact with the honest folks there who seemed, for some reason, to hate American servicemen far more than the citizens of Da Nang had.

When, therefore, I heard the lines,

In the park I saw a daddy

With a laughing little girl

He was swingin

And I stopped beside the Sunday school

And listened to the song

That they were singing

it sure made me feel like "something I had lost somewhere along the way." I had never met Kris Kristofferson, but I knew that he knew what loneliness was. Man, did he know.

I made it through South Carolina, as I had made it through Vietnam. They didn’t try to destroy you with guns in Charleston, they just tried to make you disappear with bitter indifference. The wounds last, nonetheless. Later though, I met Brenda and things got better, a lot better.

This is still one of my favorite musical pieces in the world, though, that and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Maybe I’m as mixed up, but not as talented at expressing it, as Kristofferson.

Mixtures often turn out well.

Music and Memories

Watched the first episode of the Ken Burns documentary Country Music last evening. It surely brought back some memories. In my youth, they kept our little country store open on Saturday nights until the last customer left, sometimes near one o’clock in the morning. Having spent the day in Pine Bluff, folks would stop on the way home to stock up on groceries for the week. They bought on credit mostly, waiting until payday or the day that Social Security or what they called back then “Old-aged Pension Checks” back then came.

Anyhow, crowds would gather and folks would visit on the front porch of the store while my parents filled orders. The kids would play and The Grand Ole Opry would blast from a little Philco radio. We’d vow to stay up until the store closed but sleep always won. I can’t count the number of times I fell asleep with Uncle Pen on the radio, performed by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys.

One night, while we were still outside playing, a disagreement occurred between two women over some man, wouldn’t you figure? Before anyone knew it, a straight razor gashed an arm open and the Sheriff had to be summoned. I didn’t see the incident, but I caught a glimpse of the result when the Sheriff opened the door of the pickup truck where the woman sat. She was overweight, and the gash didn’t get through the fat, it seemed. But is sure made a mess.

Two or three of us kids stood around, awestruck, until they chased us away. I don’t think they did anything but send the perpetrator home and the victim to the hospital. The law didn’t get too involved in “cuttin’ scrapes” in those days when the participants weren’t white.

If the future episodes of Country Music are as good as the first, we are in for a treat, and I’m in for a lot more memories.

Growing Up Southern: September 19, 2017

To paraphrase a saying attributed to Ulysses S. Grant, my father could whistle two songs, one was the hymn “Farther Along.” The other wasn’t.

Oh, he liked music. He just never pretended to be an active participant. He loved to close the grocery store a little early and bundle us off early to some live performance. Famous artist or unknown, it didn’t matter to him. He wasn’t above hauling the whole family down to a small venue in Rison, Arkansas to hear a young singer who had no arms, their molecules having obviously reassigned to his lungs. It was quite a show as it turned out, although I never heard of the artist again.

But, as I said, some of the artists we saw were well known. The group Johnnie and Jack played once at our high school auditorium, and they were famous. Perhaps their most popular song was “Poison Love.” Check it out, and note the fancy Latin-like rhythm guitar work by Johnnie Wright. This “Rhumba Beat” became associated with them on such classics as “Down South In NewOrleans.” That’s steel guitar legend Shot Jackson with them on the videos. I hope he was there with them in Pine Bluff. Heck, I don’t recall and I didn’t even know who he was then.

Johnnie was also famous for being married to music legend Kitty Wells for a few days short of 74 years. She wasn’t with them the night we saw them, though, as far as I can remember. She may have been busy recording “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”

Oh, and that music on the video? That was a genre called “Country and Western Music.” It became extinct somewhere around the early 1980s. Those of us who were privileged to hear it while we were growing up still miss it after all these years.

The biggest shocker, to me at least, about our musical pilgrimages came to me in the 1960s. When they made that awful, terrible, pathetic, laughable film about the life of Hank Williams, I was telling my mother that I had gone to see it. She looked at me and said, “Well you saw the real Hank Williams once.”

“I what?”

“He came to Robinson Auditorium and your daddy took us all to see him.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You weren’t but about three or four.”

From all accounts, he was sober for that performance. It was a Sunday I think. Daddy remembered Hank saying of the song “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It” that it “ … has been buying a lot of beans for me and the boys lately.”

I wish I could say I remember it. I do remember seeing those giant (fake) columns at the front of the building, and if I allow my mind to run wild I can conjure up the image of a man with dark circles around his eyes singing away. That may be pure imagination. At any rate, I can say I actually saw the man. I suppose if he had been armless, I might have a stronger recollection of it.

Daddy bought us a Johnnie and Jack songbook at their concert. I think I still have it stashed away somewhere. I’m thankful for every musical outing he took us to. I guess I’m also thankful that they didn’t have cell phones in those days. Real life was a lot more fun.

A life much too short