TRADITIONAL COUNTRY
(Background song: Life Is Like A Mountain Railroad - Patsy Cline and Willie Nelson -
later adapted as 'The Miners' Lifeguard' an American miners' union song, and by John Brunner as 'The H-Bomb's Thunder', Anthem of The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, or CND, in its early days, and sung on all the Aldermaston Marches).
(Comments/contributions: Tony.Papard@btinternet.com)
I prefer the traditional Country sounds to New Country, which is now almost indistinguishable from mainstream pop music. A few years ago there were some good New Country songs around, but I stopped listening to London’s Country station a year or so ago because there was so little which interested me, it was all a tuneless dirge.
Traditional Country music has a reputation for being corny, over sentimental, reactionary and morbid. It often is all of these things, but nevertheless I love it and rarely listen to any other kind of music nowadays. Rock’n’Roll is great for dancing to at a party or weekender, or to see live. When I’m playing tapes, records and CDs it is usually Country I choose.
I find the music very relaxing, and, like the Blues, it reflects true life. Pop music is all about love and lost love, but there is so much more to life than that. Country music has never been scared to tackle almost any taboo subject such as death, divorce, prostitution. OK, it devised its own euphemisms, but everyone knows a ‘waitress’ or a ‘honky-tonk girl’ is really a prostitute.
How many pop songs tackle these subjects, or if they do, have intelligible words? I can understand Country singers, but most pop singers since the Beatles might as well be recording in a foreign language. I well remember The Kinks’ ‘Dedicated Swallower of Matches’ for instance, or Dusty Springfield singing ‘You don’t have to say you love me just because that hand’. These words never made any sense to me, obviously because I got the lyrics all wrong. Way back in the Fifties I remember the Gilbert Harding song (‘Wonderful, wonderful Gilbert Harding’). Who remembers the photograph song? (‘Some day my prints will come’) Or the Abyssinia song? (‘Abyssinia in all the old familiar places’). But I digress. OK, the last two I never really misheard, I just made them up. But it does seem my ear is more tuned in to Deep Southern accents.
It may be over sentimental, but I can relate to many of the themes of traditional Country music. Poor old Hank Snow had so many mothers, children and little doggies pass away in his songs, and Hank Williams isn’t far behind. But I love all these, and many of them release deep seated emotions. We have all lost loved ones in our time, certainly as we get older, so why pretend everything revolves around the trials and tribulations of young love?
Yes, traditional Country, coming from the redneck Bible Belt, does tend to be quite reactionary. But I even love songs like Merle Haggard’s ‘Okie From Muskogee’ and ‘The Fightin’ Side Of Me’, Conway Twitty’s ‘Star-Spangled Heaven’ and Hank Snow’s rendition of the World War II ditty ‘There’s A Star-Spangled Banner Waving Somewhere’. These songs are so awful they are funny, as are some of the more melodramtic tragedy songs like Slim Whitman’s ‘Please Paint A Rose on The Garden Wall’ (‘So mama will think Summer’s still here’) or Kitty Wells’ ‘I Gave My Wedding Dress Away’. It is kitsch if you like, but Country also has its more serious side.
Take some of Hank Williams songs, especially those monologs recorded as Luke The Drifter. Numbers like ‘Men With Broken Hearts’ and ‘Be Careful Of Stones That You Throw’ are pure poetry, and they have a serious progressive message of how we view and treat other people.
Jerry Lee Lewis first turned me on to Country music, and he has recorded a phenomenal amount of excellent songs in this style. Many are autobiographical, such as ‘Old Country Church’ and the monolog ‘Things That Matter Most To Me’. Then there is the beautiful ‘Mama’s Hands’, these are all very moving, showing the deep love and respect Jerry had for his mother. But in his songs you can trace his whole life – the women, the booze, the depression, the bouncing back ‘I Am What I Am’ philosophy which has made him a survivor.
Some of Jerry’s songs are so brutally honest. Few artists would bare their very souls the way he does, with lines like ‘I climbed the ladder of success which led to my destruction’ and ‘I’m falling to the bottom, working my way down’. There are at least three songs in similar vein on his ‘Sometimes A Memory Ain’t Enough’ album, perhaps indicating the depression he was going thru at the time.
But it is not just Jerry Lee, many Country singers sing about real life as they have lived it. OK, New Country singer Vince Gill recorded the beautiful ‘Look At Us’ about true and lasting love then split with his wife, but George Jones has recorded many songs about boozing and broken relationships which reflect his lifestyle.
There are still some taboo subjects rarely touched upon by Country music. Gays are never openly mentioned as such in traditional Bible Belt Country music, but one of the most famous tunes in Country music is ‘The Wild Side Of Life’. The answer record with the same tune was Kitty Wells’ ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels’, an early strike for women’s liberation from a very unlikely source. Roy Acuff (and Jerry Lee) recorded the quite reactionary, fundamentalist religious song ‘Great Speckled Bird’ which used the same tune. But Montana Slim recorded this same famous tune as 'I’m Thinking Tonite Of My Blue Eyes’, a camp gay anthem about a man pining for his lost male lover who has left him to sail ‘far across the sea’. Well, ‘Hello Sailor!’. Very bold for its time, but quite unmistakably gay as Montana wonders over and over ‘if he ever thinks of me’. New Country has even tackled HIV/AIDS with the song ‘She Thinks His Name Was John’ in which a woman sings about the man who infected her.
So Country music has always sung about real people and real life, not an idealized picture revolving around young love like so many pop songs. Other forms of music such as the Blues and Soul also tackle such themes, as do many pop songs especially on albums, but personally I like my music Country.
Uptempo Country can be fun too, this is where rockabilly came from. There are whole sub-categories of Country music like Cajun and Bluegrass which have a very infectious beat.
It is sad that real Country music and its stars get so little exposure nowadays, certainly in the States. The song ‘Murder On Music Row’ covered by Alan Jackson and George Strait says it all – the Nashville music business killed traditional Country and went for the big bucks, and now Nashville mainly produces pure mainstream pop. Perhaps one day the pendulum will swing back and real Country music will come back in favor. I hope so. It is not just the words, but the tunes – traditional Country has some of the best tunes in the world. I love the twanging guitars, the steel and the fiddles, and a Country voice with a down-home nasal twang. You can’t beat Stonewall Jackson whining: ‘There Were Tears On Her Bridal Bouquet’. Corny maybe, but great stuff!
Reba McIntire, Shania Twain and Garth Brooks – they don’t do much for me nowadays. Give me the various Hanks (Williams, Locklin, Snow, Thompson), Tammy Wynette, Patsy Cline, Jerry Lee and Mickey Gilley any day.