“Whatever their cultivated tastes they are not ashamed of their native music and retain a fondness for belting it out.”
A Little Better Than Plumb
THERE IS a tendency among the falsehearted to look down their noses at this kind of music. My husband, my friend Pansy Phillips and I had an experience straight out of a Lichty cartoon once in one of the smaller cities of Kentucky.
For years Henry and I have crusaded for the Library Extension Division and its network of bookmobiles and regional libraries. A new library was in the process of being born in this small city and I agreed to speak in its behalf. Mrs. Phillips and Henry were invited to be present.
The city put the big pot in the little one for us and we were forewarned about a luncheon, the “speaking,” then a tea or reception. Pansy and I dusted off our big hats, matched up a pair of white gloves each, donned out best bibs and tuckers, squinched our toes into high-heeled shoes, which takes some doing for me because twenty-two years in the country have made my freedom-loving toes too antipathetic to tight enclosure! We went hence.
The luncheon was pretty and delicious. Eyeing the peas on my plate I thought of what Sarah Hutchison, another friend of mine and the first in Adair County, once whispered to Henry at a public dinner he was covering for his newspaper, at that time the Campbellsville News Journal. “What,” Sarah had hissed in his ear, “would banquets do without the Great American Pea?”
“Start a fad for brussels sprouts,” Henry hissed back.
Sarah shuddered and subsided.
After the luncheon in the small city we made a tour of the proposed library, then wended our way to the club room for the speaking.
The room was full of pretty women, lovely hats, minks and white gloves, the badge of the well-bred Kentucky woman wherever she goes. There was also, however, a perceptible stiffness and chilliness. My goodness, I thought, are they that cool to this library project?
Henry dropped into a back pew and Pansy and I followed our guide to the solitary elegance of the front row. These things are usually sponsored by some women’s club and there are always minutes to be read, the treasurer’s report to be heard, old business to be settled and new business to be taken up. Thirty minutes to an hour pass in this fashion during which time I try to keep an interested expression on my face, a little difficult to do after a good many years of hearing women argue whether to have a bake sale on the courthouse lawn or a country-ham dinner for the volunteer firemen to raise money for their cause. I am sometimes tempted to arrive late and escape this half to full hour of threshing around, but I never have had quite the heart to do it. I imagine it would be unsettling to the program chairman for her guest speaker not to be safely tucked under her wing when the program gets under way.
At the conclusion of business a slight woman, obviously nervous, slid into the seat beside me and whispered that she hoped I wouldn’t mind but the music chairman had arranged a short musical program to be given before I spoke. I didn’t mind. This, too, is normal. Somebody always plays a violin solo, or a piano solo or sings. It seems to bridge a kind of inevitable hiatus between two kinds of boredom, the boredom of club business and the boredom of the guest speaker’s speech.
The music chairman took charge with gusto and expounded, indeed preached, on the great good fortune of the club to be able to hear today two young men from the neighboring town who were between engagements on the nightclub circuit and whom she had been able to persuade to give of their time and talent. She harangued at length on their God-given talent and the astronomical fees they were paid in Newark and Miami and Las Vegas.
The air, which had been stiff with chilliness, now creaked as the ice froze. I nudged Pansy. “Was Elvis born around here?”
She grinned. “I think Memphis claims him.”
“Are you beginning to understand the ice?”
She nodded. “They don’t dig whoever this dowager has dug up.”
With a flourish the dowager finished in true Grand Ole Opry fashion. “Folks, here are the Jones brothers. Let’s give ’em a big hand.”
As two clean-cut, handsome kids so young they were barely shaving made a running entrance hauling their instruments with them, the hand they got was mighty meager. In fact, you could say it was nonexistent. A few white-kid gloves patted together delicately, and that was all. The boys were rigged out in souped-up cowboy shirts, tight black pants, but they didn’t have sideburns or ducktails and they had wide, warm smiles. They also had an electric lead guitar and a steel rhythm guitar.
Light broke on me as they went belting into “The Steel Guitar Rag.” The women were almost too embarrassed to bear it, not for their own sakes, but for mine. They had invited as their guest an author who, on the surface, should be cultured, well-bred as they themselves were and appreciative of the fine arts. They had done every lovely thing they could to honor me. It was being ruined by this ill-timed, ghastly performance. Even if I hadn’t really liked country music I would have done what I did. It was only courteous. Under the circumstances, however, it was no effort.
I swiveled around and beckoned to Henry who came forward to sit with me. Both his foot and mine patted noticeably to that driving beat and at the end of “The Steel Guitar Rag” we blistered our hands in genuinely warm applause. The kids were good, really good.
They played half a dozen pieces, perhaps, and outside of the hoedowns I must confess they weren’t exactly selective. If there is anything more comical, more atrociously ill timed and placed, than two adolescent boys bawling, “You don’t love me anymore” to a hundred obvious society matrons, I have yet to witness it. It nears hysteria in its inappropriateness.
There was shocked, horrified, squirmy silence when the drippy ballad ended. I made bold to request one last number, for anything, anything at all would be better than to leave the sickly chords of “You Don’t Love Me Anymore” hanging in the air. “Play ‘Bile Them Cabbage Down,’ boys,” I said.
They biled them. They mortally did bile them cabbage down. They biled them down so far they rendered out the fatback and then rendered the renderings! They sizzled and fried that old hoedown until the natural thing would have been to abandon the speaking and form squares and begin swinging partners!
With the rafters still ringing I was on next and I did a quick shift in my opening and praised the club for recognizing that country music was one of the few music forms native to the United States. “We borrow most of our music forms from Europe,” I said, “and whether we personally like it or not, here in Kentucky we should be proud of having nourished an original music.”
I wanted so much to ease the embarrassment. It had been a soul-shriveling experience for these ladies. I guessed that the music chairman had browbeaten the program committee into a pulp of nonresistance. I could see how she could have. I did want them to know their guest was not horrified.
In addition, I wanted them to understand some of the real ingenuity and real creativeness of the two boys. I said how good they were, how better than good, how truly excellent in the country music field with intricacies of arrangement that only true musicians can evolve. I said what the neophyte hears in country music is mostly noise and rhythm. What the connoisseur hears is the melodic line, backed up solidly, with occasionally, in the hands of a genius, some sudden, new, soaring shower of gold stringing. And we had heard it that day in that corny old hoedown, “Bile Them Cabbage Down.” The lead guitar had gone way out into outer space with a rippling, ranging pick that had put some brand-new sounds together.
Well, that’s the kind of music we make at our house and once in a while Henry’s guitar can go winging off into the blue, too, and give you goosebumps all down your spine.