The feeling good comes easy now since I’ve got the Pill!
Spirits were high and flowing freely at the Charlotte Motor Speedway one crisp autumn night in 1975, as Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn belted out their hard-driving country hits before nearly fifteen thousand race fans. Twitty, the fifties rock ’n’ roller who turned country in the sixties and found his niche, came on first, wearing his lemon-yellow suit, his hair combed straight back and his spangled guitar strap turning back the glare of the floodlights.
There was something almost perfect about the setting: the crowd, full of close-cropped hair styles and freshly sunburned faces, watching in rapt appreciation, shrieking in continual bursts of recognition as Twitty ran through his earthy repertoire, some of it becoming so sexually explicit that almost nothing was left to the fans’ imagination.
They loved it when he finally came to one of his biggest and bawdiest hits in recent years, a crescendo ballad called “You’ve Never Been This Far Before.” There were rebel yells and catcalls that sounded as if they might have come from a high-school locker room as Twitty sang of “trembling fingers touching forbidden places.” And yet, despite the reaction they produce, there was a serious, almost somber side to Twitty’s songs—a sort of gut-level accuracy in his description of the guilt and confusion that often occur with early comminglings of love and sex.
“Yeah, it’s explicit,” he said in a gruff and hurried interview after the show, “and I caught a little flak for it. But I still think it’s one of the best songs I ever wrote. It’s real.”
The reality came from jumbled emotions that have always been there in abundance among the good ole boys that Twitty was singing to. Even as late as the 1970s, there was the nagging assumption that nice girls don’t and real men do, which can become a problem if you lose your grip on impersonality. The changing attitudes of the late twentieth century were a source of liberation, but there was a lingering fear, a counter consideration not easily shaken, that the Good Lord was up there somewhere, methodically taking notes in indelible ink.
A big problem for the Lord, however, was that he had recently lost a potent ally: the fear of pregnancy had given way to the pill; and that change had thrown the country music audience, and nearly everyone else as well, into one of the most profound fits of turmoil in the history of modern times. The separation of sex from consequence was unprecedented boost for the temptations of the here-and-now, releasing thoughts and creating options that were carefully repressed in times gone by.
Release was not liberation, however, and with it came a new set of problems that were chronicled with a kind of flawed and earthy eloquence in the lyrics of country music. Families were shaken, men and women were rethinking the whole range of their relationships, and Hugh Hefner’s predictions about how much fun it would be when contraception became a habit sometimes had a hollow and simplistic ring in the cold light of morning.
A Grand Ole Opry singer named Jean Shepherd caught the feeling not long ago with a ballad called “Another Neon Night”—a sort of feminine echo of “Help Me Make It Through the Night”—in which a liberated country girl finds that her sexual forays have failed their larger purpose. The song was not as big a hit as Sammi Jo’s “Tell Me a Lie,” which dealt with the same theme. But nowhere in all of country music has the pain of colliding values been expressed with any more power, as the woman in the song realizes with a sudden rush of shame: There’s someone lyin’ next to me and I don’t even know his name.
Songs that explicit have become almost the dominant genre of country music, which must be an eyebrow raiser to the God-fearing fans of yesteryear. But so it goes in the modern South: Baptist churches as abundant as they ever were, but massage parlors coming on stronger and stronger as time goes by. And like porno movies, country music sex songs don’t have to be artistic achievements in order to succeed.
Positive proof of that fact was offered a while back by a Nashville songwriter named Little David Wilkins, whose career refutes the idea that success and writing talent are necessarily connected. One of his first hits was a tacky little song called “Not Tonight I’ve Got a Headache,” which displays almost exactly as much subtlety and lyrical imagination as its title suggests. Wilkins came back a few months later with another Top Forty chart-buster called “Whoever Turned You On Forgot To Turn You Off,” clumsily written (at one point rhyming the words “lost,” “loss,” and “off”) and making no point except to affirm his own interest in another man’s sex-crazed castoff.
Little David, of course, was not alone in riding inane, sexually explicit songs to the top of the charts. The list is endless: Mel Street’s “This Ain’t Just Another Lust Affair,” in which the hero reassures the girl in his motel room that somewhere in her arms the feelin’ turned to love; or Billy Jo Spears’s female reversal of the theme, in which the whiny-voiced heroine is contending that “just because we are married don’t mean we can’t slip around;” or Gene Watson’s bedside temptation of a virgin, in which he tells her to “leave if you’d rather not lose what you came with, but stay and you’ll find this is where love begins.”
Kris Kristofferson is usually given credit for opening the floodgates, though the chances are that he didn’t have Little David Wilkins in mind when he did it. Songs like “Help Me Make It Through the Night” or “Me and Bobby McGee” obviously have a purpose beyond the titillating of fantasies and the padding of bank accounts. Kristofferson’s preoccupation was loneliness, which, in the real world, can become painfully interwoven with sexuality.
Actually, Kristofferson was not the only one around Nashville to make that connection. It was true that he was a rebel, and one of the norms he flouted was the tee-hee taboo about saying what you mean. But as Kristofferson was rising to prominence in the late sixties and early seventies, more traditional singers like Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn were also toughening up their acts and dealing with some pretty down-to-earth stuff.
It was 1969 when Dolly wrote “Down From Dover,” about a country girl with an out-of-wedlock baby on the way and a lover who had gone; and earlier still, Loretta Lynn had written “Wings Upon Your Horns,” about a young girl used by a leave-’em-crying lover (“When you first made love to me, I was your wife to be,” and so on). There were disc jockeys who were offended by such frank language from a sweet and sturdy native of Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, but Loretta Lynn has sailed on through such controversy to become one of the most important country singers today—at least in part because she personifies the stirrings among a large and crucial segment of America’s female population.
Hers has been, to say the least, an unlikely odyssey. She grew up in eastern Kentucky, a few miles south of Paintsville, in a one-room cabin where she shared a bed with four other children. It was coal country, a rugged and spectacular land where questions of survival were never very far from the surface.
Today the land and the people are scarred by too many losing battles against the whims and greed of distant corporations. But in Loretta’s childhood, the spirit was different. The Depression came quietly, as the dogged menfolk scratched and battled, trying to draw crops from the coal-infested earth. At night they descended beneath it to work the graveyard shift in the mines, while the women stayed home to nurse the babies, wash the clothes, and read the Bible by the light of a candle.
Eventually the Van Lear Coal Company pulled out, leaving Butcher Hollow, as Loretta puts it, “not much more ’n a ghost town today.” By then she had long since gone.
At the age of thirteen she met Mooney Lynn (nicknamed in honor of a home-brewed mash) at a schoolhouse supper where he had decided to sample one of her pies. Unimpressed with her abilities as a cook, Mooney nevertheless struck up a relationship that led, a month later, to a proposal of marriage. Loretta’s parents, Ted and Clara Webb, were singularly unimpressed with the whole idea, but youthful unions were not uncommon in that part of Kentucky, and before long the Webbs relented.
A few weeks later, Loretta and Mooney were off to nearby Chandler’s Cabins for their bewildering teenage wedding night, and the following year, at the age of fourteen, Loretta gave birth to her first baby girl. Three more children had followed by the time she was eighteen and at first, she maintains, her naivete was such that she didn’t even know what was causing them. She was five months pregnant the first time around before she knew what was wrong.
After leaving Kentucky, Mooney and his bride made their way to Washington state, where the early years of the fifties were spent in a one-on-one war against poverty. Mooney hired on as a lumberman and Loretta supplemented the family income by picking strawberries in the migrant labor fields.
It was during that time that Mooney bought her a used guitar, and she spent her spare moments singing and picking and composing songs. As the fifties drew to a close, she made a record called “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” and she and Mooney traveled the country in a beat-up Ford to promote it. Fifty thousand records later, her career began to take off and she found herself in Nashville.
The songs she wrote and sang drew their power from a number of sources, including the years in Washington where Loretta—like so many of her fans of today—had lived within the traditional expectations about a woman’s place. But if her outlook had been unrebellious, she had also learned something basic back in the desperate warmth of a coal miner’s cabin: a sturdy sense of self and self-preservation that she has carried with her ever since. And with her budding career setting off an implicit erosion of at least a part of her feminine dependence, a different kind of spirit—a sort of don’t-tread-on-me undercurrent—began to show itself in her music.
One of the first examples of that feeling was a song she wrote herself called “Don’t Come Home A’Drinkin’ With Lovin’ on Your Mind,” a wife’s-eye view of a hard-drinking husband that invariably strikes a responsive chord among the women in her audience. The Charlotte Motor Speedway audience in the fall of 1975 was no exception, and as the ladies cheered, the men responded in a different way—shouting good-natured taunts and propositions that Loretta fended off with an adept, tough-mouthed flirtatiousness, obviously enjoying every minute of it.
Later, as her bus rolled in for a follow-up concert in Greensboro, Loretta lounged back in her blue jeans, bare feet, and number thirteen football jersey to reflect on some of her songs. “A lot of women have lived it,” she says of “Don’t Come Home A’Drinkin’.” “I guess a lot of men have too, and ’course men ain’t the only ones who drink. But it’s a real song. All of my songs deal with something that’s real, and that’s why a lot of ’em get to be number one.”
Of all her number ones, however, the one the people scream loudest for wherever she goes is “The Pill,” her million-selling smash of 1975, which concerns exactly what its title suggests, and concludes with this happy affirmation: “Feelin’ good is easy now, ’cause I’ve got the pill.”
Loretta actually recorded the song around 1970 but kept it under wraps, waiting for the times to catch up. They never quite did. The record was banned on a dozen radio stations, giving it an aura above and beyond that of a story line that was racy enough to begin with. The woman in the song is an oft-pregnant housewife who is telling her good-timing husband that she now has the pill and therefore two can play at ’most any game in town.
Even in the increasingly raw world of country music, it was a little too much to handle in some quarters, especially with such a point-blank title. And yet it seems at least plausible that the male deejays who banned it were put off by something else as well—by the song’s explicit denunciation of the double standard.
“I’m ready to make a deal,” the woman affirms, “and you can’t afford to turn it down, ’cause you know I’ve got the pill.”
It was an effective piece of corn-pone protest, and it was not the first time that Loretta had tried it. Her best effort in that direction came a few years earlier, when a brilliant satirical writer named Shel Silverstein penned a song especially for her. It was a hard-hitting anthem called “One’s On the Way,” and to a certain segment of feminine society it said far more than a hundred issues of Ms. magazine or a year’s worth of speeches by Gloria Steinem. It told the story of a woman scrambling to keep up with the insatiable demands of her family—her brood of children and a husband wrapped up in a world of his own, and a middle American home in Topeka where marches in support of women’s liberation could have been happening on some other planet.
Loretta laughed and grinned uneasily when a reporter asked her about that song. Her own views, like those of many of the people who listen to her, were slowly evolving. But it was an unself-conscious evolution, unaffected by rhetoric or ideology, for protest movements were not her style.
“I sing about the things people go through,” she said, “and ‘One’s On the Way’ is something a lot of women experience. I think it’s trying to tell men, ‘I may not be a women’s libber, but this is how it is, and it’s not right.’ Women sit at home and they see the television shows, and the soap operas, and they know their own lives are not what they oughta be.”
“I’m not no libber,” she says with her perpetual grin. “But women have got to stick up for themselves. If they don’t, ain’t nobody gonna stick up for ’em. A marriage ought to be fifty-fifty, and most of ’em aren’t. Mine isn’t. A lot of women that don’t go in for women’s lib are starting to take up for themselves, and I think that’s good.
“Men don’t have to be threatened by that. But you know,” she says, dropping her smile for a moment, “I think a lot of them are.”
The music on the men’s side of the spectrum bears her out, at least in spots. There have been a lot of changes in the world since September of 1968, when Tammy Wynette recorded “Stand By Your Man” and watched it develop a fierce popularity—not so much among men as among women.
But the sense of duty has eroded noticeably in the years that followed, and for men who are unsettled by that reality and looking for reassurance, there was the message of Johnny Paycheck. Paycheck had made a career on songs of love gone sour, some of them innocuous, some of them wrenching and straight from the gut. But he turned polemical in the fall of 1975 with a record called “All American Man,” one of the most mean-spirited diatribes ever to come out of Nashville. It went far beyond the standard (and fairly harmless) “Ramblin’ Man” macho of people like Waylon Jennings, and what’s more, Paycheck clearly seemed to believe it.
“All you men out there, you gonna love this song,” he said in a husky-voiced intro that sounded like he was gearing up for a bar fight. “And about eighty percent of you women, you gonna love it too. But for the twenty percent that don’t like it, we wrote it just for you, darlin’.”
What he wrote is really pretty startling in the latter half of the twentieth century, but there wasn’t much way to miss the point. There were put-downs of women who work, who in fact do anything but marry and make love, and the bottom line was this: “American woman, why can’t you agree? God made man for himself, but he made you for me.”
Of course, the basic message—that women are here for men to use—lurks behind the lyrics of a number of country songs, just as it lurks in the psyches of those who listen. “Billy, please get me a woman, I’m tired, and I feel so alone,” sings Joe Stampley in a lonesome-truck-driver ballad. And as the song progresses, it becomes clear from the truck driver’s specifications that almost any woman will do, as long as she doesn’t make any demands for the future.
Whatever flaws of perspective the song may exhibit, however, it and most others like it lack the caprice of Paycheck’s record. There is something sad and real in the feeling, a sort of masculine vulnerability that is there in stark and overstated terms in nearly every song that Conway Twitty and the rest of them ever do. And you have the feeling as the good ole boys in the crowd whistle and guffaw and slap one another on the back that the frivolity is tinged with overcompensation—with a kind of communal understanding that everybody’s been there, and it’s a hell of a lot easier if you can somehow bury the feelings. But you can’t, of course, and the record companies know it, and the songwriters feel it, and it’s one of the things that makes Nashville unique and irreplaceable.
Obviously there are Nashville writers whose views about all of this are frankly commercial. They know what will sell, and they churn out the songs, two a day, chuckling to themselves all the way to the bank. But I think the cynics are in the minority. For one thing, there can be few people who feel the pain of changing values more than some picker-poet out on the road and growing old fast, while the groupies tempt him and his wife waits at home—maybe. About the only good thing about that scene for him is that the times and the FCC will let him say things now that he couldn’t say before. And so you have songs like Guy Clark’s “Instant Coffee Blues,” in which a lonesome lady and a road-weary traveling man are grappling, on more or less equal terms, with the emptiness that comes on the morning after:
It all goes down so easy but the next day is hell. . .
There is, of course, a happier side to country sex, and you find it in the gentle love ballads of people like Don Williams, a lanky Texan who can sing with understated power about relationships that work. But the dominant theme is pathos, and what emerges is a picture of men who are uneasy not only with the more assertive stance of women, but also with the kinds of casual and easy encounters that should have been the dream of every red-blooded good ole boy between Georgia and California.
And so you have songs like Bill Anderson’s “Somewhere Between Lust and Sitting Home Watching TV,” which must be a gut-rocker to every suburban husband whose eye has ever wandered; or the Mel Tillis hit called “Woman In the Back Of My Mind,” about a happily married man wrestling with the love that lingers from a relationship long since severed; or Tom T. Hall’s poignant ballad about a Cub Scout daddy who knows his mistress is waiting at a cheap hotel.
People live all of that, of course, and if country music is too riddled with contradiction to put it all in place, it can at least help them sweat out the pain. “How I love that hurtin’ music,” wails Hank Williams, Jr., “’cause, Lord, I’m hurtin’ too.”