Lord, it’s a strange place to pray . . .
It was a wilting July weekend in South Carolina, just outside the booming little town of Rock Hill. The crowd of more than ten thousand had begun arriving early in the week; there were farmers and plumbers and preachers and salesmen, the hard-core folk from the back country, settling in at the Carowinds Amphitheater for a reverent, week-long festival of gospel music.
Some of the biggest names in the business were there—like the LeFevres, the Kingsmen, and Coy Cook and the Premiers. And while it may be true that none of them would produce much awe outside of gospel circles, for the avid and the faithful it was roughly equivalent to seeing Elvis Presley, Elton John, and one or two of the Beatles all in the same week.
“It’s entertainment and it’s inspiration,” explained Harold Pigford, a strapping South Carolina fan with sweat beads popping out on his sun-reddened forehead. “We go to shows like this whenever we can.”
For Pigford and thousands like him the appeal of gospel music is simple and direct. Its message is unfailingly reassuring—an optimistic New Testament fundamentalism, nearly devoid of fire and brimstone terror, with Jesus the omnipresent soother of everyday travail. “My boat shall sail safely though the waves splash high,” the LeFevres sing onstage, belting it out with a kind of high-pitched, hard-driving harmony that sets hands to clapping and shoes to tapping.
All of it is backed by the warbling melodrama of country steel guitars, and faint smiles of mellow satisfaction settle on the work-lined faces in the crowd. Even the restless, berry-brown children, tugging at the strings of their Carowinds balloons, can’t quite tear themselves away.
“It’s a time when people find themselves getting back to the basics,” says Jim Hamill, settling his two-hundred-plus pounds into a padded backstage chair, as the sweat trickled down from his close-cropped sideburns. “I think people are tired of put-ons and con jobs, and I’m talking about the whole overall picture, the feeling, the vibes you sometimes get in this country. I think people want something real, and that’s what this is—pure gospel.”
Hamill, a gruff and sincere musician from the foothills town of Hendersonville, North Carolina, is the lead singer for the Kingsmen, an Asheville group that won one of gospel music’s top awards in 1974 for its song, “When I Wake Up To Sleep No More.”
He is heartened, he says, by the growing commercial success of gospel music, and he attributes it to the fact that most Americans, beleaguered as they have been by problems ranging from war to Watergate, are searching for escape. He admits, of course, that there is a simpler factor as well: The people who listen to him most—the sturdy churchgoers of Bonifay, Florida, or Dalton, Georgia, or Cookville, Tennessee—have been the beneficiaries in recent decades of the inexorable, amoebalike expansion of the American middle class. They have more money now to spend on records.
But Hamill also believes that the influence of gospel music (and by extension, the Gospel itself) has grown steadily, even as the world around it has become increasingly secular in its apparent preoccupations. As evidence he cites the long-standing, undiminished and perhaps even growing influence of gospel assumptions on the larger and less particularized field of country music.
There is scarcely a country singer who hasn’t dabbled in gospel music at least upon occasion, and that includes even some of the most modem and rebellious. Kris Kristofferson’s “Why Me, Lord?” was by far the biggest hit he ever had, lingering on the Billboard charts for nearly a full year—which makes it one of the most durable and successful songs in the history of country music. And yet such spectacular success is really nothing new. Roy Acuff’s career was going nowhere fast until he stumbled upon “Great Speckled Bird,” and one of Hank Williams’s most famous songs was the gospel classic, “I Saw the Light,” written on a dismal Alabama highway just outside Montgomery.
But the link between gospel and country goes even deeper than songs dealing directly with the discovery of Jesus. There is often a religious factor in even the most earthbound country ballads (and most, of course, are emphatically immersed in the here-and-now). Sometimes you have to peel away the layers of meaning in order to find it, searching out the substance between the lines. At other times it’s far more obvious, with an acute sense of the Lord and his expectations lurking unapologetically near the surface. Bill Anderson, for example, handled the link graphically a few years back, when he wrote “The Lord Knows I’m Drinking,” a Top Ten hit detailing the sins and remorse of a high-stepping good ole boy who plans to have a heart-to-heart with God after one final round and a quick whirl with adultery.
Anderson’s song was recorded and carried to prominence by Cal Smith, a veteran balladeer whose twangy-rich baritone gives a distinctive stamp to nearly anything he sings. But the most striking aspect of Smith’s career, at least in recent years, has been his choice of material. Almost all the songs he has released have had some kind of theological dimension interwoven, often with considerable skill, into stories about the day-to-day existence of people on earth.
Perhaps the best-known example of that genre came in 1974, when Smith recorded “Country Bumpkin,” the tear-jerking story of a gutsy barmaid with a gift for looking life straight in the eye. During the course of the song, the barmaid meets and marries a hayseed yokel, bears his children, and then “forty years of hard work later,” dies—assuring husband and son before she goes that she will, in fact, see them later. The melodramatic story line escapes being maudlin by the finesse with which it was written, and somehow evokes a simple eschatology, a concern with ultimate destinies on earth and beyond that apparently got beneath the skin of the half million people who bought the record.
The target audience, of course, was hard-core country, and the theology simple and fundamental. There was a kind of cosmic optimism, a sunny and rocklike faith not only in the omnipotence of God, but in the certainty of a rosy future somewhere beyond the grave. Earthly optimism, on the other hand, was harder to come by, since life was never very easy or kind in the spawning grounds of the gospel tradition. Throughout the hollows of southern Appalachia, and the nooks and crannies of the deeper South, the obscure Calvinist sects—the Nazarenes, Pentecostals, and all the rest—grappled with the same assumptions that underlay the Negro spirituals of the nineteenth century: that life was what it was, and the future was frozen, and things wouldn’t improve until the coming of the chariot.
“This world is not my home,” they would sing, their a cappella voices taking on a power and a promise that would rattle the rafters, as the echo faded in the woods outside. But in the end, the hillbillies were wrong—or at least their vision became a little fuzzy when they tried to peer into future generations, for things have changed in the rural South. The economy has become more benign, and against that backdrop, the righteous certainty of old-fashioned gospel can shade unconsciously into a kind of modern-day smugness. The feeling is somehow different when the faithful arrive in fancy new cars.
Perhaps for that reason, a new and more humble gospel influence is emerging from a handful of talented young writers, most of them from Nashville. In Mickey Newbury’s “Lead On,” or Larry Gatlin’s “Help Me,” there is an implicit understanding that worldly pleasures and treasures are attainable, for both Newbury and Gatlin have experienced their share. But there is still a yearning and a sense of inadequacy, stemming not as it once did from the austerity of the present, but from the empty feelings that linger even after a thorough and conscientious sampling of the things the world has to offer.
Some of the best writers in Nashville have tried their hand at that theme, but none have succeeded any more simply or eloquently than Dolly Parton, who was voted country music’s top female vocalist in 1975 and who, by her own admission, has lived the contradiction between the lures and limitations of earthly pursuits.
She was born and raised in a rough-hewn cabin near the foothills town of Sevierville, Tennessee. There were twelve children, three of them older, reared by sturdy and moralistic parents, pillars of the local Church of God. The old farmplace yielded a reluctant living in the post-Depression forties, and Dolly can remember her share of nights without supper. But for the most part, she says, time has sweetened her recollections, and the things that stand out now are more idyllic—like Sunday School, and fireflies, and stolen kisses on the front-porch swing.
But girlhood was also a restless time. She hated school, loved to sing, and at the age of eighteen, with fantasies of stardom dancing in her brain, she struck out on her own for the big city of Nashville. She didn’t know anyone when she arrived, and in the early years the loneliness took its toll. But she received some early encouragement from Chet Atkins and Bob Ferguson of RCA, and three years later, in 1967, she signed on as the better half of the singing duo of Porter ’n’ Dolly.
She had a pure and spine-tingling voice, and a writer’s gift for word pictures, but there was also what she described as “my gaudy appearance and over-exaggerated features”—that is to say, the mound of blond hair that is not her own, and her awe-inspiring figure, which definitely is.
Because of that veneer, it was not until the 1970s that anyone outside a committed and longtime country following bothered to take her very seriously. But the message slowly spread, and with people like Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris recording her songs and Rolling Stone, New Times, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine giving her rave reviews, Parton emerged as a country music icon.
She was happy about all that, of course, but for a young woman who was raised in the Church of God and who took its lessons as the gospel truth, the whole experience has generated its own set of doubts and confusions. “Being brought up the way I was, I was taught right from wrong,” she explains. “Whether you do right or you do wrong, you are conscious of right. I am too good to be bad, but too bad to be good, and one day awhile back I had religion on my mind. I know that I am not living as a Christian, and sometimes I think about it a lot. I don’t mean to overstate that, but I think to live as a Christian I would have to put as much into that as I do into my music; and I don’t. So I wrote this song, which deals a little with the pain of religion: ‘I am a seeker, poor sinful creature, there is none weaker.’”
She begins, reciting the words to one of the best and most important gospel songs in many a year. It is fraught with the kind of searching humility you would expect from a Christian with doubts about how to fit the pieces together, and coming to Jesus with an unadorned plea for help. “I am a seeker, you are a teacher. You are a reacher, so reach out.” There are affirmations about God and his ability to help, but no hard and fast predictions about what he will do—and even in Dolly’s conversation there are traces of doubt. “I think God understands,” she says, then adds after a pause, “I hope he does. If not, we all got a problem.”
The problem, she explains, is that we are living in an age filled with diversions and complex situations in which, in the words of Canadian songwriter Gene MacLellan, “we do what we must do.” The music of people like Dolly Parton has become influenced and driven by that reality—by the creeping secularism that affects nearly everyone’s life and self-definition. But there are many people who will tell you that the reverse is also true—that many of country music’s most secular songs have been influenced by a kind of persistent religiosity that is sometimes invisible on the surface.
One songwriter who subscribes to that theory is Larry Gatlin, an affable young expatriate from the west Texas town of Odessa, who got his singing start in a family gospel group. Gatlin has written his share of straight gospel numbers like “Help Me” and “It Must Have Rained in Heaven,” but he sees more similarities than differences between them and the underlying point of his song “Rain”—which isn’t, on its face, a song of God. On the contrary, it is desperate and earthy, the story of a wino’s death, inspired by the saga of Ira Hayes, the alcoholic Indian hero whom Johnny Cash had eulogized in song.
The dominant quality of Gatlin’s wino ballad, which was recorded in its most moving version by Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge, is sadness. But sadness has a special meaning for Gatlin, containing, in its purest form, a kind of mystical quality that makes it, he says, one of the most positive forces in the universe.
“Sadness is a constant, recurring theme in country music,” he explains, “and I feel that if you are really sad, if you can evoke true, heartfelt sadness, it borders on compassion, a feeling of closeness for the person the song is about. Sadness is a gentle, creative feeling. It levels barriers, and helps let the caring and compassion flow, which is, to me, what it’s really all about.”
Certainly, Gatlin adds, those qualities were among the primary concerns of Jesus. If Gatlin is right, and it’s true that songs of compassion are inspired by a kind of religious by-product, then the inspiration is profound and widespread. Compassion has always been a trademark of good country music, embedded in the Christian culture from which the music emerged. You can see it in the earliest writings of A. P. Carter, the depression-era ballads of Woody Guthrie and Sara Ogan Gunning, and the gospel-flavored protest anthems of Johnny Cash. But few songwriters have mastered the art of compassion any more thoroughly—or underscored Gatlin’s point any more graphically-than a young Chicago hillbilly named John Prine.
Prine’s family had migrated north from the strip mine country of western Kentucky. Like most refugees from southern Appalachia, he was forced to cram a lot of tough living into his early years, and he grew up during the ferment of Vietnam. His songs draw passion from a number of sources. Many of the best were written during his years of obscurity, before the neon Chicago night in 1971 when friends persuaded Kris Kristofferson to wander down to Old Town for an after-hours visit to the club where Prine was playing. “By the time we got there, Old Town was nothing but empty streets and dark windows,” Kristofferson remembers. “And the club was closing. But the owner let us come in, pulled some chairs off a couple of tables, and John unpacked his guitar and got back up to sing.
“There are few things as depressing to look at as a bunch of chairs upside down on the tables of an empty old tavern, and there was that awkward moment, us sitting there like ‘Okay, kid, show us what you got,’ and him standing up there alone, looking down at his guitar like ‘What the hell are we doing here, buddy?’ Then he started singing, and by the end of the first line we knew we were hearing something else. It must’ve been like stumbling onto Dylan when he first busted onto the Village scene... one of those rare, great times when it all seems worth it.”
Prine’s selections that night were rough and gut-rocking creations—songs like “Donald and Lydia,” about the lonesome, desperate fantasies of a fat girl and her would-be GI lover; or “Hello In There,” the haunting story of two old people whose lives were slowly ebbing away. But perhaps the strongest song of all—and certainly the one that captured most thoroughly the Christian underpinnings of country compassion—was a bitter ballad called “Sam Stone.” It tells of a broken, strung-out Vietnam veteran who meets his end in an overdose, and leaves a wife and kids behind him. It’s an angry, disillusioned song expressing in the end a desperate kind of fear: Jesus Christ died for nothing I suppose.
For reasons that had more to do with image than music, Prine has not gained widespread acceptance among the deejays and radio executives who decide what the country music audience will and will not be permitted to hear. It’s been a genuine loss, but because of the pressure of Kris Kristofferson, Tom T. Hall, Shel Silverstein, Johnny Cash, and a few dozen more, the early seventies were, nevertheless, a watershed era for strong country music.
Interspersed among the usual commercial pap were countless songs of hope and tragedy—of human, hard-living people grappling with nearly everything life can throw at you. There were songs of soldiers and winos, streetsingers and prostitutes, divorced daddies and homesick drifters, prodigal sons and unwed mothers. And there was even a Shel Silverstein opus entitled “Rosalie’s Good Eats Cafe,” which managed in the course of eight soul-racking minutes to be about nearly all of those things.
Many people believe it was the consummate achievement for Silverstein, a onetime Playboy cartoonist who began to dabble in country songwriting for the same reason he did nearly anything else: “to live an interesting life.” It didn’t take him long to master the art, for he had a remarkable mind hidden away in his clean-shaven head, and an uncanny eye for cultural detail.
The latter talent was never more evident than in his description of life after midnight in Rosalie’s greasy-spoon diner—a setting he used as a kind of Chaucerian framework device for portraying the real-life problems of people. Every verse described a different kind of tragedy, a different brand of poignancy; and by the time you finished listening to Bobby Bare’s soulful rendition, you couldn’t help but understand the Larry Gatlin theory of creative sadness—couldn’t help but feel a gut-level compassion for all those lost and wandering souls who had come together “at two in the morning, on Saturday night at Rosalie’s Good Eats Cafe.”
I don’t know if songs like that are religious or not. But I do agree with Gatlin and a host of other songwriters around Nashville who argue that people don’t write that way if they have a cynical view of the human condition. They don’t often think such thoughts, or feel such compassion, unless they believe deep down that life is more than a meaningless accident. And that belief, many theologians maintain, is the distilled essence of faith—the fundamental affirmation, not subject to proof or logic, that everybody either makes or doesn’t make sometime during the course of his life. It seems to me that the affirmations of people like Silverstein, Prine, Kristofferson, and Gatlin are pretty unmistakable.
That is not to say, of course, that the affirmations are conscious or conceived in these terms. In most cases I am sure they are not, for songwriters as a group are not given to cerebral ramblings. They write from the gut or the heart, but certainly not from the head, and in fact for the most part they are not even very righteous. How could they be? Their lives are energized and bounded by things like speed and whiskey and groupies and ego; the road and the one-night stands, the wild and disorienting gyrations between obscurity and fame, and the treadmill demands of piling hit upon hit to stay where you are. But intermingled with all of this are what Mickey Newbury called his “godlike thoughts”—perceptions that endure their earthly surroundings until they are put to music, emerging finally as a sort of cosmic and universal expression of sadness, compassion, or humble supplication.
It’s a bewildering process, and all the more so if you are caught up within it. Which is why, I think, so many songwriters and related rebels around Nashville eventually make their way to the log-cabin porch of Will D. Campbell. Campbell is a peculiar fellow, a Baptist preacher and sometime songwriter who is about as comfortable as anyone I know with the contradictions of human nature. His religion tells him, with a little bit of help from Second Corinthians, that everybody is reconciled to God, and from there it’s a minor metaphorical leap to a related conclusion: that there is no reason not to be reconciled to yourself. And so it’s not the least bit surprising to Campbell that treasures come in earthen vessels, or powerful poetry from a troubled mind, or that a song about a prostitute could have religious dimensions.
Because of his serenity in the face of the world’s bewildering juxtapositions, Campbell has become a sort of brother confessor to all sorts of people. He worked with civil rights leaders in the South during the fifties and sixties as a staff member with the National Council of Churches. Later, as director of an outfit called the Committee of Southern Churchmen, he established a ministry to draft resisters in Canada during the sixties and seventies, and informally, on his own time, he is a sort of spiritual advisor to a few dozen country musicians.
His relationship with the latter group is something unique. They will wander his way from time to time—Jessi Colter, Waylon Jennings, or Tom T. Hall—sometimes dragging their guitars along, and they will all sit around on his porch while Will cusses and spits and prays and sings their songs. Though the relationship may appear one-sided, it is not. Will may provide the musicians with perspective and help keep them from going completely crazy, but he gets his share in return. For Campbell is captivated by country music. He is fascinated by the relentless accuracy of its humanity, the implicit intermingling of joy and pain and God and sin; and he has made use of its insights in his chosen profession.
One day in 1969, for example, he journeyed to the little town of Granite Quarry, North Carolina, for a religious ceremony of sorts, one which in a way summarized both Campbell and the peculiar religiosity of country music. His purpose in going was to be with the family of Bob Jones, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, on the night before Jones was to be shipped off to prison in Danbury, Connecticut. Campbell had developed a friendship with Jones that was odd in view of the philosophical gulf that separated them. But as a staunch believer in the gospel of reconciliation, he had grown to see the Klan as an alienated and troubled minority as much in need of his (or somebody’s) ministry as draft resisters or civil rights protestors.
So he went to Granite Quarry, and it was a strangely festive occasion, with all the kinfolk and Klanfolk assembled in the living room of Jones’s cinder-block home, telling stories and trying to be jolly and unconcerned. The whiskey flowed and the laughter continued until about two in the morning, when Campbell proposed Communion. “Hell, yes,” said Jones, “let’s have Communion.” So the people gathered in a circle, and Campbell unpacked his guitar, and said:
“I’m gonna sing a song that to me is the essence of the Christian faith. It’s called ‘Anna, I’m Takin’ You Home,’ and it’s about a whore and a lover who forgives her and takes her home. That’s what Christianity is all about—being forgiven and taken home to where you’re loved.” Then, strumming softly on his guitar, he began to pray. “Lord, ole brother Bob is going off to jail for a while. We gonna ask you to kind of keep an eye on him. Lord, you know he’s not a saint. And you also know that we sho ain’t. But the Book tells us that’s why you died. So that God and sinners could be reconciled. And we gon’ drink to that, and if it’s all the same, we gon’ sing our song in Jesus’ name:
“Anna, I’m takin’ you home...”
So whether it’s Will Campbell singing about a prostitute, or the LeFevres and the Kingsmen belting out a promise of life beyond the grave, country and gospel music speak to a wide variety of religious needs. Some are obvious, others are so unobvious that they are not even conceived as religious. But all are tied up with one thing that is, and always has been, the central preoccupation of country music: the human and imperfect grappling with the human and imperfect condition.