Will the circle be unbroken?
It began as a gleam in John McEuen’s eye, a cheerfully presumptuous impulse that hit him backstage at an Earl Scruggs concert in 1972. Scruggs and his sons were passing through Denver on a tour of one-night stands, and McEuen, the banjo player in a Colorado folk-rock group called the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, was on hand to hear him.
Like most other banjo pickers in the country, McEuen had long been in awe of Scruggs, the shy and soft-spoken North Carolinian whose three-finger picking style had revolutionized the instrument. McEuen had no way of knowing, of course, that the admiration was mutual, and he had no idea what to expect when, after a few minutes of chatting, he looked at Scruggs and blurted out with a forced casualness: “Say, would you be interested in doing an album with us sometime?”
“He looked at me,” McEuen remembered later, grinning through his bushy black beard at the memory of Scruggs’s legendary humility, “and said, ‘Why Ah’d be proud to.’”And so it was that one of the most memorable albums in the history of country music got off the ground. It wound up with the title “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,” named for the old Carter Family classic, and by the time it was finished it included performances by Scruggs, the Dirt Band, Mama Maybelle Carter, Merle Travis, Doc Watson, Roy Acuff, and Vassar Clements. In addition, some of the younger Nashville sidemen were thrown in for good measure, and the result was a breathtaking display of acoustical country music.
It had been a genuinely historic moment when the full array of pickers gathered at the Woodland Sound studios in Nashville—an unobtrusive oasis in a part of town that’s littered with strip-city filling stations, motels, and fast-food restaurants. In those days there was an enormous gulf between the fans of Roy Acuff and the fans of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and in the end it was bridged by the simple expedient of mutual respect. Like some of the Southern rockers in Macon, and hard-living Charlie Daniels in Tennessee, John McEuen had a deep and long-standing appreciation of the roots of American music. “Those of us in the band,” he recalled later, “just wanted to give the older musicians credit for what they’ve done. We thought the younger generation of fans owed it to themselves, if nothing else, to get into the older forms of music.”
All of that had enormous appeal for Scruggs, who had long been fascinated by the concept of musical cross-fertilization. Since taking to the road with his sons several years earlier, he had been experimenting with other sounds, blending his distinctive bluegrass style with everything from Memphis blues to Bob Dylan’s brand of urban folk. It was, in a way, the culmination of an itch that had begun back in 1960, when Scruggs had appeared one night with saxophone player King Curtis.
“It was a real privilege for me,” Scruggs recalled in his Southern drawl that’s as slow as the drip of molasses. “We got to jammin’ some before the show, and Curtis was so great, I don’t know, I just really enjoyed it. I think it was the first time I really realized that the banjo could go well with other kinds of music.”
That realization deepened as the sixties progressed and his sons—Gary, Randy, and Steve—grew older. The younger Scruggs’ were thoroughly versed in their father’s music. There was little of the expected teenage rebellion against it, largely because the family relationships were so close. But the boys were young enough to experiment seriously with rock ’n’ roll, and Scruggs was open-minded enough to respect their tastes.
“I remember the boys brought the Byrds—Roger McGuinn and some of them—out to the house one time a few years back,” Scruggs recalls, “and they sounded so good. I think being associated with some of the younger musicians, it’s helped my picking get better and better. I was gettin’ pretty stale after doing straight bluegrass all those years.”
Scruggs accepted the task of bringing together other participants in the album venture, including Maybelle Carter and Vassar Clements. In another of his characteristic bursts of bravado, McEuen had recruited Doc Watson, and once things began to take shape McEuen’s brother, William, worked through Acuff-Rose Publishing to secure the services of Roy Acuff.
Not everyone was delighted with the idea at first. Acuff wasn’t, and he grumbled openly about the beards and long hair and other unorthodoxies of the younger musicians. “You’re supposed to know a man by the character of his face,” he said at one point. “But if you have got your face all covered up with something, well...”
Acuff was still skeptical when he arrived at the studio, but after listening to a playback of Merle Travis and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band doing “I Am a Pilgrim,” he nodded his head and strode briskly to the microphone. John McEuen grinned and murmured to nobody in particular, “Well, I guess we passed the test.”
Despite Acuff’s misgivings, most of the other performers found the whole undertaking an unmitigated delight. For Doc Watson and Merle Travis, especially, it was a significant occasion. It marked the first time that they had met, despite the fact that they are two of the most respected and influential guitar pickers ever to emerge from the mountains of Appalachia.
“You know,” said Doc after the initial hellos, “I named my son (the great guitar player Merle Watson) for you and Eddy Arnold.”
“That’s what I heard. I appreciate that,” replied Travis with self-conscious humility.
“Well,” laughed Watson, “I figured that, uh, a little of that good guitar pickin’ might rub off on him.”
“Look who’s talking,” said Travis, and with that they were off on a comparison of each other’s favorite songs. Bill McEuen quickly turned on the tapes to record the whole event.
In all, the assembled musicians recorded thirty-seven songs for the album, the excitement building continuously as the time approached to do the title cut. When A. P. Carter wrote the song, back in the days when commercial country music was still in its embryonic stages, it was intended as a simple and heartrending ballad about a child’s reaction to the death of his mother. It is still that, but the chorus (which is where the song gets its title) has quickly become something more: an ode or anthem to the cause of musical continuity.
Very few people—and least of all such creative musicians as Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, and John McEuen—expect the music to remain static. But everybody at the Woodland Sound Studios that day believed it ought to remain rooted, and as an album “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” throbs with the excitement of that feeling.
It was a high point for Nashville, a living embodiment of the fervor and creativity that can flow from cross-fertilization. In the years since the session, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, the Earl Scruggs Revue, and many of the other musicians who were there have kept the feeling alive, producing in the process some of the best and most imaginative music that they have ever made.
Unhappily, however, there is also an entirely different result that can come from the mixing of country music with other kinds of influences. And three years after the cutting of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?,” that other possibility revealed itself clearly at a posh uptown concert a few blocks east of Music Row.
There onstage was Barbi Benton, Playboy centerfold emeritus and girlfriend of Hugh Hefner, clad, loosely speaking, in a halter-topped pants suit and belting out a medley of Hank Williams hits. As the strains of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “I Saw The Light” wafted across the hotel ballroom, a handful of well-rounded bunnies paraded through the crowd for the amusement of a few thousand disc jockeys, musicians, and assorted other lost souls who had wandered in off the streets.
Somewhere out there in the rest of Nashville they were celebrating the fiftieth birthday of the Grand Ole Opry. But that historic event seemed a minor preoccupation at best at the Nashville Sheraton. “Looks like this year’s party is going to be even better than the last,” intoned Hefner, looking simultaneously suave and ill at ease as he took the stage in his blue-jean leisure suit. “We hope you enjoy yourselves.”
Hefner had good reason to hope so. He had gone into the country music business a year or so before, and although Playboy Records was doing tolerably well for a new label, most of the artists it had signed were not exactly household names. So Hefner, like any good record executive, had seized upon the presence of a city full of disc jockeys rolling in for their annual convention and willing to celebrate pretty much whatever needed celebrating—from the golden anniversary of a cherished institution to the physical attributes of Barbi Benton.
He rented himself a hotel, lubricated the scene with free food and whiskey, and paraded out his stable of singers. There was Brenda Pepper, a strapping Alabama lass, wailing out her own version of “When Will I Be Loved” and sounding remarkably unlike Linda Ronstadt. And there was Wynn Stewart, offering up his latest single—a friendly little ballad called “I Think I’m Gonna Kill You and Bury You in a Box About Half Your Size.”
For people who were serious about their music, Hefner also brought on Bobby Borchers, a talented songwriter who had written “Jamestown Ferry” for Tanya Tucker; and Mickey Gilley, a charismatic crooner who plays the piano like Jerry Lee Lewis (which is no accident, since the two of them are cousins who grew up together).
But most of all, there was Barbi Benton, wiggling most impressively to the hard-driving beat and insisting with a straight face that Hank Williams had become her idol. There was something implausibly tacky about that particular assertion in that particular setting, but who knows? Music makes strange bedfellows, and vice versa, and the sign on the wall had given fair warning:
“This,” it said, “is Playboy Country.”
Which was another way of saying that times have changed a lot in the home of the Grand Ole Opry. The music and milieu have taken on an uptown slickness that was never there before, and the fear is growing that the substance will soon be destroyed.
Those fears reached almost hysterical proportions in 1974 when Olivia Newton-John was named country music’s Female Vocalist of the Year. Nobody would come right out and publicly assert that she didn’t deserve it. She had, after all, had several enormous and identifiably country hits, including “Let Me Be There” and “If You Love Me Let Me Know.” But there was a kind of saccharine and unfunky sweetness about her style and arrangements, and there was also her background—that of a good-looking Australian girl who knew so little about the legacy of country music that twenty years after Hank Williams’s death, she expressed an interest in meeting him.
Roy Acuff, who was presenting the award, couldn’t even bring himself to pronounce her name correctly (it came out something like “Oliver”). And within a few days, a group of stars and semi-stars whose straight-country credentials were thoroughly in order formed an organization to preserve the purity. Inevitably, of course, there were sour grapes involved. Many of the people who supported the Association of Country Entertainers, as the new group was called, had had conspicuously less success in recent years than Olivia Newton-John.
But there was more to the group than that. It had the backing of some of Nashville’s most thoughtful and successful musicians as well—people like Bill Anderson and Dolly Parton—and they were saying things that thousands of country music fans had been saying for years: Keep it country; don’t let it be ruined by success; don’t lose touch with your fans.
Dolly Parton believes the whole undertaking was worth it in a way. It did at least raise the issue, forcing people to take note of the fact, as Chet Atkins put it, that “music dies when it becomes a parody of itself.” But in an absolute sense the goals of ACE were unattainable and unenforceable, entangling themselves in a knot of conflicting conclusions.
What do you say, for example, about Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, both of whom were regarded in the early stage of their careers as pop singers who did a lot of country music? That question, more than any other, was Dolly Parton’s imponderable, for although she was interested in limiting the diluting effects of outside influences, she also realized that Emmylou and Linda sang country songs about as well as anyone around.
She had, in fact, become friends with both of them, discovering that they all had far more in common than she had expected. For starters, they were all about the same age (thirty in 1977), and they all grew up with a deep and abiding appreciation of country music. But there were differences as well. While Dolly had grown up in Sevierville, Tennessee, in the final years of intensive Appalachian isolation, Emmylou and Linda had been raised in more sophisticated circumstances (in Birmingham, Alabama, and Tucson, Arizona, respectively), and their musical tastes had been affected by a bombardment of other influences.
Linda Ronstadt believes that diversity of influence has become a universal American experience, and the result, she says, is that the blending of country music with other forms of expression is an absolutely inevitable and irreversible result.
“There isn’t any country left,” she explained over the sound of her band tuning up before a recent show. “When they closed the Grand Ole Opry, and I know they didn’t really close it, but when they moved it out to an amusement park, that sort of officially closed an era. We’re all suburban. We all have TVs and radios, and we’re all exposed to a lot of different sounds.
“But there’s a great thing about this weird hodgepodge of music today,” she continued. “People don’t have to be so hung up on labels. I’m a pop singer, I guess, but I grew up with country music. I sing it, and it influences most of what I sing, but it isn’t the only influence. Music, to me, is music, and it’s either good or bad and you judge it on that basis.”
Good and bad, of course, are pretty amorphous standards, lying primarily in the tastes of the beholder. But the examples of Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris suggest that there may be a little bit more to the issue. For there is a crucial difference, it seems, between the two of them on the one hand and Olivia Newton-John (and certainly Barbi Benton) on the other.
The difference is that Ronstadt and Harris are remarkably thoughtful and conscientious musicians who have made it a point to understand the heritage of American music—especially country music—and tap into its ongoing vitality. Emmylou, especially, has immersed herself in the Nashville music scene, becoming almost reverential in the presence of such veteran performers as Porter Waggoner, Dolly Parton, and George Jones. She has come to understand the soulful tradition on which they draw, and the understanding shows.
To appreciate the effect of such a deep-seated musical identity, you need only to spend a few hours at an Emmylou Harris concert and revel in the magnificently expressive qualities of her shimmering-vibrato voice. At times she sounds like the quintessential female shit-kicker as she moves through songs like Merle Haggard’s “Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down” or Wayne Kemp’s “Feelin’ Single, Seein’ Double.”
“It’s just an old drinkin’ song,” she says in introducing the latter number, which tells the story of a mischievous married girl who gets drunk, engages in some unintended amorous pursuits, and emerges with no regrets at all. Emmylou grins when the song is over, and says in a soft, shy voice, “It don’t mean nothin’.”
Plenty of her songs do mean something, however. She is at her best when she’s doing sad and easy love songs about believable relationships—Susanna Clark’s “I’ll Be Your San Antone Rose,” Paul McCartney’s “Here, There and Everywhere,” or her own “Boulder to Birmingham,” which she wrote about her friend and musical soul-mate Gram Parsons. Her voice, in those situations, alternates between a belting sort of power and a fragile, throbbing clarity that is all her own.
There just isn’t anybody, in fact, who sings country songs with any better feel or any more feeling; and it’s not even a matter of talent—at least not entirely. Olivia Newton-John, for example, is a competent performer, who does no real violence to the country tradition. But she can’t pour out the emotion of Ronstadt or Harris, because she simply doesn’t have the feel—the instinctive, deep-down grasping of where the music has been.
Barbi Benton takes the problem a step further. She not only lacks the feel and the background, but she is also remarkably devoid of talent. She owes her career almost entirely to the monied status of her boyfriend and to today’s high-powered production techniques, which can make the featured performer, if necessary, a less integral part of the recorded result.
That is a crucial change for country music. There was a time when, if you were bad, you sounded bad and there was no way around it. It is ironic that one of the people most responsible for changing that hard and cold reality, and opening the floodgates of modern mediocrity, is one of the most talented musicians ever to come through Nashville—a guitar-picking expatriate from the southern Appalachians by the name of Chet Atkins.
Atkins became the man in charge at RCA’s first Nashville recording studio in the mid-fifties, and quickly began raising eyebrows and setting trends with his pop-oriented productions of such country stars as Jim Reeves and Don Gibson. Blending influences was something that came naturally to him, for his whole career as a guitar picker had been one uninterrupted burst of mongrelization and nonconformity.
He was, to be sure, a country guitarist—simply because he had in fact been a country boy, a shy and malnourished mountain kid, raised amid grinding poverty in the whistle-stop town of Luttrell, Tennessee.
During his boyhood days most of the mountain musicians played guitar with a pick. But early on, Atkins chose to pluck the instrument with his fingers—initially because of the influence of his stepfather, who didn’t know any better. Later, he heard Merle Travis finger-picking on the radio, and made a conscious decision that he, Chet Atkins, would play the guitar that way from that day forth.
Atkins was restless with any one influence, however, and drew his early musical inspiration from all kinds of other sources, including Jimmie Rodgers, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Benny Goodman, and the other pop artists he could hear on the radio. In the forties, after he had turned professional, Atkins also became caught up in classical guitar—fascinated by Segovia and a musician’s musician from France named Django Reinhardt. Meanwhile he kept in determined touch with country music, at one point playing rhythm guitar for the Carter Family, and later doing backup work for the likes of Hank Williams.
Because of such a background, it was predictable that he would experiment a little when RCA picked him as their man in Nashville. Some of the experimentation came on the rockabilly sessions with Elvis, and later the Everly Brothers, but it also spilled over into acts considered more country. He put a bass drum on Don Gibson’s “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Oh Lonesome Me,” and slicked up the production considerably nearly every time he went into the studio with Jim Reeves.
In Reeves, Atkins knew he had the kind of polished and mellow entertainer who could cross over into the pop market, and so he intentionally made some compromises in the purity of the product, using symphonic-sounding violins and leaving out the more earthy and backwoodsy sounds of fiddles and steel guitars.
“We were consciously trying for pop sales and... at that time you couldn’t get a record played pop if it had steel on it,” Atkins told Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo in a lengthy interview in 1976. “That only happened a few years ago when Dylan came in with steel. But I always tried, like with Reeves, I tried to make good records that had a pretty sound.”
Generally, he succeeded. But he also opened the door to other possibilities, and the ultimate result was the uptown Nashville Sound—the big Nash-Vegas productions laden with orchestral strings and backup voices that sound about as country as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And for that, Chet has apologized.
“Of course I had a lot to do with changing country[music],”said Atkins in an interview with People magazine, “and I apologize. We did it to broaden the appeal and to keep making records different, to surprise the public.
“I hate to see country music going uptown,” he continued, “because it’s the wrong uptown. We’re about to lose our identity and get all mixed up with other music. We were always a little half-assed anyway, but a music dies when it becomes a parody of itself.”
No doubt the apology was straight from the heart, but Atkins is also intelligent enough to know that there were forces far larger than himself behind the slickness and commercialism that have become some of the key characteristics of modern-day Nashville. Commercialism feeds on itself, and when the city’s music industry began pulling in more and more profits in the fifties and sixties, the business interests downtown became slowly and dimly aware of an eye-opening truth: They were sitting—all too passively, they soon concluded—on an untapped vein of prime vinyl gold.
Tourism, the city fathers realized, was a largely underutilized resource, and for obvious economic reasons that’s a situation nearly any place wants to correct. If you don’t mind your streets being littered with camera-clicking outsiders, the tourist trade represents a remarkably enticing opportunity to pad your city’s coffers with somebody else’s money.
It wasn’t that Nashville didn’t have any tourists. For years the Packards and pickup trucks had rumbled in from the hill country and battled for parking space near the Ryman Auditorium. But all of that was simply a quaint and rustic prologue to the interlocking Jet Age visions of the Chamber of Commerce, the policymakers at radio station WSM, and a spin-off booster group known as the Nashville Plus Steering Committee.
The Chamber of Commerce had long been interested in a downtown Hyatt-Regency-type convention hotel. WSM was hatching plans to replace the dilapidating Ryman with something more spectacular, and the Nashville Plus Committee had begun to envision a face-lifting of Music Row, centering on a four-lane thoroughfare to channel the curiosity seekers through what had always been a fairly nondescript area. Since the membership of all three groups was inclined to overlap, the compatibility of the projects soon became apparent; and following a determined and high-powered push, their goals {and plenty more besides} have become a reality. The tourists are flocking in like sheep, and they are not the only ones who are impressed by what they see.
“Man,” said a young songwriter named Vince Matthews, as he strolled along Music Row a few months back, “all us hillbillies have come uptown, you know? Or maybe I should say that uptown has come to us.”
But as Matthews well knows, there are some problems there for people who are engaged in his line of work and who are serious about their craft. The commercializing forces can be a little devastating when they are really unleashed, for the common denominator of slickness—whether of the music or the landscape—is an overriding concern for what the masses will want. The concern is inevitable for a business executive, but it can be hard on the dreams of the hungry young picker-poets who wander into town with their guitar cases strapped to their backs and a handful of songs wadded away in their jeans.
Geoff Morgan has been luckier than most. He is an example of a young man learning to cope. But the tension that he faces, like a lot of those who made it before him, is that it’s entirely possible to cope too well—to adjust too completely to Nashville’s commercial expectations.
Morgan arrived in the city in 1973—a young, redheaded Connecticut Yankee with a winning smile and loads of talent. He settled in and then began the timid and uncertain process of knocking on doors and pushing his songs, including one called “Son of the Father,” which may be the definitive composition about a near-miss family relationship. It tells the story of a father who works to feed his family, and a son who continues drifting away. The melody is sad and moving and strong, and with Morgan’s country-clear, Willie-Nelsonish kind of voice, it’s an honest-to-God tearjerker in the best sense of the term. The only trouble was that because the subject matter was not very commercial nobody showed much interest in recording it—or any of Morgan’s other stuff for that matter—until he signed a writing contract with Pi-Gem Publishing.
Pi-Gem was run by Tom Collins, who was best known in those days as the producer who helped make Ronnie Milsap a superstar. Collins is a pro. He knew what would sell, and sought to generate the same instinct in Morgan. He may well have succeeded, for within a short time after their association began, Morgan wrote a hit for Dickie Lee, a former rock singer trying to salvage a career in country music. The record, called “Busiest Memory In Town,” became by far the biggest seller that Lee had had since his star began its current ascent.
The other thing worth noting about the song, however, is that it’s not really that good. It’s not bad; it’s just not the kind of thing that a person with Geoff Morgan’s ability ought to be very proud of, and in fact he’s not. But nearly every day he heads for his homemade studio around nine in the morning and quits each afternoon about five—writing an average of two songs a day, many of which are about as noteworthy as “Busiest Memory.”
It’s not that Morgan has sold out. He is a sharp fellow with few illusions, and he has come to see success in the music business as a matter of hard work as well as native talent. He is willing to pay his dues, he says, and work for the day when he is established enough to do what he wants.
Morgan may have the talent to pull it off, but some of his more artistic songwriting compatriots (Guy Clark, Steve Earle, and Robin and Linda Williams, among others) are worried about him. They are convinced that in poetic, if not commercial, terms, he’s playing with fire. They say that his have the ring of famous last words, and in his case especially, they are afraid of a waste.
My own view is that Morgan will be okay. He is one of the more impressive singers and writers to come along in a while, and he ought to be able to survive a temporary flirtation with formula. But whatever happens to Geoff, there are other people around Nashville whose careers are an implicit affirmation of the power of the country tradition. They are people like Vince Matthews—fire-in-the-belly songwriters who are tempted and buffeted by the lures of commercial success, but who cling with instinctive (and maybe even unintentional) tenacity to their own brand of artistic integrity. They may be crazy, often are; but as Johnny Cash once said of Vince, they write what they live and live what they write. And in an odd and fragile way, they are the modern-day hope of country music.