The ’90s is the ’60s turned upside down . . .
It was one of those magical Nashville evenings when the musicians gather from all over town, and the beer is flowing, and the music gains momentum with the night. They had assembled this time at the Station Inn, a flat stone building in a warehouse district less than a mile from the glitter of Music Row. It was a perfect setting for country music—a smoky room with low, dark ceilings and neon lights—and the star this time was Barry Tashian, a one-time rock ’n’ roller from Boston, who was once the opening act for the Beatles. Later, he worked with Emmylou Harris, and now he sings duets with his wife. They have a new album out, and it’s country to the core—a throwback, really, to the Grand Ole Opry and the old folk ballads of Appalachia, as Holly Tashian’s bluegrass harmonies twine through the melodies produced by her husband.
The Nashville veterans are out in force—singers Gail Davies and George Hamilton IV, and a record producer named Allen Reynolds, whose biggest client these days is Garth Brooks. This is the kind of music they love, a virtuoso blend of guitars and mandolin and standup base, but there is also an irony that nobody mentions. Though the music is fresh and the hand-crafted lyrics come straight from the heart, none of it is likely to make the radio. A lot of the best music doesn’t anymore. It’s an era defined in many people’s minds by the bubblegum sexuality of Shania Twain, the saccharine banality of Faith Hill, and the endless stream of Nashville hat acts—all those generic, good-looking hunks who deal in pale imitations of Merle Haggard.
It’s not that all of these performers are bad. You can make the case that Garth Brooks, among others, has pushed the popularity of country music to stunning new heights without sacrificing his feeling for the songs. For those who would doubt it, it was best, perhaps, to see Brooks on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, not in his flashy, full-concert venue with the spangles and the lights and the wall of sound, but alone before the audience with just his guitar. The song he picked at the peak of his career was Tony Arata’s “The Dance,” a haunting ballad of life made richer even by its heartache. It was riveting moment on the stage of the Opry, as Brooks’ tenor voice slowly filled up the room—a powerful reminder of the meaning of country music, not only to the people who had gathered in the building, but to the thousands who were still tuning in every Saturday.
This was radio, of course, but it was not top 40, where songs as deliberately emotional as “The Dance” were rapidly going the way of wooly mammoths. By the 1990s, it was the insidious design of radio programmers to set out consciously for the safe middle ground—to hire their demographic consultants who would call up listeners and play them ten-second snippets of songs. It is almost a sacrilege to try to imagine what might have happened a generation earlier if someone had played ten seconds of “Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine,” or Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” or Johnny Cash’s “San Quentin,” and then on the basis of the listener’s response, decided whether to play those songs on the radio.
But incredibly enough, by the 1990s that was how it was done, and the result at the turning of the 21st century was a brave new Alice-in-Wonderland world in which the biggest stars—Tim McGraw, Faith Hill, Shania Twain—did little to build on their musical tradition, except perhaps in financial terms. We were living instead in the era of Chad Brock, a country singer, of sorts, who had a Number One hit with a trifling single called “Yes.” (“She said, ‘Yes’/ I said, ‘Wow’/ She said, ‘When?’ I said, “How about right now?”) According to country music radio, this was the most popular song in America, yet it inspired only 175,000 people, a modest number by the standard of the times, to actually go out and buy the record. When his follow-up album barely sold 25,000 copies, Brock was summarily dropped from his label.
A lot of people could see this coming. Allen Reynolds, for example, was the gentle giant among Music Row producers, an artist with an ear and a feel for the music who had produced brilliant albums with Garth Brooks, Emmylou Harris, Don Williams and George Hamilton IV, to name just a few. Back in the ’90s, one of the artists who came through his studio was a Canadian singer named Michelle Wright. She had already had a bouncy hit single called “Take It Like a Man,” a good ole girl’s impatient invitation to a man who might be worthy of his gender. She followed it up with something more risky—a poignant ballad of teenaged love called “He Would Be Sixteen.” Written in the third person instead of the first, the song told the story of a teenaged girl who was pregnant out of wedlock. Feeling that she simply had no choice, the girl gave up her baby for adoption, then wondered years later through the wave of regret how he might be doing at the age of sixteen.
The song fell victim to the purge of honest feeling carried out in the ’90s by the radio consultants. There were the occasional exceptions, the ones that made it through, like Trisha Yearwood’s “Walkaway Joe,” and a handful of hits by Patty Loveless, Suzy Bogguss and Kathy Mattea. There were male singers too—Dwight Yoakam, Randy Travis, Radney Foster, and Vince Gill—who did songs worthy of the country tradition. But the ranks were getting thinner by the middle of the decade, and it was about that time that Allen Reynolds declared: “If we’re not careful, we’re going to market ourselves straight to hell.”
By the turn of the century, that was exactly where the mainstream had gone. The irony of it, as Reynolds and many other people understood, was that if radio was the poison for creativity, it had once been the opposite. It was the place where country music came of age, home to the honky-tonking sound of Ernest Tubb, and the blue yodel moans of Jimmie Rodgers, and it was the place where the great Hank Williams could sing about the sky being lit by the silence of a star. Beginning sometime in the 1920s, radio was the cradle for the art—the setting where the music of the mountains could evolve into what the Kentucky folklorist Loyal Jones once called “the literature of the people.”
“People know how hard life is,” says Emmylou Harris. “They have feelings. The need music that will give them a voice.”
But on the corporate-run stations of the 21st century, music as literature was nearly gone. Not surprisingly, there were people who rebelled, and many of the musicians in Nashville will tell you that the graceful leader of the revolution was Emmylou. In 1991, she and Allen Reynolds decided to do a live album, and they rented the Ryman Auditorium for that purpose. Harris had always wanted to play there, “to feel the hillbilly dust,” as she later put it, but by the time her own career was established, the Opry had moved to the outskirts of Nashville and the Ryman was left as a near-empty shrine.
When Harris took the stage that warm April night, she says she felt a surge of fear—much stronger than any she had known in a while. Part of it was gazing at the dusty auditorium, with its stained-glass windows and benches that still resembled old pews. The crowd was small, restricted because of the city fire codes, but that didn’t help her nervousness much. She knew she was taking a chance with this one—doing an album of all new material, and doing it live with very few rehearsals. But in a way she knew that the fear was good, a reminder that she was venturing into uncharted ground, taking the risks that an artist ought to take. The album itself had an old-fashioned feel. There were bluegrass songs from Bill Monroe, and one of her favorites from Creedence Clearwater, done this time with acoustic guitars. There was also a song from Stephen Foster, followed immediately by one from Bruce Springsteen, though it was hard for the audience to tell which was which.
Allen Reynolds thought it was vintage Emmylou. She always had such a feel for the music—for that tension between tradition and change, which helped give life to great country songs. The album won a Grammy and sold fairly well, but it was virtually ignored by country music radio. Reynolds was frustrated, but Harris tried to be philosophical.
“I was bothered for a while,” she says. “But it’s a natural thing that happens in a long career. You compete with yourself and your own oldies. But I admit I don’t listen to country radio. Probably that’s wrong of me, but about ten years ago, there was an explosion of people like Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith. Most of them got very little airplay on the country music stations. It seemed like a chance to broaden the music without watering it down, but the door was closed and I got cynical. There are new artists today like Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch. A lot of great country music is being made, but not a lot of it is on the radio.”
Emmylou’s solution was to keep on pushing, producing a string of critically acclaimed albums, including another Grammy winner, “Red Dirt Girl,” which showcased her splendid abilities as a writer. The album, again, was ignored by the radio, but not by the public, and it was not the only example of that phenomenon—the deliberate exclusion in the top 40 market of music that’s not only critically admired, but also popular, as measured by its sales. In 2002, the Soggy Bottom Boys’ bluegrassy revival of “Man of Constant Sorrow” wasn’t played on country radio, but it helped the soundtrack of O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a semi-popular movie, to sell in excess of 6.3 million copies.
Industry experts will argue, of course, that the only reason people bought the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack was that the movie’s main purpose was to spotlight the music. Movie-goers—often urban and northern and well-educated—were a captive audience, at first forced and later pleased to hear Dobros, fiddles and high, lonesome voices. That may be true, but it also spotlights the massive disconnect between the music that people would like to hear and the music to which they are most often exposed.
It’s not that top 40 is a total wasteland. But for the dinosaurs among us still looking for substance, it’s pretty much down to Alan Jackson and the Chicks—the Dixie Chicks, three good-looking women from the state of Texas who have an aura about them of cheerful feminism and saucy femininity. Their charisma and sex appeal are so strong that the radio stations have been compelled to play them, despite the fact that they are serious musicians with a penchant for songs that have something to say. Over the years, they have sung about the “Wide Open Spaces” that a young girl encounters when she sets out on her own to see the world, and they have sung about the longing for the person left behind. They have sung about physically abusive husbands, and later with the backing of Emmylou Harris, they have sung about the love of a newborn child.
But if they embody the fading hope for the mainstream, even the Dixie Chicks probably know that the best country music now occurs outside it. You can find it today in the urgent twang of Buddy Miller, as he sings the old Jesse Winchester song about the dark underside of “A Showman’s Life,” or in the aching country-blues of Lucinda Williams, as she sings about a girl and the death of her brother and the memories of all the places she has been. Even more obscurely, you can still hear the best of the country tradition in the work of Si Kahn, a country-folk singer from North Carolina, who paints word pictures of life in the mills, or the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta.
On his latest CD, which is simply called Threads, Kahn sings in his high and throbbing tenor voice a song about veterans of the Korean War spending their Saturday nights at the Moose Lodge.
Here’s to our country
Here’s to our town
Here’s to the days
When we rode up and down
And here’s to us now at the Moose Lodge
(copyright by Joe Hill Music)
It’s a beautiful ballad, patriotic to its core. But what you find in the course of these verses is a patriotism tinged with the traces of regret, of old men remembering the way it used to be, which is precisely the kind of subtlety of emotion that is nearly always layered in the greatest country songs. Now, of course, it has mostly disappeared from the dull and colorless flow of the mainstream, but for those of us raised on Hank and Waylon and Willie and Emmylou, you accept the glimmers of hope where you can.
For me at least, one of them came not long ago on an October evening. There was an overflow crowd at the Bluebird Café, a listening room on the south side of Nashville, where the dark hills rise against the Tennessee sky, and the picker-poets gather on a Saturday night. The star of the show this time was Marshall Chapman, a shit-kicker singer from South Carolina who came to Nashville as a student at Vanderbilt, majored in French, then set out to become a country star. She never quite made it. But along the way, she established herself as one of the finest song-writers in the city, and she was appearing at the Bluebird with Matraca Berg, a country music diva with a heart and a brain, equally gifted as a singer and a writer. On this particular night, there was also an unexpected twist. The two songwriters were sharing the stage with a pair of good old girl Southern novelists, Lee Smith and Jill McCorkle, whose stories seemed to fit with a good country song.
Even the audience was cluttered with the stars, songwriters Kim Carnes and Rodney Crowell, and a handful of authors passing through the city for the annual Southern Festival of Books. They cheered the stories interspersed with the songs, a rollicking interplay of comedy and poignance, but the mood turned serious near the end of the show when Marshall Chapman sang a signature song. “Good-bye Little Rock And Roller,” which would soon become the title of her songwriter’s memoir, told the story of a girl and her dreams and a life on the road in a rock ’n’ roll band. Every night was now or never, the road just seemed to go forever. But after a while, it came full circle, and the woman was married with a daughter of her own, and she could feel her hopes giving way to her child’s.
And so it is that the great country songs can still be found, the honest heirs to the tradition of Jimmie Rodgers, Merle Haggard and Mickey Newbury. Today, you just have to look a little harder. The music business in the 21st century is only one part of the great dumbing down, the deliberate underestimation of the audience that seems to afflict every corner of the media, from newspaper publishers to the people in charge of the television news.
But as a matter of faith and self-preservation, some of us simply have to assume the enemies of creativity are wrong. We have to assume that the people know quality if they are given a choice. Otherwise, how could Hank Williams have written those songs? How could Emmylou Harris have achieved the stature she’s achieved in her career? How could there ever have been a Johnny Cash?