He’s a poor man ’cause mining’s all he’s known and miners don’t get rich loading coal . . .
The roots. They run deep into the life-style of places like Clark County, Kentucky, an ancient aggregation of coal-country foothills and rolling bluegrass farmlands. In the western reaches of the county, perched on a hilltop overlooking the Kentucky River, is the pale green cabin of Asa Martin. He built it himself in the early sixties and, for a few years at least, it served as the haven he intended—a secluded home base for some serious bass fishing down on the river, and maybe a little neighborly guitar-picking later in the evening.
Eventually, however, they found him. Some professors from the West Coast stumbled upon the fact that he was still alive, and they reacted with all the gleeful disbelief of prospectors in the presence of a fist-sized nugget. The professors were writing the story of old-time, country-folk music, and Asa Martin had been a part of that story off and on for the past fifty years—ever since the mid-twenties when he and Fiddlin’ Doc Roberts met in a Winchester barbershop, got to talking and picking, and decided on the spot to put together a band.
That decision soon led them to the “WLS Barn Dance” in Chicago, to shows of their own at WHAS in Louisville and WLW in Cincinnati, and finally to the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. In between, Asa recorded more than six hundred record sides and wrote some enormously popular songs, including “Hot Corn, Cold Corn,” made famous by Flatt and Scruggs, and “I’m Going Back to Alabam’,” recorded by everybody from Martin, himself, to Pat Boone.
Asa was recording again in the 1970s. The music was in his blood, and at age seventy-five, he had the look of a man who was happy with his life. His frame was gaunt and bent with his age, but his sun-tanned face—uncrinkled except around the eyes and the smile—exuded the kind of serenity you see among people who have found little reason for regret.
As Asa settled back into his lived-in easy chair and began to reminisce, the memories were still sharp, as he pulled out the tattered old scrapbook with the yellowing handbills and newspaper clippings, and the promotional fliers with the dates and titles of many of his records. “Here’s an old one,” he said, fumbling with a flier dated January 15, 1930, affirming that among the latest batch of Gennett Records was “Down on the Farm” by Asa Martin. The song, which he sang for a visitor with an a cappella approximation of the original, tells the story of a young man returning to the old home place, where the memories flood his brain and a stranger greets him at the door. “I learned that from Mama,” he said. “Back around 1904, I guess it was. She used to sing it around the kitchen. Music was a big pastime back then. That was before it went commercial, and it played a big part in people’s lives.”
That fact was impressed upon people like Ralph Peer, who came South in the twenties to record the Appalachian musicians, and Cecil Sharp, the English musicologist who traveled to the mountains a few years before Peer in search of old British folk ballads that had survived in the NewWorld. He found them all right, but he found a few other things that he had not been expecting.
One of those things, he later explained, was the bearing of the people—a kind of sturdiness and self-containment coexisting with the poverty and isolation; a sharp contrast, he concluded, to the shuffling obsequiousness of many British peasants. But the most striking thing was more simple and more directly related to his musical mission: it was the fact that everybody made music; everybody.
Sharp and others have concluded from that fact that music in the mountains served a far more crucial function than simple entertainment. “It was,” says Loyal Jones, an ardent folklorist at Berea College in Kentucky, “the literature of the people. Just as the ballads had been an important form of literature in the British Isles, they also served a similar function here.”
In addition, the late Buell Kazee, a preacher and legendary banjo picker who cut fifty-six record sides back in the twenties, maintained that in the days before psychoanalysis and all the other sanity-preserving sciences and pseudo-sciences of the present, music was a way of preserving equilibrium.
Asa Martin agreed with that assessment. He remembered boyhood hikes down the narrow, tree-choked hollow just south of Winchester, when he and his family would lug along their guitars, and the neighbors would do the same. They would all rendezvous at a little weather-beaten church, sparsely equipped with poplar-bench pews, and they would sing for hours—religious songs mostly, but others as well: fiddle tunes and Old World ballads, and the indigenous compositions of tragedy and hard times.
There was an entirely different feel at such gatherings from the mood today at the dozens of old-time music festivals that are beginning to crop up throughout the South. When a quarter of a million pot-smoking, bare-breasted, stringy-haired young people will descend upon the hamlet of Union Grove, North Carolina, to revel in the music of mountain-grown fiddlers, it is obvious right away that something is different.
It’s true that on the surface what’s going on appears to be a remarkable resurgence of tradition, a modern communion with the spirit of the past. But in a fundamental sense, it isn’t. And the difference is not simply the age, appearance, and life-style of the fans, but rather their relationship with the music. For example, when Doc Watson, the virtuoso guitar-picking native of Deep Gap, North Carolina, came down from the hills for a recent bluegrass festival in Charlotte, he found himself confronted by thousands of wildly appreciative people—but they were so appreciative that their adrenalin levels were a little abnormal, and they swarmed toward the stage, shrieking and clapping and obliterating the lyrics and the musical subtleties that are, in Watson’s view, what the music is all about.
“Hey,” he told them in tones that were at once genial and sternly disapproving, “if you’re not gon’ listen, I’m not gon’ pick. I mean that thing.”
The fans were genuinely bewildered, for throughout the evening, until Watson’s appearance, they had simply responded like typical bluegrass fanatics—stomping in time with the showy fiddle and banjo runs that are intended to produce precisely that kind of frantic response. But the older-vintage musicians like Watson, Asa Martin, and Buell Kazee see a big difference between their craft and modern-day bluegrass. They may like bluegrass, may admire its pioneers such as Bill Monroe, but they are aware of a crucial and subtle distinction between it and the tradition out of which it grew.
Bluegrass has become pure entertainment, evolving during the last several decades through the consummate skills of people like Monroe, Earl Scruggs, and Lester Flatt. It sounds, in many respects, very similar to its mountain-music predecessor. Both rely chiefly on a blend of banjos, fiddles, and guitars; and in addition, the old-time music had its share of fast-paced reels and hoedown numbers—aimed, like bluegrass, at producing the same sort of rollicking retreat from reality. But bluegrass has a different spirit, a much greater emphasis on individual showmanship, that is at odds, somehow, with the natural modesty that runs through the mountain character.
And there is also a difference in the type of emotion expressed by each musical form, and therefore in its ultimate, overriding purpose. With some notable exceptions (the music of Ricky Skaggs comes to mind), today’s bluegrass is seldom sad, while yesterday’s mountain music often was. When Asa Martin, for example, looked back on the evenings at the rugged old church, the things that stood out in his mind were the slow and ballady songs like “Railroad Boy,” a New World rewrite of an old English standard, which told the story of a mournful young girl committing suicide in the cause of unrequited love. There were also, Martin remembered, the purely localized compositions—songs like “The Death of Edward Hawkins,” the autobiography of a young Kentucky man who was hanged for murder at the age of twenty-three and who, according to legend, sang his confessions from the scaffold moments before the rope snapped taut.
“There were a lot of songs about sadness and tragedy,” Martin explained with a somber nod of his head. “Don’t know quite why that was, really, ’cept it just seems natural when things go wrong, when tragedies hit, that you would make up a song about it.”
And that, above all else, has been the distinguishing feature of mountain music throughout the years. Its primary purpose lies less in escape and entertainment than in a head-on coping with whatever the world can throw at you.
Given that fact, it was not surprising that the music of Appalachia would soon become intertwined with the social and political issues that had begun to prevail. In the very early days of the Grand Ole Opry, Uncle Dave Macon raised a few eyebrows with a hard-hitting song called “Buddy, Won’t You Roll Down the Line”—protesting, among other things, the coal company bosses’ using convict labor to drive down the wages of working people. There were a fair number of songs like it, for there was a lot to protest in the mountains of the South.
Many people who had never been there once thought of Appalachia as a remote and backward place, devoid of good roads and modern methods of communication—the kind of place where the folk songs of England could endure for centuries with very little change. And for centuries that view was pretty much correct. But in the past several decades the pace of change has been astounding, particularly so to the people who have lived through it. Roads and television have made the mountains accessible to outside influences, and the accessibility has proved a mixed blessing at best.
The coal companies, for example, claim to have created jobs, and no doubt they have. But they have also transformed much of Appalachia from a subsistence-farming area into one of the most industrialized parts of the country, outside the big cities of the north.
Such industrial revolutions, of course, have never been very pretty, and when the companies arrived in the mountains, the by-products of their coming were depressingly similar to conditions in Europe a century or so earlier. Nimrod Workman, a skinny and toothless ex-miner and blues singer from West Virginia, remembered the days during Woodrow Wilson’s administration when he would enter the mines so early, and emerge so late, that he seldom saw the sun. For that, he said, he and his comrades were paid $2.80 a day—generally in scrip that was redeemable only at company-owned stores. In the evening they would wander home to the tiny cabins that they rented for six dollars a month, coming in so exhausted that “there wasn’t much to do but sing a little bit and go to bed.”
Coal camp songs thus became a desperately popular tradition in the mountains, a last-ditch bastion of sanity and perspective that helped sustain the people who were forced to create them. Among the most famous of the mining songs, particularly in the outside world, were “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark as a Dungeon,” both of them written by Merle Travis, a guitar-picking native of western Kentucky who escaped the mines through the skill in his fingers.
“Dark As a Dungeon,” recorded by everybody from Chad Mitchell to Grandpa Jones, is the better song of the two, and it was written, oddly enough, when Travis was three thousand miles away from the mines. “I was driving home after a date with a beautiful girl in Redondo Beach, California,” he explained to writer Dorothy Horstman. “I had a recording session to do the next morning and needed some material. I parked my car under a street light and wrote the verses. Sometimes the saddest songs are written when a person is happy.”
Not always, however. There were dozens of mountain writers who were never able to escape, and whose songs were as sad as any you’ll find. They may not have had Travis’s great skill with words, but they did have their own style of rough-edged eloquence that comes when you really have to live it. One of the best of these writers was a handsome, strong-faced woman balladeer by the name of Hazel Dickens. She had seen her share of Appalachian tragedy, and this, in part, was how she responded to it in her songs: He’s a poor man ’cause mining’s all he’s known and miners don’t get rich loading coal.
All through her music, there’s a rough and angry quality to the sadness, and it’s appropriate for a line of work as dangerous as hammering for coal a mile inside a mountain. But it’s a peculiar kind of anger—very fatalistic. In the polished million-sellers of Merle Travis, as well as in the down-home coal camp blues of Hazel Dickens or Nimrod Workman, the affirmation of humanity lies not in overcoming, but in staring the son-of-a-bitch right in the face and taking whatever it has to offer.
For many years, that point of view was prevalent in the mountains, but as every generation learns and relearns, the fatalism of the father eventually gives way to the anger of the son; and by the early sixties, Appalachian writers such as Billy Edd Wheeler were turning out anthems of straight-forward protest: I’ve never been one to walk in lines, picket with placards, or carry signs. But maybe I’m behind the times.
Those lines are the bridge in “They Can’t Put It Back,” a song Wheeler wrote when he was returning for a visit with his grandfather in the West Virginia mountains of his boyhood. Things had changed a lot since his departure for Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, then Berea, then Yale, and finally the beginnings of a songwriting career in New York City. He was aghast at what he saw on the trip back home.
“I was driving along Big Coal River, on one of those little old mountain roads,” he remembers, “and I came to a spot where they had been strip-mining. The machines had literally taken off the top of a mountain, and the debris was scattered down the hillsides. I had a very emotional reaction to that—I had also flown over the area and seen what they were doing in a lot of West Virginia and Kentucky. So I sat down and wrote something a little bit different—straight, hard protest.”
Wheeler has been best known over the years for a different type of song—the novelty numbers like his own country hit, “Ode To The Little Brown Shack Out Back,” or the Kingston Trio’s “Reverend Mr. Black,” or the torrid love song “Jackson,” made popular by Johnny and June Carter Cash (and later by Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood). But after his move to New York City, and some initial coaching by pop writers Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, Wheeler fell in very compatibly with some of the protest singers of Greenwich Village.
Judy Collins, among others, would periodically wander over to his dumpy apartment in Brooklyn and listen by the hour to tapes of his songs, for she had always been known as one of the most meticulous of the folkies in her search for material. Eventually she recorded four Wheeler originals, and they chronicle in a poignant way the agonies and particularities of life in the mountains.
Perhaps the most haunting of them is “The Coming of the Roads,” which, like most of Wheeler’s compositions, is couched in human rather than ideological terms. But its message is, if anything, more obvious and wrenching than much of the straightforward protest that began to proliferate in the sixties. The song tells the story of a love affair gone sour, but it weaves the sadness through all the issues confronting Appalachia—the new highways that made it accessible to outsiders, the rape of the land by the strip-mining machines, the weakening of values by the hunger for wealth. The woman in the song has been seduced by the new alien ways, and her lover can only offer his lament, blaming her leaving on the coming of the roads.
There was an explosion of such songs in the late sixties and early seventies, and there was a great deal of talk about an emerging genre of mountain protest. This thinking was true as far as it went, but most of it contained at least one major flaw. It assumed that the modern explosion was something brand-new, and it wasn’t. There was one brief period in the 1930s when Depression-era radicalism combined with indigenous mountain conservatism to produce an extremely significant development in music. It was an instant, frozen in time, whose impassioned music was a progenitor not only of recent vintage country music, but of the Pete Seeger-Bob Dylan brand of protest music as well.
Some of the key figures during the period included Aunt Molly Jackson, Jim Garland, and Sara Ogan Gunning, who were actually all members of the same family. Their father was Oliver Perry Garland, a young minister and coalminer who had been raised as a frontier farmer and then turned to the mines as Appalachian life began to change. He cast his lot with the unions at their very beginning, but change did not come overnight, and the family moved from one dingy coal camp to another in search of a more adequate living.
Like most miners in southeastern Kentucky, they never really found it, and throughout the area the sense of desperation began to grow. About the time the Great Depression descended on the country as a whole, conditions in the mines were reaching rock-bottom. The United Mine Workers union had fizzled in the face of stiff opposition, and in the area around Harlan County, Kentucky, the miners were ready when the tougher and more committed radicals of the Communist-backed National Miners Union arrived on the scene.
Even in retrospect, it was a peculiar mix: the determined New York radicals mingling with the intensely conservative coal camp people—the one group tracing its values and ideology to Karl Marx, the other to Daniel Boone and Jesus. The compatibility lay in the remnants of a frontier spirit, a sort of don’t-tread-on-me independence that had long been a staple of Appalachian values—and also in the introduction by the union of an entirely new concept: hope. The idea of perfectibility, of radical alterations of the earthly condition, had never been a part of the mountaineers’ experience. Times had generally been hard, and the quest, therefore, was for endurance and dignity in the face of the world’s limited offerings.
But in the coal fields the times hit bottom, dignity came hard if it came at all, and in those circumstances, a strong radicalism began to take hold of people such as Aunt Molly Jackson. Aunt Molly was a balladeer and a midwife. She had helped deliver more than a hundred miners’ babies, only to watch helplessly as all too many of them died of malnutrition and childhood disease.
Two of those who died belonged to her half-sister, Sara Ogan, whose husband also died of TB when the coal dust of the mines got the better of his lungs. In the early and mid-thirties, the two women—along with their brother, Jim Garland—began writing songs that chronicled the struggles of the union. Garland, for example, wrote “The Ballad of Harry Simms,” a teenaged organizer who was gunned down in eastern Kentucky as he walked along a railroad track. (Garland’s account does not mention the fact that a few weeks later, the coal company gun-thugs suspected of the killing were found slaughtered in exactly the same spot.)
Of all the writings of the day, however, none were any more revealing than those of Sara Ogan (who later remarried, to become Sarah Gunning). Sara, whose voice and compositions were recently recorded for preservation on Folk-Legacy Records, continued to sing all the old hymns and traditional numbers. But she also took the tunes to some of her favorites, including “Precious Memories,” and transformed the lyrics into an amalgam of deeply personal lamentation and highly polemical exhortation in the cause of unionism.
She called the new song “Dreadful Memories,” and she sang it all in a mournful voice, rich and clear in its hillbilly twang. What’s the crime that we’ve committed? Nothing, only that we’re poor.
In the short run, such songs played an important role in the organizing process, but neither they nor the National Miners Union became a permanent force in the history of the mountains. The bitter thrust of coal-field radicalism was blunted by several factors—the reform and renewal of the more moderate United Mine Workers union, the New Deal with its aura of concern for the working man’s plight, and finally, World War II.
The war, even more than Roosevelt’s anti-Depression strategies, pumped life into the American economy, and certainly into American patriotism. The growing sense of fear and anger in the face of hard times became submerged beneath the national will to survive. And when radicalism re-emerged in the fifties and sixties, the music of protest was channeled in new directions—into the struggle against the out-front racism of the Deep South, the more subtly ingrained varieties farther north, and then against the new and peculiar war in Southeast Asia.
But the anthems of Sarah Ogan and Aunt Molly Jackson were more than a forgotten aberration. There was a direct and personal link between them and the music that was soon to come—a link that was forged between 1935 and the early forties, when the two sisters traveled to New York, singing their songs and seeking to drum up support for the battles in the coal camps. While they were there, they met and became friends with the godfathers of modern protest, a young and highly educated banjo player named Pete Seeger, and the hard-living poet of the Oklahoma dust bowl country, Woody Guthrie.
Both men were captivated by the utter simplicity of the women’s commitment, and Seeger, especially, became a student of the folk music tradition of the southern mountains. His interest was more than political. He traveled south to study the picking style of Aunt Samantha Bumgarner, a versatile banjo and fiddle player from western North Carolina, and also of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a legendary old banjo man from outside of Asheville whose right-wingish politics were enough to curl Seeger’s hair.
Among all but the most hard-hit Southerners (as well as the industrial workers of the North), there was a tendency toward such politics in the years that followed the Great Depression. There had long been a natural conservatism in the region, a discomfort in the face of rapid change, and there were some uglier and murkier characteristics that would rear their heads from time to time—a sullen defensiveness dating back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, and a deeply imbedded theology of racism that went back even further.
Even without all that, it was hard for white workers who had struggled their way through the viciousness of the thirties to comprehend the argument when blacks began to maintain that the game was rigged. After all, the white folks countered, they themselves had known hard times, but had worked and scrimped and persevered, and in the end it had all paid off. They had begun to sniff prosperity, and it was hard to acknowledge that something other than their own sweat and blood had made it all possible.
But, of course, something else had. The Depression went away when the war came along to prime the pump. But the depression surrounding black people did not go away, for it was a fixture of the system, carefully enforced, and condemning all but a few remarkable blacks to a second-class life and livelihood.
The idealism of the struggle against that system caught the imagination of Pete Seeger and the younger musicians that followed him—Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Phil Ochs, and all the rest. But among the traditional fans of hillbilly music—the people who would retreat to their radios with the Grand Ole Opry, or besiege the Ryman on drizzly weekend evenings—the threat of new upheavals was the last thing they wanted to contemplate. The Protestant Ethic was reaping some rewards in the here-and-now, and there was an intolerance that soon bordered on outright hatred for those who would tear at the fabric that seemed to make those rewards possible.
The split between the fans of Pete Seeger and of, say, Roy Acuff was soon very striking, and the idea that the two forms of music had evolved directly—and over a remarkably short span of time—from the same point of origin began to seem wildly implausible.
But it didn’t seem that way to everybody. There were people like Bobby Bare, a transplanted Ohioan who would apply his rich and rustic baritone to offerings from both sides of the musical chasm. In the early sixties, soon after his arrival in Nashville, Bare recorded a song called “Detroit City,” the story of a man who hops a north-bound freight looking for work and maybe a little bit of excitement, winds up with nothing but an assembly-line job and a drinking problem, and begins to yearn for the home and the girl he left down South.
The song was written by Danny Dill and Mel Tillis, a pair of Nashville-based writers whose hard-country credentials are absolutely impeccable. Tillis especially has a cornpone image—a stuttering central Floridian, tall and gaunt, who eventually made it big as a singer of straight country love songs.
About the same time that Bare came out with Tillis’s song, he cut another record with a similar story—a restless young man is getting ready to cut loose for greener pastures, wrestling with the prospect of leaving his lover, but knowing that he will go and she will stay and neither of them will be very happy about it. The song was called “Four Strong Winds,” and it was written by a Canadian singer named Ian Tyson.
Tyson at the time was half of the folk-singing duo of Ian and Sylvia, and in the minds of the fans at least he was identified strongly with the Peter, Paul and Mary branch of contemporary folk music. For one thing, he had the same manager (Albert Grossman), and so did Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, and a host of others.
But there was a similarity between Tyson’s song and that of Mel Tillis, a sort of instinctive grasp of the same universal, that drew the attention of Bobby Bare and his producer, Chet Atkins. And as it turned out, the similarity was really no accident, for Tyson had grown up as country as Tillis, if not more so.
A decade and a half before all the cosmic cowboys crowded onto the scene in Nashville and in Austin, Texas, Tyson was appearing onstage in faded Levis and battered cowboy boots, and it all came naturally to him. He was raised in the cattle ranges of British Columbia and Alberta, listening to the same kind of music as his American country-boy contemporaries—the songs of Merle Travis, Flatt and Scruggs, the Carter Family, and also the spangled Canadian country stars like Hank Snow and Wilf Carter.
Eventually, Tyson and his guitar found themselves in Toronto, where he ran into an Ontario ballad singer named Sylvia Fricker. They decided to team up about the same time that the folk-music revival was rippling out from Newport and Greenwich Village, engulfing nearly everyone with a guitar and a desire to sing songs with a little bit of substance. But Tyson saw no contradiction between what he was singing and what he had always listened to, believing that all of it sprang from the same earthy source.
The same point of view was emphatically shared by his friend and fellow Canadian, Gordon Lightfoot, who would soon emerge as one of the biggest stars his country had ever produced, another pivotal figure in the reunification of folk and country music. Lightfoot was a farm boy from outside the town of Orelia, Ontario. He had been raised on a radio diet of the Grand Ole Opry and the “Wheeling Jamboree,” beaming his way from WSM in Nashville and WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia. But then one day, as he later explained to his friends, he heard a Bob Dylan song called “Girl From the North Country,” and he was bowled over by the craftsmanship of the lyrics. He decided on the spot to make a serious pursuit of songwriting, and the result was a steady outpouring of songs like “Early Morning Rain”—a blend of craftsmanship and earthiness that attracted the attention not only of Ian and Sylvia, and Peter, Paul and Mary, but also of a Grand Ole Opry singer named George Hamilton IV.
Hamilton has never been what you would call a country music purist. He began his recording career in 1956 with a million-selling teen ballad called “A Rose and a Baby Ruth,” and for the next several years he continued to churn out the teenybopper tearjerkers. But his private tastes were considerably more sophisticated, and in the early sixties he decided—long before it was a proved path to success—to pack up his family and move to Nashville.
According to nearly everybody who knows him, Hamilton is one of the most remarkable people ever to come through the city. He is tall and quiet, with unobtrusive good looks that are more wholesome than handsome. He sings pretty well, though there are scores of singers whose styles are more memorable; and yet somehow he has managed to hang on as a considerable force in the music business ever since his beginnings in the 1950s.
The reason is deceptively simple. Hamilton is, as it happens, one of the most thoughtful people in country music, and one of the things he thinks about most often is the music itself—where it comes from, where it’s all going, and all the other philosophical questions that make it more than just a pastime or a way to make a living. When he began to apply those tendencies to the music of the Canadian folkies, he soon realized that the songs they were doing were only a short step farther down a path on which he was already headed.
He didn’t see much difference, for example, between “Early Morning Rain” and the “get-drunk-and-ramble” songs of Jimmie Rodgers. And certainly there was a similarity between Lightfoot’s music and a song like “Abilene,” which Hamilton had recorded in 1963. So he began to cut the songs of Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen, and Joni Mitchell, and they proved as successful as anything he had tried. Some of his Nashville picker-friends were dumbfounded.
“But the folkies and the Nashville pickers were operating out of the same heritage whether they wanted to acknowledge it or not,” Hamilton says, looking back on the sixties. “There was a political split in those days. It was serious, but it was based on a set of conditions that appeared and have now begun to change. The common ground, I think, was much deeper.”
Hamilton believes that the Canadians such as Lightfoot and Ian Tyson played a pivotal role in the rediscovery of that common ground, for there was, he says, a crucial distinction between them and their American counterparts.
“Dylan and Joan Baez and the other Americans in the sixties folk revival were all highly political,” Hamilton explains. “They perceived some major wrongs in the country, and it led them into folk protest. But in Canada, you had a generation of kids who grew up very differently. They were in a much bigger country, with only twenty million people. It was less crowded, and there was no war and no civil rights problem—at least not of the proportions that we had in this country. So when those Canadian young people began to write from their own experiences, they produced poetic, romantic, introspective lyrics, but not angry lyrics. And that was the major contribution of the Canadian folkies in bridging the gap to country music. It was easier to relate to what they were doing, because they were writing straight people-music, without the political overtones.”
Hamilton believes that in the last ten years or so the gap has been bridged almost entirely. From the mid-sixties on, he and a host of others (Bobby Bare, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, and Kitty Wells, to name a few) began recording the songs of Lightfoot, Tyson, and even Bob Dylan.
The folkies themselves soon caught the spirit and began streaming through Nashville to record their albums, or to appear on Johnny Cash’s show on ABC, or simply to hang out in the motels and bars and trade some songs.
It was, Hamilton and others maintain, a watershed era in the recent history of American music. For one thing, it helped make possible the emergence of a whole new generation of songwriters—Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury, Dick Feller, John Hartford, Guy Clark, and dozens more—who have combined the lyrical finesse of the folkies with the gritty simplicity of Hank Williams.
But there was even more to the reunion than that. It was a metaphor—a prelude—to a national depolarization. For when Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash begin issuing formal declarations of soulbrotherhood, and Joan Baez begins to understand that her own political philosophy is very close to that of Earl Scruggs, then clearly something significant is about to occur.
Nobody in Nashville perceived that significance more clearly, or was heartened by it any more completely, than the hard-living, Christian expatriate from Dyess, Arkansas—Johnny Cash.