Hidden Country

The secret family tree of country music

Damon W. Root from the October 2002 issue

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Tosches saves his deadliest barbs for those fans of blues and folk that "praise the primitive for its own sake," and therefore "embrace in arrogance...the 'beauty' of downtroddenness and misery." He laments the '60s revival of blues singers like Mississippi John Hurt at the hands of white folkies. "A few old and long-forgotten black guys made a few bucks by putting on the required act," he writes, while the sharp suits and snap-brim hats they had worn with such style were notably absent.

It was shameful, Tosches argues, that Hurt was "compelled to assume the persona of a backwoods cottonfield coon imposed upon him by a young white America that saw itself as a force for racial equality and brotherhood." Tosches has little patience for those that equate artistic "authenticity" with deprivation and suffering. "The simple and irrefutable truth," he writes, "is that no human being would rather break his back in the cotton field than take in good folding money by making records." As for the "raw truth" of the blues, "in the recording studio, the blues, like everything else, was...calculated to take the fancy of the marketplace."

Alas, the fancy of the marketplace did not stay long with Emmett Miller. By the late 1920s, when he recorded the politically incorrect songs that now comprise his massively influential yet largely forgotten legacy, the minstrel world he loved was already near death. Vaudeville had eclipsed it, while motion pictures and radio were on a meteoric rise. Had he been born a century earlier, Miller might have become one of minstrelsy's biggest stars. Instead, he performed before ever-dwindling crowds, reduced to an opening act for dancing girls and flickering images. In Tosches' memorable words, Miller "missed the boat, both coming and going."

Slightly further on down the river of American culture was Hank Williams (1923�1953), Miller's heir, the father of modern country music, and a major influence on rock 'n' roll both as a musician and as a role model. Williams is also at the heart of Barbara Ching's Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture, an engaging account of country's most colorful characters and the acts of self-invention that made them that way.

Ching, an assistant professor of English at the University of Memphis, picks up the tale that Tosches began. She warns readers up front that her "training is in literary criticism and cultural theory," and that "country music offers an important perspective on the bewildering cultural situation, often called postmodernism, in which we find ourselves." But despite a tendency to flaunt her credentials and play loose with the facts, Ching tells her story well.

As she makes clear, Hank Williams not only successfully gathered many dead voices, he inspired many live ones. She is fiercely (if ultimately unconvincingly) wedded to the idea that "hard country music" -- a style she calls "self-consciously low, and self-consciously hard, a deliberate display of burlesque abjection" -- champions the "resentment and resilience of those whose pursuit [of the American dream] has been arduous." To her, Williams, a man who literally lived fast (pills and booze), died young (at 29), and left a pretty corpse (his funeral was attended by thousands, while tens of thousands stood outside), is a martyr for the Average Joe. "The rigors of his job failed him," Ching writes, "and its solaces failed him just as they would so many in postwar urban America."

Certainly, Hank Williams set standards -- both musical and behavioral -- that popular singers are still struggling to meet today. His voracious appetite for self-destruction is the stuff of legend, while his intimate lyrics and rollicking melodies continue to define hardcore country. His long list of admirers includes Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, and just about every country singer since the early 1950s. Even Tony Bennett was a fan, transforming Williams' high-lonesome lament "Cold, Cold Heart" into a No. 1 pop hit. "A great song from a great artist," Bennett declared.

Williams' voluminous catalog of hits (including "Lovesick Blues," "Move It On Over," and "Honky Tonkin'") still fills jukeboxes from coast to coast, while tribute albums and cover songs abound among punks, rockers, and honky-tonkers. Ching rightly calls him "the hard act to follow," and does a great job describing a few artists who tried, all of whom ended up invigorating country music in new and exciting ways.

During the late 1950s, the country music industry began consolidating its publishing and recording empire in Nashville, Tennessee. Facing the commercial threat of rock 'n' roll, a fearful country music establishment embraced a strict new hierarchy, with label executives and studio producers wielding an enormous amount of creative control. Executives dictated when and where an artist would record and perform, while producers decided on which session musicians to use and what songs to record. The resulting "Nashville Sound" leaned heavily toward pop, with songs regularly drenched in backing vocals and string arrangements.

By the early 1970s, the stage was set for an old-fashioned rebellion. Enter the Outlaws, a fiercely independent bunch of singer-songwriters who had become increasingly dissatisfied with Nashville's authoritarian power structure.

Influenced by the counterculture and led by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, the Outlaws began openly challenging Nashville's rules and carefully striking out on their own. Nelson recorded his breakthrough album The Red Headed Stranger in Texas, while Jennings renegotiated his RCA contract to allow greater control in the studio and on the road. Once they freed themselves from Nashville's power brokers, the Outlaws quickly achieved commercial and critical success. The 1976 compilation Wanted! The Outlaws, featuring Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Tompall Glaser, and Jessi Coulter, became the first country album to sell over 1 million copies.

These rebels revered Hank Williams. They claimed his tough yet tender songs and uncompromising lifestyle were the marks of a real rugged individualist, and they sang about him often. Waylon Jennings pointedly asked Nashville, "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?," and Kris Kristofferson famously declared, "If You Don't Like Hank Williams (You Can Kiss My Ass)." Ex-con and real-life outlaw David Allan Coe would later describe a supernatural hitchhike with his hero in "The Ride."

Even when they ventured far from Williams' original sound, including when their use of rock guitars, leather jackets, and drugs expanded the country audience to include Hell's Angels and hippies, the Outlaws remained quintessentially country. Their sparsely accompanied songs and intimate, narrative lyrics struck an immediate chord with country fans, and their colorful antics (onstage and off) evoked Hank's unruly spirit. Never mind that the whole Outlaw thing was basically a marketing ploy crafted by some business-savvy singers. Willie and Waylon didn't exactly earn their fortunes by robbing banks, after all; they just wrote great songs and created exciting identities. In the end, the Outlaws' mid-'70s success proved one of the most innovative and lucrative periods in country music, while their inspiring example of individual achievement over a powerful status quo made them lasting cultural heroes.

Out west in California, Dust Bowl migrants Buck Owens and Merle Haggard mixed Hank-style hard-luck lyrics with muscular rock rhythms and some honky-tonk twang to create the Bakersfield sound. With their "revved-up percussion" and driving electric riffs on top of fiddles and steel guitars, "they sounded nothing like those coming out of Nashville...in its mellow mid-'60s string-section, backup singer phase," Ching writes. Rising out of Bakersfield's tough, beer-soaked honky-tonks, Haggard scored a string of No. 1 hits, including "Mama Tried" and "Okie From Muskogee," while Owens achieved pop culture immortality on the syndicated TV hit Hee Haw.

In the 1980s, self-styled Bakersfield heir Dwight Yoakam left Columbus, Ohio, for Los Angeles, where he helped kick off the highly successful "new traditionalist" movement that laid the foundation for the commercial juggernaut of Garth Brooks. Country fans didn't much care where Yoakam, with his stylish good looks and raw, guitar-driven sound, went to high school. As with those Northerners who wrote nostalgic songs about a South they never knew, Yoakam's "authenticity" lies in his audience's response. Since he could walk the walk, talk the talk, and sing lots of Buck Owens songs, his credibility was never in question.