I get my love for country music from my Dad. I can remember him on one knee in front of the endtable/stereo, intently listening to his Johnny Cash singles, memorizing the words so he could sing them around the house. He was always singing, and despite having an ordinary voice, was never shy about it. As embarrassing as it was when I was a teenager, it was endearing when we were both much older. We definitely bonded over my rediscovery of country music, and a lot of records I brought him as an adult reawakened the love for this honest and literate music.
In his final years, after my Mom passed away, he sang a lot to fill the silence of his empty home, and his song choices tended to be older and sadder. After I made him a CD of Merle Haggard songs, he focused on one song, so typical of Merle’s songwriting, a sentimental ballad about surviving a lifetime of hardship and only at the end, looking back at what had turned out to be a good life.
Someday We’ll Look Back (performed by Merle Haggard)
Written by Merle Haggard
Someday when our dream world finds us
And these hard times are gone
We’ll laugh and count our blessings
In a mansion all our own
If we both pull together, tomorrow’s sure to come
Someday we’ll look back and say it was fun
We lived on love and pennies
And a daydream out of sight
And I’m amazed at the way you smile
When things don’t turn out right
We climbed each hill together, each step one by one
And someday we’ll look back and say it was fun
Someday when our dream world finds us
And these hard times are gone
We’ll laugh and count our blessings
In a mansion all our own
If we both pull together, tomorrow’s sure to come
Someday we’ll look back and say it was fun
And someday we’ll look back and say it was fun
My Dad worried in his final years if he’d done enough for my Mom to deserve her. He’d often ask me — a total failure when it comes to women — “What did she see in me?” The key lyric to him seemed to be “I’m amazed at the way you smile when things don’t turn out right.” And although they often didn’t, in the end everything worked out. There was no doubt that they had succeeded as a team. They had three devoted children, a handful of grandchildren and a herd of great-grandchildren, along with a home and a lifetime of memories. No one remembered the doubts they had and the mistakes they made, but my Dad did, and when he sang the final line of the song, it wasn’t boastful and it wasn’t funny. He seemed relieved, and a little bit surprised.
Sometimes I wake up in the morning confused about what I just dreamt. Why has someone I haven’t thought about in years suddenly appeared in my subconscious, or why did a person I barely know walk into the scene I watched while deep asleep? What did that appearance mean? Our dreams might seem like keys to mysteries we need answered, but more often than not, they result in more questions.
One of the best-loved of all country songs, Sweet Dreams is one of the simplest, saddest expressions of lost love that I’ve ever heard. Few things are worse than using sleep to escape thinking about someone, only to be ambushed by those thoughts in a murky, twilight world where you can’t deny the truth to yourself.
Sweet Dreams (Performed by Faron Young)
Written by Don Gibson
Sweet dreams of you
Every night I go through
Why can’t I forget you and start my life anew
Instead of having sweet dreams about you
You don’t love me, it’s plain
I should know I’ll never wear your ring
I should hate you the whole night through
Instead of having sweet dreams about you
Sweet dreams of you
Things I know can’t come true
Why can’t I forget the past, start loving someone new
Instead of having sweet dreams about you
I prefer Faron Young’s version. His nasal warble really does pick out the heavy line and base the song around it. And in Faron’s version, it’s “I should hate you the whole night through/instead of having sweet dreams about you.” Whoever coined the phrase about there being a thin line between love and hate deserves a co-writing credit on this song. Being robbed of a good night’s sleep by someone you thought you were over is incredibly unfair. You wake up, and can’t deny that she’s still in there, somewhere.
Ξ December 5th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Music |
I read a statistic this week that a quarter of teenagers today have sexted another; that is, they’ve “shared sexually explicit photos, videos and chat by cell phone or online.” The speed at which we can communicate now is not only immediate, but is faster than common sense can keep up with. Technology has yet to perfect the means to pull back a poorly considered, quickly composed thought.
I’m sure text-messaging kids would be fascinated to learn that, just a few decades ago, people wrote letters, and the wait for a response may have been weeks or months. Not all letters composed were literary masterpieces, but they required a measure of effort and, sometimes, much consideration went into the choice of every word. You didn’t always have a lot to say, but you had to imagine how each word would be received.
Love letters were even more difficult. Finding the right way to say something, or to ask something, when you couldn’t read the look on the recipient’s face was far more daring than sending a nude photo. Awaiting that reply, and dissecting the words enclosed took courage. There’s a reason we still rely on the phrase, “reading between the lines.”
Among the many great songs written by Charlie and Ira Louvin is a mournful waltz with lyrics that fit a sad and lonesome letter. Because so many of their songs were written about soldiers far from home, I can’t help but imagine the anguished voice in this song belongs to a guy in a foxhole somewhere who can’t do anything but scribble his desperate words, wait and wonder.
Lorene (written by Charlie and Ira Louvin)
Performed by the Louvin Brothers
Lorene, write me a letter
Answer the last one that I wrote to you
Lorene, I hope you’re still waiting
But your last letter is way overdue
I know many times you have started to write
Darling I wonder what’s taking your time
Lorene, you seem to be near me
But your last letter is way overdue
Lorene, stop me from hurting
All it would take is a letter from you
Lorene, you said I could trust you
But your last letter is way overdue
If you’ve found another since I went away
Don’t let me return for it’s best that I stay
Lorene, I feel I have lost you
For your last letter is way overdue
There’s something in the song that suggests that even as he writes the words, he knows the reason she hasn’t written back. That long overdue letter is going to be toughest one he’ll ever have to read, and all he can do is sit and wait for it to arrive.
You know that you’re a success when your name is used to represent your creation and, in the same breath, endows in it a sense of quality and authenticity. I’m going to defer to the many guitarists who are mourning the 94-year-old Les Paul online today, who love what he created and did with his life — they are better than I am at describing how his work changed the world. But I want to acknowledge the passing of this man and what he accomplished.
By all accounts, a master with a guitar in his hands, Lester Polfus didn’t settle for what he had. He innovated, attaching amplified strings to a 4-by-4 piece of wood — lovingly called “The Log” — when he was dissatisfied with the volume of his acoustic guitar. Brought aboard by Gibson Guitars, he continued to innovate, developing the solid-body electric used by so many musicians, whose sound is loved by so many music fans. He is also credited for multi-track recording and numerous recording techniques. Always innovating, exploring and crafting new possibilities. I’m so proud to count him among the many talented and restless folks to come out of my home state of Wisconsin.
It’s a safe guess that Les Paul held a guitar in his hands nearly every day of his 94 years. But after he mastered it, he transformed it. It’s a sentimental cliche to talk about the big concert being staged every night in heaven. But I bet there are a lot of tributes tonight to the new guy, who inspired so many.
RIP Mr. Paul.
For my mom, gone from this world six years now. I hope she wakes up with breakfast in bed every morning, and with no worries about her kids.
The Sweetest Gift, A Mother’s Smile (performed by the Blue Sky Boys)
Written by J.B. Coats
One day a mother came to the prison
To see an erring but precious son
She told the warden how much she loved him
It did not matter what he had done
She did not bring to him parole or pardon
She brought no silver, no pomp or style
It was a halo bright sent down from heaven
The sweetest gift, a mother’s smile
Her boy had drifted far from the fireside
Though she had pleaded with him each night
Yet not a word did she ever utter
And though her heart ached, her smile was bright
She left a smile, son, you can remember
She’s gone to heaven from heartache free
The bars around you could never change her
You were her baby and e’er will be
She did not bring to him parole or pardon
She brought no silver, no pomp or style
It was a halo bright sent down from heaven
The sweetest gift, a mother’s smile
Thanks, Mom.
The lesson a music fan can take away from the career of Kelly Willis may be this: If you resist the manipulation of major-label tools, you might not be invited to walk the red carpet at the CMAs. But at least there’s a chance you will earn respect through the virtue of solid songwriting and performing skills, and still get to be the same real you.
Recording three albums for MCA, beginning in 1990, Kelly was a promising, attractive — if not a little bland — act that the label had a hard time marketing. After being released from her contract, she recorded an EP, Fading Fast, for A&M. Although that was also not a happy relationship, it was a glimpse at what she was capable of. The highlight of the record, for me at least, was “He Don’t Care About Me,” written by her husband, Bruce Robison, and backed by members of Son Volt and 16 Horsepower. Friends and family would replace the support a label was supposed to provide, and Willis’ career has blossomed as a result.
The records that have followed, 1999’s What I Deserve, 2002’s Easy and 2007’s Translated From Love, are filled with songs the records that country music radio should be championing, if there was still country music radio. Willis has written some of her own best songs, but has also benefited by writing with hubby Robison, Chuck Prophet, and the Jayhawks’ Gary Louris, and has turned in great covers of the Replacements, Iggy Pop and Nick Drake — not the easiest choices for a waify ingenue.
The song that I keep returning to, and my iTunes counter would prove it, is Willis’ cover of Little Feat’s “Truck Stop Girl” on the 1996 compilation Rig Rock Deluxe. Again backed by members of Son Volt, Willis purrs the tale of heartbreak at the truck stop, the lovesick trucker so devastated by the rejection of his waitressing love that he drives off “without tightening down,” leading to his doom. I love the image of her with “her hair piled up high, the look in her eye that would turn any good man’s blood to wine.” It’s what country music really needs — a sea shanty set in the dusty bays of a giant truck stop, complete with tragedy, bloody wrecks and beehived sirens slinging hash.
And on top, as thick and sweet as melting cheddar on a slice of apple pie, is that voice. Thank God Kelly Willis’ Nashville career was cut short by MCA.
If you live in Minneapolis, you’ve probably read the recent news item about a couple of teenage burglars who beat an 85-year-old man nearly to death in the process of stealing a few bucks from his modest home. The man has survived, but the photos they show of him on the news are sickening — red bruises all over his face, and stitches around and over the top of his scalp, the result of attempts to relieve swelling in his brain.
This is the kind of thing that makes me sick and angry, and I don’t have any sympathy for what will happen to the two young men who will hopefully be tried as adults and receive serious punishment. I doubt that their lives are redeemable to us — the prison system is nowadays more about keeping them away from us than turning prisoners back into fully functional human beings again. Maybe at one time there was hope that the man walking out of prison has soberly considered his actions and wants a new life, but now our hope is that he feels as much discomfort as possible and, for a given period of time, he can’t hurt anyone else.
But what may be the most disturbing aspect of this story is a quick soundbite that a reporter got from the mother of one of the suspects within a few days of the crime. Why the mother would show her face to the camera is a mystery, given the shame she ought to be feeling regarding her son — who, with his partner, were caught at the scene. After a quick, flat apology to the victim’s family, she said that the assailants were just kids who had “made a mistake.” I hope those photos of the elderly man on the receiving end of her son’s mistake are as haunting to her. But there’s no doubt how those kids learned to excuse their own behavior.
Mama Tried (performed by Merle Haggard)
Written by Merle Haggard
The first thing I remember knowing
Was a lonesome whistle blowing
And a young’un’s dream of growing up to ride
On a freight train leaving town
Not knowing where I’m bound
And no one could steer me right but mama tried
A one and only rebel child
From a family meek and mild
My mama seemed to know what lay in store
Despite all my Sunday learning
Towards the bad I kept on turning
Til mama couldn’t hold me anymore
And I turned 21 in prison
Doing life without parole
No one could steer me right but mama tried, mama tried
Mama tried to raise me better but her pleading I denied
That leaves only me to blame ’cause mama tried
Dear old daddy rest his soul
Left my mom a heavy load
She tried so very hard to fill his shoes
Working hours without rest
Wanted me to have the best
She tried to raise me right but I refused
And I turned 21 in prison
Doing life without parole
No one could steer me right but mama tried, mama tried
Mama tried to raise me better but her pleading I denied
That leaves only me to blame ’cause mama tried
Merle doesn’t say what crime landed his character in jail, but “life without parole” suggests that it was serious. (Merle himself focused on armed robbery, which is why he got to have a recording career and a few great songs about being an ex-con.) The key line in the song is, of course, “That leaves only me to blame ’cause mama tried.”
It’s an old-fashioned notion, captured in a 1970s country-western song, that you are responsible for your own actions, especially the awful ones. Maybe the problem was that these children weren’t raised on Merle Haggard. Or maybe it was, in their case, mama’s lack of trying.
I made a bad joke to friends a few years ago when Hank Cochran died that he was the fifth best-known Hank, and we were down to just a few contenders left. Well, I consider Hank Locklin the third best-known Hank, and the highest-ranked “living Hank” before his death yesterday.
Hank Locklin’s greatest moment may have been “Send Me The Pillow That You Dream On,” a really sweet song, so earnest that it could never be recorded today, when the sentiment would be considered creepy. I believe that “Please Help Me, I’m Falling” was an even-bigger hit, although both songs became hits for several other artists. But I’ll always remember him for a song called “While the Band Plays the Blues,” a song my Dad requested that I find for him. When the only copy I could find was my own copy of Hank’s 1960 LP, I happily gave it to my Dad. I got the LP back a few months later, and put it back into my collection. Dad’s probably bugging him tonight to play it live.
And officially, I consider the order to be Williams, Snow, Locklin, Thompson, Cochran and Penny.
RIP Mr. Locklin.
A few years ago, I drove through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. Besides being one of the most beautiful places in America — the trip took place while the leaves were changing through an incalculable range of colors, and the damp cold could be felt on the mountaintops and in the shadier areas — there was an oppressive feeling of isolation, not only because the park is large and the visitors few that week, but because if there had been others in the park, you likely wouldn’t have seen them through the trees and around the endlessly curving angles of the earth.
We stopped at a wayside on the downside of the mountain, at the site of an old mill, bubbling and creaking on as a small stream trickled by. To get a closer look, you followed a walking trail across a narrow bridge, winding around to the side of the building. I left my Dad in the vehicle and walked out there alone. I couldn’t have been more than 300 feet away, but that trail wound slightly, and the tree branches and wet leaves blocked the view of the parking lot and, save the bubbling of the creek, blocked out all other sound. It was easy to imagine being very alone, and far from anything familiar. Walking back out of that isolation and seeing my trusty old Jeep parked at the end of the lot was a big relief.
Although that feeling of isolation was real, I felt silly about it, and still do, a little bit. But there was something unnerving in those thick woods and that uneven terrain, with enough murmuring noise to overwhelm your thoughts. You could imagine walking out of the woods and finding a different world than you’d left, with nothing but unfamiliar faces.
Rank Stranger (performed by the Stanley Brothers)
Written by Alfred E. Brumley Sr.
I wandered again to my home in the mountains
Where in youth’s early dawn I was happy and free
I looked for my friends but I never could find them
I found they were all rank strangers to me
Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger
No mother or dad, not a friend could I see
They knew not my name and I knew not their faces
I found they were all rank strangers to me.
Now they’ve all moved away said the voice of a stranger
To a beautiful home by a bright crystal sea
And some sweet day I’ll meet them in Heaven
Where no one will be a stranger to me.
The people who lived in those mountains and sang songs passed down through generations to explain how the world works, those people knew what it meant to be alone, left behind and without the familiar faces you could count on. And there wasn’t a more comforting idea than that they’re on the road ahead, waiting for you. And the faces that surround you today, the faces of strangers, are only temporary, until you can rejoin those to whom you belong.
It’s a really simple image — “a beautiful home by a bright crystal sea” — but I can’t come up with anything better or more reassuring, so I’m going to dream about that. And prepare for the walk one eventually has to take alone, and what I might find at the end of that winding trail.
Back in the ’80s, music was pathetic. There are very few exceptions — the world was obsessed with MTV, and artists like Michael Jackson and Madonna dominated radio, and if you didn’t like it, there was always yacht-rock captains like Christopher Cross. There was also new wave, which to some was an attempt to make punk more acceptable, more popular. I bought many records that had guys wearing makeup on the cover and playing weak-sounding keyboards on the record. Then one glorious day, I bought a strange record with a slightly ominous-looking cover photo.
Songs the Lord Taught Us was the Cramps’ first full-length record, and its murky, crazed songs had a big effect on me. There’s not a sufficient way to describe songs like “TV Set” or “Garbageman” or their cover of the Sonics’ “Strychnine” or their cover of Johnny Burnette & the Rock and Roll Trio’s “Tear It Up,” or any of the others. You have to listen to them. They were so wild, so frantic, in that age of staged weirdness, where you know everything is so calculated to be “out there.” When you saw a performance of the Cramps (wherever you were so fortunate to see such a thing in the pre-YouTube days, maybe on MTV’s 120 Minutes), you were focused on the lead singer, stuffing the microphone in his mouth, flailing on the stage, still singing. It seemed like genuine dementia — not something rehearsed, but something really wrong.
That was Lux Interior (born Eric Lee Purkhiser), the perfect guy to lead this perfect band. Along with guitarist/vixen Poison Ivy Rorschach, Lux led the Cramps through a dozen or so records, never compromising the band’s sound: raw rockabilly mixed with R&B and punk, with dark themes, even cartoonishly dark themes that seemed to be drawn from midnight b-movies and monster magazines. The Cramps’ Gravest Hits and Psychedelic Jungle were thick with tribal rhythms and Charlie Feathers-like vocals.
But maybe the clincher, the moment when you knew that the Cramps meant business is their performance at the California State Mental Hospital — a live show thankfully captured on video. The performance actually feels dangerous. It was dangerous for the band, who endures patients wandering onto the stage and hijacking the mic; for the patients, whose fragile conditions may not have been able to handle either the band’s performance or material; and for the activities coordinator who scheduled the performance, who must have been looking for a new job within a week.
Lux apparently died today, and the first indications are that it was the result of a heart problem. It was a well-used heart — he put all of it into the music he made, and I’m very thankful for that.
RIP, Mr. Interior.
The Cramps “Garbageman” (Video, YouTube)
The Cramps “Tear It Up” (Live, YouTube)
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