Danny Alexander writes:

On a Thursday night in May, on a county road midway between Kansas City and the Oklahoma border, John Fullbright takes the stage of the Scipio Supper Club, part roadhouse/part family style restaurant. The place is filled to the brim with diners, ages ranging from perhaps 18 to maybe 80. The club’s been prepared for a special evening of music by some fine country blues from opener Parker Millsap and his bassist Mike Rose, a pair of just barely 20-somethings who certainly know how to catch the attention of a room that may not have even want its attention held. Fullbright immediately ups the ante.

He walks out on stage alone, his small frame dressed simply but wearing his trademark pork pie hat. After a moment at the mic, he lets out this mountain cry, calling “Am I born to die” and taking the whole club with him to a world of “flaming skies.” By the end of that song, he has the club’s full attention, and the whole band joins him to answer with the second song, “Jericho.” The lyric calls on listeners to look inside ourselves, find the walls that trap our souls and “Let your mighty voices sound/ Until the walls come tumbling down.” Death is inescapable but, Fullbright has argued every night of his past year on the road, it’s most certainly not the reason we’re here.

That’s no doubt an essential vision to someone who grows up in the Bible Belt, where the concept of God as a petulant tyrant is so familiar that this Kansas audience, like every other, goes wild over his “hit” religious send up, “Gawd Above.” But what’s the matter with Kansas is what’s the matter with our whole social system—we are not encouraged to free our souls.  We are most certainly not encouraged to turn against the walls that divide us.

It’s precisely that fight in Fullbright’s music that manages to turn a roadhouse on a dark road in Kansas into a sacred space while filling that space with what he calls his “reluctant love songs,” blues improvisations and plain old rock and roll fun. His crack band aids enormously in this: Drummer Giovanni Carnuccio III is a driving force who can drop rhythm on a dime at Fullbright’s seemingly intuitive cue; at one point bass player David Leach similarly responds to a nod for a stand-up bass solo propulsive enough to carry Fullbright through a surprisingly natural dance as he moves from guitar to his first instrument, keys. Then there’s guitarist Terry “Buffalo” Ware’s ringing responses to Fullbright’s vocal call, always eloquent in his phrasing but able to swing from a pencil thwacking thump in one Waits-like jam to an unexpected Hendrix refrain to snap the band back in focus when another jam seems to have veered off course.

All of that said, Fullbright’s songwriting is the center pole for this tent show. Like any great country or blues artist, Fullbright recognizes life’s limits bind his songs (his ballads are so sad because even on those rare occasions when things are good, as in a new song’s refrain “don’t I feel like something when you’re here,” they’re fleeting and fragile). But what makes John Fullbright a fine rock and roller is that he has a strong sense of the transformative power of music. All of this intimacy around our failings is a strength with still untapped potential. You can hear it most clearly in perhaps his greatest pop song, “Daydreamer.”  He has no answers, but when he sings “Dream me a better world, and I’ll find a better way,” he wants someone to call his bluff.

So it makes sense that one of the high points of that Thursday evening comes when one of several sound system malfunctions causes his guitar to cut in and out on the new solo acoustic song, “Keep Hope Alive,” a song so stark and personal no one in this Republican county bar confuses it with a campaign slogan. If anything, it feels universally apparent how such a song suggests the malignancy of promises unfulfilled.

Fullbright doesn’t wait to see if his guitar is going to stay on after the second time it cuts out; he unplugs it, and he steps away from the mic. The whole place now grows so quiet no one dares even to count change at the bar. The singer steps up onto a chair and sings to the back of the club’s two rooms. He takes the song through to the end and receives the loudest applause, hoots and hollers of the evening. The power in that moment certainly sounds nothing like that God in the other song; just a guy doing the best he can and fighting for his life.

Photo by Ann Cox

David Cantwell writes:

…in a world that’s run by men.”

Norma Jean Beasler, Porter Wagoner’s “girl singer,” better known as simply Norma Jean (or “pretty Miss Norma Jean,” as Wagoner liked to introduce her) sang that headline, about how rough it was to make it as a waitress, all the way back in 1967. Here it is 2013, and women still face obstacles and double standards, limited and limiting expectations, particularly if they’re trying to make it in the country music business.

Think of all those country singing women, who also often happened to write a goodly portion of their own material, who found solo success  at radio over the years only to see it snatched away nearly overnight: kd lang, the Dixie Chicks.  Or who saw success dribble away nearly as quickly: Mary Chapin Carpenter, Suzy Boggus, Terri Clark, Deana Carter, Lee Ann Womack, Gretchen Wilson.  Or who just never found a mainstream country radio foothold in the first place:  Leona Williams, Matraca Berg, Dawn Sears, Bobbie Cryner, Shelby Lynne, Mandy Barnett, Elizabeth Cook, Gretchen Peters.   (Is it too early to add Kellie Pickler to this last group? I hope not…)

Unfortunately, all those names together barely manage a dent in country music’s female country casualty list.  And, like they say, the more things change…  There’s been a lot of deserved attention paid lately to Kacey Musgraves and Ashley Monroe, as they both try to negotiate the transition from behind the scenes songwriters and supporting players to the spotlight. A big part of the news hook is that they’re trying to make it in a radio format dominated overwhelmingly by largely indistinguishable men, the glaring exceptions of Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert and (the probably already gone) Taylor Swift notwithstanding.

I’ve already written a bit about Musgraves’s  Same Trailer, Different Park, and its surprise hit “Merry Go ‘Round,” but I wanted also to say a word or two about Monroe’s Like a Rose, as well.  Monroe’s album lacks a single as resonant as “Merry Go ’Round” but is stronger, I think, start to finish.

The album’s first two singles—the hell-out-of-Dodge-but-taking-your-time-about-it title track and the part cheating song/part masturbation fantasy “You’ve Got Me”—are moody and insistent, subtle and beautiful, shimmery. They are singer-songwritery in a Gretchen Peters vein. Put another way: They are terrible choices for country radio singles, just now.   That’s true, as well, for my favorite track on the album, “The Morning After.”  It’s a drinking song that’s all about everything that happened before the drinking started and about what’s going to happen again when the bottle’s empty.

Of course, the Like a Rose songs that have gotten the most attention, the ones, like “Merry Go ‘Round,” that push a bit at the boundaries of what country can be about in 2013, are also the twangiest, most traditional sounding on the album—if you’re crossing lines, steel guitar lines make the transgressions seem less threatening.  “Two Weeks Late” weds troubles paying the rent to troubles of a different sort via a surprise ending that’s likely a twist only to male listeners.  “Weed Instead of Roses” picks up the tempo and strengthens the beat as Monroe sings about trading in boring teddy bears for whips and chains, and pinot noir for pot. The twisty-twangy-rockin’ electric guitar that eggs Monroe on might make those suggestions go down better, even fit in, kinda-sorta, on the radio, but the same goes for her lyrical details.  She wants to get kinky—but only to spice things up with her husband; she wants to get high—but her dealer’s her brother-in-law. Family values!

Two other tracks (both co-written by Monroe and Vince Gill) also lean hard in a retro roots direction.  “Monroe Suede” is a tall-tale road song that finds the singer inventing a dangerous alter ego for herself.  Co-starring Blake Shelton (who’s always better the more old-school he kicks it, no matter what Ray Price might think), “You Ain’t Dolly (and You Ain’t Porter)” broadcasts its lowered expectations right there in the title—but it lives up to them and then some, with a nice late-model addition to the country’s tradition of fussin’-and-feudin’ duets.

Like Musgraves, Monroe has got the goods—strong songs, a distinctive voice and her looks ain’t gonna hurt her either.  It’s hard not to feel the odds aren’t against both women having major solo careers, though, least as far as radio is concerned.  The smart mainstream career path for country women lately has been either singing  in a group (a la Monroe in Pistol Annies) or joining up with men in a family act (Kimberly Perry of Band Perry) or otherwise fronting for boys (Hillary Scott of Lady Antebellum, Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland, Karen Fairchild and Kimberly Shlapman of Little Big Town).  At least in this sense, opportunities for country women have not expanded too far beyond those available to Sarah and Maybelle Carter at the creation of the genre or to the countless girl singers who followed in their still considerable wakes.

Musgraves’ second single, the wonderful “Blowin’ Smoke,” in which a working girl quits her waitress gig and leaves the singer behind to complain about it—and to wish she had to the guts to join her—barely cracked the Top 40.  The debut singles from Monroe’s album haven’t charted at all.  Heaven help the both of them  as they move forward.

I Lived to Tell It All

By George Jones with Tom Carter

(Villard)

The story of George Glenn Jones and his voice is the story of country music. In the rough Big Thicket of 1930s and 40s east Texas, Jones grew up idolizing the country’s major national success stories–Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, the Opry–even before his family moved to find steady work in the Beaumont shipyards. Like his heroes, he learned to sing in tiny Pentecostal churches, and he soon discovered he could sing the old gospel hymns so well that his drunken dad would violently roust George out of bed for impromptu camp-meetings. He liked the new western cowboy songs too, though.  His first guitar was decorated with a picture of Gene Autry.

Then a teenage George heard Hank Williams, saw the light and was changed forever, just as country music was, and he set to playing dives he was legally too young to enter. Recording for Starday, Mercury and United Artists in the 50s to mid 60s, he kept honky tonk alive in Elvis’ rock & roll universe, both by sticking to his tradition–gorgeous, wretched ballads like “Color Of The Blues,” “Tender Years” and “She Thinks I Still Care”–and by injecting many of his hits (“Why Baby Why,” “White Lightning,” “The Race Is On,” etc.) with riffs, rhythms and tempos that were only just shy of rockabilly. At Musicor in the late 60s, Jones mastered the Nashville Sound, with Jim Reeves-ish ballads like “Walk through this World with Me,” and in the 70s and 80s, teaming with countrypolitan producer Billy Sherrill, he sometimes added lush strings, pianos and choirs. But the point of it all remained his incomparable voice–regularly called country’s greatest ever– which helped keep twang on the radio when Olivia Newton-John and Kenny Rogers were cool and then sparked a congregation of new traditionalists converts: John Anderson, Randy Travis and George Strait, then Alan Jackson, Sammy Kershaw and Mark Chesnutt. The fall of trad’ country, even as Hot New Country peaks, is Jones’s story too; nowadays, he can’t buy a hit.

Along this road were too many fifths of whiskey, handfuls of diet pills, and vile after vile of cocaine, all of which contributed greatly to three failed marriages and to addictions that very nearly killed Jones on more than one occasion. So I Lived to Tell It All, Jones’ account of this incredible life and career, has a lot to live up to. Generally, it’s not up to the job, but it’s also not a complete disappointment, either.

“Co-writer” Tom Carter has become country music’s king of the as-told-to bio. Before I Lived to Tell…, he has taken dictation from Ralph Emery, Buddy Killen, Reba McEntire and several others, and these best-sellers have given Carter a reputation for painstakingly capturing the voices of his subjects. This book shouldn’t add to that reputation. While some sections of the bio seem so repetitive and chronologically jumbled that you’ll wonder exactly what services Carter provided, others moments collapse under the spell-breaking weight of what is clearly Tom Carter’s own voice. The first line of “George’s” preface, for example, is typical. “The shoppers stirred impatiently on the Florida grass, looking closely for bargains at the yard sale” sounds like a sentence so written that 1,000 George Joneses typing for a 1,000 years would likely never have produced it.

That’s too bad because when Carter just lets Jones tell his own stories, in his own Texas twang, it’s clear that Jones the storyteller needs little in the way of writerly improvement. His best stories are filled with the masterful understatement of one who has truly survived to tell some terrifying tales. When he concludes one section on another unsuccessful stint in rehab with “I wish it had taken,” we can hear his regret at the self-destructive stories that were still to come.  Some of those stories are already well-known bits of Jones mythology (George riding to the liquor store on a riding mower; George performing entire concerts in a Donald Duck voice, etc.) but still make for reading that is both hilarious and grueling–and the book is filled with dozens more that are equally gripping. Country music fans will want to hear about the time George got the shit kicked out of him standing up for Stonewall Jackson, or the time he visited a near-death Lefty Frizzell in that legend’s sad basement apartment, or his reaction to the suicide of singer Mel Street, and so on and so on.

Those stories are undeniably great, but unfortunately, there’s not much else to the book. Many Jones fans, already disappointed by the way the two previous Jones bio’s have focused almost exclusively on the tabloid side of the Jones’ saga, will be underwhelmed again by Jones’ and Carter’s version of the tale. There are no revelations here about George’s motivations at all, either artistic or psychological, and to be fair, George warns us off such expectations on more than one occasion. He can’t remember most of his recording sessions, he says, because he was just too drunk; he can’t provide analysis of his life and near deaths because he doesn’t really have any. What he does know is that he’s glad all that well-publicized pain (the vast majority of which he admits he brought on himself) is behind him, that he’s lucky to be alive, that he loves his wife Nancy. As for all the music, its place in country’s story, and his incomparable voice, Jones seems content to let it speak for itself.  –David Cantwell

[This review originally ran in No Depression]

Charles Hughes writes:

On April 8^th, the internet exploded with discussion over Brad Paisley’s “Accidental Racist,” recorded with LL Cool J and included on Paisley’s new album Wheelhouse. The song features a white Southerner and a black Northerner discussing the historical legacies and contemporary realities of American racism and ultimately achieving a friendly, though tentative, understanding. Although some have defended it and others contextualized it , “Accidental Racist” has been widely criticized and lampooned as a failure that misrepresents American history and suggests that white supremacy can be eliminated simply by everyone letting bygones be bygones and trying to understand each other as individuals. The song deserves much of the criticism – it seems well-intentioned, but it’s oversimplified, inaccurate and sometimes patently absurd. Others have spelled out the specifics (see above), but “Accidental Racist” surely presents a view of U.S. history and contemporary life that is deeply flawed.

Still, the laughter and derision that has marked the reception of “Accidental Racist” has obscured a key fact: the song’s message of racial transcendence isn’t really all that different from one of the key narratives that structures broader understandings of Southern musical history. Particularly in the decades since the Civil Rights Movement, the South’s music and musicians have become well-known symbols for colorblindness and interracial cooperation in the United States. Writers, filmmakers, curators, anthologists, educators, tourism officials, politicians and many of the musicians themselves continue to assert that – in the deeply-divided South – music is a space where the races have come together as equals. The collaborations between Jimmie Rodgers and Louis Armstrong, or Hank Williams’ musical education from Rufus “Tee Tot” Payne, are offered as counter-examples to the nadir of Jim Crow segregation. The interracial intermingling in 1950s rock ‘n’ roll is heralded as a precursor to the imminent Civil Rights Movement. Most obviously, perhaps, southern soul is a go-to symbol for 1960s integration. In studios like Stax or Fame, black and white musicians played together in the heat of racial turmoil and supposedly either didn’t see race or didn’t care about it. In the pantheon of southern musical heroes, no quality is more revered than cross-racial collaboration, and the theme of racial crossover frames the promotion of contemporary artists from Darius Rucker to Yelawolf to the Alabama Shakes.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s significant importance in the accurate assertion that, even in the worst days, musicians in the South worked together to produce something that defied both the ideology and practice of white supremacy. But those who promote this discourse – and there are lots of them – have a disquieting tendency to imply that the music existed outside of Southern and American racial history. Statements like “racism didn’t exist in this studio” or “on the bandstand, everyone was the same” or “we saw no difference between black and white” are commonplace in these discussions, and you’re likely to spot at least five people (almost always white, of course) wearing “No Black, No White, Just Blues” T-shirts at any blues festival. Even some scholars have uncritically reiterated this rhetoric, although many of the best haven’t.

This dismissal of racial politics in Southern music is problematic as an overarching theory of history, but it’s also significantly inaccurate. Interracial collaborations usually were limited to making music, with few friendships continuing offstage or out of the studio. Additionally, significant conflicts erupted over racial slights and disparities. Many musicians – even in supposed utopias like Stax or Fame – resisted these racist practices, which ultimately led to major changes in the hierarchies and economics of southern studios. Even when the musicians did get along, they knew that their activities were still determined and often limited by the racial politics of their era. This could include everything from the restrictions produced by legal and extralegal segregation to nagging beliefs in the essential difference between black and white music. These dynamics were only amplified by the fact that the genres themselves were and are thoroughly racialized. In fact, from the “race” and “hillbilly” days through to country and hip-hop, the South’s music has been one of the most powerful symbols of racial division in American culture. On both a daily basis and over the course of their careers, southern musicians – black, white and otherwise – acknowledged and negotiated the racial contexts in which they lived and worked. In a very real way, nothing mattered more to them than race.

Additionally, this privileging of interracial friendship – currently exemplified by the image of Brad Paisley locked in a bro-hug with LL Cool J – has had the ancillary effect of disproportionately crediting whites as racial liberators in southern musical history. From Elvis Presley to Steve Cropper to Joe South to Willie Nelson and beyond, white musicians are credited with using their musical blends to demonstrate their racial open-mindedness and thus ultimately help liberate the South and nation. Additionally, white executives like Sam Phillips, Rick Hall or Phil Walden are hailed as colorblind champions of the interracial South, even though they all abandoned African-Americans to work with whites and have been roundly criticized by some of their black employees. On the flipside, black southerners have been repeatedly mischaracterized as the “authentic” voices of the past who help whites to become better people through their musical influence and then conveniently fade into the background. Sometimes, as in the case of southern soul in the Black Power years, African-Americans even become the implicit villains because they brought racial politics into the supposedly-harmonious studio, thus alienating their sympathetic white counterparts and destroying the interracial magic. (This continuing popularity of this narrative is particularly outrageous, both in terms of accuracy and implication.) Even when black musicians are simply pushed to the margins, though, the primary beneficiaries and heroes of this supposed colorblindness are white folks. And that is neither exceptional nor a cause for celebration.

So when we criticize “Accidental Racist,” as we undoubtedly should, I hope we also take a moment to more broadly reconsider in the way we think about race, music and the South. The attention galvanized by this furor makes it a perfect occasion to interrogate the conventional wisdom about what has been racially progressive and reactionary in southern musical history. It offers us a chance to ponder how these tenacious narratives correspond to other, uglier discourses: the idea that everything was fine in the South until blacks got unreasonable, for example, or the suggestion that African-Americans exist primarily to help and redeem white folks. Most importantly, it gives us an opportunity to acknowledge that the South’s musicians – through their skillful negotiation of racial politics, not to mention their remarkable music – have provided us with one of the best ways to understand how race has worked, and continues to work, in the South and the rest of the United States.

If nothing else, Brad Paisley and LL Cool J have tried to contribute to that process. In that respect, and maybe only in that respect, “Accidental Racist” might be far more progressive than it initially seems.

David Cantwell writes:

The macho good ol’ boys who’ve pushed country radio around these last few years—I’m thinking of Jason Aldean, Eric Church, Randy Houser, and Brantley Gilbert, but there’s a slew of them—have tended to go on and on about just how darn country they really are.  And, just in case you might’ve missed the point, they’ve made sure to go on about it strenuously and noisily, or quite loudly at any rate.  So what struck me most when I first heard “Merry Go ‘Round,” the big critical favorite cum big radio hit by singer-songwriter Kacey Musgraves, was just how quiet it is.  The screaming classic-rock guitars and thudding drumbeats that have lately defined the format are replaced on Musgraves’ breakout single by delicate, rippling piano notes and absentminded banjo plunks, and by lots of empty sonic space most of all. It stopped me cold, and had me leaning in as if to catch a secret whispered from a new friend.  Or maybe an old friend, once lost but now found.

That “secret” is that human beings contain multitudes, contradictions, and ambivalence, country music fans included.  For a very long time, an acknowledgment of this complexity was just a fact of life as far as the country audience was concerned.  When the Carter Family advised that “There’s a bright and a sunny side of life” and “a dark and a stormy side,” they understood these sides as belonging to the same life.  Jimmie Rodgers was rough and rowdy and ready to ramble, sure, but he was also sweet and sentimental and wanted to settle down.  Not so far from our time, Garth Brooks understood, in “The Dance” in particular, as did Lee Ann Womack in “I Hope You Dance,” that good times come hot-wired to bad and are often indistinguishable, one from the other.  Or, as Musgraves has it in her album’s opener, “Silver Lining” (which by the way sounds like Sheryl Crow, and that goes double later for the song called “Stupid”): “If you’re ever gonna find a silver lining, it’s got to be a cloudy day.”

It is, in part, precisely this double vision that marks Musgraves as “country,” and as “traditional,” and why “Merry Go ‘Round” is so arresting on the radio.  Houser and sundry other hunks—the entire format, really—have told us incessantly these last few years “How Country Feels.”  It feels great, in case you couldn’t guess, always, and marriage and children and small towns, and religion and tradition, always foster meaning and comfort and are inevitably consistent with a version of living right and being free.  In its very first verse, “Merry Go ‘Round” pushed back on all fronts—marriage and kids and small towns, religion and tradition, can also sometimes (sometimes even at the same time) leave folks feeling isolated, unfulfilled, and trapped—unfree.   It’s not that country can’t feel great.  It’s that next door to your place maybe it doesn’t feel so great at all. Maybe some days it feels like shit, a feeling that’s just as true, and just as necessary to sing about.  Same park, different trailer.

That kind of attitude has been anathema on country radio for a while now, and for the white working class generally.  Candidate Obama condescends that some folks cling to guns and religion and, as if to prove his point, some folks become outraged, feeling not merely looked down upon by the comment but threatened.  So, right on cue this month, in response to the “Merry Go ‘Round” line “Mary, Mary quite contrary, we get bored so we get married,” my Facebook feed showed me this backlash greeting card:

Well, that made me sigh… What’s great about the best of Musgraves’ Same Trailer, Different Park—“Merry Go ‘Round” most of all but also “Blowin’ Smoke,” “Follow Your Arrow,” and “It Is What It Is”—is that it loves its characters enough to let them be dissatisfied, fallible, bored.  It does this intimately and ever so quietly–so quietly that on the radio it sounds like a shout–and all without ever calling them stupid.

David Cantwell writes:

The great country crooner Jack Greene passed away earlier this week. I interviewed Greene for the following feature in The Journal of Traditional Country Music (in its latter day incarnation as a Country Music magazine insert). It was around 2002, but I’m unable to pin down the exact date, unfortunately, or even the headline it was given at the time; what follows may not be word for word what actually appeared in print. But I wanted to share this here because, as I’d feared, his death has recieved little to no notice–a state of neglect unlikely to improve as his catalgoue has yet to make the transition to compact disc, let alone to downloadable mp3’s. He deserved better….

Jack Greene, the Jolly Green Giant of Countrypolitan

Jack Greene was once as luminous a country star as any in the world. In just three years at the close of the 1960s, he scored nine Top Five country hits, including five number ones. The first of these, “There Goes My Everything,” topped the country charts for nearly two months in 1967, prompting Greene to give up his job as Ernest Tubb’s drummer in favor of a solo career. “Ernest told me ‘Son, I believe it’s time to go,’” Greene remembers today. “But he also said, ‘If you can’t make it, you can always come back and be a Troubadour.’” He never HAD to come back. “There Goes My Everything,” the Jeannie Seely duet “Wish I Didn’t Have To Miss You” and, especially, “Statue of a Fool” were instantly indelible recordings. This was due, in part, to the records’ elegant countrypolitan settings—what Greene describes as “the power of [producer] Owen Bradley.” But it was mostly thanks to Greene’s singular voice. When his rich, quivering tenor rose to the aching climax of “Statue of a Fool,” it confirmed that Greene was among the great crooners in all of country music.

****

Jack Greene was born in Maryville, Tennessee in 1930. Often ill as a child, Greene was encouraged to play music by his mother, who was fond of playing the guitar and singing Carter Family songs around the house. “I had a disease called diphtheria fever,” Greene says. “So I had to stay inside—I was just a kid, barely ten years old—and in order to keep me in, mama taught me to play ‘The Wildwood Flower.’ I’d practice for hours.” He also listened to the radio. As a teenager, Greene found himself especially enamored of western swingers such as Tommy Duncan and Tex Williams, the lead singers for Bob Wills and Spade Cooley’s bands, respectively. These crooners worked a smoother, more pop-influenced style that, in the string-band rich hills of east Tennessee, struck Greene as sophisticated and exotic.

Greene also made sure not to miss singer Pete Cassell’s radio performances on WWVA’s famed Saturday night Jamboree. “Cassell was called the Blind Minstrel, but he was really a crooner too,” Greene remembers. “He had a vibrato that was a little fast and he had a deep, rich voice but he could sing high too. He made a big impression on me.” Indeed, Greene’s recollection of Cassell’s vocal style—a crooning vibrato that could both tumble low and fly high—describes as well the style that made Greene a star twenty years later.

His first break came in high school when he and a neighbor friend, Cecil Griffiths, landed a show on Maryville’s WGAP. Maryville and nearby Alcoa, Tennessee, were by then known as the Twin Cities, an area where most people either worked for the Aluminum Company of America—WGAP stood for “World’s Greatest Aluminum Plant”—or scratched out a living from the land. It was, in part, this dearth of opportunities, as well as his recent local success as a working musician, which prompted Greene, fresh out of high school, to take a gamble and accompany Griffiths to Atlanta, where his friend had heard there might be radio and television work for two hungry musicians.

There wasn’t, not at first anyway. In fact, while Cecil found a job as a salesman in an Atlanta shoe store, Greene endured a period of homelessness. “I’d go to an office building there just before closing time,” he recalls, “and I’d go into the restroom and stay there. They’d close the place up and I’d sit there on the commode all night. That’s where I slept. I’d get up the next morning and there was a truck would come buy and leave about ten cases of milk to this restaurant, and I’d drink all I could out of those. That’s how I lived until Cecil got me on at the shoe store.”

Things improved considerably for Greene after that, and not just financially; he was soon playing music again in a series of local bands, providing rhythm guitar, upright bass, or drums, whatever was needed. Eventually, he earned a spot keeping time and, occasionally, singing for the Peach Street Cowboys, a successful Atlanta group that played local night clubs while starring in its own half-hour program each midday on WSB-TV.

Greene spent the next decade with the Peach Streeters. By the time he left the Cowboys in the late 50s, Greene, now pushing thirty, was married, had a family and was employed at a glass factory. He continued to perform, though, singing and drumming for pedal steel man Pete Drake, whose band also featured future stars Joe South, Jerry Reed, Roger Miller and Doug Kershaw. A soon-to-be in demand session player himself, Drake introduced Greene to his brother, Jack, bandleader and bass player for Ernest Tubb.

“Jack Drake would always say when you going to move to Nashville,” Greene recalls. “I’d tell him I can’t afford to. I got five kids, and I’ve got a good job. But one time he caught me in a weak moment. He called me up saying Ernest needs a drummer and how long would it take me to get to Nashville. About five hours, I said.

“I was working as shop foreman at the glass factory and as I left that day I said, ‘Tell the stockholders to get ‘em a new boy, I’m going to Nashville.’ When they asked me when was I coming back, I said: ‘Never!’”

****

From 1962 to ‘67, Greene was a Texas Troubadour, passing weeks aboard Tubb’s bus as it rolled through a seemingly endless string of one-nighters that, come Saturday night, found the band back in Nashville for the Grand Ole Opry. In these years the Troubadours featured a line-up that Tubb biographer Ronnie Pugh has dubbed “the great band,” due to the sizzling, jazzy solos of lead guitarist Leon Rhodes and pedal steel player Buddy Charleton, as well as to the vocals of rhythm guitarist and front man Cal Smith. And, of course, to the impassioned balladry of Jack Greene, who Tubb quickly dubbed his “big-eared singing drummer.”

In the Troubadours’ opening sets, Greene mostly performed radio hits of the day, but his signature number with the band hadn’t been a hit in thirty years. Originally recorded by Rex Griffin in 1937, “The Last Letter” was a song he remembered from his youth, when his early hero Pete Cassell performed it on the radio. Greene’s reading of the song’s funereal melody and chilling lyrics—the letter is “the last” because it’s a suicide note—was a perfect showcase for his unabashedly emotional style: Jack delivers each quivering line with a pristine caution that sounds at any moment like he might collapse into blubbering anguish.

“The Last Letter” was so popular for Greene, especially after being included on a Troubadours album, that it was released as a single—a move that soon led Greene to sign a solo recording contract with Decca Records. He scored his first minor country hit, “Ever Since My Baby Went Away,” in 1966 even as he continued to back E.T. Later that year, though, he recorded songwriter Dallas Frazier’s “There Goes My Everything,” which sat atop the country charts for seven weeks in the winter of 1966 and ‘67. The record changed his life.

“It was number one and I was still sitting back there playing drums,” Greene laughs. “But I didn’t just want to say, ‘See you Ernest, I’m gone.’ I waited until he told me it was time.”

****

“There Goes My Everything” won the Country Music Association’s first Single of the Year award in 1967. Along with its chart-topping successor, “All the Time,” the record also earned Greene the CMA’s debut Male Vocalist of the Year prize, as well as an invitation to join the Grand Ole Opry. The next couple of years included a whirlwind of hits for Greene; You Are My Treasure,” “Until My Dreams Come True,” and “Statue of a Fool” each topped the charts. But as the ‘70s dawned, the big hits, to Greene’s surprise, stopped coming.

“I still am surprised that ‘Lord, Is That Me’ didn’t do more,” Greene says, referring to the wrenching 1970 single that stands as among the most soulful moment of his career. “I loved the arrangement, the dynamics, the words—a guy dreaming of his own funeral. It’s my favorite song I ever recorded.”

Still, Greene has some theories about what went wrong for him in the seventies. First, he believes that his frequent duet releases with Jeannie Seely began to rob attention from his solo recordings. He also believes that, for a time, he drifted too far away from who he really was. “We tried to keep up with the times,” he explains today. “We came out on stage in jeans instead of a nice suit, played dinner theaters in St. Louis, stuff like that. Before long, we lost our identity.”

Even in the lean years, though, Greene never stopped performing. Today, at 72, he still plays a few dozen dates a year, is busy completing his first album of new material in eight years, and remains a regular on the Grand Ole Opry. And when he sings his monument to heartache “Statue of a Fool” from the Opry stage, Greene’s dramatic final note—an operatic cry that Marty Robbins or Roy Orbison might have envied—is still greeted by the Opry audience with a staggering blast of ovation.

Danny Alexander writes:

Rarely have I felt such a strong call to write about a band.  Even more rarely have I found it so hard to respond.

When The Low Anthem played one of Kansas City’s most popular night spots at the end of August, Kansas City Star critic Tim Finn wrote, “the crowd of about 100, give or take a dozen (the place was about half-full), deserves some rowdy applause for not making much noise during the band’s 75-minute set (give or take a few minutes). During one song, it was so quiet you could hear an ice cube drop into a bourbon glass.”

Of course, the band made that space.  Beginning the set with a dedication to hometown legend Charlie Parker, the three core members—lead singer, Ben Knox Miller and fellow multi-instrumentalists Jocie Adams and Jeff Prystowsky—started the show in a trash fire circle, singing into one microphone, the arresting séance of a song, “Ghost Woman Blues.”  That was followed by the even quieter “Matter of Time,” both newer songs, off the band’s 2011 album, Smart Flesh, not off of the breakthrough album Oh My God, Charlie Darwin.  When they did turn to Charlie Darwin, on the third song, “To the Ghosts Who Write History Books,” band members also started in a very quiet place, with Jocie Adams’ clarinet searching above Prystowsky’s bowed bass.  Again, a talk with the dead and a talk about talking secured the quiet that made the show work.

And quiet is crucial to what the show and the Low Anthem are about.  As with Smart Flesh–wherein the sounds of the Providence, Rhode Island pasta factory where most of it was recorded become a part of the texture of the work, where Jocie Adams’s breaths on her three clarinet meditation, “Wire,” seem as much a part of the music as the clarinets themselves—the sounds of performance are as much a part of the music as any written notes.  In the Kansas City show, as the band took a kaleidoscope of different formations, including the sometimes addition of fourth member Mike Irwin, the quick change became a part of the show.  Most vivid of a number of such scrambles was Jocie Adams trying to free her antique cymbals from organ cords and any number of other instruments.  Like Japanese theater, foregrounding the artifice created an ability to move unusual places, such as that moment when front man Ben Knox Miller could actually play with the feedback between two cell phones (on the song “This Goddamned House”) and achieve a meditation on lost connections guaranteed to bring a tear to the eye.

Let me count the ways it shouldn’t work.  The Low Anthem is not just a bunch of college kids, but Brown University kids, playing two or three instruments at a time, singing a cross section of Americana in plaintive, reverential tones.  Even writing that description feels interminable.

But the show was just the opposite.  If anything, it was all over too soon.  The Low Anthem created an experience as captivating as close talk with a lover.  With songs hitting on everything from the fall of the Twin Towers to the psychic toll of mindless labor and the hostility of a world with no inherent meaning, the pillow talk never ceases to resonate and resonate deeply. 

What more than redeems the Low Anthem generally, and was certainly evident in this show, is a core belief in the human spirit not quite obscured by the landscape of despair.  It’s there in the way the band trusts the audience as a participant in the drama, and it’s there in every intonation of Smart Flesh.  While gravity pulls planes and towers and hippies and prophets to the ground, the Low Anthem sings of birds nesting beneath Gatling guns and high wire trips to heaven.  Though “Smart Flesh,” the title cut, offers a litany of limits and describes the world as a machine that alienates and even kills the soul, that soul nevertheless “loves itself wildly.”  In “Golden Cattle,” the trio of singers ask together, “As the blind walk the blind through the blackness of freedom/Who writes the songs that we all will be singing?”

Maybe it’s best that the band doesn’t offer anything that looks like an answer.  From stage to record, the call seems clear.  This music is an experiment in learning how to hear each other.  The answers that would most interest the Low Anthem no doubt lurk around the band in the darkness, in a silence made up of listeners. 

In keeping with that notion, after that KC show was over, the band indeed talked to the crowd. My last images of the band are Adams talking to another woman at the bar while Prystowsky and Miller sit on the lip of a window beneath a group of fans on the porch.  They both have grins on their faces, soaking up the moments.  Miller’s head is cocked, the way one does when he’s trying hard to hear.

David Cantwell writes:

The passing this week of Charlie Louvin reminded me of this piece I’d written some years ago (for the Miami New Times and its editor John Floyd), when the classic albums of Charlie and his late brother Ira, the Louvin Brothers, were just being issued for the first time on compact disc, when Charlie himself was making something of a comeback, and when the ironic v. the earnest was a current debate in alternative country circles. So here it is, edited slightly though probably not enough.

Not Kidding Around: The Tragic Songs of the Louvin Brothers

The Louvin Brothers were country music’s best-ever brother team, and when they titled their greatest album Tragic Songs Of Life, they weren’t kidding around. Over the course of that record, a woman rambles “this wide world all over,” leaving her abandoned lover to contemplate suicide; a man, rich beyond his dreams, sits alone in a mansion, longing for the wife and family he has never known; another man beats his girlfriend with a stick until the ground flows with her blood; still another man “shivers when the cold wind blows,” just thinking about the lover who is “on that train and gone.” Ira and Charlie sang each of these songs in tenor harmonies so perfect that all the usual descriptions–yearning, aching, high and lonesome–are rendered insufficient. If you said these harmonies were the closest anyone has ever come to actually simulating the pain of human loss and desire right there in the recording studio, you would probably be right. But you still wouldn’t be doing them justice.

Contemporary sensibilities struggle to make sense of such straightforward songs, especially ones sung so earnestly. To the generations born since the Louvins recorded–those among the Baby Boomers who mistook Dylan’s significance to mean that great art is obscure; the Gen Xers who slip into ironic detachment as easily as they breathe–these songs sound quaint, silly, corny. They are appreciated as kitsch, if at all, and dismissed as sentimental. The Louvins would have called them sentimental too, of course, but they wouldn’t have meant “mawkish” or “excessively romantic.” They would just have meant “full of deep feeling” or, more to the point, “true.” The Louvins knew that such songs simply recount the very stories that get told over and over, everyday, in people’s real lives. Broken hearts, loneliness, senseless death, losses of innumerable variety will forever be among the things that pull human emotions most passionately. Fittingly, the Louvins sang with an intense emotionalism that mirrored the way people actually experience such events. They called their album Tragic Songs Of Life, but simply Songs Of Life would have done as well.

It’s heartening then, if a bit surprising, that something of a Louvin Brothers renaissance appears to building. Last year, Razor & Tie released When I Stop Dreaming, a swell secular-heavy, one-disc history of the group, and this year, in addition to Tragic Songs Of Life, Capitol Nashville has reissued two more Louvin long players: 1959’s gospel classic Satan Is Real and 1960’s A Tribute To The Delmore Brothers. Now, Razor & Tie and Capitol plan to team up next fall to reissue another of the duo’s albums, Country Christmas from 1961, and Charlie Louvin has just released The Longest Train , his first solo album in seven years.

The Louvins were born Ira and Charlie Loudermilk in 1924 and 1927, respectively, in the Sand Mountain region of northern Alabama, just as the tragedy of the Great Depression was gearing up and just as country music’s great tradition of brother duets was reaching its commercial and artistic zenith. At church, Charlie and Ira sang and worshipped among tiny Pentecostal congregations filled with the laying on of hands and speaking in tongues, and at home, they huddled around the family radio, soaking up their favorite duets: the sweet, close harmonies of Bill and Earl Bolick (better known as the Blue Sky Boys), the high-and-lonesome harmonies of Charlie and Bill Monroe and, most of all, the smooth harmonies and boogie songs of Alton and Rabon Delmore (themselves Sand Mountain natives). Following in the tradition of their heroes, the Loudermilk boys taught themselves to pick and harmonize–Ira on mandolin and high-as-heaven tenor, Charlie on guitar and a tenor more down to earth–but it wasn’t until one day in 1940, when they had their doors blown off on the highway by Roy Acuff’s touring car, that they vowed to make music their life’s work.

Success was a long time coming. The brothers moved around a lot, performing here and there and finding usually brief jobs on radio stations all over the southland. They adopted Louvin as a stage name (for some reason, they thought it’d be easier to pronounce than Loudermilk). They recorded a handful of sides for a few labels without much notice, and they even broke up once when Charlie joined the army in 1945. Mainly, they just kept singing those tragic songs in those close, gorgeous harmonies, getting better at it every year and slowly developing a reputation as great singers, and gifted writers, especially when it came to gospel material. You can’t eat a reputation, though, and they were all but busted when Capitol producer Ken Nelson championed their cause, encouraging the Grand Ol’ Opry to hire them and, eventually, Capitol to let them record.

Their first real popularity was with their version of old-time southern gospel. Louvin compositions such as “Broadminded” (“That word ‘broadminded’ is spelled S-I-N”) and the minor-hit title track of their 1952 debut album, The Family Who Prays (with electric guitar courtesy of Chet Atkins), established the duo as successful sacred performers in the fervent Sand Mountain tradition. Their unique brand of reverent yet often judgmental gospel was all they recorded until they were able to persuade Nelson to let them cut one of their own secular songs, “When I Stop Dreaming,” a Top 10 country hit in 1955. Other hits quickly followed, making the brothers one of the most loved acts of their day. The best of these secular country hits was probably “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby,” a song so painfully paranoid and anxious (the narrator is scared because he has dreamed his baby has a new love) that it makes Roy Orbison look like the Dali Lama.

But Tragic Songs Of Life, originally released in 1956, remains their greatest achievement. “Alabama” and “Kentucky” (and the brilliant electric picking of Paul Yandell) are bursting with love and home and human connection, the very things that will make the grim losses of the remaining cuts feel so tragic. The album practically drips with death, as well as other less viscous losses. The album features the definitive versions of several traditional tunes that have now become country and bluegrass standards, most notably “In The Pines” and the horrifying, guilt-ridden first-person murder ballad “Knoxville Girl” (covered this year by both BR5-49 and The Lemonheads). Even in the pair’s secular recordings, God’s judgment seems to loom as a terrifying end.

So it’s no surprise that the brothers never completely abandoned the sacred.  Another new reissue, Satan Is Real from 1959, is nearly as strong as Tragic, and is filled with the spirit while also not being quite so harsh as much of their earlier gospel. The joyous testifying on “There’s A Higher Power” and “The River Of Jordan” are joyous duet examples of the jubilant southern gospel tradition that, today, is fading away. The album’s famous cover–the brothers in white Sunday suits, hands outstretched, Charlie smiling and Ira looking more racked, both standing in front of a 12 foot plywood Satan and a fiery, rocky hell that Ira made himself–is a tableau that might be viewed as camp today. One listen, however, to the peace in the Louvins’ harmonies on the nearly-Transcendental  “He Can Be Found” or the tremendous relief  in their  “Satan’s Jeweled Crown,” reminds us that these boys weren’t kidding around. Whether you take the sermon that Ira, a frustrated preacher, delivers on the title track (“It’s sweet to know that God is real…But Satan is real, too, and Hell is a real place”) to be literal, as he certainly intended, or to be a metaphor for human hubris and its resultant tragedies, you still know he meant every sanctified syllable.

The brothers knew that sense of tragedy well, especially Ira. Tired of Ira’s frequent fits of alcoholic fury (which over the years had routinely cost them gigs, pushed him to try to strangle Elvis, and resulted in many smashed bones and mandolins, as well as the three bullets his third wife put in his back), Charlie left his older brother in an ugly 1963 split. He went on to have a successful if unspectacular solo career throughout the 60s, as well as a few hit duets with Melba Montgomery in the early 70s. But Ira, along with his fourth wife, died in a Missouri auto accident in 1965, a tragically predictable end for a man who’d spent his life torn between the Word and the bottle.

Sadly, stories like Ira and Charlie Louvin’s are played out every day. During their too brief career, the Louvins sang about those tragic stories, as intensely, passionately, desperately as people feel them, all the while searching for peace. More than anything else, it’s that universal quest for harmony in a disharmonious world that shone through when the Louvin Brothers joined their voices in song. If we want to know the full worth of their art, we have to fight past the reflexive post-modern desire to roll our eyes and hear fervency as some big joke, and instead we have to listen as earnestly as they sang. We have to remember that, like each of us at the end of the day, the Louvin Brothers were not kidding around.