Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself Read online

  Such was offensive even to a ruralite like myself, who was quite familiar, indeed, with slopjars, the forerunner to the automatic garbage disposal.

  I had occasionally drifted across WSM, clear-channel, Nashville, Tennessee, on Saturday nights and listened to the Grand Ole Opry, but even the commercials bothered me there. Somebody was always singing about Black Draught, which I seem to recall was a laxative, and about Goo-Goo Cluster candy bars.

  What WPLO did was to put a disc-jockey on the air introducing country music who didn’t sound like he just crawled out from under a slopjar, and nobody sang commercials about laxatives and candy, and I could understand the words to the music, and the singers sounded as though they didn’t look like something that would crawl under the refrigerator when the lights went on in the kitchen.

  Actually, my pilgrimage to country was a pretty short trip. Despite my early affair with Elvis, nobody could grow up in a small rural town like Moreland, Georgia, in the 1950s and not have at least some appreciation for the way country music sounds when a jukebox is blaring it out from the inside of a truckstop on a hot, thick, summer’s night, when the neon is bright and the bugs are bad.

  My favorite of the two truckstops in Moreland was Steve’s, where the waitress paid off on the pinball machines at the rate of ten cents an extra game; where the cheeseburgers were thick and greasy; where if you were tall enough to reach the counter, you were old enough to drink beer; and where they had an all-country jukebox that played twenty-four hours a day for what must have been fifteen years.

  Once I learned in which directions the magnet pulled, I could easily turn fifty cents into a dollar-and-a-half at the pinball machines, and I spent many hours of my youth at that practice alongside the jukebox that was full of coins and country.

  There was Hank Williams, still barely cold in his grave, and Faron Young, Little Jimmy Dickens, Eddy Arnold, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Hank Locklin, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Miss Kitty Wells, Gentleman Jim Reeves, the Wilburn Brothers, Lefty Frizell, Lonzo and Oscar, and Webb Pierce singing, among other great hits, “In the Jailhouse Now” and “There Stands the Glass.”

  In the late sixties, another generation of country stars began to blossom. Johnny Cash put on his black outfit and sang “Ring of Fire,” and people talked about the time he had spent in prison, which apparently gave him credentials to wail about life’s miseries.

  Misery. That’s what a lot of early country music was really all about.

  At the same time, former rockers like Conway Twitty and Jerry Lee Lewis were joining the fold, and they brought fans with them. Finally there was music that people like me, who thought Led Zeppelin had something to do with the octane level of gasoline, could listen to without getting a splitting headache.

  Back in those days, Willie Nelson was just another short-haired Nashville songwriter. But once I heard him do a song called “Bloody Mary Morning” — she left last night and this is morning, and I might as well start drinking early so I can hurry up and pass out and forget her — I was hooked. He almost talked that song in a clear and piercing, if not somewhat nasal, tone. I hummed it for days.

  Later, I heard him do “I Gotta Get Drunk and I Sure Do Hate It” and his own “Crazy” and “Ain’t It Funny How Time Slips Away,” and I became a devotee. I told other people about him, but they sort of looked at me sideways, the way a dog does when he’s trying to figure out what on earth you’re talking about. Pretty soon I got used to that look.

  Despite the growing popularity of country music, there were still those holdouts who felt that all country wore a straw hat with the price tag hanging off (sorry, Miss Minnie). I picked up a date one evening, and when I started my car, the radio began playing George Jones doing the classic “Of King Kong Was Just a Little Monkey Compared to My Love for You.”

  My date immediately reached for the selector buttons on my radio and punched until she found some whiny Simon and Garfunkel song.

  “What are you doing?” I asked in genuine horror.

  “Somebody put your radio on a country station,” said my date, in the same voice she would have used to tell me a large dog had committed a horrid indiscretion in the front seat while I was out of my car.

  This was not the same young woman who later dragged me to the Elton John concert, but they probably were second cousins now that I think back on it.

  “I put my car radio on a country station,” I said proudly.

  The girl made a horrible face. Maybe a dog did commit an indiscretion on the front seat while I was out of my car. But no, it was worse. My date was turning up her nose at country music.

  “You actually listen to that crap?” she asked.

  “Crap?” I said. “You’re calling country music crap?”

  “That’s exactly what it is. Crap.”

  “And what is that you’re listening to?”

  “Simon and Garfunkel.”

  “Hippie music.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “Yes, it is. That kind of music is exactly what’s wrong with this country.”

  “Are you some kind of Bircher or religious nut?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, “but I like country music and I don’t like anybody who doesn’t, and I will thank you to keep your communist, unpatriotic, ungracious fingers off my radio.”

  The girl asked to be put off at the next bus stop, which I was more than happy to do. I left her standing there, and as I drove off, I punched my country station back on and disappeared down the street — alone for the evening, but proud that I would not allow even the stirrings of lustful passion to come between me and George Jones.

  This probably is how the Good Ol’ Boy fraternity — a fairly recently identified sociological group — got its start. Smart-aleck women, hippies, and other non-desirables began to make fun of us for enjoying country music, and we sort of banded together in retaliation. The offshoot was that we also went in directions opposite to those who scoffed at us, such as preferring cold beer in longneck bottles to white wine, pickup trucks to Volvos, and, in many instances, our dogs to women who would dare move our radio dials off a country music station.

  Before long, country music was appealing to individuals who previously thought they were incapable of enjoying it. This phenomenon was called “crossover,” which meant that even yankees had begun listening to country music without remarking about how corny it sounded. The first time I saw this conversion was in Chicago, where I was once held prisoner for three winters.

  Powerful Chicago radio station WMAQ had recently changed its format to country and was running away with the ratings. The station even went as far as to sponsor a country concert at the Ivanhoe Theatre on the fashionable, trendy, north side. Billy “Crash” Craddock and Don Williams were the entertainers.

  There wasn’t an empty seat in the house, which was the first thing that surprised me. I didn’t think that more than a handful of Chicagoans had ever heard of either artist. Crash Craddock came out in a red outfit with sparkling rhinestones, and instantly I thought I was back home in the National Guard Armory with Ernest Tubb on stage and every country girl within six counties down in front of the stage taking Ernest’s picture while he sang, “It’s a long ways from Nashville to Berlin, Honey, so keep them cards and letters comin’ in.”

  Crash did all his big numbers, including the moving ballad “If I Could Write a Song,” while midwestern ladies who had the night off from the bowling leagues snapped pictures of him and his funky Santa suit.

  It was Don Williams, however, singing soft and low, who stole the show. He came out wearing a floppy hat—the kind Gabby Hayes used to wear — and proceeded to sing nonstop for two hours. When he was done, three thousand frostbitten yankees stood as one and cheered his marvelous, mellow performance.

  He had done “Amanda,” of course, and “You’re My Best Friend” and “She Never Knew Me.” And during his encore, I felt I was at some sort of evangelical celebration where the entire
audience suddenly had seen the light and had come forward en masse for the altar call.

  The entire evening had, in fact, been a wonderful religious experience, and I do not make a spiritual allusion here without basis.

  Remember Tom T. Hall’s “I Remember the Year Clayton Delaney Died”? Clayton Delaney, so the song went, had been an extraordinary guitar-picker (that’s different from “guitarist”), and he also drank a bit and was a rounder. But as he lay dying, the story went on, Clayton Delaney got religion. Tom T. finished the ballad with the suggestion that Clayton’s deathbed conversion, and the fact that he could flat pick, probably led him to his just reward. Sang Tom T. in the last verse:

  “I know there’s a lot of good preachers,

  Who know a lot more than I do.

  But it could be the Good Lord

  Likes a little pickin’, too.”

  * * *

  The pure state of country music — once called “blue-eyed soul” — was bound to go the route of all else once good and simple, of course. I don’t know who or what is to blame for the fact that country has forsaken its roots. Today flutists are playing background (and probably oboists, too, although I don’t think I would recognize the sound of an oboe if I heard it), country stars are making movies, New York has its own country music night club and radio station, the rhinestones have been replaced by tight jeans and occasionally even tuxedos, nobody remembers Faron Young or Webb Pierce anymore, and half of what you hear that’s supposed to be country today isn’t country at all, but rather some sort of unholy mix better left for Wee-Wee Pole and the other musical fruits.

  We have to start somewhere in tracing what caused country to go cosmopolitan, however, so I think we should start with Dolly Parton’s breasts.

  It’s not Dolly Parton’s fault that she has big breasts, and I dare say she still would be a rare talent without her chesty appearance. However, when Dolly Parton became a big country star, people started noticing her breasts more than her singing. Suddenly everybody else wanted to get into the act, and sex subsequently found its way on country stations where once Miss Kitty Wells, in ankle-length skirt and cowgirl boots, had trod.

  Pretty soon the Mandrell sisters were wiggling a lot, and the girls on “Hee Haw” were half-naked for each performance, and Conway Twitty was singing, “Pardner, there’s a tiger in those tight-fittin’ jeans.”

  Has anyone noticed the sexual overtones that have found their way into modern country music? Conway ought to have his mouth washed out. He sang another song about “Even with your hair up in curlers, I’d still love to lay you down.” And there was the one where he sang about the girl “who had never been this far before, bum-bum-bum,” and he even had the audacity to remake a Pointer Sisters hit, where he suggests, “You want a lover who will spend some time; not come and go with a heated rush.”

  Country singers today think nothing of crooning about “the first time we went all the way,” and “When we were down to nothing, nothing sure looked good on you,” and “If I don’t feel like a man, feel again.” All of this likely would leave an old pioneer purist like Roy Acuff with his yo-yo in a knot.

  I also blame Willie Nelson for a lot of this country-gone-chic. I could overlook the beard and the headband and the ponytails, but then he went one step over the line.

  I was at a Willie concert, all ready to cry in my beer and stomp my feet. Then I noticed that the crowd was changing a bit. There was the cowboy-hatted contingent and the GOB’s, but there were also people apparently leftover from that Elton John concert, and those weren’t Marlboros they were smoking.

  Willie put on his usual grand show. He opened, as always, with “Whiskey River,” and then he did a medley of his older material. He knocked us over with “The Red-Headed Stranger,” which has an ending line that always brings a cheer from the male contingent in the audience: “You can’t hang a man for killing a woman who was trying to steal his horse.”

  It was somewhere in “The Red-Headed Stranger (From Blue Rock, Montana),” as a matter of fact, that I noticed something strange about Willie Nelson.

  He was wearing an earring. Or, at least, he appeared to be wearing an earring. I asked a companion sitting next to me to verify my observation.

  “Damn if he ain’t,” was his reply.

  It took me a week or so to figure out how I felt about such a thing. To begin with, I naturally had some doubts about a man wearing an earring, the same sort of doubts I would have had about a man wearing undershorts with pictures of flowers on them. I don’t even think Elton John wore an earring, and I’m certain you could have threatened to bash Ernest Tubb’s guitar and he still would have refused to wear an earring.

  I doubt seriously if there’s anything in the Bible that warns against men wearing earrings, but there should be. “Woe be unto ye if ye stick an earring in thy ear and aren’t named Rachel or Ruby Ann,” is what it should say.

  I was pleased at first that country music had become so universally accepted, but did that mean country music eventually was going to lose all its purity? The way Willie Nelson sang, I supposed I could overlook the earring, too, but where would all this eventually lead?

  Crossover not only meant their coming to us, I determined, but it also could mean our going over to them. Would we have bisexual country stars and country stars who dressed as bats and stuck out their tongues at the audience? Would country music no longer embrace its classic subjects—cheatin’ and fightin’ and truckin’ and drinkin’ and cryin’—but begin to embrace drugs and anarchy? Would the time come when I could no longer differentiate between country music and rock music, because all music would have blended into a form without identity?

  These were troubling thoughts. If country music lost its identity, if it were swallowed up into a giant, black hole where electronic gadgets screamed and screeched, where drums pounded out ancient rhythms, who would be left to sing for those of us who fed it during its hungry years?

  Willie Nelson wearing an earring. He had told us in “I’d Have to Be Crazy” that he had grown a beard “just to see what the rednecks would do,” but did he have to give us this rigid a test?

  I never quite forgave Willie Nelson for the earring, but I continued to listen to his music, giving him the benefit of the doubt. I figured he was on the road so much that he didn’t get a balanced diet, which caused him to be constipated a lot, which is a direct cause of strange behavior. A person who is constipated all the time suffers great fits of anxiety that go along with it, and maybe Willie had been so anxious that it had affected his ability to think clearly. So one day he said to himself, “I think I’ll buy an earring and stick it in my ear, and maybe that’ll take my mind off being constipated.”

  How I wish Willie had consulted me before he did that. A few swigs of Milk of Magnesia probably would have had the same effect and wouldn’t have been nearly as unsettling to his fans.

  * * *

  Here’s what I wish would happen to country music: I wish they would give it back to the loyalists and the traditionalists.

  I wish somebody would start a new brand of music called “Neo-Country” or “Randy Rural,” and anybody who wanted to sing with flutes and oboes and loud guitars, and sing lyrics you would be embarrassed for your mother to hear, could go off and listen to that. The rest of us, including Willie and his pal Waylon, could go on back to Luckenbach, Texas, and get back to the basics of country music.

  I want the kind of country music George Jones sings. George sings like a steel guitar sounds. I want to hear more of George singing “If drinkin’ don’t kill me, then her memory will.”

  I want Willie to take out the earring and sing more songs like “Faded Love,” that he did with Ray Price, and “Railroad Lady,” that he did in memory of Lefty Frizell. In recent times, Willie has sung with Spaniard Julio Iglesias, and he’s making an album with Frank Sinatra. Where will it end — Willie and Pavarotti singing opera together?

  I want more Moe Bandy rodeo songs. I want more pure sounds l
ike Larry Gatlin, more lyrical quality like Tom T. Hall brings to his music. I want Gene Watson and Rex Allen, Jr., and a few Chet Atkins instrumentals and less Eddie Rabbitt. Said my boyhood friend and idol, Weyman C. Wannamaker, Jr., a great American, who is also a country music fan, “If that mess Eddie Rabbitt sings is country, my dog’s a P-H-damn-D.”

  I want Kenny Rogers to take a few months off and never sing another song like “Coward of the County.” I want George Strait to make more songs like “Amarillo by Morning,” with those mournful fiddles in the background. I never want to hear John Anderson sing “Swingin” again.

  I don’t want Alabama to do anymore truck-driving songs like “18-Wheeler.” Dave Dudley and Red Sovine should do truck-driving songs; Alabama should do “Old Flame” and “She’s a Lady, Down on Love.”

  I want more Joe Stampley and more country songs like “You’re a Hard Dog to Keep Under the Porch” and “Don’t Come Home a-Drinkin’ with Lovin’ on Your Mind” and less like “If I Said You Had a Beautiful Body, Would You Hold It Against Me?”

  I want country songs with twin-fiddle intros, and I want Charley Pride to do what he does best — sing the old songs Hank used to sing — and I want Hank, Jr., to forget the hard country and try singing the sweet songs that make you want to cry and call your ex-wife and ask for forgiveness, like Don Williams sings.

  I want Conway Twitty to clean up his act, but I don’t want Merle Haggard to change a thing.

  Country music is too much fun to allow it to be spoiled. No other sort of music offers such classic lines:

  —“If fingerprints showed up on skin, wonder whose I’d find on you?”

  —“My wife just ran off with my best friend, and I miss him.”

  —“You’re the reason our children are ugly.”

  —“If you’re gonna cheat on me, don’t cheat in our home town.”

  —“I’ve got the all-overs for you all over me.”

  —“It’s not love, but it’s not bad.”