WHAT IS COUNTRY MUSIC THESE DAYS, ANYWAY?

 

Defining modern Country & Western music is chock full of difficulties. What is the real thing? Everybody who cares at all seems to have a different answer. Is it old time mountain music? Is it Bluegrass? Does the term Country & Western even make sense anymore when the population shifted to the cities three or four generations ago? When airplane travel has facilitated the relocation of many millions of people from all over the country? When network radio and TV have homogenized regional accents and minimized many cultural differences? When strip malls seem to be almost everywhere?

My friends who did grow up in small towns and on farms weren't raised on traditional music, learning them ol' familliar hymns on their mammy's knee. They grew up listening to rock and top 40. They may have heard their parent's records but they hated Country until they got older. (Let's face it, C&W isn't children's music.) And I know a lot of northern city-bred people who are basically rockers but fell in love with Johnny Cash's late recordings and then picked up a Hank Williams set, maybe another couple by Ray Price, Buck Owens or George Jones. "Now that's country music!" I hear them declare with all the zeal of a recent convert. "Not that pop crap on the radio!" And, of course, they're right. Up to a point.

As someone who's been deeply involved with C&W, both as a listener and player, for over thirty five years I have to smile. There are so many rooms in the great, sprawling mansion on the hill that is country music. From the Bristol recordings of Ralph Peer, to Emmet Miller and His Georgia Crackers, to the almost rocking two beat swing of Bob Wills' postwar recordings, to Roger Miller's wacky humor, to the strong Mexican flavor, some of it even sung in Spanish, that permeates so much country music of Texas and the Southwest, through, say, Willie Nelson's "Teatro" and beyond (Did I mention Cajun music? Rockabilly? Bakersfield? Don Gibson's recordings with Los Indios Tabajaras?), it's downright kaleidoscopic! Some of it's stripped down and stark. Some of it is full and lush. Some is elegantly simple and some is exquisitely sophisticated with modulating bridges and borrowed chords. Lyrics? Tragedy! Comedy! History! Romance! Country music has it all. Some is more to my taste than the rest, of course, but taken as a whole I find C&W to be the richest American popular music tradition. Staggering in range and full of surprises. What's in it for us, as a culture, to close off rooms and whole corridors in that big house? Not much that I can see. And so I chafe against a host of currently fashionable ways of separating the wheat from the chaff.

By far my least favorite common current distinction is between "old" country and "new" country. In this silly model "old" is good and "new" is bad. I'm flabergasted at how often I'm asked whether I play "new" country or "old," as if I had a time machine and could choose my era! I always answer "new" and just let them go ahead and assume whatever they care to about my music. I find the question unhelpful for so many reasons even though I too find precious little to enjoy on contemporary country radio.

Why should we bother to play it at all if everything we do is by definition bad? Wouldn't it be better to just let it die rather than keep a weak pulse and a few vital signs going through life support? There are lots of recordings. Let's just take grandma off the feeding tubes and treasure the mementos. After all, she doesn't even know who we are anymore when we visit her at the nursing home. No thank you! People must die but traditions don't have to. As a musician, I want to participate in a living tradition, one that makes sense in the world I actually live in.

One approach that derives from this misunderstanding is slavish imitation of the past in the naive belief that the results constitute "old" country. Of course, they don't. I'm not the only one who doesn't have that time machine and, besides, the milieu that supported that music is long gone. All you get that way is carefully imitated surfaces. They may be fascinating surfaces, but I want more than that. Country music deserves more than that! I can only smile in wry amusement when musicians who think they play "old" country start plugging their "originals." I sure can't square that circle!

And when did "original" material become the standard of quality in C&W, anyway? Country has always made room for great writers who didn't sing. And great country singers have often delighted in reinterpreting well known songs. The best country singers who also wrote great songs never fretted much over whether they sang "originals" or "covers." I think they cared more about having good songs to sing than they worried about the publishing. Even Hank Williams, one of the greatest, best loved and most prolific singer/writers in the tradition, had a huge career breakthrough by recording a "cover" of Lovesick Blues.

One particularly pernicious consequence of the "old" vs. "new" problem is that it undermines one of the great strengths of the tradition, its adaptability. That adaptability is exactly why country music has meant so much to so many people over so many generations. It spoke directly to them in a changing world. The glories of post WW II country happened precisely because GIs from all over the country were living and fighting side by side, exposing each other to their regional musics. Country music was enriched by the process, not adulterated. It seems silly to think that country music's malleability came to an abrupt end at some point. And who gets to choose that point? Using what criteria? And most of all, why do it?

And it's patently false that "old" country music is good. It's easy to assume that what the filter of time has preserved as classic is representative of its era, but even a cursory glance at the facts (Just check out some old Billboard charts if you don't believe me.) reveals that the great bulk of what was very popular C&W in the past, even during various "golden ages," no longer says much to us today. Often we barely recognize the singers' names. The arrangements and production can easily sound cheezy to modern ears. The songs often seem quaint and dated, without much timeless or universal appeal. For historians, antiquarians and scholars only. To counterpose a selection of things that have stood the test of time (or, to be more accurate, that it is currently fashionable to believe have stood that test) against what is on the radio right now and draw any conclusions at all is just a strawman. Only time will reveal what lasts. An informed backward glance suggests that much of what is very popular won't. And history also suggests that posterity will value music that is largely ignored today, music my hipster friends who dismiss "new" country with a wave of the hand probably won't hear.

Don't get me wrong. I treasure the length and breadth of the great tradition and love singing old songs, both well known evergreens and underplayed gems. Over the years I've sung hundreds and hundreds of them. There's a numbing number of wonderful songs out there. They add great variety and interest to a set. They're fun to sing and make great foils for my songs. I drink deeply from that well every day, every gig. So many tunes, so little time. But my goal is always to exploit the singer's craft to breathe life into a song I love, whether that's the way Paycheck did it or not. Only an audience can judge whether it works.

But the quest to define authentic C&W in terms of some particular slice of the past continues anyway, as if there were a skeleton key imbedded at some specific point in time that can unlock a secret formula for making classic country music today. T'aint so! The artists from the past that we now value so highly weren't self consciously trying to make timeless classics. They were playing music for a living, breathing, chattering, drinking, bellowing, flirting, dancing, fighting, spitting audience, adapting to the reactions of that audience, noticing which grooves filled the dance floor, hawking records, noting which songs had couples suddenly holding hands, etc. They were professionals cultivating careers and reaching out for listeners. In contemporary calumny, they were "selling out," words we so easily spit through our teeth as if there's something inherently crass about ordinary people liking music, as if "real" musical artists have snide contempt for audience.

And what about that "pop crap" on country radio? Now, don't get me going about neo-payola. And don't get me going about how media consolidation has taken programming away from music people and put it in the hands of a small number of exclusively bottom line driven executives who maximize profits by tightly controlling ever narrowing playlists to the detriment of our once proud and rich radio culture, but is it bad for music to be popular? Do we really have to throw Patsy Cline, Eddy Arnold, Jim Ed Brown, Marty Robbins, Chet Atkins, Ray Price, Wanda Jackson, Wynn Stewart, Charlie Pride and Jim Reeves out of the canon just because they made so many "pop" records? I'd rather not, even if only because I like so much of their music. Such worthy "hard" country icons as Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson have recorded an awful lot of what sounds like pop music to me. Some of it also sounds great to my ears. Jimmie Rodgers, the Father of Country Music, recorded with Louis Armstrong! Were they all betraying some sacred trust? Were they selling out? Pandering? Or did they perhaps have a larger, richer vision than the levites who would cry foul?

What to do? Here's my idea. Let's stop worrying about authenticity and standards. Let's play music. Isn't that how they used to do it? As Duke Ellington said, "If it sounds good, it is good." A pretty straightforward and yet open ended rule of thumb that allows people to have very different tastes and ideas without ideological implication. So what if it isn't "real" country? So what if it isn't "pure?" The right question is, does it work for you as a listener? And besides, was it ever pure?* Or is that just a perverse form of noble savage romanticism that we impose on the past to serve our own very contemporary needs? How am I supposed to know? I'm just a musician! Let's play!

 

*For a fascinating, in-depth, well researched, well documented discussion of the question of "authenticity" in Country Music, I strongly recommend "Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity," by Richard A. Peterson. 1997 University of Chicago Press

I eagerly await someone taking Peterson's lead in re-examining the Blues and "Folk" traditions. Hip Hop anybody?