![]() The blue yodels of Jimmie Rodgers, the first country and western star, still retained much of the plaintive color of the southern mountains, but in Hank Williams's singing it had become sentimental and stylized and in Johnny Cash it has disappeared almost entirely. As folklorist Alan Lomax puts it, “The Non‐Conformist revival exacerbated the moral and emotional conflicts of this Calvinist and patriarchal folk and touched all their music with melancholy.” Since then it has been steadily debased. It is a cry of loneliness and alienation, which began in the south ern mountains and backwoods. It is this, more than anything else, which still gives coun try and western music its emotional impact. It is a well‐re searched, workmanlike account that hedges some questions (was Hank homosexual, and if not why all the references to his “never achieving manhood”?) but at least it never glamorizes the subject, despite few bows In the direction of Hank Williams's “genius.” What made Hank so phenomenally successful? Roger Williams isn't sure, but he includes a superb quote from another singer, Roy Acuff, which helps ex plain it: “Each of us had a type of cry in our voice.”Ī type of cry. Roger Williams's biography of one of the archetypal postwar country and western singers, Hank Williams, who died in 1953 and is not related to the author, is much less ambitious and imaginative. That's what commercialism means, and we should be grateful to Hemphill for describ ing it so horrifyingly well. His book is like a huge pop col lage, as immensely detailed and triv ial as a Rauschenberg and, by its end, one has a real feeling for the scene: its tawdriness, its triumphs, its money ‐ greed, its racism, its smash‐ups and pillheads and ego trips, and the painful spectacle of genuinely creative, sensitive semi “folk” artists ripping themselves apart in pursuit of a Cadillac‐and ranch‐house success. If you do not want me give this litter to Johnny Cash.” Come at night so know will see me go with you I need about 4 or 5 men to carry out the 5 boxes and a hat box. ![]() You can see a big field the field is on 19 Mile Road. “Take a helicopter they can land any place that is the only way you can come and get me. In between he manages to throw in a lot of detail about Nashville, about how Music Row works, and about the kind of people who make country music what it is-from the D.J.'s who plug it (“Friends, let Bill Cochran in Toccoa take your expert photographs”) to the teen‐age girl in rural Michigan who wrote a fan letter to Bill Ander son: ![]() Hemphill describes the scene in a racy, impressionistic style, mix ing profiles of singers such as John Wesley Ryles I, Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell with on‐the‐spot ac counts of Friday night at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge, Saturday night at the Grand Ole Opry and several nights on the road with Bill Anderson and the Po Boys. Neither of these books pays much attention to the music as such, and there's virtually no attempt to evalu ate it. And so the scene books have begun to arrive, their authors drawn to the subject partly by nos talgia-Hemphill is a Southerner, and both he and Roger Williams are work ing journalists living in Atlanta-and partly, like so much else about coun try music, by the lure of dollars. The Nashville sound is so popu lar that even Dylan has been re cording there. Country music is definitely “in” at the moment: Johnny Cash and Glen Campbell are superstars Den nis Hopper and Tony Richardson are using country music on the sound tracks of their new movies and rock groups such as The Band have manu factured yet another hybrid, country rock.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |