A M AG A Z I N E O F T H E S O U T H WINTER 2022

country roots
T H E S T O R Y O F

HANK
WILLIAMS
TANYA
TUCKER
ORVILLE
PECK
MICKEY
GUYTON

EMMYLOU
HARRIS
L I N DA
RONS TA D T

D O L LY
PARTON

FREE CD
INSIDE!

SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE VOLUME TWENTY FOUR

C E L E B R AT I N G 3 0 Y E A R S
P U B L I S H E D I N PA R T N E R S H I P W I T H T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F C E N T R A L A R K A N S A S
Chapel Hart | Photo by Rudy Melancon Photography
 There’s a lot more to
Mississippi music than
mojos and hound dogs.
The blues may be Mississippi’s most famous cultural export, but we were laying
the foundation for country music long before country was cool. Mississippi is
the birthplace of “The Father of Country Music,” Jimmie Rodgers, as well as
other greats from Tammy Wynette to Charley Pride, Marty Stuart, and Faith Hill.
That tradition continues today with acts like Chapel Hart, who are inspiring new
generations of performers through their breakout performance during the 2022
season of America’s Got Talent. Learn more at VisitMississippi.org/Country.

#WanderMS
WA LT O N

ALEGACYO FLE I SU R E
South Walton’s 26 miles of sugar-white sand beaches in Northwest Florida
offer an all-natural escape, yet perfectly blend modern amenities, world-
class cuisine and small town charm into an unforgettable experience.

The days move a bit slower here, and it’s this

simplicity – a day spent creating memories at
the beach – that draws generations of families
back to South Walton.
DESTINATION RELAXATION
When settling into the wide-open space along our 26 miles of stunning beaches, you can check out a good book
or simply check out. Find your perfect beach at VisitSouthWalton.com.

MIRAMAR BEACH • SEASCAPE • SANDESTIN • DUNE ALLEN • GULF PLACE • SANTA ROSA BEACH • BLUE MOUNTAIN BEACH
GRAYTON BEACH • WATERCOLOR • SEASIDE • SEAGROVE • WATERSOUND • SEACREST • ALYS BEACH • ROSEMARY BEACH • INLET BEACH
 SOUTHERN MUSIC ISSUE VOL. 24

COUNTRY ROOTS OX F O R D A M E R I C A N * W I N T E R 2 0 2 2

P OINTS SOU TH FEATU R ES

12 Johnny Cash, Pray for Me 76
by Casie Dodd ONCE UP ON A HIGH LONESOME
Listening for a cry in the night
16 The Maple Leaf Piano Speaks to the Bayou Maharajah by Holly Haworth
a poem by Karisma Price
84
20 That High Lonesome Sound T H E T R AG I C TA L E O F R AC K B AC K
by Josina Guess T O M A N D H I S R E P E N TA N T S P OU S E
a ballad by John Jeremiah Sullivan
28 Mickey Guyton Talks to Us
90
a Q&A with Melissa Ruggieri
HER RIGHTFUL PLACE
36 Old-Time Folks The everlasting legend of Tanya Tucker
by Baynard Woods by Jason Kyle Howard
98
42 Little Blue Transistor Radio
a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa
S I L E N T H E A RT B E AT
Buddy Harman and the quiet revolution
44 Not Country, Not Western, Just West of country drumming
by Justin Taylor by John Lingan
104
52 The Bard of Lower Broadway
by Mikeie Honda Reiland
T H E C O U N T RY I D I O M O F H I P - H O P
How trickster tales, diasporic toasts,
56 Dr. Ralph Stanley Live at the Carter Family Fold and James Brown shaped a genre
a poem by Andrew Lee Butler by Imani Perry
110
58 The Singer
I AIN’T GOT NOTHING BUT TIME
a story by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
The mostly true legend of Hank Williams
by David Ramsey
64 Exiting / In
by Francesca T. Royster, with Philip M. Royster
SONGB OOK
ART BY 136 Rebecca Gayle Howell on Trio
Gus Stewart, Gijsbert Hanekroot, Sheri Lynn Behr, 140 Noah T. Britton on Solange
Charles Chamblis, Aaron Morse, Julie Blackmon, 142 Gretchen Peters on hiraeth
Josina Guess, Phylicia J. L. Munn, Mike White, 144 Charles Hughes on Millie Jackson
John Mullins, Jen Borst, Forrest VanTuyl, Susana Raab, 148 Brían Mac Gloinn on an Irish ballad
Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, 150 Sarah Smarsh on Tracy Chapman
T-Marie Nolan, Carter/Reddy, Sid O’Berry, Jamaal Peterman, 151 Madeline Weinfield on Patsy Cline
Ed Thrasher, Julia Reinhart, Christophe Ketels, Mike Reddy, 152 Carina del Valle Schorske on the Pointer Sisters
Julia Johnson, Bobbi Fabian, Ralph Dominguez, 156 Carter Sickels on Orville Peck
Rick Kramer, David C. Morton, Greg Mathison, Molly McCall 158 Annie Zaleski on Olivia Newton-John
162 Rebecca Bengal on David Berman and Johnny Paycheck
165 Rodney Crowell on songwriting
Cover: Source photographs (clockwise from top):
Linda Ronstadt © Gus Stewart/Redferns/Getty Images; Emmylou Harris © 166 Larry Kay on Tomás Doncker
Gijsbert Hanekroot/Alamy; Dolly Parton © Sheri Lynn Behr/Alamy 170 Rissi Palmer on country music lineage
172 Music Credits

6 WINTER 2022
Copyright © 2022 The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc. All rights reserved. The Oxford American (ISSN 1074-4525, USPS# 023157) is published four times per year, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, by The Oxford American
Literary Project, Inc., P.O. Box 3235, Little Rock, Arkansas 72203. Periodicals postage paid at Conway, AR Postmaster and at additional mailing offices. The annual subscription rate is $39 for U.S. orders, $49 for Canadian orders,
and $59 for outside North America. (All funds must be U.S. dollars.) POSTMASTER: please send address changes to The Oxford American, P.O. Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834-3000, or e-mail subscriptions@oxfordamerican.org,
or telephone (800) 314-9051. For list rental inquiries, contact Kerry Fischette at (609) 580-2875 or kerry.fischette@alc.com. Advertising, editorial, and general business information can be obtained by calling (501) 374-0000.

Charles Chamblis (with camera) and his daughter, Reva Chamblis (left), and an unidentified relative, about 1975 (Supplied Title).
Photograph by Charles Chamblis © Twin Cities African American Community. Minnesota Historical Society. OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 7
REBECCA BENGAL is a contribut-
ing editor at this magazine.
Strange Hours, a collection of
her writings on photography, will
be published by Aperture in
2023. Her short fiction accompa-
nies Kristine Potter’s monograph
Dark Waters, also forthcoming
from Aperture, and her essay
“Repo Man” is the afterword to
the latest edition of Charles Por-
tis’s Norwood (Overlook Press).
NOAH T. BRITTON is a writer from
Georgia currently based in Spain.
His work has appeared in the
Oxford American and the film
journal Little White Lies.
ANDREW LEE BUTLER is a writer
from Kingsport, Tennessee. He
is a PhD candidate at the Univer-
sity of Tennessee, where he
curently serves as editor-in-
chief of Grist: A Journal of the
Literary Arts.
RODNEY CROWELL is a Gram-
my-winning artist and songwrit-
er who has written fifteen num-
ber-one hits for Emmylou Harris,
Johnny Cash, Keith Urban, and
others. His compositions have
been recorded by artists such as
Etta James, Bob Seger, and the
Grateful Dead. Crowell has been
honored with the Lifetime
Achievement Award in Songwrit-
ing from the Americana Music
Association, the ASCAP Found-
ers Award, the Academy of Coun-
try Music’s Poet’s Award, and
induction into the Nashville
Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is
the author of the acclaimed
memoir Chinaberry Sidewalks.
CASIE DODD lives in Arkansas
with her husband and two chil-
dren. Her writing has appeared
in the Windhover, Susurrus,
Front Porch Republic, and other
journals. She is the book review
editor for Psaltery & Lyre. Based
8 WINTER 2022
CONTRIBUTORS
in Fort Smith, she is the founder
and editor of Belle Point Press, a
new small press celebrating the
literary culture and community
of the American Mid-South.
Producer, singer, songwriter,
guitarist, and indie label CEO
TOMÁS DONCKER has collaborat-
ed with luminaries such as Bootsy
Collins, Patti Smith, Meshell
Ndegeocello, Ivan Neville, and
Bonnie Raitt and helms his own
band, Tomás Doncker & The
True Groove All-Stars. His
ongoing musical collaborations
with Yusef Komunyakaa have
yielded four critically acclaimed
albums. Their most recent is
called Endangered.
HOLLY HAWORTH’S work appears
in the New York Times Magazine,
Lapham’s Quarterly, Orion, Si-
erra, and elsewhere. It has been
listed as notable in The Best
American Travel Writing and
included in The Best American
Science and Nature Writing.
She’s currently at work on her
first book, about listening.
JASON KYLE HOWARD is the author
of A Few Honest Words: The Ken-
tucky Roots of Popular Music and
coauthor of Something’s Rising:
Appalachians Fighting Moun-
taintop Removal. His work has
appeared in the New York Times,
the Atlantic, the Oxford Ameri-
can, Salon, the Nation, the Mil-
lions, Utne Reader, and on NPR.
He directs the creative writing
program at Berea College and
serves on the faculty of Spalding
University’s Naslund-Mann
Graduate School of Writing.
REBECCA GAYLE HOWELL is an
assistant professor of poetry and
translation for the University of
Arkansas’s MFA program and the
longtime poetry editor at the
Oxford American. Among her
awards are the United States
Artists Fellowship, the Marguerite
and Lamar Smith Fellowship
from the Carson McCullers
Center, two poetry fellowships
from the Fine Arts Work
Center in Provincetown, and the
Pushcart Prize.
CHARLES HUGHES teaches at
Rhodes College in Memphis.
He is the author of two books,
Country Soul: Making Music and
Making Race in the American
South and Why Bushwick Bill Mat-
ters, as well as many articles. He’s
co-editor of the American Music
Series at University of Texas Press,
a regular contributor to the Teach-
ing Hard History podcast, and a
voting member of the Rock & Roll
Hall of Fame.
LARRY KAY is an ex-newspaper-
man, obsessive vinyl junkie, and
aspiring bread baker. He once
had coffee and cannoli with Iggy
Pop. Iggy paid.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA’S books of
poetry include Taboo, Dien Cai
Dau, Neon Vernacular (for which
he received the Pulitzer Prize),
Warhorses, The Chameleon
Couch, The Emperor of Water
Clocks, Night Animals, and most
recently Everyday Mojo Songs of
Earth. His plays, performance
art, and libretti have been per-
formed internationally and in-
clude Saturnalia, Testimony,
and Gilgamesh.
JOHN LINGAN’S most recent book
is A Song for Everyone: The
Story of Creedence Clearwater
Revival, which was published in
August. He has written for the
New York Times Magazine, the
Washington Post, Pitchfork, and
many other publications. He lives
in Maryland with his wife and
three kids, and first started play-
ing drums at age ten.
BRÍAN MAC GLOINN is a musician,
songwriter, and singer from
Carlow, Ireland, best known as
one half of folk duo Ye Vaga-
bonds. Singing in English and
Irish, Mac Gloinn has a strong
connection to the vocal tradition
of Ulster and his mother’s native
Arranmore Island, County Do-
negal. He also produces albums
and has made a number of radio
documentaries, including the
award-winning radio-ballad The
Ballad of the Stolwijk Rescue.
JOSINA GUESS has an essay in
Bigger Than Bravery: Black
Resilience and Reclamation in
a Time of Pandemic, edited by
Valerie Boyd (Lookout Books,
Fall 2022), and is a student in the
University of Georgia’s MFA in
Narrative Nonfiction. She lives
with her family and many ani-
mals in Comer, Georgia. Read
more at josinaguess.com.
RISSI PALMER has received wide-
spread media attention in na-
tional publications including
Ebony, Billboard, People, News-
week, Huffington Post, Rolling
Stone, the Wall Street Journal,
and more. She has performed on
CBS Mornings, CNN, and Oprah
& Friends, as well as at the White
House, Lincoln Center, and the
Grand Ole Opry. Palmer made
music history in 2007 with the
release of her Top 40 debut sin-
gle, “Country Girl,” becoming
the first African American
female to chart a country song
since 1987. She is now the
host of the Apple Music show
Color Me Country Radio w/
Rissi Palmer.
IMANI PERRY is the author of sev-
en books. Her most recent is the
New York Times bestselling title
South to America: A Journey Be-
low the Mason-Dixon to Under-
stand the Soul of a Nation, a fi-
nalist for the National Book
Award in Nonfiction. Perry is a
professor of African American
Studies at Princeton University.
GRETCHEN PETERS is a two-time
Grammy nominee and a Country
Music Association Song of the
Year winner (“Independence
Day”). In 2014 she was inducted
into the Nashville Songwriters
Hall of Fame. In 2021 she was
awarded the Poets Award by the
Academy of Country Music. Her
latest album is The Show: Live
From The UK.
Wilderness, 2021. Acrylic and oil on canvas by Aaron Morse. Courtesy La Loma Projects, Los Angeles
ASHLEIGH BRYANT PHILLIPS is
from Woodland, North Carolina.
Her debut collection of stories was
Sleepovers (2020). Her stories have
appeared in the Paris Review,
New York Tyrant, and elsewhere.
KARISMA PRICE’S work has ap-
peared in Poetry, Four Way Re-
view, Indiana Review, The Adroit
Journal, and elsewhere. She is
from New Orleans and is current-
ly an assistant professor of En-
glish at Tulane University. Price’s
debut collection, I’m Always so
Serious, is forthcoming from
Sarabande Books in spring 2023.
DAVID RAMSEY is a contributing
editor to the magazine. His work
has been anthologized in Da
Capo Best Music Writing, Best
Food Writing, Cornbread
Nation: The Best of Southern
Food Writing, and The Norton
Field Guide to Writing. He last
wrote for the magazine about
Fontella Bass.
MIKEIE HONDA REILAND is a writ-
er from Nashville. He is a gradu-
ate of the University of Georgia’s
MFA in Narrative Nonfiction
program. His work has appeared
in the Oxford American, Bitter
Southerner, and SB Nation.
FRANCESCA T. ROYSTER is a
professor of English at DePaul
University, author of Sounding
Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and
Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul
Era and Becoming Cleopatra:
The Shifting Image of an Icon,
and coeditor of “Uncharted Coun-
try,” a special issue of the Journal
of Popular Music Studies on race
and country music.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 9

DANIELLE A. JACKSON
Editor
Assistant Editors CHRISTIAN LEUS, ALLIE MARIANO
Editor-at-Large ROSALIND BENTLEY
Poetry Editor REBECCA GAYLE HOWELL
Art Directors CARTER/REDDY • www.CarterReddy.com
Art Researcher ALYSSA ORTEGA COPPELMAN
Copyeditor ALI WELKY
Editorial Interns
TILLIE LEFFORGE, ALEXA NORSBY, ANNIKA WARRICK, ZHENZHEN YU
Archive Intern
WINNIE LITCHFIELD
Contributing Editors
LUCY ALIBAR, REBECCA BENGAL, ROY BLOUNT JR., WENDY BRENNER,
KEVIN BROCKMEIER, BRONWEN DICKEY, LOLIS ERIC ELIE,
BETH ANN FENNELLY, LESLIE JAMISON, HARRISON SCOTT KEY,
KIESE LAYMON, JESSICA LYNNE, ALEX MAR, GREIL MARCUS,
TAYLER MONTAGUE, DUNCAN MURRELL, CHRIS OFFUTT, IMANI PERRY,
AMANDA PETRUSICH, PADGETT POWELL, JAMIE QUATRO, DAVID RAMSEY,
DIANE ROBERTS, ZANDRIA F. ROBINSON, CARINA DEL VALLE SCHORSKE
The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc.,
Board of Directors
Chairman SARA A. LEWIS
RICHARD MASSEY, JENNY DAVIS, ENJOLIQUÉ A. LETT, DANIELLE A. JACKSON
SARA A. LEWIS
Executive Director
Advertising Sales Director KEVIN BLECHMAN
(678) 427-2074 • kblechman@oxfordamerican.org
Senior Account Executive KATHLEEN KING
(501) 944-5838 • kking@oxfordamerican.org
Senior Account Executive CRISTEN HEMMINS
(662) 801-5357 • cristenhemmins@gmail.com
Senior Account Executive RAY WITTENBERG
(501) 733-4164 • rwittenberg@oxfordamerican.org
Senior Account Executive GINGER ROELL
(501) 766-6519 • groell109@gmail.com
Marketing and Communications Manager KELSEY WHITE
Accounting Manager SHAVON TAYLOR
Development Coordinator AMANDA BOLDENOW
Engagement Editor LAURA DALEY
Creative Consultant RYAN HARRIS
Fulfillment Coordinator SARAH GRAHAM
The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc., receives support from
THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS, THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT
FOR THE HUMANITIES, AMAZON LITERARY PARTNERSHIP, ARKANSAS ARTS
COUNCIL, ARKANSAS HUMANITIES COUNCIL, AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY
COMMISSION, THE DEPARTMENT OF ARKANSAS HERITAGE,
THE JULIA CHILD FOUNDATION FOR GASTRONOMY AND THE CULINARY ARTS,
STELLA BOYLE SMITH TRUST, THE WINDGATE FOUNDATION,
WINTHROP ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION, WATSON-BROWN FOUNDATION,
and THE COMMUNITY OF LITERARY MAGAZINES AND PRESSES
SUBSCRIPTIONS
The quickest, greenest way to subscribe is to visit our website.
A one-year subscription (4 quarterly issues) is $39.
www.oxfordamerican.org/subscribe • (800) 314-9051
SUBMISSIONS
We accept online submissions.
Please visit our website for more information.
ABOUT US
The Oxford American is a nonprofit quarterly
published by The Oxford American Literary Project, Inc.,
in alliance with the University of Central Arkansas (UCA).
OFFICE ADDRESS
P.O. Box 3235 / Little Rock, AR 72203-3235
Phone: (501) 374-0000
Business Staff: info@oxfordamerican.org
Editorial Staff: editors@oxfordamerican.org
10 WINTER 2022
MELISSA RUGGIERI is the nation-
al music writer at USA TODAY.
She has written about every
genre of music and attended
more than 3,000 concerts during
the past two decades. Previously,
she was the music critic for the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
and Richmond Times-Dispatch.
Ruggieri and her husband reside
in the Washington, D.C., area.
CARINA DEL VALLE SCHORSKE is a
writer and translator of Puerto
Rican poetry. Her essays and
criticism have been published in
many venues including Bookfo-
rum, The Believer, Virginia
Quarterly Review, and the New
York Times Magazine, where she
is a contributing writer. In 2022,
she won a National Magazine
Award for her cover story on
grief and belonging on plague-
time dance floors. Her debut
essay collection, The Other
Island, is forthcoming from
Riverhead Books.
CARTER SICKELS is the author of
the novel The Prettiest Star (Hub
City Press), winner of the 2021
Southern Book Prize and the
Weatherford Award for Appala-
chian fiction. His debut novel,
The Evening Hour, was adapted
into a feature film that premiered
at the Sundance Film Festival in
2020 and is now streaming. His
writing appears in the Atlantic,
Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Guer-
nica, Joyland, and Catapult.
Sickels teaches at Eastern
Kentucky University.
SARAH SMARSH has covered
socioeconomic class, politics, and
public policy for the New York
Times, Harper’s, National Geo-
graphic, and many other publica-
tions. Her first book, Heartland:
A Memoir of Working Hard and
Being Broke in the Richest Country
on Earth, was a New York Times
bestseller, a finalist for the Nation-
al Book Award and the Kirkus
Prize, the winner of the Chicago
Tribune Literary Prize, and a
best-books-of-the-year selection
by President Barack Obama. Her
latest book, She Come By It Nat-
ural: Dolly Parton and the Wom-
en Who Lived Her Songs, was a
finalist for the National Book
Critics Circle Award.
JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN has
lived in Wilmington, North
Carolina, for almost twenty years.
He has been writing for the Ox-
ford American for even longer
than that—twenty-five years, to
be exact—his first piece, an inter-
view with the late songwriter Vic
Chesnutt, having appeared in
these pages in 1997. He is a con-
tributing writer for the New York
Times Magazine and a co-found-
er of the nonprofit research col-
lective Third Person Project.
JUSTIN TAYLOR is the author of
three books of fiction and the
memoir Riding with the Ghost.
He is the director of the MFA
program at Sewanee, the Univer-
sity of the South.
MADELINE WEINFIELD is a writer
based in Washington, D.C. Her
work has appeared in the Wash-
ington Post, AFAR, Garden &
Gun, InStyle, Lonely Planet, and
elsewhere.
BAYNARD WOODS is the author of
Inheritance: An Autobiography
of Whiteness and the co-author
of I Got a Monster: The Rise and
Fall of America’s Most Corrupt
Police Squad. He lives in
Baltimore.
ANNIE ZALESKI’S writing has been
published in Rolling Stone, NPR
Music, the Guardian, Salon,
Time, Billboard, Vulture, Classic
Pop, and the Los Angeles Times.
She’s the author of a “33 ⅓” book
on Duran Duran’s Rio and an il-
lustrated biography of Lady Gaga,
and also contributed liner notes
to the 2016 reissue of R.E.M.’s Out
of Time and Game Theory’s 2020
collection Across the Barrier of
Sound: PostScript.
WELCOME TO THE

OF THE ARTS.
WINDGATE CENTER
FOR FINE & PERFORMING ARTS, OPENING SPRING ’23
▶ 5,000-square-foot arts common ▶ Art education classrooms
▶ 900-square-foot art gallery ▶ Graphic design lab
▶ Sculpture studio and kiln room ▶ Painting studio

CAPITAL CAMPAIGN
Johnny
Cash,
Pray
for Me
BY CAS I E D O D D

very afternoon, I sing my daughter to

sleep with my own lullaby versions of the
same two Johnny Cash classics. “I Walk
the Line” smoothly gives way to “Jackson”
as she closes her eyes and nestles in for a
nap. When she resists, I might segue into
an old-fashioned hymn briefly to settle
her down, but I still always pad out of the
room humming about infidelity.
Johnny’s music, biography, and spirit
have profoundly shaped my motherhood
and liminal sense of faith over the past
three years. What began with the reali-
zation during my first child’s newborn phase that “Folsom Prison
Blues” calmed him like nothing else (there’s something about that
steady bass, I guess) turned into a regular rhythm of my lonely
postpartum days. When my husband was away at work and I clocked
nearly twelve hours on my own most days—alone in a huge city with
a clingy, sensitive baby—Johnny kept us company.
My son has always been spirited, but from the beginning, he
seemed to find a sort of intuitive comfort in music linked to his
roots. Our family is from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and the mid-South
region; I grew up there but relocated to Chicago with my husband
to start what we thought could become a new life. As our fami-
ly grew, that option became more and more untenable. Despite
our Midwestern exile—and a lack of particular interest in country
music—even in pregnancy, I was drawn to Johnny’s oeuvre as a
primal link to the place I came from. But after my son was born, he
screamed constantly (at least, it seemed that way); we couldn’t get

Chaise, 2013, by Julie Blackmon © The artist. Courtesy photo-eye Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
12 WINTER 2022 Blackmon’s third monograph, Midwest Materials, was published this year by Radius Books.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 13
him to stop except when music was playing.
There’s a video somewhere of one incident
where he was shrieking at my grandmother’s
house—only to be calmed instantly once he
heard the opening to “Folsom Prison Blues.”
When Johnny said “Hello,” my son listened.
Despite the often-rowdy rhythms of so many
of his songs, Johnny seemed to communicate
something to my son I could not yet translate
myself. That effect is not by accident. Cash
himself said of his early sound in songs like
“Hey Porter”: “Everything coming out [at the
time] was the same; the arrangements were
so predictable, and I didn’t want to sound
like anybody else. I put paper in the strings
of my guitar to get that…sound and a beat
that was so bare and sparse, it sounded like
a train with two wheels gone.” As a mother of
young children, I can often relate to that train.
Over time, Cash also came to speak to me
on a deeper personal level. During this same
period, I was working my way—with some
reluctance—toward a Catholic conversion,
officially forsaking my evangelical heritage.
My religion was (and still is) a complicated
part of my identity that I’ve struggled to rec-
oncile with the various
cracks in my human-
ity. In an interesting
way, Johnny’s abiding
Johnny found a
faith in a Baptist tra- way to take what
dition—one cut from
the same cloth that I he was given
was trying to leave be-
hind—helped me rec-
and infuse it
oncile the parts worth with something
holding on to with the
tradition to which I felt startlingly new,
called. There’s some-
thing in his voice that
even as he
evokes a confidence remained loyal
mingled with humili-
ty: an awareness that to the source
he can be saved from
anything despite ev-
of that music:
erything that he may the gospel.
do to strain that grace.
That sound—the tim-
bre, the depth, the conviction—made a home
in me. It gave me comfort as I listened to and
sang the songs that testify to a love that hopes
never to waver despite the knowledge that
it will eventually. In that respect, “I Walk
the Line” became a sort of shorthand for
“Amazing Grace” that reminded me I could
still love my family (and God) fully even as
I seemed constantly to be failing both. The
fevers that will come can still be washed
14 WINTER 2022
away in the blood once more. I knew the
biography behind those lyrics, and perhaps
that intuitively made “Jackson” the natural
follow-up for me; I nearly always experience
one song alongside the other. I barely know
any Catholics—at least on a level that would
make talking about such things possible—but
I know the wounds that cultivate that kind
of voice. The brokenness. But he just kept
singing, all the way to the end. He knew it
was the only way to keep going.
Of course, you can’t really talk about
Johnny—in any context, but especially in
the context of faith—without talking about
gospel music. One of my favorite videos of
his is an early live performance of the spiri-
tual “I Was There When It Happened” with
the Tennessee Two. It is hard to articulate
the emotional logic at play in how pro-
foundly this song comforts me. For those
unfamiliar, the song basically affirms the
evangelical concept of salvation: a firm con-
viction that we can (and should) pinpoint
a single moment in time when we “accept-
ed” Jesus once and for all as our Savior. As
someone who carries deep wounds from the
theology and all the
cultural underpin-
nings of this song,
I’m perplexed by my
willingness to em-
brace it when Johnny
sings it to me. Part of
it goes back to sound.
Marshall Grant, one
of the Tennessee Two,
spoke about how they
stuck with that same,
consistent sound to-
gether from the be-
ginning: “The first
eight bars that we ever
played together—that
Johnny Cash sound was
right there.” I have to
confess that it’s tempt-
ing to project a spiri-
tual significance onto
this statement. They knew the gift they had
received, and they simply made it their own.
Johnny found a way to take what he was given
and infuse it with something startlingly new,
even as he remained loyal to the source of
that music: the gospel. But maybe another
explanation for what makes his performance
so powerful has something to do with the look
on his face in this video. Other people have
described his demeanor—his whole perso-
na—better than me, but I see something that
communicates the kind of grief in knowing
you can believe something without being able
to live it wholeheartedly. The way he encour-
ages you to “go get your burdens lifted” while
his eyes keep holding that same half-pained
tint. One truth that Johnny made inhabitable
for me was how purely and ineffably music
can translate things we know to be real, but
can’t find a way to say. In the sound—that
voice—one soul speaks to another.
During the obsessive and isolating stage
of parenting an infant, this sense of kinship
with Johnny became a compulsion. I sought
out all his albums. I curated playlists (usu-
ally driven by a lot of the earlier hits) and
listened to them every day. I watched John-
ny Cash documentaries and other videos of
his performances; I read his fictionalized
account of the Apostle Paul’s conversion. I
bought a Christmas album on CD to make
sure we’d have his music handy on the long
drive back to Oklahoma for the holidays,
where streaming music can be spotty along
those mid-Southern interstates. At home,
when my son wouldn’t nap, I cranked up the
music loudly enough to translate my own
screams into song. Sometimes, the upbeat
rhythms helped avert a crisis and distracted
us into happier moods; other times, they
channeled my rage and gave me an outlet
to avoid doing something I might regret.
For it was also during this season that I
was moving perilously deep into postpartum
depression and struggling to work out how
to see my way through. Why was I so angry?
Where do I start? It is astonishingly difficult
to be a mother without any support system. It
is even more difficult to be a person of active
faith without a meaningful community. It is
devastating when the support system you
once had has been taken away from you. Mix
all that up with maternal hormones and a
predisposition toward mood disorders and
things can get pretty dark. As much as I felt
compelled to move toward Catholicism, I
could not feel completely at ease about it
or make peace with the loss that it required.
In some primal sense, I needed to cling to
the roots of the faith that had raised me,
which now became translated through the
lens of motherhood. As I took care of my
children and learned what it meant to care
fully for another person, I experienced a
sort of liminal space that seemed shared,
in some spiritual way, with the women who
raised me. My maternal grandmother—a
lifelong Southern Baptist and as anti-Catholic
 rks,
state pa
venture, &
e to outdoor ad, eclectic shops rts,
om ing reso
eorgia. H rm-to-table din n art & culture, m.
ounty, G fa ia o
Rabun Ckes & waterfalls, lleries, AppalachExploreRabun.c
rivers, la , wineries & disti uch more! Visit
markets olfing, and so m
spas & g

Autumn Mares Tails by Peter McIntosh

mcintoshmountains.com
as they come—who died several years before
I became a mother, became a sort of real
presence to me in the lonely late-night hours
when sleep was impossible. I felt her with
me, whether in the silence or through the
music. Johnny helped me reconnect to the
earnestness that infuses my memories of her.
It was incomplete—always seeing through
the glass darkly. And it also took me to a
painfully depressed place that could have
become dangerous. But when I was most ac-
The Maple
tively trying to make sense of all that, Johnny
was there too. He kept us safe. He moved
Leaf Piano
seamlessly from prison jams or “One Piece
at a Time” to spirituals like “Peace in the
Valley,” embracing a fully lower-c catholic
Speaks to
perspective that believes anything could be
made holy: even parenthood.
the Bayou
How does it feel to listen to a Johnny Cash
song? How does the body respond? From
the first notes, his voice, his hum, grabs you.
Maharajah
It enters you. It tells you you’re not alone.
BY KARISMA PRICE
The guitar riffs play off his own little im-
provisations in this magical way that I have
found myself enacting as a sort of liturgy
the longer I listen to these songs. I find it for James Booker (1939–1983)
hard to imagine anyone stays entirely still
through a whole song. For me, it tends to The stage is a red face
start with my head—riding the waves of of wrinkles and you’ve returned
those chords. I realize several more beats from Nice with no record deal.
in that I’ve started snapping my fingers. I The first time you vomited
attempt to mimic that inimitable cadence on me I forgave you, wore it
of his mid-Southern croon: a sound that is like a brown dressing
forever part of my own voice. I pace around from Commander’s Palace.
our noisy Arkansas house (where we’ve re- The second time you spilled,
settled our roots)—dancing with my children. blood swarmed
Both can walk on their own now, and they the cracks of my keys,
ask for Johnny themselves sometimes when but you continued playing
it’s time for music. I officially converted to in the slush. You backwards
Catholicism the same year Johnny found me, Moses. I know it’s not the way
but it continues to be a complicated though you wanted to mark me
unavoidable part of who I am. Like Johnny in but what do you have
some ways, I tend to feel more comfortable left to give but the remains
somewhere between heaven and earth. His of a sour stomach? I created you
rhythms have stitched themselves under my to glorify me, to show the world
skin, like my children’s DNA running through an addict in a wig could rattle
my veins. It is sacramental. The Christian my body with divine imagination.
tradition clings to this idea of a “communion I handed you a soul that could not
of saints.” Johnny felt the same way about his be taken by anyone who fears
deceased brother, whom he saw as a lifelong you. Booker, I want it back.
minister to him from beyond the grave. I’ll
never forget one day driving anxiously down
Lake Shore Drive—my infant son shriek-
ing endlessly in the background—as “A Boy
Named Sue” tried to drown him out. I looked
up at the skyline, said aloud, “Johnny, pray
for me,” and managed to keep the car straight
one more day.

16 WINTER 2022
History is more than
a timeline—it is a
thread woven through
all of our lives. Pick up
that thread at the Museum
of Mississippi History and
the Mississippi Civil Rights
Museum. Explore and experience
the moments, movements, and
milestones that continue to shape
our world. Plan your visit today at
twomississippimuseums.com.
 Everything Sounds Better in
BEALE STREET,
PHILLIP VAN Z ANDT

MEMPHIS
Songs, stories, and places are interconnected – especially in Memphis, where almost
any location can conjure a musical lyric, legend, or new-generation artist.
We asked Memphis’ music community which songs these storied locations call to mind.
Use it like a playlist, an itinerary (or both) the next time you’re in town.

“ Your Love Is Too Late”
BY DON BRYANT: BEALE STREET
“This song takes me back to the early
1960s Beale Street scene: singing in Willie
Mitchell’s band, working in the clubs, writing
songs for The 5 Royales, Solomon Burke,
and Little Junior Parker – whose music you
still hear today on Beale,” Bryant says.
The street’s 20-plus live music venues are
book-ended by the Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul
“Respect Yourself” by The Staple Singers:
National Civil Rights Museum
In the years following Dr. Martin Luther King
Jr.’s death, artists including The Staple Singers
composed the soundtrack of the civil rights
movement. Memphis’ historic Lorraine Motel
is now the National Civil Rights Museum.
“People Make the World Go Round”
by The Temprees: Soulsville &
“Everybody Knows (The River Song)”
by O.V. Wright: The Mississippi River
From “the minor stomp of the intro
to Wright’s soaring first lines and
minor groove on the final word,” nothing
captures the emotion of the Mississippi
River like this song, says Alex Greene of
Reigning Sound.
THE BLUES FOUNDATION'S

Museum and Memphis Music Hall of Fame. Stax Museum of American Soul Music BLUES HALL OF FAME,
ANDREA ZUCKER
An “amped-up guitar and string section” make
The Temprees’ version of this song “grittier
DON BRYANT,
JAM IN THE VAN and funkier,” says Tonya Dyson, Executive
Director of Memphis Slim Collaboratory,
a space for sharing and creating music in
Soulsville, home to Willie Mitchell’s Royal
Studios and the Stax Museum of American
Soul Music, celebrating its 20th anniversary
in 2023.

NATIONAL CIVIL SOUTHERN AVENUE,

RIGHTS MUSEUM, S E A N DAV I S
RAPHAEL TENSCHERT

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

 GRACELAND MANSION,
SEAN FISHER
“Can’t Help
Falling in Love”
BY ELVIS PRESLEY:
GRACELAND
When Elvis was asked what
he missed most about
Memphis while he was
away in the Army, he
answered, “Everything.”
Pay tribute to The King at
his home, Graceland.
“She’s a Mover” by Big Star:
Overton Square Entertainment District
“This was part of a late-night session at
Ardent. Within a stone’s throw of Overton
Square, Ardent Studios was the heart of
Midtown nightlife,” says Big Star drummer
Jody Stephens, who serves as Studio
Manager at Ardent today, still down the
street from the vibrant Overton Square
Entertainment District.
“We Need Love” by Donald O’Connor:
Crosstown Concourse
“This song embodies the fortitude of
creators in Crosstown Concourse and the
surrounding neighborhood with its driving
disco beat,” says Jared Boyd, program
manager for community radio station WYXR
91.7FM, which broadcasts from Crosstown
Concourse alongside a listening lab, live
music venues, art galleries, and more.
SUN STUDIO,
ALEX SHANSKY
MEMPHIS MUSIC
HALL OF FAME,
DAV I D M E A N Y
“Hot Cheetos” by MonoNeon:
South Main Historic Arts District
In this song recorded in a home
studio off Main Street, MonoNeon
“demonstrates the funk, jazz, gospel, and
soul of Memphis over hip-hop drums,”
says producer IMAKEMADBEATS.
Also in the neighborhood: The Blues
Foundation’s Blues Hall of Fame,
DittyTV, and Central Station, a boutique
hotel in a century-old train station that’s
still in use today.
“Love You Nice and Slow”
by Southern Avenue: Overton Park
“This song is inviting and familiar with
tons of character, much like my favorite MEMPHIS
ROCK 'N' SOUL
park, where mornings and evenings MUSEUM
bring about peek-a-boo sunrises RAPHAEL TENSCHERT
and sunsets,” says Tikyra Jackson of
Southern Avenue.
“All I
Need
Is You” STAX MUSEUM OF
AMERICAN SOUL MUSIC,
BY BLACK CREAM: MARISSA STRANG
SUN STUDIO
“Four musicians grooving
together and nothing else:
Just like the simplicity of Sun
Studio’s legendary sound,
this song is just about
capturing the moment,” says
neo-soul artist Nick Black. WWW.MEMPHISTRAVEL.COM/MUSIC
SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION
That High
Lonesome Sound
BY JOSINA GUESS
n jeans, blue flip-flops, and a gray
windbreaker, Mya Thay cradles
a wooden instrument on his lap.
He’s perched on a metal folding
chair addressing a few dozen peo-
ple spread out on a green meadow
in northeast Georgia. Speaking
through an interpreter he repeats
how thankful he is to be there.
He turns his attention to the instrument
in his hands: a thana, or Karen harp, carved
from the branch of a nearby tree. A micro-
phone leans precariously toward him to catch
20 WINTER 2022
the sound. With his left hand, Mya Thay keeps
a steady downbeat on the longer strings. He
plays a high melody from the shorter strings
close to his body. Unless the light hits the
thana just right, it looks like he’s dancing
with his fingers, just painting a tune from
the springtime breeze.
Mya Thay begins to sing in a way that seems
plaintive to my western ears. I don’t speak
Karen, and the translator doesn’t interpret
the song. There is a familiarity to the music,
played in a minor key. Somewhere between
the blues and bluegrass. These comparisons
fall flat since the sound predates both. He
carried this sound with him from Myanmar
to Thailand to the southern Appalachian
foothills. Radio producer Jack Chance, who
recorded the music of Karen refugees in Thai-
land and the United States, describes the tha-
na as “a small wooden harp with this haunting
bluesy tone.” This isn’t new music. This is, as
Alabama sings in their 1982 country anthem,
“mountain music,” like the singers’ “grandpa
used to play.” The notes of the thana settled
into these ancient mountains worn down to
nubs and found their way home.
Photo by author
Solutions start
in the South.
We are the Southern Environmental Law Center, one of the
nation’s most powerful defenders of the environment, rooted
right here in the South. As lawyers, policy and issue experts,
southernenvironment.org
and community advocates and partners, we take on the
toughest challenges to protect our air, water, land, wildlife
and the people who live here. Together, we can solve the most
complex environmental challenges in our region.

©Leslie Restivo
©Sam Dean
 I was living and working at Jubilee Part-
ners, a community that offers short-term
housing and English classes to refugees from
around the world, when Mya Thay arrived
with his three children and his parents in Jan-
uary 2016. His sister and nephew had arrived
a few years earlier, and he came to Georgia
to be close to them. I drove Mya Thay’s family
to dentist appointments and helped keep a
small used clothing store stocked with fleece
jackets, socks, and warm hats for residents
unaccustomed to winter weather. Appala-
chian music was born from the memories
of music and instruments that African, Eu-
ropean, and displaced Indigenous people
carried with them into the hills. Listening
to Mya Thay play his new instrument, just
months after his arrival in the United States,
was like witnessing the birth and evolution
of mountain music in real time.
The thana is about arm’s length, with a
resonator the size of a newborn baby. The
whole thing weighs the same as an infant,
but it feels heavier. It curls like a tadpole or
a comma, holding space between what was
and what is to come.
Mya Thay is part of the S’gaw Karen ethnic
group, from the mountains that straddle the
border between Thailand and Myanmar. The
Karen trace their origin to a journey across
“a river of sand,” possibly from Mongolia
through the Gobi desert or maybe down
the silty Yellow River in China. They are the
earliest known inhabitants of what is now
called Myanmar, settling in the area around
700 BCE. Over the ensuing centuries, the
Karen were pushed into the hills and op-
pressed under the Burmese feudal system.
Under British colonial rule, ethnic tensions
were amplified and the Karen sided with
the British. Since the end of World War II,
the Karen people have been engaged in an
ongoing civil war with Myanmar.
Mya Thay started playing the thana when
he was ten years old and living in what he and
his family still call Burma. His father, Maung
Ngal, plays the thana, but Mya Thay was also
taught by community grandfathers and from
watching the young men “go from house to
house,” the Karen phrase for dating. When
I worked at Jubilee, we learned not to ask a
refugee why they left. Documented cases of
ongoing human rights violations including
sexual violence, enslavement, and system-
atic burning of villages by Burmese soldiers
created a refugee crisis causing thousands
of Karen people to cross the border or live
as internally displaced people in Myanmar.
22 WINTER 2022
Instead, I ask Mya Thay about what happened
to his music. When he had to leave home, Mya
Thay’s uncle gave him a thana to take with
him, and he was able to carry it safely into
a refugee camp in Thailand.
People in the Thai refugee camp thanked
Mya Thay for bringing them a familiar sound.
He doesn’t remember seeing very many peo-
ple who could play and make thanas. In his
spare time, Mya Thay played his thana and
taught it to anyone who asked. The thanas
from back home had fiber strings, but he
used steel guitar strings for the two he made
in Thailand. He made his first thana when
he was seventeen. He played and sang at
festivals, parties, and church services. After
a long day working in Thailand, Mya Thay
said, he would feel so tired, but playing the
music gave him energy.
In the camp, Mya Thay’s family, like thou-
sands of other displaced people around the
world, applied for refugee status through the
United Nations High Commission on Human
Rights. In the early 2000s, Karen refugees
began resettling in other countries, like the
United States, Australia, Canada, and Norway.
When Mya Thay learned that he and his family
would resettle in the U.S., he began learning
some customs and rules of his new homeland.
He was disappointed to learn that you could
not just cut down a tree whenever you needed
one. They were allowed two checked bags
per person. Without a traveling case, a harp
would have been too vulnerable as luggage
and too big as carry-on. So he left one with
his brother and gave one to the church in the
refugee camp. He wasn’t sure if he would ever
make a thana or play his music again.
Jubilee is located in a wooded setting
in the small town of Comer, not far from
Athens, Georgia. The first Karen families
came to Jubilee in 2004. By 2011, some Karen
and Karenni, another ethnic minority from
Myanmar, started settling close to Jubilee.
Now there are a few hundred people from
Myanmar living in and around Comer and
Athens, enough to have a large community
garden, two churches, and regular cultural
celebrations. One of Mya Thay’s friends, a
man named Hei Nay Htoo, who had stayed at
Jubilee several years earlier and lived nearby
in Comer, told him it would be okay to make
a thana from a Jubilee tree.
Mya Thay’s father helped him to hew a limb
from a tree behind the used clothing store.
After English class, Mya Thay used a machete
to form the whole instrument, following the
natural bend in the branch. He even whittled
the seven-inch tapered tuning pegs with the
same blade. He used a hand drill to bore six
peg holes and drove the pegs into place. He
drilled five holes on one side of the resonator
and tacked a folded cookie tin on top with
a handful of nails and hammered holes in
the top. He threaded six steel guitar strings
through the spine of the folded cookie tin,
then wrapped the wire ends around each
peg, twisting them tight. He says it took him
about three days.
He took more time with the second tha-
na. He carved the neck and resonator sep-
arately, and then joined them. He polished
the neck and carved notches on top resem-
bling a snake head. He left his maker’s mark,
hammering his name and the date in Karen
script into the golden repurposed cookie
tin. Finally, in the great evolution of music,
he gouged out holes big enough to glue an
electric amplifier into the resonator.
After about three months at Jubilee, Mya
Thay and his family moved to Athens. He
gave the first thana he made in the U.S. to
Jubilee Partners. It is a gift that no one there
can play. I moved a mile away from Jubilee in
2017. I borrowed the thana to write this piece.
It sits in my dining room office, a feast for
the eyes. I pluck the strings to try and con-
jure words to match the feelings it conveys.
Homesick, haunted, happy, home. Everything
I feel about living in rural Georgia.
John Cohen, filmmaker, photographer,
ethnologist, and musician of the New Lost
City Ramblers, is credited with coining the
term “high lonesome sound” to describe the
fast fading bluegrass music of Appalachia.
The thana sounds high and lonesome too.
When I was growing up in Washington,
D.C., I’d roll up the car windows and shrink
down small when my mom turned on the
Stained Glass Bluegrass radio show on 88.5
WAMU. It was strange enough to have a white
mother in our mostly Black world, but she
was country, too, from the Appalachian foot-
hills in Ohio. I worked hard to get the long
A sound out of her mouth when she said
words like cash and trash. The banjo picking,
fiddles, and strange harmonies floating out
of our blue Gremlin didn’t match our urban
landscape. But at night, on long road trips,
she’d sing “The Long Black Veil,” a murder
ballad, as a lullaby, and I found it comforting.
As a biracial Black woman living in the rural
South, I have found that Mya Thay’s music, so
reminiscent of those old harmonies my mom
taught me to love, is one of the many things
that makes me feel at home here.
At the heart of America’s inland waterways, you’ll find a sophisticated rivertown
that inspires. Paducah, Kentucky, is a confluence of cultural heritage and creativity
where art goes beyond something to appreciate – it’s a way of life.

A designated UNESCO Creative City, Paducah is gaining acclaim as a

destination for those who crave rich, authentic cultural experiences!

CELEBRATE Quilting
Immerse yourself in the artistry and technique of masterpieces from around the
globe at the National Quilt Museum.

Plan your experience at

Paducah.travel

1-800-PADUCAH
 Jean Kidula, a professor of music and ethnomusicology at
the University of Georgia, visited Jubilee one Sunday evening
after Mya Thay and his family moved to Athens. I showed her a
cell phone video of Mya Thay playing his thana. Kidula said it
reminded her of the adungu, a portable wooden harp played by
the Alur people of Uganda.
I brought the thana to Kidula’s office and revisited that con-
versation this fall. I asked her if there is a universal “high lone-
some” mountain sound. The Karen have a migratory origin story
starting in Mongolia. The Alur are said to come from Egypt. They
both have been pushed to the margins, the hill country. Kidula
notes that the Alur, like the Karen, are “a people who have been
displaced, splintered, and moved around.” Both the adungu and
the thana are easy enough to carry, she notes, making cultural
continuation possible. “The Alur sing a lot of nostalgic songs.
Sometimes nostalgia is good,” Kidula said, “but sometimes it’s
melancholic.” I told her I’d been reading Kristina Gaddy’s new
book Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo’s Hidden History and
wondered if people will write about the thana in American music
two hundred years from now. She didn’t have an answer, but she
liked my questions and wonderings.
I recently visited Mya Thay in his sister’s house across the street
from the house he shares with his parents and two younger chil-
dren. His oldest daughter is married and moved out now. He wore
camo pants, and I recognized his shirt from old videos from his
time at Jubilee. It’s a short-sleeved striped button-down shirt with
three embroidered patches. The patches above the left pocket read
“U.S. Army,” and “481 Scout Team.” The right patch has a bald
eagle in front of an American flag with the words “Jesse James,
The Value of the Quality” stitched above it.
Mya Thay had been up all night. He works six nights a week at
the chicken plant. He didn’t have much time, but he was happy to
talk about his music. He plays for Karen community celebrations,
but he doesn’t play as often as he would like. We sat on the floor
with his thana and another instrument, a black water-buffalo
horn, between us. I set the borrowed thana down beside him. He
picked it up and started tuning it, noting damage on one peg.
Some of his young nieces and nephews played while his sister-
in-law, Sher Htoo, translated. His sister Tin Win was cooking and
washing dishes. The recording of our conversation is backed by
the percussion of running water, chopping, crying, and laughter.
One of his nieces, wearing pink cat ears, walked a green-haired
doll along the strings of the borrowed thana. His nephew played
a few notes on the horn.
After talking for about half an hour, he picked up his thana
and played a short song. He closed his eyes. His face looked tired,
thinner than when he first arrived. When he finished the song, I
asked for a rough translation. Sher Htoo said he played a song
about farmers working long days in the fields and feeling tired.
“When they get back home and hear that sound of the thana
coming into their homes, it makes them feel more comfortable,”
she explained.
Mya Thay just bought a little piece of land out near the Karen
church in Vesta. His sister bought a mobile home, and he’s going
to build a house out there. His first grandchild will be born any
day now. He wants to have more time to make and share his music.
Even though Mya Thay had spent the night in a factory instead of
a field, the song fit the moment.
24 WINTER 2022
Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation.
(1.) Publication Title: Oxford American Magazine. (2.) Publication Number:
10744525 (3.) Filing Date: 10/27/2022. (4.) Issue Frequency: Quarterly. (5.)
Number of Issues Published Annually: 4. (6.) Annual Subscription Price:
Free to qualified subscribers $39. (7.) Complete Mailing Address of Known
Office of Publication: P.O. Box 3235, Little Rock, AR 72203-3235. Contact
person: ShaVon Taylor. Telephone: 501-263-0191. (8.) Complete Mailing
Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher: Oxford
American, P.O. Box 3235, Little Rock, AR 72203-3235. (9.) Full Names and
Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor:
Publisher: Dr. Sara A. Lewis - P.O. Box 3235, Little Rock, AR 72203-3235.
Editor: Danielle A. Jackson - P.O. Box 3235, Little Rock, AR 72203-3235. (10.)
Owner: Oxford American Literary Project, Inc., P.O. Box 3235. Little Rock,
AR 72203-3235. (11.) Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security
Holders Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds,
Mortgages or Other Securities: None (12.) Tax Status Has Not Changed
During Preceding 12 Months (13.) Publication Title: Oxford American
Magazine. (14.) Issue Date for Circulation Data: 10/27/2022. Extent and
Nature of Circulation (15a.) Total Number of Copies (net press run):
Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 16,417.
Number copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 12,000.
(15b.) Paid circulation by mail and outside the mail: (1) Paid/Requested
Outside-County Mail Subscriptions Stated on Form 3541. Average number
of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 6,682. Number copies
of single issue published nearest to filing date: 5,810. (2) Paid/Requested
In-County Mail Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541: Average number
of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Number copies of
single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. (3) Sales Through Dealers
and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Non-USPS Paid
Distribution: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12
months: 1,340. Number copies of single issue published nearest to filing
date: 584. (4) Requested Copies Distributed by Other Classes Mailed
Through the USPS: Average number of copies each issue during preceding
12 months: 424. Number copies of single issue published nearest to filing
date: 75. (15c.) Total Paid and/or Requested Circulation [Sum of 15b 1, 2, 3
& 4]: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months:
8,446. Number copies of single issue published nearest to filing date:
6,469. (15d.) Nonrequested Distribution (By Mail and Outside the Mail):
(1) Nonrequested Outside-County Mail Subscriptions Stated on PS Form
3541: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months:
1,047. Number copies of single issue published nearest to filing date:
794. (2) Nonrequested In-County Mail Subscriptions Stated on PS Form
3541: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months:
0. Number copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. (3)
Nonrequested Copies Distributed Through the USPS by Other Classes of
Mail: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months:
0. Number copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 0. (4)
Nonrequested Copies Distributed Outside the Mail: Average number of
copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 400. Number copies of
single issue published nearest to filing date: 360. (15e.) Total Nonrequested
Distribution [Sum of 15d 1, 2, 3 & 4]: Average number of copies each
issue during preceding 12 months: 1,010. Number copies of single issue
published nearest to filing date: 1,000. (15f.) Total Distribution [Sum of
15c and 15e]: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12
months: 9,456. Number copies of single issue published nearest to filing
date: 7,469. (15g.) Copies not Distributed: Average number of copies each
issue during preceding 12 months: 6,961. Number copies of single issue
published nearest to filing date: 4,532. (15h.) Total [Sum of 15f and 15g]:
Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 16,417.
Number copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 12,000. (15i.)
Percent Paid and/or Requested Circulation: Average number of copies
each issue during preceding 12 months: 89%. Number copies of single issue
published nearest to filing date: 87%. (16a.) Requested and Paid Electronic
Copies: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months:
525. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing date: 300.
(16b.) Total Requested and Paid Print Copies [Line 15c] + Requested/Paid
Electronic Copies [Line 16a]: Average number of copies each issue during
preceding 12 months: 8,971. Number of copies of single issue published
nearest to filing date: 8,746. (16c.) Total Requested Copy Distribution [Line
15f ] + Requested/Paid Electronic Copies [Line 16a]: Average number of
copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 9,981. Number of copies of
single issue published nearest to filing date: 9,756. (16d.) Percent Paid and/
or Requested Circulation (Both Print and Electronic Copies) [16b divided
by 16c x 100]: Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12
months: 90%. Number of copies of single issue published nearest to filing
date: 90%. (17.) Publication of Statement of Ownership will be printed in
the Winter 2022 issue.
 Una nueva exposición bilingüe

EXHIBITION ON VIEW
THROUGH JANUARY 22, 2023

520 ROYAL STREET IN THE FRENCH QUARTER

LEARN MORE AT HNOC.ORG/SPANISHNOLA

The Historic New Orleans Collection invites you to a groundbreaking RESERVE YOUR FREE TICKETS

bilingual exhibit exploring New Orleans’s influential—yet often forgotten—

generation under Spanish colonial rule. See how a sparsely populated

imperial outpost became a diverse, urbanized colonial capital.

2022 Michael and Baptist

Community Louise H. Moffett
Bienville Circle Krista J. Dumas Ministries Family Foundation
@VISIT_THNOC

MSU Riley Center
What’s that sound? In downtown
Meridian, it’s music – straight-
from-the-heart Southern music
everywhere you go.
Start on the sidewalk in front of The MAX, and look down. Those
bronze stars are part of a Walk of Fame honoring Mississippi
creative geniuses. Just a few steps from each other, you’ll
see blues legends Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker. Fire-
breathing rock ’n’ roll pioneers Bo Diddley and Jerry Lee Lewis.
And country music’s Charley Pride and Tammy Wynette.
Don’t look for a sign that says “The MAX.” That’s the local
nickname for the Mississippi Arts + Entertainment Experience.
It’s a museum like none you’ve ever experienced, interactive
and revelatory about musicians and other legendary artists,
from writers to actors to media personalities who have
delighted the world. Rootsy music of all kinds floats through
the downtown streets from regular live performances inside
the museum at Maxie’s Juke Joint and outside in the courtyard.

This month, The MAX will induct five
new members into its Hall of Fame,
including blues popularizer W.C. Handy,
country traditionalist Marty Stuart (who
still lives in his nearby hometown,
Philadelphia) and soul man Sam Cooke.
Carla Cooke, Sam’s youngest child, will
sing at a ceremony in the MSU Riley
Center, at the other end of the Walk
of Fame.
Stroll up 22nd Avenue from The MAX.
See that many-arched Romanesque
Revival edifice two blocks away? That’s
the Riley Center. Earlier this year, Bob
Dylan played a sold-out show in its
gorgeously restored Victorian gem of a
theater. This month it will host Emmylou
Harris and Mississippi’s “America’s
Got Talent” sensation, Chapel Hart.
Mississippi Arts + Entertainment Experience
Along the way, maybe you’ll hear live
music from Brickhaus Brewtique, a
craft beer bar with a courtyard stage,
or the Balcony Bar at Weidmann’s,
Mississippi’s oldest restaurant. If you’re
lucky, you’ll catch Full Moon on 5th, an
occasional evening block party with
live bands in front of the Riley Center.
Around the corner, Threefoot Brewing also
has live music on tap. Walk a couple more
blocks to another stunning showplace,
The Temple Theatre, a 1920s movie
palace complete with its original organ.
Keep going a few more blocks to the
Jimmie Rodgers Museum, celebrating
the Meridian native known as the
Singing Brakeman and the Father of
Country Music. The Jimmie Rodgers from The MAX (near the 1906-vintage
Music Festival, which began in 1953, train station). It’s the site, spring
is America’s oldest. In its third year, a through fall, of the monthly farmers
young Mississippi-born singer named market known as Earth’s Bounty –
Elvis Presley wowed the crowd. which, of course, features live music.
The festival takes place the second
week in May all over downtown. Find out who’s playing where
at VisitMeridian.com. Or just
Add some visual to your audio with ramble around historic downtown
murals featuring Rodgers and another Meridian and follow your ears.
local native, David Ruffin of The
Temptations, on Fourth Street a half
block east and west of 22nd
Avenue, respectively.
Musical events also pop up at Singing
Brakeman Park, just down Front Street
Mickey Guyton
Talks to Us
A Q&A WITH MELISSA RUGGIERI
honestly don’t remember the first
time I heard Mickey Guyton’s
voice. It might have been on the
2020 Academy of Country Mu-
sic Awards, when she unfurled
a searing, almost-tearful “What
Are You Gonna Tell Her?” to a
pandemic-empty theater, Keith
Urban quietly joining her on piano. Or maybe
it was in her stark video that same year for
“Black Like Me,” when she posted part of
it on social media following the murder of
unarmed Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia. But I
do remember thinking, “THIS is an artist with
depth. I hope she sticks around.” So, when
the first thing Guyton tells me is how, just
prior to the pandemic, she planned to quit
the music business, my heart sank.
“Country music is really hard to make a
living [in] as a woman,” she says, unguarded
as always.
And, as Guyton will expound on through-
out our conversation, she endures the “dou-
ble whammy” of being a woman in country
music who is also Black. So many of Guyton’s
accolades the past couple of years have in-
cluded the introductory phrase, “the first
Black female country artist to (fill in the
blank).” For the record, these accolades in-
clude being nominated for a Grammy Award
in the Best Country Solo Performance cat-
egory, singing at the Grammy ceremony,
and hosting the Academy of Country Music
Awards—all in 2021.
No argument against the fact that her feats
are historical and commendable, but some-
times that qualifier, “the first Black female
country artist…,” feels like THE reason we’re
supposed to appreciate Guyton’s artistic out-
put rather than that modifier existing as a
simple footnote in her career. My admiration
for the Texas-born Guyton extends beyond
her skin color and even beyond her voice, a
velveteen instrument capable of a honeyed
28 WINTER 2022
whisper or a sonorous boom.
Guyton admits to being swamped by anxi-
ety prior to helping induct Tina Turner into
the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last year. Yet
those who saw her performance of the time-
less “What’s Love Got to Do With It” didn’t
see a “country” artist playing dress up in a
Turner-styled jean jacket and leather skirt.
They watched a charismatic vocalist embody
the spirit of the rock and soul icon, sashaying
across the stage and imbuing her singing
with Turner’s inflections not to mimic, but
to honor.
When she was tapped to sing “The Star-
Spangled Banner” at this year’s Super Bowl,
I was peppered with many “who is that?”
queries from casual music fans unfamiliar
with her potent output, including her thrice
Grammy-nominated 2021 debut album, Re-
member Her Name. After hearing her belt
a lovely, controlled rendition of an anthem
routinely dissected after any celebrity per-
formance, no one asked me to explain Guyton
to them again.
One of the coolest things about Guyton
is her refusal to be labeled, institutions be
damned. Even though she’s categorized as
a country singer, she’s really a musical cha-
meleon, a singer who hopscotches between
country, pop, and soul with confidence. Yes,
you’ll see her hosting or performing on coun-
try music award shows. And she proudly
recounts her introduction to the genre via
LeAnn Rimes and the Patron Saint of All
Country-ness, Dolly Parton. But you might
also notice Guyton being interviewed by
Miley Cyrus in Rolling Stone or stomping
around in black boots on a Central Park
stage growling “Nothing Else Matters” with
Metallica, as she did at September’s Global
Citizen Festival.
The self-proclaimed “little girl in the back-
ground making little noise” has morphed
from “an artist to an activist-artist,” she says,
unafraid to be frank in her
songs, her statements, her
actions, or her musical
preferences. Though she
moved to Nashville in 2011
after attending Santa Mon-
ica College in Los Angeles,
Guyton’s personal life has
expanded as much as her
professional one. Married
to attorney Grant Savoy
since 2017, Guyton is now
bi-coastal (L.A. and Nash-
ville) to suit both of their
careers. In February 2021,
she became a mom to son
Grayson. Any mention of
the baby induces one of
Guyton’s luminous smiles.
In conversation over
Zoom, she exudes warmth,
her doe-eyed beauty ac-
centuated by corkscrew
locks flowing from under
a wide-brimmed white hat.
Guyton is eager to talk, so
let’s get to it.
What defines country
music to you?
There is this guy I met from South Africa
and I asked him, “What is country for you?”
and he said it was foundational. I was so
taken aback by that. It was such a profound
statement in the sense that country music is
life, no matter where you’re from. We define
it as American and American culture, but
you are literally singing about what is before
your eyes. It is homegrown. It is you singing
about your family and life.
You grew up singing in choirs in Texas,
so at what point did the intersection
of gospel and country hit you?
It hit me because my gospel church took us
to a Texas Rangers baseball game when I
was eight or nine, and LeAnn Rimes sang the
national anthem, and you heard this wom-
an, you didn’t even hear a country artist. I
just heard this soulful voice who happened
to be singing country music and when you
think about it, gospel and country are so
married. It didn’t matter what it was that
she was singing, and when she released [her
1996 breakthrough] Blue, the soul in that to
me... Genres are so weird, because for me,
I listen to singers, period. It didn’t matter
if it was Shania [Twain] or Dolly Parton,
Whitney Houston, or Mariah Carey, CeCe
Winans and gospel.
Photograph by Phylicia J.L. Munn
So is it fair to say that LeAnn was the
gateway for you learning more about
country music?
Absolutely. I would go to my grandma’s house
all the time and she would have Dolly or
Kenny Rogers VHS tapes hanging on the
back of her door [in a plastic holder]. I never
thought, “those are country artists.” I was just
watching them because they were available
in her house since she didn’t have cable. It
was LeAnn that then made me start listening
to country music, but it was always there.
Was Blue the first country album you
remember hearing?
Yes, absolutely.
Is it still the country album that you
go to when you need either inspiration
or to lift yourself up?
Yes. I just love that record. I come back to
hers, a lot of Shania. To be honest, now I’m
just listening to a lot of CoComelon and all
these kids shows because of my child. I don’t
even listen to music anymore; all I listen to
are kids’ songs! But I listened to Faith Hill a
lot as well. I love ’90s country.
You did a CMT Crossroads installment
with LeAnn Rimes earlier this year,
which must have been a thrill.
CMT was a full-circle moment. That woman
deserves her flowers. The industry hasn’t
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 29
always been kind to her. Peo-
ple don’t know LeAnn. She
was the lone wolf; she never
had the friends and the sis-
terhood, but she is salt of this
freaking earth. The industry
needs to give her the love and
flowers she deserves. However
I can support and lift her up, I
will. I am a LeAnn Rimes stan.

Was country music some-

thing your grandma would
play around the house, in
addition to having those
VHS tapes?
Grandma didn’t have a record
player. She was really poor,
but she had a VHS player. I
knew she loved John Denver
growing up. My grandma was
just a fan of Dolly. That was
her person, whether it was
her movies or her music.

It must have been a thrill

for you to meet Dolly,
then. [In 2016, Parton sur-
prised Guyton on the set
of CBS This Morning, an
on-camera meeting arranged by show
host Gayle King.]
I have a video of it on my phone! My mom
was the youngest of twelve kids, and when I
would go to my grandma’s house, my mom
had a bunch of ugly quilts. I don’t want to call
them ugly because they were actually beauti-
ful. Some were blue, some were weird, crazy
patterns. I finally learned that my grandma
was so poor that she made blankets for her
kids out of her clothes, so Dolly’s “Coat of
Many Colors” really, really hit home for me
because of what it said and what the song
meant.
What made you see yourself in coun-
try music as you decided to pursue a
music career?
It was always LeAnn; she always made me
feel like I could be a country artist. Also Rissi
Palmer. I was living in L.A. at the time, going
to school. I had befriended a lot of screenplay
writers, including Jessica Bendinger. She
wrote the screenplay for Bring it On and Stick
It, and I was friends with her. She asked me
out of the blue, “Would you consider your-
self a country artist?” I said, I love country,
but I don’t see any singers out there who
would take me seriously and she was like, you
should be a country artist. It was something I
loved. I loved Carrie Underwood—her music
really spoke to me. I remember I was like, I
actually DO see myself as a country artist
but I didn’t think anyone would accept me
in that sense, and Jessica said, “You should
consider it.” Then I went down the rabbit
hole of the internet and looking at Black
country singers, and I saw Linda Martell
and Rissi Palmer. And I don’t know, seeing
two other Black women made me feel like I
could do it. I knew who Charley Pride was,
but it isn’t until you see yourself that you’re
like, I can do this.
You were told early in your career to
make sure your songs didn’t sound
“too r&b,” and yet some r&b singers
from the South, like Lionel Richie
and the Commodores, were criticized
for sounding “too country.” Does it
frustrate you when people can’t see
the through line between the genres
and their mutual influence on the
other?
It’s absolutely frustrating, and it’s a product
of the circumstances of the way this coun-
try was built. For some reason, our country
needs genres so we can make sense of where
you belong, and the reality is, it’s very frus-
trating because…how do I say this without
sounding angry because I’m not? But it’s
just reality. You could have a woman with
blond hair and blue eyes sing exactly like me
and she would be considered country. But
because of what I look like, it’s almost like
you have to go that much further [to show]
that you deserve to be there. I feel like these
imaginary boxes we allow ourselves to be
put in don’t exist. Genres are becoming less
and less, anyway. It’s time to erase the boxes.
I can see someone like Kane Brown; first,
[Nashville] didn’t accept him and now they
love him. He’s doing whatever he wants. If
he wants to release a pop record, he releases
a pop record, and that makes some people
mad, but for me, I’m gonna still be who I am
regardless. This is what you get.
I found it really ironic that Tina Turner’s
first solo album, Tina Turns the Country
On!, is all country covers, yet the only
Grammy it was nominated for that year
was for Best Female R&B Vocal.
You know, it’s still happening to Black women
to this day. You’ll have artists who are clearly

30 WINTER 2022 Photograph © Storms Media Group/Alamy

VISITGREENWOOD.COM
#WANDERMS
pop artists—I won’t name names—but we
instantly put them in an r&b category when
the definition of what pop is, is popular mu-
sic. And you will have that artist who is at
the top of the charts, whether Cardi B or
Rihanna, who are still put in r&b. But you’re
taking away from all of the artists who are
actually singing r&b. Again, this is a product
of our circumstances. The system was built
and it’s time for us to completely dismantle
it. It’s frustrating for Black women. Being
an afterthought is really, really frustrating.
Speaking of Tina, what did it mean
for you to sing her biggest hit at the
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction? You
had the whole thing—the jean jacket,
sthe strut.
(Laughs) I was gonna PLAY Tina! It was
nerve-racking for me. Singing people’s iconic
songs actually keeps me up at night, and for
some reason they keep asking me to do it.
They had no idea how stressful it is for me.
It meant a lot. I still couldn’t believe they
asked me. I might not have chosen myself.
It was truly terrifying, but it was an honor.
At least she wasn’t sitting in the audi-
ence! [Turner accepted her award via
video from her home in Switzerland.]
It was enough knowing Jay-Z and Paul McCa-
rtney were there. But actually Tina? I don’t
think I could have done it. She is the icon
of icons.
You’ve talked about being influenced
by “big-voiced” women like Whitney
and Reba. Was Tina a particular influ-
ence in any way?
Oh my God, yes (starts singing “River Deep—
Mountain High”). I loved Tina. Who didn’t
love Tina?
You’ve said that when you started,
Nashville wanted you to be Nashville.
So when you first began writing songs,
were you thinking you had to fit some
kind of mold, or were you writing what
you wanted to but had to modify your
music upon getting to Nashville?
When I first moved to Nashville, I wanted to
respect the system. These people had been
doing it a long time. But then I was meeting
these other great artists and we were really
pushing the envelope of country music and
so often, I would send the songs back [to
the recording execs], and the response was,
like, “No.” And that was really hard for me
32 WINTER 2022
and I lost myself as an artist because of it.
Being an artist, so often record labels, man-
agement, sign artists and try to make sense
of them—again, putting you in these boxes.
I ran into problems often because of that. I
don’t think people were purposely trying to
be harmful. They do that to a lot of women.
I can’t say it’s just me because I’m Black. It’s
me and I happen to be Black in the genre. It’s
being a woman on top of being Black that
I’m fighting. And that was really difficult and
debilitating for a long time, and thank God
I’m not aging horribly (laughs) and I’ve been
able to sustain myself in this genre. There’s
so much we have to deal with: we have to be
cute and pretty and we can’t have babies, we
can’t marry, we can’t even control our bodies
for goodness’ sake. Being a woman…and for
me it was a double whammy.
What you’re saying sounds a lot like
what Serena Williams just went through
with retirement. The male players, they
don’t have to worry about the physi-
cal effect of having another baby or
as much about balancing their family
and a career.
That was really emotional for me, watching
Serena retire. I was boo-hooing like a baby.
I could see that life is just so quick (snaps
fingers). She did it, but still…people just don’t
understand.
Talk to me about “What Are You Gonna
Tell Her?” and “Black Like Me.” Were
those two songs the first time you felt
you could really be yourself in your
songwriting? Did they represent a
changing point for you as a songwrit-
er to be able to stand up for what you
wanted to do in Nashville and not what
the industry wanted you to do?
Both of the songs were moments of despera-
tion when I wrote them. I wrote “Black Like
Me” in 2018 and I played it for people and
they literally didn’t know what to do with the
song. I knew it was a bold statement; it came
out of completely left field from anything I’ve
ever written. The people I played it for at first,
some didn’t even get back to me for a couple
of days. They just didn’t have the words. Then
I wrote “Love My Hair” and “What Are You
Gonna Tell Her?,” and then it was like, these
three songs, there’s something there. But they
were all out of necessity. I didn’t see them as
anything other than a therapeutic moment
for me to get out how I was feeling, and I
didn’t think anybody was going to hear them.
So you never even thought these might
be defining songs in your career?
I knew when I wrote them they were really
important. After “What Are You Gonna Tell
Her?,” that took me a moment; it was so emo-
tional for me, that song. I was sad. None of
these songs were moments of, “Take THAT
country music!” They were really a reality
check of where we are.
But do you feel looking back at country
roots and then looking at what you’re
part of now, that these songs will live
on decades from now?
Absolutely. Years later when I’m long gone,
hopefully people will look at those songs and
be like, we’ve come such a long way. There
are a lot of songs like that you hear from
artists back in the day that you’re like, man,
that was so profound. I hope that happens
to these songs.
You’ve released some new music this
year. What’s going on into next year?
This year was me just going back to writing
what I was before the pandemic and what’s
gotten me here and having a baby. The role
I’m taking now, it’s about me. Before, it was
about a moment that was happening before
all of our eyes, and now it’s about me learning
that I am enough, that I can take the stage
now and be an artist. I’ve said everything I
could possibly say—for now—about country
music, and I see people actively take the steps
to make that change. I’m praying that sustains
and is normalized. Now it’s about me and my
music and what I have to say, and that’s just
a different approach for me.
Do you have some confidence those
boundaries we’ve talked about may be
getting blurred a bit?
(Laughs)
Or not!
There are a lot of steps moving toward in-
clusion; there are a lot of steps of people
fighting against it. But me existing and con-
tinuing to show up is my form of fighting
through it. I still honestly know we have a
long, long way to go. But having a label like
I have (Universal Music Group Nashville)
and the president of the label, Cindy Mabe,
and her even signing artists like The War
and Treaty, they’re a duo signed to a major
label that are incredible. As long as people
like that keep existing and succeeding, we
will see change.
 GT L AW.COM

Greenberg Traurig
is honored to support
Oxford American’s
30th Anniversary Celebration

We applaud its dedication to entertain,

inspire, and highlight diverse perspectives.

GREENBERG TRAURIG, P.A. | ATTORNEYS AT LAW | 2500 ATTORNEYS | 43 LOCATIONS WORLDWIDE°

Enjoliqué Aytch Lett | Shareholder WORLDWIDE LOCATIONS

333 S.E. 2nd Avenue | Suite 4400 | Miami, FL 33131 | 305.579.0500
United States
Greenberg Traurig, LLP GreenbergTraurigLLP GT_Law GT_Law
Europe
The hiring of a lawyer is an important decision and should not be based solely upon advertisements. Before you decide, ask
Middle East
us to send you free written information about our qualifications and our experience. Prior results do not guarantee a similar
outcome. Greenberg Traurig is a service mark and trade name of Greenberg Traurig, LLP and Greenberg Traurig, P.A. ©2022 Asia
Greenberg Traurig, LLP. Attorneys at Law. All rights reserved. Attorney Advertising. °These numbers are subject to fluctuation.
Images in this advertisement do not depict Greenberg Traurig attorneys, clients, staff or facilities. 37209 Latin America
 ROCK CITY AT
GOLDEN HOUR

Rock City: Splendor of the South

Sustainability, Art, Innovation, and People. These four cornerstones epitomize Rock City’s
history and serve as the attraction’s guiding ethos as it celebrates its 90th
year in business with recognition as a leader of public land stewardship in the South.

E
stablished in 1932 by husband and wife founders
Garnet and Frieda Carter, Rock City Gardens is a shining
gem in the American landscape.
Atop Lookout Mountain in Georgia, Rock City is just six
miles from the neighboring Chattanooga, Tennessee. What looks like
a chiseler’s life-size dream, Rock City almost appears to be carved
from rock, with acres of undulating faces and land contours dotted
with pockets of exploding greenery and thriving plant life.
With an abundance of sprawling, natural beauty, the Carters
viewed themselves as stewards of the land with a responsibility to
protect, nurture, and share its treasures.
Embracing the expanse’s natural riches and their pioneering in-
stincts, the Carters created the remarkable wonder of present-day
Rock City.
Frieda embarked on a lifelong journey of horticulture and whimsy
by transplanting wildflowers, indigenous foliage, and charmingly
situated German gnome statues. A geological wonder, today’s Rock
City features massive rock formations with tremendous views and
a network of trails lined by gardens of greenery and herbage that
bloom so illustriously it is known as the Enchanted Trail.
Stretching 4,100 feet, visitors can roam the Trail, encountering
intriguing rock patterns, magical caves, and awe-inspiring views
along the way. In addition, one can tick off landmarks like Fat Man’s
Squeeze and Needle’s Eye—spots so narrow travelers can only pass
through by walking sideways—and experience breathtaking views
from the Swing-A-Long Bridge, spanning 180 feet. Fittingly, the Trail
ends at the famed Fairyland Caverns, with hand-crafted dioramas
of fairy tale favorites rendered in retro glow paint.

Sustainability
Long before its employ as a branding buzzword, sustainability was
a core pillar of Rock City’s ethos and remains so today. Respect for
the earth’s natural state is evident amidst the attraction’s 400+
native plant species thoughtfully cultivated in Rock City since its
earliest days.
In the 1920s, Frieda Carter traversed the massive property with
string in hand, forging a trail through the rocks that ended at the
outcropping known today as Lover’s Leap. Situated 1,700 feet above
sea level, visitors can admire sweeping views of the Tennessee Valley
and famously, “See Seven States”: Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia,
North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama from one
stunning vantage point (an impressive claim that dates back to 1860).
Art
Frieda Carter, a trailblazer in native rock gardening, also harbored
a deep-seated appreciation for European folklore. Her influence on
Rock City’s “90 years of enchantment” is unmistakable.
Rock City has long invited artists to draw inspiration from the
landscape as a haven of otherworldly art. In the late 1940s, the
attraction entreated sculptor Jessie Sanders to visit and create what
would become a glow-in-the-dark masterpiece. Lining the walls of
natural rock caves are heroines from classic fables like Snow White
and the Seven Dwarves, woodland creatures, and an impressive
collection of German gnomes that comprise the Fairyland Caverns.
A decades-long endeavor, Sanders’ work culminated in the Mother
Goose Village, a mountainous diorama depicting the enduring col-

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION


JESSIE SANDERS
lection of French tales and English nursery rhymes. Unveiled in
1964, the Village and Caverns are well maintained by present-day
craftsmen and remain a delight for visitors of all ages.
is tradition of playful artistry persists with whimsical path-
ways recently added to the gardens and set with original masonry
and stunning glasswork. Furthermore, an intricately carved stone
troll named Ibsen and a series of mystical “Elder Flame Trees”
further burnish the Enchanted Trail. Today, Rock City boasts
seven art installations for visitors to peruse.
Innovation
Influenced by his wife’s fascination with folklore and driven by
his entrepreneurial spirit, Garnet Carter dreamed up the notion
of Fairyland in the 1920s—an entire neighborhood with homes
for families to settle atop the idyllic Lookout Mountain.
One of the most appealing features of Fairyland was an an-
ticipated golf course for residents and visitors. With eager golf-
ers awaiting its completion and construction dragging, Garnet
improvised and invented what is regarded as the nation’s first
miniature golf course: Tom umb Golf. e mini golf course was
wildly popular with tourists, so much so that Garnet was able to
franchise the concept across the country.
Alas, amid the peaks and valleys of the American economy
between two World Wars and the Great Depression, Garnet’s
Fairyland golf course was not to be. Nevertheless, he harnessed his
industrious spirit and devel-
oped new visitor attractions
that ultimately provided the
income necessary to beauti-
fy the property and maintain
Rock City’s expansive gardens.
A novelty when first em-
ployed in the artwork of the
RAINBOW HALL
gardens in the 1940s, Rock
City was the first attraction
to use black light technology outside of a scientific or industrial
need. In the winsome Fairyland Caverns and Mother Goose Vil-
lage, scenery comes alive with brightly painted characters like
Humpty Dumpty and Little Miss Muffet glowing on the dark
walls, illuminated by black light. A technique still used, the cave
of glowing nursery rhymes charms visitors to this day.
In the mid-1930s, Garnet gave new meaning to the term “barn-
storming” with his legendary advertising campaign. Enlisting the
services of American sign maker Clark Byers, he commissioned
the painting of over 900 barns across 19 states in the South and
Midwest from the 1930s–1960s, with the attraction’s motto
“See Rock City” boldly emblazoned on the rooftops. e result was
Rock City’s establishment as a remarkable tourist attraction for
hikers, geologists, and families seeking an enchanting journey.
Now a fourth-generation run entity, the Carter family’s legacy
of innovation endures. Today, visitors can head to the Welcome
Plaza, proudly powered by a nearby solar arbor, and pick up a
world-famous Rock City birdhouse: a hand-crafted miniature
recreation of a “See Rock City” barn.
People
In addition to the industrious Carters, Rock City also has strong
ties to several beloved Southern music artists. e attraction
counts country star Rick Trevino (once part of the Grammy-win-
ning outfit Los Super 7) from Austin, Texas, among its admirers.
Trevino delighted Rock City fans with his ode to the magnificent
rock formations when he recorded his 1996 single “See Rock City,”
a classic country bard about a hankering for ad-
venture amidst the attraction’s natural wonders.
During the popular annual Summer Music
Weekends, visitors can experience a variety of
top-notch live music acts, including regional
blues, jazz, country, folk, and bluegrass artists.
Chattanooga local Matt Downer, the affection-
ately known “Old Time Traveler,” is well-loved
KOFI MAWUKO
for his nostalgic music played on the fiddle,
banjo, and guitar. Blues musician Rick Rush-
ing, son of the legendary Jimmy Rushing of the Count Basie Big
Band and the Highbeams, turns out high-energy performances
full of rich harmonies. Additionally, Nashville-based Americana
singer-songwriter Tarryn Aimee Smith draws crowds with her
signature blend of folk, bluegrass, jazz, and country.
From festivals and live music to ecological sites of untamed
splendor, visitors have a new reason to visit Rock City every
season. One can celebrate German culture during Rocktoberfest,
marvel at the Enchanted Garden of Lights holiday show, discover
unique native flowers during the Southern Blooms Festival, and
take in toe-tapping bluegrass and country shows during Summer
Music Weekends.
With the foundational cornerstones of Sustainability, Art, In-
novation, and People always at the forefront, Rock City remains
as majestic a place to visit as it was 90 years ago when the Carters
first opened their “backyard” to the public. A natural wonder in
the South full of whimsical art, environmental innovations, and
a robust events calendar, visitors from all over the country have
a reason to visit Rock City and create memories worth repeating.
Learn more online at seerockcity.com
CLARK BYERS
Old-Time Folks
B Y B AY N A R D W O O D S
n the day his new album, Old-Time Folks, was re-
leased, Lee Bains III was at a muffler shop in Atlanta
hoping that the mechanic there might be the one
who could finally figure out what was wrong with his
ailing van. But Bains already knew the real trouble
and it came like a gallows humor punchline.
“422,000 miles is a long and gracious life,” he tex-
ted me. “But this would be a hell of a time for it to go.”
Those miles were racked up playing more than nine hundred shows
over the last decade, since Lee Bains III and the Glory Fires released
their Southern-fried gospel-punk debut, There Is a Bomb in Gilead,
in 2012. Bains, along with brothers Adam and Blake Williamson on
bass and drums, respectively, booked as many as two hundred gigs a
year on the punk circuit, often taking rotations of three weeks on and
three weeks off the road, playing mixed bills in church basements,
punk houses, restaurants, all-ages clubs, and bars.
“The fact that Glory Fires is such a positive band, the music is so
positive and a chance for a lot of good things, it really motivated
me to keep doing it,” Blake Williamson said.
That was important to everyone in the band. Bains is a writer
who has something to say. He often begins shows with a song called
“Sweet Disorder,” which he prefaces with a homiletic description of
purpose that also serves as a call to arms.
“This song’s about fucking up systems of oppression, it’s about
fucking up white supremacy, it’s about fucking up the objectification
of women, it’s about fucking up worker exploitation,” he barks out
over roaring feedback on Live at the Nick. “It’s about showing up
for your brothers and sisters and family members and kinfolks, it’s
about showing up for your hometown.”
Birmingham, Alabama, is Bains’s hometown, though he has
lived in Atlanta for over a decade now. Both places hold horrible
histories of white supremacy, but they are also sites of resistance,
with history at the very heart of the civil rights movement and
countless other struggles over centuries.
Bains’s grandmother was a choir director in local Methodist
churches and young Lee would sometimes sing with her at the church
or for people in retirement homes. “She was, you know, disciplined
about it. She’s like, we’re gonna practice for this,” Bains recalled.
“She would be, you know, particular about, like, hitting the notes
and when I’m taking a breath and all that kind of stuff.”
When the day of the church performance would finally come, Bains
would get nervous and stressed. “I just remember my granddaddy
would just say, ‘You know, buddy, like, you don’t have to do this
perfect. You’re not gonna do it perfect,’” Bains recalled, his own
grizzled, downhome voice sounding older than his thirty-seven
years. “‘This is just about making a joyful noise. This isn’t about
you, and it’s not about me. This is just about sharing God’s love
with other people.’”
36 WINTER 2022
Bains, who is an unorthodox sort of Civil Rights Christian, has
a sound that is deeply Alabamian, his voice sharing shades of the
rich guttural growl that animates the songs of Patterson Hood and
Jason Isbell, with a style that has always been heavily influenced
by that early gospel music. There Is a Bomb in Gilead is based on a
mis-hearing of the old hymn about a “balm” in Gilead.
He also brought the pattern of discipline and release that he first
learned from his grandparents into Birmingham’s DIY punk scene.
There, as in church or a hootenanny, the boundaries between per-
former and audience break down, dismantling the capitalist concept
of the star even as the scene creates it by setting a stage off from the
crowd, putting a name on a flyer or a marquee.
Bains did his best to bring the old-time gospel ethos with him
out onto the road. And the calluses on his left hand don’t just come
from the guitar and the steering wheel. Over the last decade, when
he wasn’t touring, Bains started working blue-collar, manual-labor
jobs, digging ditches on road crews, hauling rocks, whatever. Now
he runs a handyman business where he is his own boss.
The manual labor wasn’t just a necessity of a life spent half on
the road. It was also an important part of Bains’s ethic, embodying
his beliefs about community and work. Just because he had grown
up middle class and gone to NYU didn’t mean that he was too good
to dig a ditch in the hot Alabama sun. As a white man in America,
it may not have come natural to him, but Lee Bains was learning
every day that he wasn’t better than no one else. In music, he was
striving to make great art, to do something extraordinary. But he
knew he could only achieve that in the collective.
“The way that I get more in touch with that part is through com-
munity,” he said. “Through talking to others, and, you know, kind
of being guided by that more collective spirit.”
L ate last year, Bains published a cycle of poems called “Work
Lunch” in the New Yorker. The poems are formally inventive
explorations of Southern foodways, labor, race, and family (among
other things).
For a long time, Bains says, he didn’t really see any difference
between music and poetry, but in recent years he has learned to
use the space surrounding the words on the page in a way that’s
analogous to the way a song uses the placement of its words in time.
It is my personal responsibility
to climb in the van,
pull the sack of whitebread, peanut butter, bananas
from the shady spot on the floorboard,
to smear this peanut butter on this whitebread,
to cut up the bananas into little circles,
to unfasten the paper clip from the bag
of chips.
Photo © Mike White/DeadlyDesigns.com
 The store over by work is a national bargain-center entity.
It is owned by something called an investment manager,
headquartered in Toronto, Canada.
That’s the shit that his music does too: it takes the small personal
detail and then expands the context, whether economic or historical,
or, often, both. His view of the South is global and transhistorical,
time overlapping time, place overlapping place, a palimpsest of
struggle and resistance. But it’s also everyday, old-time, rest stops,
parking lots, meat-and-threes—and the people who work in them.
In the poem “National Fast Food Entity,” Bains describes sitting
in the van, sweat-soaked, windows down, eating a Value Meal and
watching an Adam Curtis documentary on his dashboard-propped
phone and compares the experience to Andy Warhol’s definition of
heaven. But the poem ends on another day, when he missed lunch,
and is “dog-tired and labor-whipped” and can think of nothing
but that Value Meal in the van until he notices a Fight For 15 picket
line out front, demanding a living wage for the fast-food workers.
I approach the turn-in to the drive-thru,
ease off the gas,
lower the window,
honk the horn,
raise my fist,
drive on by.
Not on our watch.
We are worth more.
D uring those long hours behind the wheel and the shovel, Bains
had been thinking about the records he listened to the most.
The Glory Fires’ website describes the genesis of Old-Time Folks
in “records that were more produced, arranged, and textured than
their own past work, to records that struck them as timeless and
immense, ones that invited you in, to get lost in the details.” Bains
wanted to make something epic like that.
Joe Steinhardt, whose Don Giovanni Records released the last two
Glory Fires albums, was on board. He set the band up with producer
David Barbe, who had produced ambitious albums for Vic Chesnutt,
k.d. lang, R.E.M., Drive-By Truckers, and others, and they set to work.
They’d laid down some basic tracks when COVID hit. That changed
the process—and gave Bains a lot more time to write. “My stimulus
check was like my arts grant,” Bains said.
The result is one of those records that contains a complete aes-
thetic and political world view, a song cycle like Bruce Springsteen’s
Nebraska, in which phrases repeat in different contexts, each iter-
ation deepening the others. Sonically, the album lands somewhere
between Waxahatchee’s 2020 Saint Cloud and Steve Earle’s 2000
classic Transcendental Blues, bringing the lyrical specificity and
spacious arrangements of the former into the hard-charging bom-
bast of the latter.
But more than anything on either of those albums, Bains’s new
songs are word-drunk. You can hear the influence of Southern hip-
hop in Bains’s sheer ability to fit so many intricately timed words
in a measure, while still feeling swampy and Southern. “Post-Life,”
for instance, rhymes “do-gooder trophies for billionaire sweatshop
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 37
bootstrap-stranglers” with “peace prizes for genocide-chiefs, land-
thieves, and drone-swarm-slingers.” (He admits it only rhymes with
a Southern accent.)
The repeated themes in the lyrics of Old-Time Folks ultimately
reveal a sort of cosmic battle between various forms of oppression and
the people, old-time folks, who resist them. On the one side there’s
the white supremacist patriarchy so easy to find in the South—and
the postmodern, neoliberal systems of subjugation and alienation,
which Bains dubs “post-life,” which will:
turn your soul into a brand, your story into content.
It’ll turn your friends into followers, your town into a market.
It’ll turn your car into a taxi, your house into a hotel.
It’ll turn the past into a vapor, the future into a cold hell
On the other side of this divide are “old-time folks,” which is all
of us, whether we recognize it or not, but especially “folks who
are undertaking heroic action,” and are “part of those traditions…
of resistance,” as Bains put it in one conversation. “Or,” he added,
people “who recognize that they have inheritances of exploitation
or whatever, that they can, through acknowledging it, choose to try
to do something about it.”
Bains is steeped in that radical tradition. The album was almost
called A People’s History, after the Howard Zinn books, and the first
words spoken on the album come in the form of a lo-fi prelude of
Angela Davis quoting her own mother: “This is the way things are
now, but…this is not the way they always have to be.”
That invocation leads into the first of two versions of the title song,
which is literally a catalog of resistance, with verses like:
Cherokee and Mayan survivors
banging on Appalachian prison bars,
Communist lawyers and sharecroppers
parting courthouse lynch mobs,
queer angels and prophetesses
walking and talking with God
Bains’s lyrics grow deeper with each album, but the biggest differ-
ence between Old-Time Folks and the previous Glory Fires releases
is the way that the music makes room for the vocals, lifting up the
words like they are so many stage-divers in the mosh pit. The ar-
rangements are simultaneously sparser and richer than Bains’s in
earlier outings, incorporating more backing vocals and instruments,
but also holding them back, almost as if Bains had learned to see the
silence within the songs like he did the white space around words in
his poems. The extra air brings out the gospel and country that had
always been buried deep in the heart of Bains’s songwriting. The
song “Gentlemen,” which is structured as a conversation with his
grandfather, finds Bains singing the verses backed primarily by a
piano, bringing in drum and strings only halfway through, his nor-
mally booming voice a scratchy, nasal, high-and-lonesome whisper.
But if the new album brings country and gospel squarely into
Bains’s sound, it also throws his radical politics into those genres
like a bomb. If Jason Isbell could be described as country music’s
AOC, Bains is its antifa.
I n spring of 2022, the album done, shortly before they were set to
start another tour, the Williamson brothers quit the band.
38 WINTER 2022
“That band was the most important thing in my life, for twelve
years really, and I’d just kind of gotten to a point where it couldn’t
be anymore,” Blake said.
He was tired and COVID forced a reevaluation. “This is Lee’s band.
It’s hard to make an artistic statement because he has done it. He
does it all,” he said. “I’m envious, and I’m in awe.”
But, Blake said, comparing himself to the tires on the van, “my
tread is gone.”
Adam agreed. “I just don’t think I had it in me anymore to just
trudge through tour after tour, bar after bar, night after night,
sleeping on floor after floor for somebody else’s music,” he said.
This hit at the contradiction at the heart of Bains’s artistic endeavor.
He has a singular vision about community and music. But it is his
vision. It wasn’t that he tried to keep the Williamson brothers from
contributing more than the parts he assigned them. It was just that
he knew what he was going for. It was Lee Bains III + the Glory Fires.
But after more than a decade together, Bains was hurt by the
brothers’ departure, likening it to a divorce. He was also a little
scared. He had to figure out how to do a tour alone, immediately.
And then, on a larger scale, to promote what should have been the
band’s biggest album yet that summer and fall.
“B lew a fucking tire,” Bains texted from the side of I-85, a nar-
row-ass, truck-filled stretch of highway without much shoulder
to boast of, on his way from Durham to Silver Spring, Maryland,
just outside of D.C.
Bains stood there cursing, no bandmates to lend a hand. He got
the van jacked up to change the tire, but the wind of a passing
truck blew it down. Finally a good ole boy with a tow truck came
and helped him out and declined to accept any payment. Thought
Bains seemed like he could use a hand.
With a big beard, a camo baseball cap, cowboy boots, and both
a jacket and pants of worn-down denim, Bains looked like the kind
of guy a good ole boy in a tow truck would give a break to. But that
effect was likely due as much to demeanor as appearance. Bains’s
voice is infectious, warm, effusive, big, friendly, and unassuming. He’s
the kind of guy to greet you with a bear hug. He doesn’t smoke or
drink, and at shows, he rocks out, front row, full attention, to every
other band that takes the stage, drinking from a gallon jug of water.
Since he was alone, he’d invited me to ride along with him for
some shows. I met him at the Quarry House Tavern in Silver Spring
that night, when he finally made it to town. Following a raucous
punk band, Bains took the stage alone, with his guitars—he switched
between acoustic and electric—and a stomping board he’d built for
when he went out to the picket line to play for workers on strike at
the Warrior River mine in Alabama.
As soon as he started to play, I couldn’t help but think that it
might have been good that the brothers left the band. Bains’s voice
was ragged and soaring, and, within its guttural Alabama whine
and wailing country intensity, it contained a sense of gravitas
that brought a hushed attention to the tattooed punks. When
he played “God’s A-Working, Man,” the first single off Old-Time
Folks, it felt like a communion. Bains lured the punks in with his
political sermons—which are as much a part of the live show as
the songs—and then kept them rapt with the power of the song,
which unites his labor politics with the Woody-Guthrie-esque
vision of Jesus as a union carpenter in a rich and timeless-sound-
ing country gospel.
 In the city Where Soul Lives...
never miss a beat.

Plan your stay today!

 Old broken things to fix,
a riled-up, wild-eyed band,
piles of winding stories,
a sanctified, beaten-down land.
The longer I’ve been living,
it seems like the less I understand.
But every morning I hit my knees,
and thank God my God’s a-working, man.
T he next night in Philadelphia there was a completely different
vibe. It was a very young crowd, there mostly to see Angel Du$t,
which featured members of the popular band Turnstile. Bains had
only been added to the bill as a last-minute opener when his original
gig that night got canceled. Where Bains’s set had electrified the
highly political D.C. punks, most of the all-ages crowd in Philadelphia
stood in the back of the room talking as he played.
Both Bains and his label-chief Joe Steinhardt, who lives in Phil-
adelphia, knew it wasn’t the best bill for Bains. But, as they saw it,
even last-minute opening-act slots in church basements are better
than the big corporate conglomerates that dominate so much of
the music industry.
“The whole industry is consolidating,” said Steinhardt, who teaches
music production and business at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
“Over the last few years, there have been these conglomerates
forming that are taking over small venues,” Bains added. These
conglomerates would book bands on a whole tour, playing only in
their venues. The Glory Fires, Bains said, decided early on that they
wouldn’t play at places like that.
“What happens is, those corporations—like Wal-Mart or whatev-
er—they have no connection to the community,” Bains said. “And
they wind up putting long-running community-rooted independent
venues out of business, because they can’t compete with these bil-
lion-dollar corporations.”
After the set, Bains pulled me over to the side and introduced me to a
young guy named Ethan Alexander, who had driven up to Philadelphia
on his day off from his job as an auto mechanic in my hometown of
Greenville, South Carolina. Alexander had come to see another band,
but he had been moved by Bains’s songs and his message of solidarity
and hung around the merch table much of the night.
B y the time the album finally came out, almost five months later,
Bains had figured out a solution for the tour. He never got his
van fixed, but he rented one from a friend, and Loamlands, which
describes its music as “distorted country” that is “built out of a love
for Southern, queer culture” would both open for him and serve
as his backing band.
It was not any cis-het white dude that Loamlands would tour
with. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna go on this tour with this guy and here
he is,’ and my queer friends were like, ‘What?’” Kym Register, the
leader and singer of Loamlands (which has since started going by
the name Kym Register), recalled. They had a similar reaction half
a decade or so earlier when they first saw Bains play.
That first time, Register turned around and started to walk back
out. “And then I just heard him talking about unions and the class
struggle, like socialism,” they said. “Or being country and fighting
racism in the South and accountability to whiteness and so I just
turned right back around and listened to his whole set and got
preached at.”
40 WINTER 2022
So when Register’s friends asked why they were going on tour with
a straight white man, instead of explaining, Register just played the
music. But, on previous records “he sings so fast and [it’s] so hard
to understand what he’s saying sometimes,” they said.
The production of Old-Time Folks makes it easier to digest. But it
also pushes the music to a place that is closer to that of Loamlands,
whose haunting and almost ethereal country lyricism and feed-
back-fueled fingerpicking sounds of a piece with Bains’s new songs
like “Old Friends,” “Rednecks,” and “Gentlemen.”
I met up with Bains and Loamlands for the final date of the tour
in Greenville. The city had changed so much in the twenty years
since I’d lived there, and as Bains and I walked past the busy bars
and cafes on a Sunday evening in the once sleepy, theocratic town,
I could feel the tension between the old, Christian repressiveness of
the city’s past and its new “post-life” commercial extraction.
I could tell Bains was tired as we walked back to the Radio Room. It
was the last night of a long tour. But when he took the stage, the signs
of exhaustion disappeared. The live set took all the quiet, thoughtful
intelligibility of the album and turned it up to a high-decibel boil
with Bains’s utterly raucous howling, kicking, and dancing.
Loamlands’ muscle-shirt-and-headband 1980s stage vibe helped
Bains’s denim-gray-and-camo palette stand out in a way that was
parallel to the new life they brought to the songs. Register, an old
friend of Bains’s, sang harmony on some songs. When they didn’t,
they were there in the front row, singing along and rocking out. I was
right beside them, waving my fist in the air. On my other side, I saw
Ethan Alexander, the Greenville mechanic we’d met in Philadelphia.
Bains ripped into the next song, coming down off the stage and
into the audience, where members of the crowd wrapped their arms
around him in a gesture toward community, toward breaking down
that barrier between performer and observer, toward liberation.
“Organizing from the stage,” Register called it.
Outside after the show, I started talking with Alexander about
what had drawn him to Bains’s music in Philadelphia that night.
“I’m from the South…and he had the whole vibe that kinda just
attracted me to his music,” he said. “He spoke about workers’ rights
and white privilege and stuff that’s really all affected my life in many
different ways here.”
Alexander told me that happening upon the Bains show that night
changed his life.
“Through Lee and through his activism and basically just learning
about what he stands for and what he does really inspired me to act,”
Alexander said. “I quit my job. I was an auto mechanic for fifteen
years…and I’ve started a new life and I’m trying to do my best to
stand up for everybody who’s oppressed at work and people who
are taken advantage of.”
Alexander got a new job driving a truck, with better wages and
conditions, and he’s doing organizing work, including joining a
movement to organize Starbucks workers in Greenville, despite the
difficulties of South Carolina’s political landscape regarding labor.
It was a testimonial there in the parking lot, where Bains and
Loamlands were loading up the rented van. Bains would drive them
back to Durham that night and then return home to Atlanta in the
morning. As the doors slammed and he drove away, I stood there
thinking about something Alexander had said just before he left,
as Bains’s songs also echoed in my ringing ears.
“Lee, he’s the soundtrack for the movement, man. People just
don’t understand yet.”
 THE MOMENTARY
YOUR NEW LIVE MUSIC DESTINATION

BENTONVILLE, ARKANSAS

CHECK OUR 2023 LINEUP

THEMOMENTARY.ORG

theMomentary.org 479.367.7500

THE MOMENTARY FOUNDING FUNDERS PRESENTED ON THE COCA-COLA STAGE

Little Blue
Transistor Radio
B Y Y U S E F K O M U N YA K A A

Untitled, a mixed-media artwork by John Mullins.

42 WINTER 2022 Courtesy Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland, California
I switch on the shiny radio hidden under Fats’ “Blueberry Hill” on WWOZ
my pillow, & turn down the volume. or bluebird at the Louisiana Hayride,

My bed smells like a grass sack of yellow calling “I’m so lonesome I could cry.”
canning pears, as I wonder if my mama If Daddy Red would’ve gone there—

will ever come home again. This radio yes, something was in his blue eye
she gave me always casts a good signal & gray eye that would’ve stopped

upon the dark night, a slow gray mist any disbeliever back then. Wesley
in dank air, a whippoorwill’s signifying was his real name—a black man

down by the gully of tin cans. Earlier, who looked white, my step-grand-
I was about to put down my left foot papa, who’d say, “It’s alright to call

as the rust-colored water moccasin your mama’s name in your sleep,

writhed there, making a muted noise even if she’s pickin’ Pima cotton

in the tinny slush. I saw & didn’t see. in Phoenix.” I still love any ballad
I almost fell, but somehow my hand with a little dirt on raggedy roots,

grabbed-up a long heavy oak branch. even if it was Rose & her brothers
I was eleven & could hit hard as a man. sleeping in concrete culverts in L.A.

A bloodless thing laid there, the sun Years later, the blue radio traveled
setting. I went to my persimmon tree. with me, truly a crystal-clear sound

Grandma Elsie said she could see me all its own. I don’t believe in good
from the backdoor, & she asked, What luck charms & magical potions, but

song was you singin’? I said, My own I took my radio with me to Chu Lai.
words. She said, Next thing you be Why not? It had already traveled

wantin’ a lowdown guitar. Oh, yeah, like an old friend over to Panama
I was once hypnotized by fingers on to jungle warfare school, a Saturday

a banjo. Now, go wash your hands, I danced among tall trees. In fact,
come in here, & say the Lord’s grace. it seems to have a mind of its own.

After my supper & a bath in a #3 tub, One night, I thought of my mama

I read twice Paul Laurence Dunbar’s when I didn’t wish to, & in my hands

“We Wear the Mask.” I kneeled, was a screwdriver, & as I opened it up

said the Lord’s prayer, & then crawled I noticed how my small blue box didn’t

into bed. I could feel the radio under have wires, components, or numbers.
my head as I played the same yes & no But It did have these words: Beware.

game, as if letting a talisman decide Raise a first & last question, praise
my Fate. My fingers could always silence, & put flesh on every word.

touch the dial in the dark, seeking If you love playing Country & Blues,
one of the two stations in my head: this unit will plug directly into you.

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 43
Not Country, Not
Western, Just West
B Y J U S T I N TAY L O R
hese days, summers in the
Pacific Northwest are one
long standoff with the air
quality index. You wake
up and check the weather
report first, hoping to get
some fresh air before the
day pushes toward triple
digits, but then depending on what’s on fire
where, it still might not be advisable to go
44 WINTER 2022
outside. In late July, for example, my wife
and I took a trip down from Portland, where
we live, to Ashland, a gorgeous mountain
town in Southern Oregon. Ashland is a
climbing and hiking hub (the Pacific Crest
Trail runs right by it) and also home to the
world-renowned Oregon Shakespeare Fes-
tival. It was 112 degrees on the day we drove
down to see a production of The Tempest at
OSF’s historic outdoor theater. Showtime
had already been pushed back in hopes of
cooler evening temperatures, and we had
been warned that the cast would not be
wearing the heaviest elements of their cos-
tumes, but when the wind shifted and smoke
from the rapidly expanding McKinney Fire
in Northern California blacked out the sky,
the performance was canceled. When we
woke up the next morning the inside of our
hotel room smelled like burnt toast and there
Photograph © Jen Borst. Courtesy Fluff and Gravy Records
was a thick layer of fallen ash caked on our
car. We fled.
About a week later, we found ourselves at
the Pickathon music festival, which is held
on eighty acres of rolling hills and forest
just outside the Portland city limits in a
town called Happy Valley, which used to be
a sleepy farm town but is now among the
fastest-growing and most expensive parts
of the metro area. (In case it bears disclos-
ing: Pickathon had a literary stage on which
I appeared and for this performance was
compensated with an all-access pass for the
weekend.) From the knoll where the main
stage was situated you could not help but
survey the acres of ticky-tacky houses that
had popped up during the pandemic, and
which all but guarantee that the venerable,
beloved music festival will eventually be NIM-
BY’d to death by the burgeoning exurb. In the
meantime, several thousand of us enjoyed
fifty-odd rock, pop, jazz, folk, and hip-hop
artists over the course of four idyllic albeit
scorching days. The bright green smiley face
on my AQI-monitoring app was more than
consolation for the fact that it never dropped
below 100 degrees while the sun was out,
and if it must be admitted that I ended each
day by hacking up a good bit of farm dust,
I was honestly just grateful that it wasn’t
particulate ash.
I saw a lot of great music that weekend
(Built to Spill, Garcia Peoples, Sons of Kemet,
Valerie June) but the standout was a young
country singer named Margo Cilker. She is
twenty-nine years old, a Californian, and
has released one album whose nine tracks
together run just over thirty minutes. Po-
horylle, which came out in late 2021 on the
Portland label Fluff and Gravy, was acclaimed
by everyone from Pitchfork, Stereogum, and
No Depression, to NPR, Rolling Stone, and
MOJO, which described her sound as “Gil-
lian Welch at The Band’s sessions with Allen
Toussaint.” Her affable stage presence and
relaxed delivery belie the sly brilliance of her
lines as well as the originality she’s teasing
out of a tradition she doesn’t seem entirely
comfortable claiming as her own, even as
she gives it a much-needed shot in the arm.
Cilker and her band were the main stage
undercards on Friday night. She won over a
boisterous crowd of dusty, dehydrated, vari-
ably-intoxicated festival-goers, an estimable
portion of whom (including yours truly) were
mostly there to secure spots for Wet Leg, who
were headlining. “That river in the winter / It
could fuck me up,” Cilker sings on the aptly
named “That River,” which is a toe-tapper on
vinyl and a foot-stomper when played live. I
first took the line as an example of zoomer
irony, as though she were saying, Yeah, river,
fuck me up with that winter beauty. But no.
The lyric continues, “Crack my ribs, bust my
lip / It could do enough.” That river might or
might not be pretty to look at, but her real
concern is with what happens if she falls in.
I was so impressed by Cilker that I went to
see her play again on Sunday, solo acoustic on
a much smaller stage inside of a poorly ven-
tilated barn. Seated in a highbacked wooden
chair that might have been borrowed from
somebody’s grandmother’s dining room,
wearing pinstripe slacks, a white t-shirt with
the sleeves pushed up, and a red bandana
loose about her neck, she played stripped-
down versions of the country-rockers she’d
presented two nights earlier. Sean Jewell,
editor of the roots music website American
Standard Time, served as her host and in-
terlocutor, asking her questions between
songs and later inviting the audience to do
the same. Some musicians hate this sort of
thing; they don’t want to be asked to analyze
what they do, let alone how or why they
do it. I’d thought Cilker might be of this ilk
since her Instagram header tersely declares
that she is “Not country, not Western, just
West.” In fact, she was a forthcoming and
funny conversationalist, a born storyteller
with an infectious smile. She talked to Jewell
about growing up in California, the formative
time she spent in the Basque country, and
the economic insecurity brought on by the
pandemic, which kicked off shortly after she
moved to Enterprise, Oregon, a tiny town in
the extreme northeastern corner of the state.
She’d moved there to be with Forrest
VanTuyl, a musician, poet, and “freelance
cowboy” whom she’d met on tour; they got
engaged after knowing each other for four
days. (VanTuyl releases music under the
name An American Forrest, and these days
plays bass in Cilker’s band.) At the time, the
plan had been to live cheap, save up, and
tour as much as possible. Instead they found
themselves locked down in extreme isolation,
scraping to get by. Cilker worked as a house
cleaner, as a nanny, in a chicken-processing
plant, and as a ranch hand. (Per her song “Te-
hachapi”: “I’d been working / My shoulders
were hurting / I was learning / how to turn
my muscles into something.”)
At one point during the conversation with
Jewell, the subject of “country music” came
up: Is it a good or a bad thing to be labeled
a country artist? Is there even a workable
definition of the genre? Cilker talked a bit
about what having a song break through on
country radio can mean for the commercial
viability of an up-and-coming artist: gig rates
and record sales spike; it might change your
whole life. She spoke in terms that were far
more conciliatory and equivocal than her
Instagram header suggested, but you could
tell she didn’t love having to thread this
needle, and I don’t blame her. Instead she
talked about branding cattle when she lived
in Enterprise and bravely admitted to the
partisan crowd that she and VanTuyl have
since crossed the state line; they currently
live on a sheep ranch in Goldendale, Wash-
ington. It all sounded country enough for me.
It’s worth bearing in mind that much of
the music of the American West has its or-
igins in the South, because the late stage
of the westward expansion was radically
accelerated by the end of the Civil War and
the shock troops of that depraved land grab
included an outsize proportion of residents of
what had been the Confederate states. Some
had been true believers, others conscripts
or mercenaries; some surely deserters and
apostates from the accursed “lost cause”;
some were newly freed; all were looking for
a new start far away from a region ravaged
by war and still under military occupation.
White and black, they brought their musics
with them, and everything that followed,
from the Tulsa Sound to Texicali, from Snoop
Dogg to the Grateful Dead, can claim a share
of this infinitely rich, infinitely ambivalent
inheritance.
The idea that the South maintains an ex-
clusive or privileged claim on country music
is a twentieth-century fantasy sold to us first
by the bigoted segregation of “race records”
from “hillbilly music” in the 1920s; extended
by Nashville’s pathological self-mytholo-
gizing from the Grand Ole Opry to, well,
Nashville; and sustained even to this day by
no small degree of Northern condescension.
Some of this fantasy is conciliatory, some is
pernicious, some is both, and all of it is a little
silly. Everything comes from somewhere,
sure, but nothing stays put. So unless you’re
prepared to argue that rap music remains
the sole province of Sugar Hill, Harlem, or
that the Pennsylvania-born Taylor Swift can
claim her piece of Philly Soul but ought to
take her name off the education center she
endowed at the Country Music Hall of Fame,
then probably we need to rethink not just the
limits of “country music” as a category but
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 45
why we insist on reaching for such categories it’s astonishingly sure-handed. The title is a
in the first place. testament to Cilker’s abiding affection for the
All that said, Cilker’s “Tehachapi” is cer- Basque country as well as her commitment to
tainly the best (and possibly the only) song spotlighting the stories of women who might
in American history to set an entire verse in otherwise be silenced or forgotten. Gerta
Sonoma County without risking its country Pohorylle was a German Jew who fled to Paris
bona fides, so maybe the category’s most in the 1930s after the rise of the Nazi Party.
enduring value is that it provides each gen- She became a celebrated photojournalist,
eration with a legacy worth rebelling against publishing her work under male pseudonyms
and reinventing. and eventually covering the Spanish Civil
War, where she was killed at the front in 1937.
Pohorylle’s production, by Sera Cahoone,
A s luck would have it, less than a week
after discovering Margo Cilker’s music,
the Oxford American asked me if I had any-
who also played drums, showcases Cilker’s
clear, confident delivery, and there’s a barrel-
thing to say about the past, future, or vexed house swagger to songs like “Kevin Johnson,”
present of country music. I told them that a cutting portrait of a self-satisfied son of the
I didn’t, but I knew who did, and that she South, the kind of guy one might encounter
would be playing on August 17 at the High in abundance at, say, Clemson, where Cilker
Desert Music Hall, a deconsecrated church went to undergrad. (An as-yet-unreleased
in Redmond, Oregon, and furthermore that song, “I Remember Carolina,” is more
I would be happy to drive down there to see affectionate toward the Palmetto State.)
her for the third time in two weeks. The bright buoying horns on the studio
Redmond is about three hours from Port- version of “Tehachapi” are by the multi-
land. My route took me east past Mount Hood, instrumentalist and arranger Kelly Pratt,
then south through the Warm Springs Res- originally from Kentucky, whose credits include
ervation and farther south along winding David Byrne, Beirut, LCD Soundsystem, and
shadeless moun- Father John Misty.
tain roads and The December-
scrublands where My route took me east ists’ Jenny Con-
the smoke-scent- lee-Drizos plays
ed wind rocked past Mount Hood, piano, organ, Mel-
the car to the
edge of its lane then south through lotron, and accor-
dion. Mirabai Peart
and finally into the Warm Springs plays violin and
verdant if atten- viola, adding som-
uated farm coun- Reservation and ber color and tex-
try, hemmed in as ture throughout,
it is by mountains farther south along but perhaps to best
as well as desert. winding shadeless effect on “Broken
The temperature Arm in Oregon,”
was once again mountain roads and where she hovers
in the triple dig- at the edge of the
its. The roadside scrublands where the sonic palette, mov-
wildfire warning smoke-scented wind ing slowly toward
signs all had their the center as the
arrows pointing rocked the car… song develops. In
to the red zone. I the second verse,
was retracing the Cilker describes
route my wife and I had taken a few weeks a time she “took a tumble on a mountain /
earlier when fleeing Ashland. I pushed that and it rattled up a few things,” which might
grim thought to the back of my mind, pulled be the source of the title, though she’s quick
up Cilker’s album on Spotify, and cranked to reassure us “I was singing again by the
the volume. time I made it down.” In the third verse, Cilk-
Pohorylle is a roomy record but not a spare er recalls another woman’s story of assault,
one; there are a good number of players and Peart’s persistent violin takes on a new
making big and small contributions to var- layer of meaning, as does the name of the
ious tracks, but the instruments don’t crowd song. “Now every room she sleeps in / she’s
each other or blend together. As debuts go, got to map out her escape plan / Imagine all
46 WINTER 2022
those hours devoted to bigger things,” Cilker
sings, an edge of disbelief in her voice. When
she slides back into the chorus—“Is it any
wonder / it gets hard for me / A lot gets lost
on me”—the emotional register of the song
has so dilated that these words, which earlier
felt like half-serious smoke-break banter, now
carry urgent moral and existential weight.
“Brother Taxman Preacher” begins as an
affectionate sketch: “Well I wish I was my
brother / I could light up any room / that
I ever walked through / All that matters is
/ What’s in your head that’s true.” To wish
to be the taxman, however, means “I could
go from door to door / incriminating all the
unlucky and the poor,” while the province of
the preacher is to tell you “who to vote for /
who to pity, who to fuck.” The escalation is
fast, and the palpable feminist disgust is of
a piece with “Kevin Johnson” and “Broken
Arm in Oregon.” I doubt that Cilker hates
her brother (I don’t know if she even has a
brother) but her point is well taken: However
neutrally or virtuously a man might use the
gendered power that the world has afforded
him, that power exists on the same spectrum
of entitlement that makes possible—perhaps
inevitable—the depredations of the taxman
and the preacher.
R edmond is a one-time whistle-stop town
on the eastern edge of the Cascades. It
has lately reimagined itself (like Ashland) as
an outdoorsy paradise, though it also boasts
a T-Mobile call center, an airfield where
smokejumpers train, and enough cultural
aspiration for someone to have opened the
hippie/hipster hotel where I was staying.
They’ve also got a bookstore, a brewery, a
cupcake cafe, a number of coffee shops, and
a couple of food cart pods, one of which was
in the parking lot of the High Desert Music
Hall. After a pretty good IPA and a very good
burrito, I made my way inside. The woman
taking tickets and checking IDs couldn’t find
my name on the guest or press list, but let
me in anyway because, she said, it seemed
like I was telling the truth.
Cilker took the stage in an ankle-length
pleated turquoise skirt, a black t-shirt, and
a red neckerchief I recognized from both
of her sets at Pickathon. Her live band is of
necessity a more streamlined outfit than
her studio band. She plays her acoustic gui-
tar and is abetted by VanTuyl on bass, Dan
Galucki on drums, and Jeremy Ferrara on
electric guitar. It’s a different sound: louder,
rock-forward, inevitably not as nuanced,
 Black Country Music
NEW
Listening for Revolutions
BY FRANCESCA T.
FROM THE ROYSTER

The Color Pynk

UNIVERSITY
Black Femme Art for
Survival
OF TEXAS BY OMISE’EKE NATASHA
TINSLEY

PRESS I’ve Had to Think Up a

Way to Survive
On Trauma, Persistence,
and Dolly Parton
BY LYNN MELNICK

Maybe We’ll Make It

A Memoir
BY MARGO PRICE

The Running Kind

Listening to Merle
Haggard
BY DAVID CANTWELL

Why Patti Smith

Matters
BY CARYN ROSE

DJ Screw
A Life in Slow Revolution
BY LANCE SCOTT
WALKER

Where the Devil Don’t

Stay
Traveling the South with
the Drive-By Truckers
BY STEPHEN DEUSNER

un i ve r s i t y o f t exas p r ess
www.utexaspress.com @utexaspress
but what the quartet lacks in musicians they
make up for in musicianship. VanTuyl’s bass
is powerful but not overpowering; his playing
is grounded and assertive, like he’s under-
lining each song with a black Sharpie. Ga-
lucki keeps the trains on time and finds his
fun where he can, which can’t be easy when
you’re using brushes instead of sticks and
playing a kit that has to fit in the back of a
minivan. I doubt Ferrara took a solo longer
than twenty seconds at any point during the
show, but he made such intuitive, enlivening
use of his time that the audience was moved
more than once to spontaneous applause in
the middle of a song.
And as for Cilker, well, what can I say?
She’s the real deal. I’ve seen her play in an
open field at sunset, I’ve seen her play by
herself in a barn, and I’ve seen her play in
a deconsecrated church at the edge of the
high desert. She’ll own any room you put
her in, and if the next room I see her in is an
amphitheater or an arena, I won’t be a bit
surprised. I think she’s a rare generational
talent, heir to an expansive tradition that
encompasses not only the California-coun-
try of Merle Haggard, Gillian Welch, and
Gram Parsons, but also the crossover coun-
48 WINTER 2022
try-rock of Neko Case, Katie Crutchfield,
Amanda Shires, and Lucinda Williams. Her
work doesn’t really “answer” the question
of what country is or can be or should be; it
obviates that question, because country has
more to gain by making a claim on her than
she does by making a claim on it.
C ilker grew up in the Santa Clara Valley,
between Sunnyvale and Cupertino. “The
heart of the beast that is Silicon Valley,” she
told me. We were sitting in a back booth
of the Backline Lounge at the music hall,
about half an hour after her set. Her paternal
grandparents founded Pine Cone Lumber
in 1959, and her father and uncles still run
that business today. She told me that her
father remembers a time before the high-
way, when the region was still mostly apricot
orchards and walnut farms. “I’ve worked in
the lumberyard; most people in my family
have done their time working there,” she
said. Still, and lest I get the wrong idea about
her collar and class, she was quick to cop to
“privilege,” a “sheltered upbringing,” and a
“typical suburban childhood.” (This brought
to mind another snatch of lyric from “Te-
hachapi”: “Told you I was willing / But you
heard ‘struggling.’”) “Well,” she amended,
“maybe not typical for everyone.”
Cilker’s childhood tracks almost exactly
with the region’s most radical period of trans-
formation by big tech and venture capital,
even as swaths of it remained stubbornly
committed to a hippie mythology from which
she felt alienated. “The Bay Area thing just
kind of broke my spirit,” she told me. One
time, for example, when she was still “too
young to go to shows” but eager to perform,
her mother took her to play an open mic
at the storied Berkeley roots music venue
Freight & Salvage. “We got there at six and
there was a line around the corner, mostly
older gentlemen in tie-dye shirts. You put
your name in the hat and you get one song
and I waited until ten o’clock to play, sitting
through all the covers of ‘Homegrown To-
matoes’ and whatnot, and the whole time
I’m thinking, ‘Margo, you’re knocking on the
wrong door. Just totally missing the mark
here.’ And it’s weird because a sense of place
is so important for artists, and in the coun-
try music world, it’s like, really important,
but I was born into a place that was rapidly
changing even in my lifetime. I just couldn’t
dig my heels in there. I’ve been doing this for
Photograph © Forrest VanTuyl
pearl River resort

Pearl River Resort is a spectacular blend of casino thrills, family-style fun

and dazzling live entertainment with down-home Southern hospitality and warmth.
Escape to the historic, rolling hills of Choctaw, Mississippi, and engage in
KPƂPKVGFKXGTUKQPUYKVJYQTNFENCUUECUKPQUVKOGNGUUCPFEQOHQTVCDNGCEEQOOQFCVKQPU
a 14-table Poker Room, marvelous restaurants, two award-winning golf courses,
European-style Salon, full-service Sportsbook, and so much more!

PLAN YOUR VISIT AT

PEARLRIVERRESORT.COM
OR CALL 1.866.447.3275

CHOCTAW, MS PearlRiverResort.com
ten years now and I’ve only played one show
in my hometown.”
I wondered whether she’d dug her heels in
at Clemson. I also wanted to know what had
drawn her to a land-grant college in South
Carolina in the first place. She told me that
when she was a kid she went to a Christian all-
girls summer camp in North Carolina. “Kind
of intense,” she said, “but I loved it, and we
had this tennis coach who prayed with us at
the start of the lesson. He’d say something like,
‘Dear Jesus, let’s have a great day out there, I
pray that the sun’s shining and y’all can learn
and grow. And may the Clemson Tigers win!’
And I’m looking around thinking, ‘What was
that? What are you talking about?’ Then when
I was a junior in high school flipping through
the Princeton Review looking at colleges, I
saw it there and I thought, Oh, Clemson! I
remembered that guy who prayed for the
football team and latched on to it: good music,
not California, the rest is history.”
At Clemson she played coffee house open
mics and began to write songs in earnest,
influenced by Southern musicians. She
mentioned Old Crow Medicine Show, Gil-
lian Welch, Steve Earle, Justin Townes Ear-
le, and a handful of Nashville-based sing-
er-songwriters: Caitlin Rose, Tristan, and
Andrew Combs. She ended up majoring in
anthropology, which led to a study abroad
year in Bilbao, Spain, where she finally found
what she’d been searching for. “There was all
this music. Neighborhood bands, tiny little
bar shows, proper concerts, everything in
between. Literally every night of the week I
was going to shows, and three weeks after I
moved there I had a band. We played Cree-
dence, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, a couple of
songs in Spanish, ‘Dead Flowers’—anything
I could get my hands on.”
After the year in Bilbao, Clemson lost its
luster: “I tried to dive back into being a stu-
dent, but I was so done, you know? I went
from this beautiful, cool city with a badass
public transit system and this amazing music
scene to being isolated with no connections.
I couldn’t get gigs and I was miserable. I
played at barbecues for a bag of pulled pork,
random farmstand shows, wherever I could
be with my guitar and make people listen.
But I couldn’t keep doing that, so I dropped
out of college and moved back to Bilbao. I
taught English, taught guitar, gigged my ass
off every night, hustling.” People in Bilbao
didn’t draw bright lines between genres like
rock, classic rock, country, and folk. Cilker,
at one point, put together a Lucinda Williams
50 WINTER 2022
tribute band and got gigs all over town.
This seemed as good a time as any to ask
Cilker about her relationship to the “country”
label. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was asking,
but babbled my way to the proposition that
there’s a country life and a country sound, and
they’re not necessarily—or even often—the
same thing anymore, if they ever were. “But
it seems to me,” I told Cilker, “that you’re at
the thin center of that Venn diagram, because
you’re interested in the sound but you’ve also
actually branded cattle and processed chick-
ens and live on a ranch, which is a lot more
than a lot of country singers can say.”
“Yeah, I’ve smelled a lot of mule shit,” Cilk-
er said. “I vacillate with it a lot, obviously, but
sometimes I just throw up my hands. I am who
I am. My favorite pastime is writing country
songs, and you can take that or leave that. It’s
what I like to do and the way I like to sing. Do
whatever you want with that information.”
I was so satisfied by this answer that I decid-
ed to change the subject, and so discovered
that Cilker is an avid reader. In the course of
our conversation she mentioned Pam Hous-
ton, Raymond Carver, Barbara Ehrenreich,
and William Kittredge—all laureates of the
Mountain West. It could probably go without
saying that anyone who has worked the jobs
she has would find a fellow-traveler in the
author of Nickel and Dimed, but it’s worth
noting that Cilker’s songs are full of shrewdly
observed physical and emotional details that
amplify and complicate each other, which is
precisely what I, in my day job as a creative
writing professor, look for in a good short
story. “There’s a barbed wire fence way down
in the canyon,” she sings on “Barbed Wire
(Belly Crawl).” “Are we inside or outside the
line?” While the question certainly carries a
figurative meaning, I sincerely doubt that the
fence itself is a product of her imagination.
The Carverian realism of her imagery is
spiced up by a dash of Dylan in her phrasing.
“In his work boots worn thin / Stands my love
untrimmed,” she sings on “Chester’s,” a song
about the kind of small-town watering hole
where everyone goes because it is the only
place to go. At the end of “Kevin Johnson,”
she tells us that “Kevin Johnson heard the
people cry.” He responds, “I can do that, too
/ Listen, it’s not hard to do,” a line that could
be credibly attributed to William Zanzinger
or Judas Priest.
Now I’m one of those people who can, after
a few drinks, get on a real high horse about
Bob Dylan. I wasn’t about to do that to Cilker,
but I thought maybe we could geek out about
Shot of Love or the alternate version of Blood
on the Tracks. I got as far as recommending
Standing in the Doorway, Chrissie Hynde’s
transcendent album of Dylan covers released
last year, before Cilker told me I’d have better
luck on this front with her husband. “Forrest
is your boy,” she said. “The day before we got
engaged, so day three, he sang ‘Brownsville
Girl’ across the campfire from me, and that
was that.” “Brownsville Girl,” which Dylan co-
wrote with Sam Shepard, is an eleven-minute
shaggy dog yarn off of 1986’s Knocked Out
Loaded, one of Dylan’s all-time least success-
ful albums. I told her that in that scenario
I’d have probably married Forrest, too, and
since we were talking about him, I asked after
his work. What does a “freelance cowboy”
actually, you know, do?
“He’s for hire. Like in the old days, the
cowboys would be in town with their saddle,
here to work, you know? It’s day labor. You go
pick up the laborer and they come and gather
cows or whatever you need. He’s worked at
a number of ranches, and it’s been cool to
get to see how different ranches operate.” I
asked if their current residence at the sheep
ranch was the result of Forrest’s work. No,
Cilker said. Or rather, not officially. “Our
landlords are awesome and we help each
other out. It’s a farm, you know? Everybody’s
got to pitch in.”
Speaking of pitching in, the venue staff had
hung on well past closing time for the sake
of our conversation, and the band’s gear was
long since loaded into the van. The High Des-
ert Music Hall, with the audience gone and
most of its lights off, felt like a church again.
It was full dark outside, the vast sky low and
heavy with clouds. The heat of the day had
subsided and trees stirred in a gentle breeze
on which no hint of smoke was borne. It was
a perfect Western summer night and if it had
been an hour earlier I might have asked Cilk-
er if she and her band wanted to go scare up
a nightcap somewhere, but I knew she needed
to get everyone back to the Airbnb and get a
decent night’s sleep. Tomorrow they’d drive
on to Nevada for a few shows, then Cilker
would take off for a string of European fes-
tival dates. She sounded a bit preemptively
exhausted just describing it to me, but said
she was looking forward to performing and
to spending time overseas. “I wanted to be
an anthropologist,” she reminded me, “and
even though I dropped out…” She trailed
off, shrugged. “You still kind of are one?” I
suggested. “Yeah,” she said, favoring me with
a smile. “That’s how it feels.”
SHIMMY. SHIMMY.
SHAKE. SHAKE.
A MUSIC LOVER’S UNDERCOVER
GUIDE TO ROCKING THE CITY
One of the best kept secrets in the South is Birmingham’s robust music scene. From emerging artists to established acts, we’ve
got more than enough going on to fire up your inner audiophile. Looking for a place to kick up your heels? You just found it.
The Bard of
Lower Broadway
BY M I K E I E H O N DA R E I L A N D
esselee Jones stands on stage
at the bar he owns with the
band he leads, a guitar in his
arms, a .22 Magnum on his
hip. His sleek black hair car-
ries a whiff of Elvis, his eyes
are the color of faded den-
im. He wears a black shirt, a
black cowboy hat, black boots. Rising from
his shirt collar, his face is a full moon, and
he scans the room with the air of someone
constantly aware of possibility, the eyes of a
man who watches a lot of Westerns.
It’s two-thirty on a Saturday afternoon
on downtown Nashville’s Lower Broadway.
Brazilbilly, the house band at Robert’s West-
ern World, one of the strip’s original honky-
tonks, is about to start their set. Concert
posters, old guitars, shelves of old cowboy
boots, and a neon Busch sign line the walls
surrounding the stage. It’s the kind of place
people come to feel their idea of Nashville.
Most people who actually live here wouldn’t
set foot anywhere on Lower Broad by choice.
Anywhere except for Robert’s.
“We don’t want to get into politics,”
Jesse’s wife, Emily, says into the mic. “But
that flag represents our freedom to bitch
and moan. And we always start with the
national anthem.”
The drummer starts a roll, Jesse puts his
hand over his heart and gazes at the flag,
mounted on the wall next to a twenty-inch
box fan. He moved to the States from São
Paulo in his twenties. Emily and Jesse met for
the first time on this stage. A mutual friend
had invited her there one night knowing
two things: one, that she could sing Merle
Haggard’s “Silver Wings,” and two, that Jesse
would be there. The friend tipped the band
$100 to call her up to the stage. She sang.
Jesse listened. A friendship began. Then, a
relationship. Now, Emily and Jesse are mar-
ried, and they run Robert’s together. She’s
52 WINTER 2022
played many shows in her home state of Texas
and her voice fills the space without issue,
calibrated to carry over dance hall din. After
she belts out “And the home of the brave,”
she smiles, says, “Let’s honky-tonk, y’all!,”
and descends from the stage to her table.
The band opens with a few instrumen-
tals—fiddle-heavy, foot-stomping tunes.
Then, Jesse steps to the mic. When he starts
to sing, his voice is deep, almost conversa-
tional. Bar talk hums beneath the music, but
for the most part, the crowd is entranced,
spellbound, transported to 1944 with a
cowboy classic.
See them tumbling down
Pledging their love to the ground
Lonely but free, I’ll be found
Drifting along with the tumbling
tumbleweeds
When Jesse finishes, there’s a pause. Then,
the crowd cheers and whistles, as if Jesse
snapped his fingers and brought them back to
the present. “Thank you,” he says bashfully,
as if after almost three decades on this stage,
he still can’t believe the applause is for him.
“We’ll get it going here.” Jesse nods once at
his bandmates, then launches into an old
Marty Robbins tune.
Some memories just won’t die
Some feelings just won’t leave
No matter how hard you try
Through the window behind the stage,
pedal taverns, party barges, and glow-in-
the-dark buses cruise down Broadway.
Bachelorettes and recent SEC grads stream
past, down the street to multilevel bars
owned by modern country stars. Jesse’s time
machine effect dissolves beyond these walls.
It’s late September, and Nashville’s summer
is turning to fall.
N ashville’s Lower Broadway
bar district stretches four
blocks, from Bridgestone Are-
na, where the hockey team
plays, to the soupy banks of
the Cumberland. Lower Broad
is a gradient—live country
and airbrushed history close
to Bridgestone, bros and
bachelorettes increasing in
number as you approach the
water. The street smells like
piss, leather, Old Spice, and
hot dogs. On most nights, a
landslide pours inexorably
toward the river, where the
loudest, newest, shiniest
honky-tonks blast Florida
Georgia Line and Lil’ Jon on
light-up dance floors. Alan
Jackson (AJ’s Good Time Bar),
John Rich (Redneck Riviera),
Blake Shelton (Ole Red), Flor-
ida Georgia Line (FGL House),
and Jason Aldean (Jason Al-
dean’s) all own signature bars
on Broadway.
Robert’s, located on the first
block near the arena, consists
of a stage, a long rectangular
bar, and a balcony, all cast in
dim, aquarial, reddish-yellow
light. The most famous thing
on the menu is the Recession Special: fried
bologna sandwich, chips, a PBR, and Moon
Pie for six dollars. A sign behind the bar
reads, BEER: THE REASON I GET UP EVERY
AFTERNOON. In here, Blue Moon and Shiner
Bock are high-end. Emily and Jesse are dog-
matic about not using fancy ketchup; they are
Heinz squeeze bottle loyalists. There are no
TVs. The Robert’s crowd generally out-ages
the rest of Lower Broad by a good two or
three decades.
 Jesse and Brazilbilly often play from
two-thirty to six P.M. on weekends. Through-
out sets, Bert, the tip collector who’s worked
for them for two decades, circulates a plastic
jug. The band used to play from ten P.M. to
two A.M. every Friday and Saturday. But Jesse
got married and now battles Meniere’s dis-
ease, which can cause progressive deafness
and vertigo. Afternoon sets make sense. At
first, Jesse missed closing down the bar, but
now, he’s used to it. The quieter afternoon
Photograph courtesy Robert’s Western World
crowd creates more of a listening room, and
he can play more of the old songs he loves.
Jesse took an oblique, yet seemingly
pre-ordained, path to this stage. Picture a
boy, the son of Italian immigrants, growing
up in the Seventies in north São Paulo. He
grows up with nothing, but he has a TV, and
from his working-class corner of a cosmopol-
itan city, living in a tiny apartment above the
bar that his father runs, he can access the
world. He listens to the Beatles and Stones.
He mainlines shows like Cannon and The
Rockford Files and pictures himself cruising
around L.A. in a Lincoln Continental. Life
in these shows seems much more appeal-
ing than his actual circumstances, in which
his parents’ relationship and his home life
crumble around him. He’s the oldest of three
and protects his two younger sisters from
the random adults who pass through their
home, who sometimes beat him. At twelve,
he runs away to live with his uncle Ruy, who
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 53
sits him down and plays him Eydie Gormé
and Nat King Cole on vinyl. Although he can’t
understand the words, the melodies captivate
him. He stands in front of the mirror, waving
his arms like a conductor, and sets his heart
on a career in music. As a teen, he receives
a classical-style guitar as a present, learns
the basics, and starts a band.
To this day, childhood flashbacks keep him
up at night. But he still believes that when
he sat in front of that record player, music
began to save his life.
In his twenties, he decides there’s nothing
for him in Brazil, where he drives a cab. He
finds a family, friends of friends, to host him
in Peoria, Illinois. He speaks no English. He
gets robbed on the Greyhound he takes to
meet them, and he shows up penniless. When
he arrives, the matriarch teaches him to love
Westerns, especially the show Gunsmoke,
and he falls in love with the wistful quality of
the music in these movies. He attends Illinois
Central College and studies to become a cop,
inspired by gunslingers in Westerns and his
love for his new nation. He doesn’t graduate,
but a professor gives him a Marty Robbins
cassette, which moves him to tears. Country
music and Westerns, with their worship of
an idyllic, shared past, allow him to escape
his own. So much so that he wants to make
this music himself.
His childhood dreams of a life dedicated
to music resurface. He drives to Nashville in
the early Nineties. He cleans bathrooms at the
theme park Opryland USA. He makes his way
to Lower Broad, which at this point is all sex
and knives and needles and pools of street
sludge. It’s been this way for two decades,
vacant and dystopian after dark, ever since
the Grand Ole Opry left the Ryman for the
suburbs in 1974.
He moves from bar to bar in search of
music, eventually drawn to the one that sells
rhinestone Western wear. When he walks in,
a lone guitar player stands on stage singing
“Hickory Wind.” It’s classic country, pure
nostalgia and plaintive steel guitar, the sing-
er reflecting upon climbing an oak tree in
the Carolina breeze. A pair of women start
fighting in the crowd, and the singer stops
to tell them to shut the eff up. He’s drawn to
this place, to its raw outlaw air. It feels like a
saloon. It feels like those Westerns, that pure
Americana that soothes him.
He talks to the bar’s owner, Robert Moore,
who takes him on as a de facto apprentice,
showing him how to keep the books, run the
business, make the food, scrub the toilets.
54 WINTER 2022
When he pays enough dues, Robert puts
him on stage.
Beyond the bar, he hones his craft, play-
ing shows at nursing homes across the city.
When he arrives, he knows a few chords,
but Nashville forces him to improve. He gets
much better on his six-string and starts to
learn the piano. People are confused by him
at first, this Italian-Brazilian who loves old
country standards.
“You’re a Brazilian hillbilly,” a member
of Robert’s house band tells him one day.
“You’re a Brazilbilly!”
N ear the end of their two-thirty set, Bra-
zilbilly plays one of their classics: “El
Paso” by Marty Robbins. It’s one of their
most requested songs, the one that Bert,
the longtime tip collector, loves seeing them
play. It’s a tale of adventure and travel, of
cowboys and the cost of forbidden love. It’s
a song about the type of world Jesse wants
to live in, one built on tradition and honor,
one that provides an escape hatch through
storytelling.
Out in the West Texas town of El Paso
I fell in love with a Mexican girl
Nighttime would find me in Rosa’s Cantina
Music would play, and Feleena would
whirl
After their set, Jesse retires to a leather
armchair in his office above the bar, where
the band divvies up the evening’s take. It’s
been more than two decades since he bought
the bar from its namesake. When he retired
and decided to sell his honky-tonk, Robert
Moore could’ve accepted more lucrative of-
fers than Jesse’s. But he liked Jesse’s work
ethic and allegiance to the bar’s original
vision. He saw Jesse as his rightful heir.
Right as Jesse showed up on Lower Broad,
life started to return. In 1994, the Ryman
reopened as a concert venue, and live mu-
sic began to drift out the doors of Robert’s
and Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, a neighboring
bar. The city changed zoning codes, allow-
ing for residential construction downtown.
The arena was built in ’96. Stable healthcare
and higher-ed sectors supported Nashville’s
growth through the aughts. Tourists began
flocking in, bringing a windfall of money
to downtown. Soon, bachelorette parties
became ubiquitous along with now-infa-
mous “transportainment”: pedal taverns
and party barges cruising Lower Broad. As
tourism boomed, many spaces on Broadway
became caricatures of past selves (John Rich’s
Redneck Riviera Nashville, the three-story
Honky Tonk Central), fine-tuned for weekend
travelers and their expectations of Nashville.
The fallout is complex. Certain parts of the
city have grown rich. But it’s all started to
feel like one big Airbnb.
In the midst of change swirling all around,
Robert’s has not budged. It is Jesse’s very
own Rosa’s Cantina, a fantasy kingdom, a
place by design stuck in time. A bar where
the old country legends never die, where
idealized versions of tradition and the past
remain—until you walk out the door and they
don’t—where you can still get a sandwich, a
Moon Pie, chips, and a beer with not much
more than a five-dollar bill. A place where
your own past doesn’t have to matter, so
long as the collective country and western
past does.
“Robert’s is the Last of the Mohicans,”
Jesse says from his chair. He sweeps an arm
out to indicate Broadway. “This was a sea
of country music. Country music meaning
the music that made Music City. We’ve got
to travel back to the late ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s
to talk about that music, because that’s the
music that established this town as Music
City, U.S.A.”
“Everything has changed around us,” he
continues. “But these are the things that
attracted me to Nashville. These were the
things that brought me to America.”
A giant, glass Apple store rises up just
beyond the alley behind the back door of
Robert’s. Turn right, walk a block, and you’ll
end up at Ryman Auditorium. Nashville is
like this, the hypermodern mingling with
the historic, the past, present, and future
running together like paints on a palette.
Jesse and Robert’s are prime examples.
“It’s actually very easy to do what we do
and stay where we are,” Jesse says. “I don’t
pay attention to what [everyone else] is do-
ing. Not at all.”
Later tonight, Jesse will leave the bar he
owns, this altar to tradition that will forever
be preserved. He’ll hop into his car—a black
1978 Lincoln Continental, the one he always
dreamed of—and drive across the river to
his house in East Nashville, where most of
the city’s working musicians live. When he’s
ready to try and sleep, he’ll pop in one of his
many Western DVDs. And he’ll see if he can
fight off the flashbacks, drifting off to the
comforting sounds of gunfire in the saloon,
tumbleweeds in the wind, and the music that
saved his life.
Sewanee MFA in creative writing
Earn your MFA in creative writing SUMMER 2023
starting next summer on our beautiful SEMESTER DATES
mountaintop campus in Sewanee, JUNE 5–JULY 13
Tennessee. Apply this winter and join
us for our 2023 session. Learn more on Important dates
our website: letters.sewanee.edu
Dec. 1 applications open
Current and recent faculty: Jan. 1 priority deadline for
Chris Bachelder, Nickole Brown, admissions and scholarships
Sebastian Castillo, Ryan Chapman,
Tiana Clark, Sidik Fofana, Vievee Mar. 15 last day to accept @SewaneeLetters
Francis, Jessica Goudeau, Adam applications
Justin Taylor
O’Fallon Price, Jamie Quatro, Meera
Director
Subramanian, and John Jeremiah
Sullivan. April Alvarez
Associate Director

letters.sewanee.edu • 931.598.1636 • The University of the South • 735 University Ave. • Sewanee, TN 37383
Dr. Ralph Stanley
Live at the
Carter Family Fold
BY ANDREW LEE BUTLER

56 WINTER 2022 Dr. Ralph Stanley at the annual bluegrass festival of Jerusalem Ridge © Susana Raab/the New York Times/Redux
We came to hear “O Death,” humming to ourselves,
O Death, O Death—
won’t you spare me over ’til another year,
but sat through him selling books and telling stories.
He said no one could keep him from going by
“Dr.” just because it was honorary—
nothing honorary about (and I’m paraphrasing)
a bunch of Lomax-loving poindexters
who tell him it’s charming to learn what’s what
with his own hands. That, in short, he’s earned it.
He’s Dr. Ralph Stanley. Then he sang a song about trains.
What is this that I can’t see
with ice-cold hands taking hold of me?
Then another. He reminded everyone O Brother,
Where Art Thou? sold however much it takes
to go multi-platinum. He sang “Angel Band”
and “Man of Constant Sorrow” then he picked up
his banjo. I went down to the dance floor,
but my feet don’t move quick enough to flatfoot,
so I shuffled and laughed and stood out of place.
I’m sure I seemed like an asshole. Probably was.
I am Death, none can excel.
I’ll open the door to heaven or hell.
Dr. Ralph Stanley glowed under the brim
of his white Stetson, under the hot lights
of that stage, then he talked about family—
how everyone thought his brother would be
the one to make it big, that his brother
had the voice and vision and whatever it is
that makes a man enchanting to another man.
But look at them now.
The children prayed, the preacher preached,
time and mercy are out of your reach.
His brother’s been buried forty years,
succumbed to alcohol. Ralph’s a doctor.
Sold millions. Was on the TV. No one
thought he could but he could. Look at him.
Platinum and playing the Carter Fold.
Do you remember him damning his brother
and selling books? I’m texting a friend
a decade later. She says it didn’t happen.
I’ll fix your feet ’til you can’t walk.
I’ll lock your jaw ’til you can’t talk.
She says I’m wrong. Probably am.
But I remember the silence when he stopped
and set that banjo down. The adagio clack
of the dancers’ soda-can shoe taps gave way
to stillness. This was after the Fold
walled off the grassy hill you could spread
a blanket on. This was after they replaced
all the school bus loveseats with stadium chairs.
I’ll close your eyes so you can’t see.
This very hour, come and go with me.
The armrests held me in place. I regretted coming.
I wondered why I was there. I never cared much
for old-time or bluegrass except to gatekeep—
making claims, telling my Austin friends
about authenticity, when all I really know
is that it sits in a corner booth in a meat-and-three
right outside Galax, grumbling about Tech’s run game
and a story they saw on Facebook.
Simply put, I’m ashamed. The music loves all the places
I wish I could. The backing bands always belong
to some dear place—the Clinch Mountain Boys,
the Reedy Creek Band—and I still want to be a boy
who belongs to some dear place. But I never was.
I don’t remember wanting my town until I lost my way
around it. But I remember Dr. Ralph Stanley
starting up “O Death.” He sang
I’m Death, come to take the soul,
leave the body and leave it cold
and he watched me for those lines.
I burned white under the lights and it felt
like he saw me, saw through me, and knew
I was a fraud. My friend is wrong. I’ll learn
the names of birds and native species of plants.
I’ll drive up to Galax. I’ll take the backroads.
I’ll remember the waitress’s name
and love whatever she brings.
Each time I remember Dr. Ralph Stanley,
his brother is deeper in the ground. No wealth, no ruin,
no silver, no gold. Nothing satisfies
but the soul. O Death—I’m scared to know you
before I know the truth. Does anyone
anymore know what’s true. Won’t you spare me
over ’til another year. Spare me over ’til another year.
Spare me.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 57
The Singer
A S T O R Y B Y A S H L E I G H B R YA N T P H I L L I P S
“The center of our musical world...was Mother.” —Bill C. Malone
’m not sure where this story be-
gins. I’ve been trying to figure out
how to tell it my whole life. I don’t
even know if this is the right way.
Let’s start here:
Imagine a woman. It’s winter,
1987. She’s driving home alone
from choir practice. She’s the pianist. It’s night.
See her down there? The headlights shin-
ing a thin sliver. We need to see her from
up here because I want you to see where
she lives.
She lives in the middle of nowhere—where
everyone before her has been raised. And
it’s so dark at night here. But this woman
has never known nights to be any different.
Because this is the country.
So I want you to imagine that the woman
is driving at night in the country of your
mind. Think isolation, woods, barren fields
in winter.
This woman, the pianist, we’re not going
to hear her talk. As I said, she’s driving alone
and she’s not the type to talk to herself.
We’re going to hear her sing. She doesn’t
have the best voice but there it is—a hymn
that she learned in childhood. A hymn that
always comes to her when she’s feeling lost
or abandoned.
Imagine any hymn you know about being
weary and wanting rest, perfect submission,
perfect delight.
Now notice that there’s only one rooftop
amidst the fields and woods. This is the home
the pianist is heading toward. Where she
prays over supper, and puts her feet up by
the fire. Where she rocks in the rocking chair,
and has an apple for dessert. Her children
are grown and gone.
See that light in the window? That’s the
living room. Her husband is there waiting,
smoking a cigarette, watching the news.
He’ll get up and turn off the TV when she
comes in, in case she wants to play music.
58 WINTER 2022
She often does.
For their thirtieth wedding anniversary
she made a card for him. The front of the
card was a flower that said, “My love for
you just…” And then he opened the card, it
opened downward, the stem of the flower
unfurled all the way to the floor. At each fold
the card read:
Grows
& her favorite characters. They have two beds
Grows
& So at fifteen, Aunt Nell is working as a wait-
GROWS
MY LOVE FOR YOU JUST GROWS &
GROWS & GROWS.
But let’s go back into the clouds and look
down again. See that lone tree right off the
road, right across from the house? Years and
years ago when the farmers were making the
fields, they decided to save that tree. It was
so old and big. Majestic.
It’s been there ever since the pianist can
remember. Suddenly, she veers toward it.
Her headlights bend. Precisely and gently.
Right into the tree.
A unt Nell knows all the stories. How my
grandmama ate peanut butter on her
apples and wore gaudy jewelry as a little girl.
Aunt Nell’s really my great-aunt by mar-
riage, but no one says that in the country. In
this story, I’m calling her Aunt Nell.
We’re gonna move in time again. This time
it’s 1947 and we’re at the foothills of some
mountains. In the middle of the woods, down
a worn path, there’s a dirt-floored shack. Hear
that woman screaming? She’s giving birth to
her third child. The baby’s early.
She’s born with a veil over her eyes. The
mother has always heard about these kinds
of births but never thought she’d have one. It
means her baby girl is a seer. She’ll be able to
see straight through to people’s hearts. When
the doctor finally makes it out to the house,
he’s surprised that the baby has survived
through the night. The baby is my aunt Nell.
Her daddy is a sharecropper. He’s also in
trouble with the law. He moves the family
from state to state. Tells them never to use
their real names.
Aunt Nell watches her mama give birth to
nine more children. She’s curious about life.
She loves to read, steals books from school.
She gets to name her younger siblings after
to share between all of them.
ress. A young tall man comes in. And then he
comes in again. He orders black coffee, puts
molasses on his biscuit.
And then all of a sudden Nell’s daddy picks
up and moves the whole family to another
farm. This time over three hundred miles away.
She writes letters to the tall young man.
She’s unsure of her spelling, but she’s sure of
her words. They are the truth. He writes her
back. And then he drives all the way down to
see her. He tells Nell to open the glovebox.
She finds an engagement ring.
The young man is my Uncle Everett. He
drives Nell all the way back to his home.
They drive past the big old majestic tree and
to the church his whole family was raised
in. Everyone is there. Including his sister,
my grandmama, the pianist. She plays the
wedding with a little girl in her lap. The little
girl is my mama. She has blond curls.
My aunt Nell begins her new life. She
listens and writes the stories of her new
home in a sacred place in her heart. She
does anything anyone asks of her. She plays
patty-cake with my mama. Later she helps
Mama pick out my grandmama’s casket. And
she’s the first one at the hospital, waiting to
hold me after I’m born.
I never got the chance to know my grand-
mama, she died before I was born.
In one version of the story, my Uncle Ever-
ett refuses to go to her funeral. She was his
big sister, she toted him on her hip. He gets
a backhoe and takes down the tree.
In real life, the tree is still standing. And
everybody knows what happened there.
There’s no need to tell it.
I f you come back home with me, you’ll see
that tree. We pass it every Sunday on the
way to church. And my mama won’t look at
it. She pretends it ain’t there.
Mama doesn’t really tell stories. She says
she doesn’t remember.
But she told me this one when I was grown:
She’d just moved home after college. She
was training for the volunteer EMS. They
Jumbo’s, 2006, wood inlay and shellac, by Alison Elizabeth Taylor, whose work is on view through January 15, 2023,
at the Des Moines Art Center. The accompanying monograph, The Sum of It, was published in October by Delmonico Books.
© The artist. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York City
got a call about a wreck. When they got to
the location, nobody wanted my mama to
see it. Everybody knows everyone. Everyone
knows what it looks like. My grandmama was
an angel, a pianist. Everyone loved her. She
never hurt anyone.
In Mama’s version of the story, my grand-
mama died of a brain aneurysm. That’s why
she drove into the tree. She was still wearing
her winter gloves.
After her mama died, my mama got mar-
ried, had children, went to work, and then
when work was over, she’d lie in bed. She’d
sleep. No one ever said the word depression.
But my mama has always had this gift. She
can sing. And when she sings, she always
harmonizes. It comes to her so naturally.
To create volumes, to create multitudes,
to never be alone.
On Sundays she sang in the choir. Daddy
would look down at me and say, “Y’all hear your
mama?” It was always easy to find her voice.
I tried to pretend I saw my grandmama
playing the piano for my mama to sing. But
it was hard.
E veryone said my birth was a blessing. I
was born thirty-some months after my
grandmama’s death. My mama didn’t see a
therapist until she was pregnant with me.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 59
She didn’t have pictures of her mama in the
house.
My grandaddy turned his spare bedroom
into a memorial for my grandmama, hung up
photos that ranged her whole life. Got special
light pink carpet put in. Framed the Valen-
tine’s Day card she’d given him. MY LOVE
FOR YOU JUST GROWS & GROWS & GROWS.
No one was allowed to sleep in that room.
Not until I came home from college to
take care of Grandaddy when he was dying.
I gave him his pills, tucked him in at night,
and made sure he was there in the morning.
In the living room—the same living room
we saw at the start of the story, when we
were in the clouds at night. My grandaddy
was waiting with the lights on, smoking a
cigarette. But now he’s in bed. And I’m alone
looking at my grandmama’s piano stool. I
loved to spin the seat of it when I was little,
like I was turning the helm of a great ship.
But this time I sit on it, try to pick out a
hymn on the piano. Have Thine own way
Lord, Have Thine own way, Hold over my
being absolute sway. I stay at the piano until
I have the chorus. They say my grandmama
had tiny hands. How did someone with such
tiny hands master all these keys? And I see
my grandmama playing. She’s moving quick-
ly ’cause her fingers can’t reach long. And
there’s my mama. She’s a little girl, standing
at Grandmama’s shoulder, watching, singing.
A little animal was crying out in the yard.
The sun was starting to set. I found a black
kitten stuck in Grandaddy’s wood pile. He
was in rough shape. And I knew Grandaddy
would throw a fit if he found out. But the
kitten slept on my chest in the special pink
carpet room for Grandmama.
When we went through Grandaddy’s
things, we found a picture of my grandma-
ma as a little girl. She was lying in the grass,
snuggling an armful of squirming kittens.
T hey say I was really shy when I was little.
I sucked my thumb longer than I should
have, had this cotton doll named Willie that
I took with me everywhere. Maybe instead
of shy I was scared? I don’t know what I was
afraid of.
Here’s a story from when I was about seven:
I walk right up to the preacher before
church and tell him that I’d like to sing. All
by myself, in front of the whole congregation.
I sing a hymn that was written centuries
before I was born. One I’d never read, but
knew from memory. I’d heard my mama sing
it. There is a name I love to hear, I love to sing
60 WINTER 2022
its worth, It sounds like music in my ear, The
sweetest name on earth.
After this, everyone wanted me to sing all
the time. I sang, alone, without accompani-
ment, in church, at ball games, at birthdays
and funerals. Everyone was so proud of me.
But it only lasted a couple of years. Wasn’t
before long that I stopped.
In one version of the story, Aunt Nell asks
me to sing a song at the church spaghet-
ti supper. It’s from the point of view of a
woman who is remembering something that
happened when she was eight years old. Her
daddy’s beating her mama, he always has. So
the girl goes to the fair in town to get out of
the way. When she comes back home, her
mama has set the house on fire. And you nev-
er figure out if the mama survives or not. Let
the weak be strong, Let the right be wrong.
In the other version, I’m not singing the
song. We’re watching another woman in our
church sing it. We’re all quiet. No one moves,
no one makes a sound. Somehow a spotlight’s
shining on her in the fellowship hall.
Then the spotlight moves out into the
audience.
Roll the stone away, Make the guilty pay.
And there’s Aunt Nell. She’s crying.
Whether or not I sing “Independence Day,”
the fact is, it makes Aunt Nell cry.
And I don’t want to sing again.
A unt Nell loves to tell this story:
My mama is still pregnant with me, and
Aunt Nell is praying and praying that they’ll
find someone to take care of me once Mama
goes back to work.
One night, Aunt Nell sits up in her bed,
and written right across from her, above the
doorframe in shining golden letters it says:
ANNIE RAY REYNOLDS.
When Aunt Nell tells the story, she holds
her hands out in front of her and pulls them
apart, like she’s letting the light in.
I magine a busy port town in 1949. People are
always coming and going. There’s a movie
theater on the corner. A young woman is on
a first date in this movie theater. It’s a horror
film. And someone is walking up and down
the aisles dressed as the monster. Make it the
monster that terrifies you the most.
Look at the young woman running out
of the theater. Not with abandon but with
composure like she’s an expert at holding
pain. Her date runs after her and puts his
hands all over her to comfort her. They get
married, then divorced.
She never talks about her first husband
again, becomes a nurse, cares for a man who
says he’ll always listen to her. She sits by his
bed, puts a wet washrag on his forehead, and
tells him how scared she’s been her whole life.
One night when she was little, she called
and called for her daddy and brother to come
in for supper. They were out in the barn,
getting the cows settled during a storm. But
it was already lightning, raining sheets. She
called and called for them. But they never
came.
Her mama told her they’d been struck
by the same bolt of lightning. They were in
heaven now, looking down on them.
The young woman nurses the sick man
back to health. He takes her hand in his.
They get married and he moves her back to
his home. Near the big old tree we started
with, but across the little river.
They miscarry multiple times. She imag-
ines the lost babies as angels in heaven with
her brother. He’s bouncing them on his knees.
She thinks of this even after she has her
only daughter, while she works in a factory,
is active in her church. Until one day, she’s a
widow and her daughter never comes home.
She sits alone in her house and listens to
music about walking the streets of gold.
She’s in the grocery store when another
woman approaches her. It’s my Aunt Nell.
“You don’t know me,” Aunt Nell says. “But
I know you, you’re Annie Ray Reynolds.”
Then she leans in closer, “I saw your name
in a dream.”
M iss Annie Ray kept me at her house some-
times. It was filled with angels. An angel
flying in the window. An angel in prayer. An
angel blowing a kiss, holding a butterfly,
sleeping on a cloud. Angels laughing. Angels
singing. I saw Miss Annie Ray’s brother, my
grandmama too. Their mouths were perfect
little Os.
There was also the music Miss Annie Ray
always played. Because He lives, I can face
tomorrow, Because He lives, All fear is gone;
Because I know He holds the future, And life
is worth the living, Just because He lives!
Her stories always came back to her broth-
er. She said his name every day. She said it
like it was the most beautiful word she knew.
M iss Annie Ray didn’t know my grandma-
ma, but she said that her husband had
been distant cousins to her down the line.
Everything feels connected. This is what
I’m trying to tell you.
 ;‚;

So
-=-
u nd‹
s
G o od
On any night of the week, listen to live music while
=;-vࢼm]om-†|_;mࢼ1-f†mŝu;oѲ;1†bvbm;|_-|‰bѲѲ
_-ˆ;‹o†u|-v|;0†7v7-m1bm]-vl†1_-v‹o†u=;;|ĸ

LAFAYETTE
L O U I S I A N A

Seasoned to Celebrate
-=-‹;‚;$u-ˆ;Ѳĸ1olńѲ-=-‹;‚;ň‰;;hѲ‹ 800 346 1958
 When she died, Miss Annie Ray’s obitu-
ary listed me as a survivor. “A very special
young woman that she considers her own
grandchild.”
She taught me how to wash behind my ears.
She came every time to hear me sing. And
even then, when I was a child, she said, “You
should write these stories down someday.”
After I stopped singing, Miss Annie Ray gave
me a diary for my birthday.
Or was it Aunt Nell?
I remember asking Aunt Nell if she ever
had a diary. It went something like this:
Aunt Nell: Oh yes.
Me: (interrupting) Really? Where is it?
Can I read it?
Aunt Nell: Oh, I don’t have it anymore.
Me: …
Aunt Nell: The day I married your Uncle
Everett, I burned it.
Me: But why?!
Aunt Nell: There was too many hurt mem-
ories. I couldn’t hold on to them anymore.
L ook now at a crowded kitchen, where ev-
eryone’s sitting at the kitchen table. It’ll
sit six comfortably, eight can squeeze in. I
always sit beside Aunt Nell. She always sits
to the left of Uncle Everett. He’s always at
the head of the table.
But he’s not at the table now. He’s in the
living room in a hospice bed. He’s dying. He’s
saying he’s seeing his sister in the walls. Look
at him motioning his hands into the air. Aunt
Nell says it’s the other side.
We go in to see Uncle Everett one at a
time from the kitchen table, where we’re
all waiting to say our goodbyes. This is the
kitchen table where Aunt Nell showed me
how to press leaves into books. Where she
taught my mama how to can snaps. Where
my grandmama painted her fingernails.
All of Aunt Nell’s siblings are here. The
ones she named after her favorite characters:
Nancy, Jo, Amy. They start talking about their
sharecropping childhoods, slung across so
many states. Telling so many stories together,
all at the same time. Collecting chestnuts,
feedbag dresses, keeping meat in a bucket
at the bottom of a stream. Then…
“I won’t never forget the time we found
Mama hung up in the shed by her wrists.”
“Daddy had slashed her cheek open.”
“Amy tried to run away.”
“Things were bad.”
“Daddy told us not to use our names.”
“He didn’t want anyone to know who
62 WINTER 2022
we were.”
“One time Nell walked to town ’cause
Mama needed flour.”
“And Daddy had just beat her, blood was
coming through the back of her shirt.”
“The folks in the store wanted to know
who she was, if she was alright.”
“And she told them her name. She told
them what was happening.”
“That night men from town came out and
found Daddy.”
“Drug him out in the front yard, beat him
so bad.”
“I think they kicked out one of his teeth.”
“Mama stayed up all night tending to him.”
“I was glad to see him hurting.”
“But then he whupped us all again once
he got the strength.”
“I won’t never forget how he looked at Nell
then. Y’all remember?”
“Like the devil.”
Hear Aunt Nell coming down the hall?
She’s coming to the kitchen. Her sisters stop
the stories. But Aunt Nell heard them any-
ways. She leans against the kitchen table
and says, “Why are y’all dragging up those
bad memories?”
W hen I think of my earliest memories,
it’s Aunt Nell in front of me, feeding
me with a spoon. It’s Aunt Nell, rubbing my
back so I can get to sleep. It’s Aunt Nell sitting
me down at the kitchen table for homework,
helping me stay in between the lines.
After I stopped singing, Aunt Nell told me
that God had given me a gift and if I stopped
using it, He’d take it away.
I want to believe I still have a beautiful voice.
I know my mama thinks so.
Although I never have been, and never will
be, able to harmonize like her—no matter
how much I listen to her sing.
A unt Nell never talked about when she
was little. Only told me she never had
a birthday until she came into our family.
Imagine celebrating your first birthday when
you’re sixteen.
And I don’t know if Aunt Nell really burned
her diary.
But I know that she’s never going to let
me read it.
And I’m not sorry for telling you these
hurts. I want you to feel them.
I wanna make Aunt Nell proud, Mama, and
Miss Annie Ray too.
I still wanna be a singer, use my gift
somehow.
Like I said, I don’t know if this is the right
way.
A ccording to Aunt Nell, shortly before my
grandmama died, she stood in the same
kitchen that I’ve told you about before and
said, “I just want some peace.”
She prayed for peace.
Peace for what?
I don’t know where the story ends either.
I told Mama I was working on this new
story.
She wanted to know what it was about.
I told her singing.
I told the editors singing, storytelling, and
survival.
But really, this is something I wanna show
my mama and Aunt Nell. They’re the only
ones left that can read it.
I love you.
I’m sorry.
I’m so proud to be yours.
I keep the family hymnbook on my night-
stand.
The GROWS & GROWS & GROWS card is
framed above my bed.
W hile I was writing this, a friend came over.
She sat on my grandmama’s piano stool.
And I started telling the story again.
My grandmama was 5'2". Ate apples by the
fireplace. Let the kittens crawl all over her.
Chew her hair, lick her fingertips. She went
to school with scratches on her little wrists.
She was a pianist.
I ’m back home. I’m walking with Aunt Nell
in the side yard. She stops and points to
the clouds above the side yard.
“Remember when I’d bring you out here
and put you on a blanket to look up at the
clouds?”
I don’t remember.
“We’d lay down and make stories up from
what we saw… Those were the first stories you
wrote,” she says. “Don’t you remember you
took one and gave it to Miss Jenny?”
Miss Jenny was my sixth-grade teacher.
“To this day, every time I see Miss Jenny,
she’ll tell me how much she enjoyed that
cloud story.”
“I wonder what it was about,” I say.
“Oh, I don’t know… You’ve always had an
imagination.”
Then I follow her up the porch steps and
into the house.
Spirit
in the
Land
Feb 16 –
Jul 9, 2023

This exhibition is organized by Trevor Schoonmaker, Mary

D.B.T. and James H. Semans Director, Nasher Museum of
Art at Duke University.

Lead support for Spirit

in the Land is provided
by the Ford Foundation.

Major support for Spirit

in the Land is provided
by The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the
Visual Arts.
At the Nasher, Spirit in the Land is supported by The Duke
Endowment; the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger
Family Fund for Exhibitions; the Frank Edward Hanscom
Endowment Fund; the Janine and J. Tomilson Hill Family Fund;
Katie Thorpe Kerr and Terrance I. R. Kerr; Alexandria and Kevin
Marchetti; Lisa Lowenthal Pruzan and Jonathan Pruzan; and
Caroline and Arthur Rogers.
Hew Locke, Mosquito Hall (detail), 2013. Acrylic on
chromogenic print, 83 7/8 x 49 3/4 inches (213 x 126.4 cm).
Courtesy of the artist, Hales Gallery, and P•P•O•W. © Hew
Locke. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2023.

nasher.duke.edu
Exiting / In
B Y F R A N C E S C A T. R O Y S T E R , W I T H P H I L I P M . R O Y S T E R
or four years in the Seven-
ties, my father moonlighted
as a session musician and
live performer in Nashville,
while also teaching English
classes at Fisk University. He
was a conga player trained
on the beaches of Chicago’s
Lake Michigan, but arrived in Nashville in
1970 as a newly minted professor, the first in
his family to finish college. My mother, my
sister, and I moved with him. A few nights a
week, he and his band would play psyche-
delic jazz at Exit/In and other spots, or on
recordings of country and folk albums by
artists who heard him in local clubs. What
he found in Nashville was a meeting of de-
sires: a city with a music industry that was
booming and almost all-consuming; a Black
community that had become fragmented and
somewhat wrecked, but was still producing
great music; and within himself, a desire for
joy in the face of an eight-year marriage that
was in trouble.
Our move to Nashville was less a migration
than a return, with a difference. My par-
ents were second-generation Chicagoans.
Most of my great-grandparents moved from
Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas in the
1910s and 1920s. (But in the complexity of
many people’s family histories, not everyone
migrated from the South. My great-grand-
mother Pauline, a Polish immigrant, met and
married my African American great-grand-
father in Cleveland and then made a home
in Chicago in 1919.) No one had ever moved
back to the South. While Nashville wasn’t
where the family came from, it may have
represented the South that they broke from.
But the struggles of the South had their own
Northern version. My grandfather on my
father’s side had served in the South Pacific
in World War II with the U.S. Marines, and
when he came home to Chicago in 1945, he
worked several jobs, often at the same time,
including foundry laborer, insurance agent,
post office clerk, janitor, and drugstore deliv-
ery person, all to support his family of eight
64 WINTER 2022
children on Chicago’s West Side. My mother’s
grandmother, who raised her on the South
Side in the 1940s, had been a little more
prosperous, once owning a building kept
afloat with boarders, but over the years she
had to constantly fight to keep ownership of it
from the bank. Like many of the other women
in my family, another great-grandmother
worked as a domestic for white people, in
this case a wealthy lawyer and his family in
Wilmette, Illinois. When my parents met at
University of Illinois at Navy Pier, both were
struggling to pay for school. They were both
in a university African dance troupe, my
mother a dancer and my father a drummer.
They discovered that they shared a desire to
get out and make something new.
When the job offer came from Fisk, my
parents responded to a return to the South
differently. For my father, Fisk glimmered
with possibility, as a place to launch his ca-
reer as a professor of African American lit-
erature at the school where W. E. B. Du Bois
taught and the Fisk Jubilee Singers brought
Black spirituals to the world. But my mother
didn’t want to leave Chicago, or her mother
and grandmother, who were deeply involved
in our lives, providing daily childcare and
emotional support. My father left without us
for a few weeks, and they had the chance to
imagine a life apart. Reluctantly, my mother
decided to move with him. But their recon-
ciliation proved fragile.
W hen we arrived in Nashville in 1970 when
I was three, the city was in the midst of
great change, for better or for worse, espe-
cially for the Black community. It might have
felt a little like walking into a barfight that
had ended just moments before: chairs in dis-
array, glasses broken, people bleeding, a door
left open. And a fight could erupt again at
any moment. In spring of 1960, the leaders of
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com-
mittee, Fisk students John Lewis and Diane
Nash (who had also come to Nashville from
Chicago), launched a powerful campaign
to desegregate Nashville’s public facilities.
Fisk had been the site of powerful protests,
including a 1967 uprising led by students
from that university as well as Tennessee
State, just over a mile from Jefferson Street,
a street which was at the time plagued by
bankruptcies, closures, and neglect. Before
that, Jefferson Street had been Nashville’s
vibrant Black musical and commercial cen-
ter, home to nightclubs that were part of
an important r&b scene, featuring, among
others, Etta James and Jimi Hendrix as key
performers.
Starting in the 1950s, Jefferson Street had
been targeted by the city for “urban renew-
al,” and fractured by the building of I-40,
against the wishes of the community’s lead-
ers. By the early Seventies, approximately
six hundred twenty homes and twenty-seven
apartment buildings had been demolished.
The presence of I-40 also geographically
isolated Fisk from Tennessee State and other
entities in the Black community of North
Nashville. Journalist Steven Hale describes
the ongoing trauma of the destruction of
this community as “root shock,” borrowing
a term from Mindy Fullilove, a professor
of urban policy and health, to describe the
effects on people who have experienced mass
displacement events.
At the same time, two and a half miles
away, Music Row was exploding. According
to journalist Paul Hemphill, by 1970, Music
Row boasted the second-largest recording
industry in the country, second only to New
York City. It included forty studios, fifty-three
record labels, and four hundred music tal-
ent agencies. Taking over what Hemphill
acknowledges as “a vast Negro section” of
the city, the presence of the music industry
raised property values, pushing out Black
homes and businesses. He writes, “When
the city announced elaborate plans some
five years ago for Music City Boulevard, land
values on Music Row boomed overnight. One
corner lot on Seventeenth sold for $39,000 in
January of 1965 and the buyer turned down
$160,000 for it the following January. A 50-
foot lot could be laid for $15,000 in ’61 but
Side Profile of David Theodore, 2019, oil on canvas by Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe.
Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. Artwork photographed by Alan Shaffer OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 65
was priced at $80,000 five years later.” As
Nashville journalist Jewly Hight notes, at the
same time that I-40 was being built, “bisect-
ing and decimating neighborhoods and the
live music scene along the Jefferson Street
corridor, the city was giving institutional
heft/legitimacy/respectability to Music Row,
perhaps most notably by erecting the original
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
there in 1967. The interstate construction
was also completed that decade.”
We lived in Fisk faculty housing, a set of red
brick townhouse apartments built in 1968,
in the neighborhood that had been siphoned
off the rest of the city by I-40. A gleaming
metal gate surrounded the apartments. The
gate was open during the day, but locked
in the wee hours of the morning by a metal
padlock and long, rusted chain. In other ways
too this was a space of protection: speed
bumps to protect the children playing on the
sidewalks and sometimes playing kickball in
the streets; gravel that slowed the cars down,
too, and that we would pick up and put in
our pockets for treasure, or break open with
hammers to look for crystals, sometimes
splinters of rocks sparking up to sting our
cheeks, but miraculously never hurting our
eyes. We’d play parachute, jumping from the
garbage cans while holding plastic bags to
catch us, or freeze-tag on the grassy quad in a
space adjoining the
buildings where
you could look into When I got to sit
the patios of your
neighbors, or hide- in on one of my
and-seek in the
sheds that hid each father’s classes,
unit’s air condi- or to watch when
tioners. Sometimes
we would scale the he recorded at
walls that protected
the power generator a studio, I saw
at the center of the another side of
complex, sneaking
to play doctor in the him, too: relaxed,
midst of its ongoing
electric buzz, out of engaged, and
parents’ sight and focused.
hearing. We were
kids of the faculty
and staff and Fisk, mostly Black and Brown
and occasionally white, and while our par-
ents felt like it was safe enough for us to
play outside without a parent watching over
us, I was always aware of that gate, and the
implied separation from the neighborhood
outside of it.
66 WINTER 2022
M y parents’ marriage was only eight years
old when we came to Nashville, and al-
ready it seemed to have withered on the vine,
a mixture of small betrayals, layered upon
one another; the violence of their families of
origin, yet unprocessed by therapy; and their
youth and inexperience. They married when
both of my parents were still nineteen, and
according to the sexist rules of the State of
Illinois, my mother was considered of age,
while my father was not. My grandmother
had to sign for him. They were parents almost
right away, my sister born just six months
after their wedding, and then me, four years
later. And while both were committed par-
ents, they were also stretched thin. When we
got to Nashville, my father had finished his
doctoral coursework at Loyola University, but
not his dissertation on the poetry of Langston
Hughes. So one of his responsibilities (along
with teaching at Fisk and sometimes Belmont
College, and also pursuing drumming) was
writing his dissertation. My mother stayed
home with us for those first years, and then
started working at a drop-in community
center, sponsored by the Nashville Public
Library, called Read and Rap. It was located
in the James A. Cayce homes, Nashville’s larg-
est and oldest public housing developments.
I sensed my father’s need for escape when
I was a child, even though I couldn’t put it
into words. Unless he was
listening to his music, his
energy was often frenet-
ic, sometimes focusing on
small problems around
the house. (It was later,
in watching Warren Be-
atty’s 1991 performance
of mobster/entrepreneur
Bugsy Siegel, that I rec-
ognized in my father this
man bursting with ener-
gy, and who could not
sit still. He shared with
me as an adult that this
frenetic-ness came out of
his grief about a homelife
where he felt he had no
intimacy or authority.)
My parents would create
failed campaigns to connect: the waterbed
purchased together at 100 Oaks Mall that
sprung several leaks; the tandem bike that
was bought for riding dates at Centennial
Park but was mostly used by my dad to take
my sister and me around the neighborhood.
Both of my parents wrote, and they per-
formed their poetry together. Sometimes
those events were fraught with small dramas.
They never hit each other, but they bickered,
or just ignored each other, building their own
worlds. My mother seemed happiest at her
job at Read and Rap or when it was just the
three of us, my sister and me accompanying
her on a shopping trip or making dinner.
When I got to sit in on one of my father’s
classes, or to watch when he recorded at a
studio, I saw another side of him, too: relaxed,
engaged, and focused. I could see it on his
face as he played his drums in the park, his
eyes closed, face raised to the sun.
I recently joined my father via Zoom, to
ask him about this time and how he got
involved in the Nashville music scene. We
were already used to this way to connect
and share difficult stories in these years of
the COVID-19 pandemic, both of us in our
office sanctuaries surrounded by the familiar
comfort of our books. Lit by the warmth of
his desk lamp, my father’s face was open,
eyes magnified by his reading glasses. His
voice was halting at first:
It’s a little painful how I got involved
but it’s real. I was very unhappy and I
decided, well, that I was going to have to
do something else in my life besides my
teaching career because my nights, af-
ter I got done with my teaching—which
I loved—there wasn’t much that was
exciting for me, or pleasing. I needed
some zest and creativity in my life. So
I decided to put my drums on my back
and go out and play, and I went and
found a club called the Black Diamond
on Jefferson Street. Most of the guys I
played with were from Tennessee State
or had graduated from Tennessee State,
and I got into playing rhythm and blues,
especially Southern style. And from
there, things kind of exploded.
At the Black Diamond, my father was re-
introduced to the r&b that he had grown
distanced from as a graduate student and
young father with no time to go out at night.
He’d watch men and women dancing and
relaxing and finding their joy to Wilson Pick-
ett and Sam and Dave. He began a routine
of playing at different clubs, moving from
Black clubs like the Black Diamond to pre-
dominantly white spaces like Exit/In, where
he and his band, the John Betsch Society,
would play free jazz and meet members of
Songwriters.
Screenwriters.
Journalists.
Publishers.
Directors.

STORYTELLERS
IN EVERY FIELD.
For more than 45 years, Mike Curb College of Entertainment and
Music Business graduates have been telling their own stories in
the industry—and the students of today continue the tradition.
Learn how you can tap into our rising talent at BELMONT.EDU/CURB.
the alternative music community, including
young multi-genre artists Dianne Davidson,
John Hiatt, Jimmy Buffett, and Mac Gayden.
Dad tells me he felt from these musicians
in the space of Exit/In a genuine desire for
connecting and for pushing the boundaries
of country music and other genres:
One of the things that started to happen
was that the white musicians would
see me play, and we’d get to know each
other, and they started bringing me in.
From there I started working at other
[white] clubs like Red Dog Saloon and
General Store and also the music stu-
dios in Nashville, working with various
musicians on their albums.
Of course, the hunger for Black musical
expertise that my father found coming from
white musicians, especially musicians in
country music, was not entirely new. Black
music has always been foundational to coun-
try music, from the country sound of banjos,
an African instrument; to the caricatured
blackness of minstrel shows and medicine
shows; to the apprenticeship of white coun-
try performers (like the Carter Family and
Jimmie Rodgers) to Black ones. Country’s
history has included a slow but steady stream
of Black performers who attempted to break
into its segregated world. But as historian
Charles Hughes points out, this period from
1970 to 1974 was of particular importance for
white country music identity, particularly in
what he calls the “Country Soul Triangle,” the
three-pronged network of recording studios
from Nashville to Memphis to Muscle Shoals,
Alabama. While in legendary studios like
Stax and FAME, 1960s Black soul artists and
white country music artists often used the
same songwriters, musicians, and producers,
the 1970s saw a kind of white backlash. Even
when white country artists demonstrated a
respect for Black music, they often left actual
Black musicians out of the limelight. In this
period, a new generation of white country
artists who were interested in integrating
soul, r&b, and funk into their music were
credited for being experimental and expan-
sive, while Black music was treated as the raw
material for white creativity.
The musical scene that my father entered
in Nashville was one, then, that was not risk-
free for Black musicians. The appetite for
Black musical styles was strong, and many
white musicians felt free to visit Black musical
venues and to invite Black musicians to come
68 WINTER 2022
and play and record with them. But many
Black musicians, especially those raised in
the South, did not feel as safe to travel into
white spaces. Black Northern transplants like
my father, coming into the scene from the
outside, may have felt freer to cross these
racial lines and collaborate. The mostly white
and subcultural Exit/In club was one of those
spaces. And it was there that my father built
a multiracial network of musicians that he
played with. This led to opportunities to also
record in the studios:
One of the greatest experiences for me
was to go into the studio and work with
country and western musicians. I lis-
tened to the music a long time before
that, because my mother loved it when
I was a child, but I didn’t really under-
stand the music. But when you go in to
record with musicians, whatever the
music they play, you come out under-
standing it, where it comes from in their
hearts. That was really a mind-opening
and heart-opening experience, because
I was playing with the greatest musi-
cians on the planet, because they were
there and that was what Nashville was
all about.
My father brought to these new collabo-
rations his own strength and stamina built
from playing for hours at live performanc-
es. As a teenager, he learned congas at the
hands of the drummers who would meet at
the beach that spanned South 63rd Street
and South 49th Street, at the eastern edg-
es of Chicago’s Hyde Park and Woodlawn
neighborhoods. There, every weekend in
the summer, the players, mostly men, would
drum for hours, polyrhythmic patterns from
the African diaspora pounding against the
limestone boulders lining the beach. There
was fellowship across neighborhoods, some-
times across class, as they taught one another
what they had learned from the elders, or
from records like Patato & Totico, or artists
such as Olatunji or Tito Puente or Mongo
Santamaría or Willie Bobo. If you were bold
enough to jump in, you were expected to hold
up the beat responsibly, keeping time for the
dancers, whether you were a drummer or a
passerby grabbing a spare cowbell or mara-
ca. This was serious play, a way to manhood
distinct from other ways of becoming a man
on the South and West Sides, different from
sports, or gangs, or doo-wop. Strength was
shown through skill in playing and listening,
and in endurance, as players might perform
as long as six to eight hours at a time.
When Dad was invited to perform as a side-
man in the Nashville studios, he met skillful,
professional sidemen who would lay down
their licks with style and expertise. The cul-
ture of playing in studios was quite different
from performing at parks and beaches or in
clubs. But his endurance was admired by his
colleagues. There, despite some of the racial
tensions of Music Row, he found respect and
passionate focus that brought out his own
best work, especially with country folk artist
Dianne Davidson. As he describes working
with her, his voice grows thoughtful:
Dianne had such a beautiful voice. All
I had to do was really listen to her, and
much of what I was going to play just
happened. When she sang, all you had to
do was put your hands over your drums
and allow her singing to go through you
and you’d know what to play.
One night Davidson invited our whole
family to her house for a band practice. I
remember riding through the Tennessee
hills through the fog to her home, covered
with a blanket because it was already past
our bedtime. When we got there, we were
surprised by the presence of two wildcats—
ocelots?—lounging on the velvet Victori-
an couches, padding their way across the
worn oriental rug to us to rub against our
legs, the roughness of their tongues as they
licked us hello just this side of sharp. I re-
member my mother tucking me in on one
of the couches, my sister and I foot to foot,
while Mom perched beside us to read the
paperback novel she’d brought with her. My
father disappeared with the rest of the band
to practice. He was the only Black person in
the band, and we were way out in the country.
Maybe that’s what made my mother nervous,
staying close by us, not getting up to talk
to Dianne or the band, or maybe (maybe?)
it was the woman at Dianne’s side, rubbing
her shoulders. I hope not, but it could be. As
I nestled in, comfortable in this new space,
something opened in me at the sight of the
two women, the way that they seemed both
like sisters and lovers. As I fell asleep, I could
pick out the sounds of the rest of the band,
the bottom beat of my father’s congas, the
patterns I always heard at home, traveling
across place and time to us in that eccentric
farmhouse in the hills, and carrying me into
my dreams.

T he lyrics for “Delta Dawn” tell the story
of a woman who seems stuck in time,
and perhaps in her own desires. Once the
“prettiest woman you ever laid eyes on,” she’s
usually seen wandering the streets of Browns-
ville, suitcase in her hand, faded rose in her
lapel, telling anyone who will listen about the
working-class, dark-haired stranger who will
take her far away from here, to his “mansion
in the sky.” Maybe it’s a song about frustrated
sexuality in a society that represses women’s
freedom. Maybe it’s a metaphor for the need
for a New South, the old one outdated and
stuck in old dreams of a plantation past.
But in Dianne’s rendering, we are welcomed
into Delta Dawn’s yearning. Her line “Did I
hear you say / he was meeting you a-here
today?” has the tone of an empathetic lis-
tener, someone sitting at Delta’s elbow with
a cup of coffee and a cigarette. The sense
of empathy in this version is made possible
in part by the role of the conga playing be-
neath it. Dad’s conga makes Delta’s yearning
something that’s alive and present, with a
beating heart, not just a stagnant dream.
Dad told me that he was dissatisfied with the
engineering of the song, as it was recorded,
because you couldn’t hear the full richness,
timbres, and textures of his drumming, in-
cluding the distinctions of a closed versus
an open hand slap. But that beat still gives
the song presence, energy, and depth. It is
the beat of the living underneath the faded
rose, the truth within the storytelling, the
presence of other bodies who are watching
her and bearing witness.
M y parents decided to separate in 1974,
and while I missed my father, I also felt
a great sense of relief, even as we packed up
to move out of the only home I had remem-
bered. As a young person, I felt torn during
my parents’ fights, unsure of who was right,
or where to put my loyalties. In the early
years of their divorce, I split myself between
identifying with the everyday struggle of my
mother, making a new home and life for us,
and with my father, who struggled to stay
connected to us while also creating a life
away from Nashville, in Albany, New York.
Perhaps for a time, my father’s music gigs
distracted him from the unresolved conflicts
of his marriage, and potential loss of our
household. After Nashville, my father never
again pursued a recording life. I had always
assumed that he had been tempted by the life
of being a musician, and that he left it behind
because of some of the more sensational
aspects of the entertainment industry, like
drugs or alcohol. But in our recent conver-
sations, he shared with me that what was
dangerous for him about the life performing
in clubs and studios was not the drugs or
alcohol, or even the late nights or time on the
road, but the ways that the music took the
place of other joys and achievements that he
wanted for himself: to grow as a scholar, to
find a true life partner, and to build a better
family with his daughters.
After his divorce from my mother, and
some therapy, my father uncovered a life
script of dying prematurely. In this premo-
nition, he’d die at age thirty-three in a car
accident, fatigued after a day of playing his
drums, and that this way of dying had felt
inevitable since he was a young person. In-
deed, a few years into his thirties, before
he separated from my mother, he started
having a series of car accidents after sessions
of playing with his drums. They were minor
fender benders at first, and then once, he
completely rolled over his turquoise Volvo
station wagon with the drums packed in-
side. This startled him enough to seek help.
Eventually, he worked to create a new vision
of a long life, still with his music as part of
it, teaching and writing about music and
playing with African dance troupes in his
new home.
A few years after his discovery in therapy,
my father almost found himself in another
car accident. He had been playing drums in
the park with a friend, someone who had
formerly been incarcerated in Attica prison.
Though they were both exhausted, they got
in the car, and my father drove through a red
light on a very busy street. When the police
stopped him, they sent him home without a
ticket, telling him that he was very lucky and
that he should have been killed. My father
is convinced that it was his own decision to
live a long life that protected him. His second
career of recording and gigging in Nashville
had fed him by connecting him to new people
and places, but ultimately, he needed music’s
power of self-reflection and transformation
to make the life that he yearned for. As he
told me at the end of our conversation:
Music has always helped me to live,
whether times were good or bad. And
the transcendent experiences I learned
to achieve first through music have al-
ways served me in the most positive and
constructive ways. They never distract-
ed me from my need to become a better
person and build the life of my dreams.
They actually did just the opposite.
I n thinking about the continued power of
music in his life, my father told me about
watching his own father, who played drums
and harmonica in Chicago:
My memory of him playing the harmon-
ica is that he would be lying in his bed.
His feet would be out and you could see
his toes, and he would be playing and
his toes would be moving at the same
time. That’s the way I remember him. He
would never be playing the harmonica
standing up. And that was a kind of
sanctuary for him.
Before my father left our Nashville home,
he created a musical space in our living room:
conga drums with special homemade suede
covers lined up along the wall; framed photos
of jazz greats and African dancers; lovingly
assembled stereo equipment, including a
reel-to-reel tape recorder, turntable, and
speakers; and a long triple-row of LPs. This
was where he would play his drums along
with music that he’d listen to on his head-
phones. He had pillows on the floor, and
he’d often invite my sister Becky and me
to come and sit with him to listen in. This
space, wedged between the couch and the
dining room, orderly and inviting, felt to me
like an entrance into another space, and an
unknown time. I never knew what to expect
when my dad popped on the headphones for
me to listen. It might be one of Alan Lomax’s
recordings of field calls or John Coltrane or
Miles Davis or Celia Cruz or a little Marvin
Gaye. Sometimes he’d be listening to the
rehearsals of one of his bands, or sometimes
he’d tape new songs from the radio station.
Becky and I would bring over our favorite
music to play on the stereo: the Jackson 5’s
ABC or Peter and the Wolf or The Nutcracker
Suite. I felt special when my father invited
me to this space to listen, or to get a lesson
in polyrhythms, trying to keep time on the
cowbell while he played his bongos beside
me. No one among my mostly white friends
had that kind of relationship with their par-
ents through music. In our home, where the
sadness seemed to lurk in the corners, the
presence of music—the drums and the mag-
ical headphones—were important routes
inward and outward. A temporary sanctuary
from sadness, and also a means of transfor-
mation. An exit in.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 69
<HNKM>LRH?MA>FBLLHNKBABLMHKB<:ELH<B>MR%LM'EHNBL
SHOWTIME.
THAT’S MY M-O.
A^eeh%ma^gZf^lFbllhnkbFh_hklahkma^k^mh
bgmkh]n\^rhnmhMa^?Z[nehnl?hqMa^Zmk^bgLm'Ehnbl'
Mablablmhkb\lmZ`^aZlahlm^]i^k_hkfZg\^lmaZmaZo^
^gmakZee^] Zn]b^g\^l _hk g^Zker Z \^gmnkr' Fhk^ Zkm%
Zk\abm^\mnk^ Zg] ablmhkr ZpZbm bg ma^ @kZg] <^gm^k
:kml=blmkb\m'IeZgrhnk`^mZpZrZmOblbmFh'\hf
 18TH & VINE BLUE ROOM
PHOTO : VISIT KC

Missouri’s Enduring Legacy

of American Music
From country, blues, and ragtime, to rock, pop, and R&B, the great state of Missouri has
played an integral role in the history of America’s most quintessential musical genres.
A hotbed of live music, unique museums, and monuments to legendary performers and
historic venues, Missouri’s reputation as a musical mecca continues to flourish from its
urban metropolises to its sprawling Ozark Mountains. Today, the music scene in Missouri
is as vibrant as ever.

BLUES + R&B e city of St. Louis is bursting with music venues

designed for visitors to hear live acts while partaking in
Once home to blues and R&B icons like electric guitar
the exceptional local culinary scene. e historic BB’s
legend Bennie Smith and soulful singer Eva Taylor,
Jazz, Blues & Soups (which cheekily claims a long-ago
St. Louis continues to be a springboard for modern
history as a house of ill repute) and Hwy 61 Roadhouse
chart-toppers.
& Kitchen on the northern end of the famed Blues
To further delve into the state’s deep R&B roots,
Highway are two standout venues that draw crowds
one can visit the National Blues Museum, whose live
from all over the country.
music and rotating exhibits outline and explore the
Relatively new to the scene, the Blues City Deli is
genre’s legacy as the foundation of nearly all Ameri-
fast becoming a St. Louis mainstay, cranking out pulled
can music. e museum features a robust calendar of
chicken po’boys while hosting live blues shows by
modern blues acts as well as a weekly Sittin’ on the
hometown musicians. e nearby Broadway Oyster
Porch series, which invites players of all levels to “play
Bar offers a walloping seven nights of live blues and
the blues” together.

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

R&B to its diners, free of charge. If the tunes weren’t that pairs well with jazz, many visitors choose the
compelling enough, Cajun-Creole-style Southern deli- Corvino Supper Club & Tasting Room for an intimate
cacies like fried alligator keep fans coming back nightly meal of modern American cuisine served directly by
for their fill of rhythmic Missouri music and cuisine. the restaurant’s Chef de Cuisine. Like any Kansas City
restaurant worth its salt, live music is also on the menu.
In downtown Kansas City’s Power & Light Dis-
JAZZ trict, Midland eatre has has greeted guests with
e epicenter of jazz in the 1920s-1940s, millions still open doors since 1927. Today, its state-of-the-art
flock to Missouri to experience the thrill of hearing the sound systems and a starlit amphitheater bring
country’s finest live jazz. Nowhere is this more evident in big acts, with a 3,000-person viewing capacity.
than in Kansas City.
e 18th & Vine District in Kansas City, which boast-
ed 50+ jazz clubs in the genre’s heyday in the early-to- ROCK + POP
mid 20th century, remains electrifying. Find riveting Guitar showman and Rock pioneer Chuck Berry set St.
performances as you brush against the lore of some Louis stages ablaze in the 1950s with his free-wheeling
of Missouri’s most famous innovators of jazz, notably and exhilarating shows that helped usher in a new era
Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. You can trace their of American music—rock ‘n’ roll.
early careers to St. Louis and Kansas
City, respectively.
NATIONAL BLUES MUSEUM
eir enduring legacies are proudly PHOTO : VISIT MISSOURI

recorded at Kansas City’s American Jazz

Museum (AJM). Featuring educational
programming and meticulous historical
record-keeping, the museum houses
artifacts and cultural touchstones that
harken back to the era when Davis
dominated club stages with his trum-
pet while Parker’s saxophone blew his
contemporaries out of the water.
e AJM’s Blue Room ushers the past
into its rightful place in the present via
a 150-person jazz club with curated
performances engineered to transport
guests to the genre’s early days with
sparkling piano sets and dizzying saxo-
phone solos from some of today’s most
celebrated jazz artists.
For a singularly transformative expe-
rience, one can visit the Green Lady Lounge, a classic For a rollicking performance, one can visit the Duck
Kansas City jazz lounge. Steeped in nostalgia with crim- Room (a homage to Berry’s infamous Duck Walk) at
son walls, oil paintings, and stages bathed in red noir Blueberry Hill, known for its exceptional curation of
light, the club exclusively spotlights original composi- indie and rock performers like Titus Andronicus, Dead
tions by local jazz musicians, just like the days of old. Poet Society, and the Black Lips.
Like St. Louis, Kansas City’s dining scene is as mem- Perhaps one of the few acts to match Berry’s unbridled
orable as its music. For an elevated dining experience energy were Ike and Tina Turner, once ubiquitous on

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

 NATIONAL BLUES MUSEUM
P H O TO : E X P LO R E S T. LO U I S

the St. Louis club scene as a husband and wife duo per- those with a bent towards mid-century nostalgia, as it
forming R&B ballads across the city. When Tina Turner boasts eight interactive galleries dedicated to the city’s
embarked on an illustrious solo career, she earned the unique role in American history.
nickname “Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll,” renowned for her Just south of the history museum is the Gillioz e-
floor-shakingly ener- atre, an opulent Span-
getic sets. ish Colonial Revival
An iconic venue in house that opened in
Kansas City, Knuckle-
“Brimming with soul-stirring 1926, prepared for lon-
heads had beginnings art and vibrant culture, gevity with a 100-year
as both a convert-
ed railroad boarding
Missouri is a haven for lease. After a period
of closure and resto-
house in the late 19th American music and history.” ration, today’s visitors
century and a motor- can marvel at the ven-
cycle shop/speakeasy ue’s splendor and hear
slinging beers, tacos, and blues. Today, Knuckleheads retellings of the infamous visit by Elvis Presley, during
has evolved into a veritable performance complex fea- which he commandeered the theater with his touring
turing four stages that serve as home to knock-about band for an afternoon movie.
acts like Johnny Winter and Billy Joe Shaver. A native of the “bootheel” town of Kennett, Missou-
In Springfield, the birthplace of Historic Route 66, ri, Sheryl Crow’s music is emblematic of Missouri’s
the History Museum on the Square features a treasure influence on American pop. Crow became famous as
trove of iconic American memorabilia. It’s sure to thrill much for her soulful voice and earworm choruses as

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

for her seemingly effortless ability to combine elements
of multiple musical genres (rock, country, pop, folk,
and bluegrass) and turn them into chart-topping hits.
COUNTRY +
RAGTIME
Ragtime may seem a niche genre today, but its
influence on Jazz and link to traditional African-Amer-
ican music in the state of Missouri is tremendous.
Modern fans can pay homage to the “King of Ragtime,”

BLUEGRASS pianist and composer Scott Joplin, with a visit to the

Scott Joplin House State Historic Site in St. Louis, the
While the cities of Missouri lay claim to the brassy likely respite and home of Joplin during one of his
and floor-thumping energy of jazz and rock and roll, most prolific periods in 1902. e site’s docents are
the serene plains and rolling hills hold their own as a Jazz musicians who revel in rhapsodizing about the
haven of country and bluegrass. King’s heyday.
Hailing from a musically inclined family, Rhonda e Blind Boone Home in Columbia is the remark-
Vincent – “e Queen of Bluegrass” – traces her roots able Victorian house of another Ragtime luminary,
to Greentop. e three-time Grammy Award win- John William “Blind” Boone. A contemporary of Joplin,
ner performs every year at the Sally
Mountain Park Bluegrass Festival and
Silver Dollar City’s Bluegrass & BBQ
Festival. Visitors will be enthralled
as she picks her way through com-
positions on the mandolin, fiddle,
banjo – or any of the other stringed
instruments she plays.
One of the oldest music halls in
Branson, the Presleys’ Country Jubi-
lee, was opened by an Ozarks-born
family back in 1926. Even after the
explosion of country music and mu-
sic halls in the area, Presleys’ Country
Jubilee remains a mainstay on High-
way 76, turning out genre-blending
shows of bluegrass, country, and
gospel.
Not far from the Ozarks, chart-top-
ping country star Sarah Evans began BLIND BOONE HOME
PHOTO : VISIT MISSOURI
her musical career in New Franklin,
Missouri, alongside her siblings in
e Evans Family Band. Her sound as
a solo musician is heavily influenced by the country Boone was a blind man, a survivor of poverty, a prolific
and honky tonk of her home state and has evolved to composer and pianist, and a tireless performer, esti-
incorporate pop. mated to have given over 7,000 performances during
Alternative country made its rollicking debut when his career.
Uncle Tupelo (which later reformed as the well-loved Brimming with soul-stirring art and vibrant culture,
indie alternative outfit Wilco) married honky-tonk, Missouri is a haven for American music and history.
country, and indie rock to great acclaim. In a satisfying Whether it’s the thrill of experiencing live music at
example of things coming full circle, Wilco returns its finest, a chance to encounter the next great act, or
time and again to perform triumphant sold-out shows the simple pleasure of traversing the same streets as
at venues like e Pageant in St. Louis’ Delmar Loop. legendary musicians, the draw of Missouri is strong.

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

76 Whippoorwill, a painting by T-Marie Nolan © The artist.
Listening for a cry in the night

77
 Listen to music religiously, as if
it were the last strain you might hear.
— HENRY DAVID THOREAU,
IN HIS JOURNAL, JUNE 12, 1851
t the edge of a mountainside skid path, scar of an
old logging operation, a woman crunched across
the leaf litter holding a long stalk of rivercane.
She swept the cane over the ground around her
as she went, like a dowser with a divining rod
searching for water or minerals or buried treasure
underground.
They would be above the ground, nesting on
it, but so camouflaged you wouldn’t see them.
“You can almost step on them before they
flush,” she said to me. Their feathers would be
perfectly pigmented to blend with dappled sun-
light on last year’s fallen oak and poplar leaves
decaying in rich shades of brown on the forest
floor. A flock of geese is called a gaggle, but when
these flock, it is called an invisibility. If they
heard a noise, they would close their large eyes, like smooth black
agates, to hide the gleam. They would lie motionless, silent, listening.
They would be on their second brood of the season then, in early
June. Two speckled eggs to each clutch. If brushed by the cane, the
woman explained to me, the mother would flush, flutter upward,
kick the eggs aside in hopes of obscuring them, then flop over or
limp to feign a wing injury to distract the predator from the precious
next generation. “It’s a brilliant strategy,” the woman said. Her name
was Chris Kelly, and she was a diversity biologist for North Carolina
Wildlife Resources Commission.
I followed with a cane of my own, sweeping the leaf litter. I peeled
my eyes; though it was broad daylight, they felt feeble against the
prospect of camouflage’s trickery. My skin and clothes were no
guard against the sharp thorns of wild blackberry brambles, which
conjured threads from the weave and minute beads of blood to my
arms’ surface, snagged and tore both shirt and tissue.
We flushed no whippoorwills.
In another tract of woods, at the other end of Transylvania County,
we scoured around the granitic domes that the birds haunt, hoping.
These slabs of stone provide small openings in the canopy, and
are bordered by the low sheltering limbs of understory trees like
mountain laurel. Edges: that’s what Antrostomus vociferus likes.
Some space for the light to shine in and dapple them, blending with
their mottled plumage; little clearings in which they can hunt. Places
78 WINTER 2022
where the songs of the males will bounce off the granite and echo
through the woods. “It’s like they’re on a stage,” Chris said, laughing.
“They want to be the loudest thing around.”
Not in the daytime, though. They only sing at night. Between that
fact and the camouflaging, ornithologists deem them “extremely
cryptic,” an official scientific description. The whippoorwill is one
of the least studied birds in North America. “Few people know the
Whip-poor-will,” a writer for Bird-Lore magazine wrote in 1911. “He
is merely a wandering voice, a cry in the night.”
We hopped along the rocks, careful not to step on the sensitive
lichen and reindeer moss, and swept our canes in all directions.
Gnarled blueberry bushes flanked the outcrops, and I paused to
pluck the ripe fruits, bursts of sweetness on the tongue.
But we didn’t find the treasure we dowsed for in the leaf litter.
No rufous or cinnamon-colored wing fanning out of a sudden from
leaves the shade of shale and terra cotta. No nesting whippoorwills.
This worried me.
A dowser, rod in hand, walks with questions. Such as: Where
does water flow in the earth? Where lies a seam of quartz?
Or: where does song grow in the leaf litter?
Where’s that old flutter in my heart, rouse of my blood? I wanted
to find it.
T hat month in the Georgia Piedmont, where I was living, the
temperatures had blazed upwards of one hundred degrees. It
is the southernmost portion of the whippoorwill’s breeding range,
but I had heard none singing.
I had read a scientific report that placed the bird on a list of spe-
cies of concern, saying that its populations had declined by seventy
percent in the past forty years. A few hops and skips northward over
the mountains and through valleys, in East Tennessee, I’d heard the
bird calling when I was a child. It beckoned me toward the edge of
where my family’s house sat, a place where I felt very alone, where
the silent ache of no one to tell my story to, no one to listen, no one
to understand me, gnawed. The whippoorwill was a throat rup-
turing open, reaching me in my lonesomeness. It was a wild flight
of imagination that took wing on the night. It called not from an
ominous dark but the darkness of possibility. Its song tugged at the
bleak dark inside me, out of which, I would learn—was it teaching
me?—a kind of music can be made.
us. They were the bones of the animals whose throats contained a
special organ called a syrinx—named scientifically in 1872, taking the
ancient Greek word for a human instrument, a shepherd’s pipe, and
in this etymology we hear the flights of our own musical language.
Syrinx: an organ that carried piercing-lilting notes to our ears, like
the flutes we would learn to make. Through their bones we sent our
own breath, and behold!—our songs could carry far, too. The birds
inspired us to make music, and to inspire is “to breathe spirit into”

I n my palm, a whippoorwill would weigh no more than fifteen

or twenty copper pennies. Yet, in the psyches of those who lived
in its breeding range historically, the bird had immense gravity,
(though this meaning is considered archaic, out of usage), and in
this way what we share with birds is at the foundation of what makes
us human—for how could we live without music?
something I didn’t know as a child in my isolation. Throughout a We wanted to be something like the birds, did we not? And we
wide swath of the East, from the Atlantic coast all the way to the succeeded. Their gift was song, and we learned it. The harmonica
tallgrass prairies of eastern Kansas, and from the North in southern that Uncle Eck plays in the song is an iteration of the bird flutes,
Ontario and Quebec, down to the northern portions of Alabama and ancient instruments. Our breath through their bones lifted onto the
Georgia, the bird’s mating song, that weightless part of it, seeped air in carrying notes and helped lift us, our arms flapping outward
into people’s minds, giving the whippoorwill cultural density. from our bodies; we danced, for which purpose we found our own
In the gloaming, past dusk and before dawn, it pours forth “the skeletons were well-designed.
courageous repetition of its name,” as one Simeon Pease Cheney
wrote in Wood Notes Wild, in 1892. This bird that repeats its own
name in the dark sung its way, especially, into the hearts of Appa-
lachian people, suffusing their songs with contours of feeling that
grow fuzzy with time.
Fuzzy like the record made in 1927 of Uncle Eck Dunford and
“T he Whip-Poor-Will’s Song” was laid down on shellac at a
makeshift studio in Bristol, Tennessee, the second and third
floors of the Taylor-Christian Hat and Glove Company.
Hattie Stoneman, two musicians from Southwest Virginia, singing More than thirty years earlier, two women had organized the first
“The Whip-Poor-Will’s Song,” of which I had obtained a copy. I Audubon group in Massachusetts in response to the slaughter of
had spent the early summer digging for tunes that mentioned the millions of birds for their feathers, used by the millinery industry
whippoorwill, and this was the oldest one I found. Down through to decorate women’s hats, and women in Tennessee soon followed
ninety-five years of time, the song wended its way to me, sweet and their lead to organize their own Audubon society. I wonder if the hats
wistful. A guitar and harmonica, a subtle and fluid fiddle, two voices. sold at Taylor-Christian had feathers in them; I wonder if the cryptic
“I wandered by the woody rill where ev’ning shadows play, to whippoorwill ever saw the light of a wide-brimmed hat. Americans
hear the song of the whippoorwill as he sings his ev’ning lay,” Dun- had already witnessed the loss of iconic species, like the passenger
ford intones. The old meaning of lay was a short song or poem. The pigeon, the last of which died in 1914, and the Carolina parakeet,
meanings of many words have fallen by the wayside or into obscurity North America’s only parakeet, the last of which croaked in 1918.
along with many songs. The recording was an aural artifact. “O, list’,”
sings Dunford, short for “listen.” I did.
Between phrases in the chorus, Stoneman pipes in with “whip-
poorwill!” in a girlish soprano, the only word she sings in the song,
as if she’s the bird itself. “O, list’,” and Stoneman interjects with
whip-poor-will!
“His song”—whip-poor-will!—“It floats”—whip-poor-will!—“a-
long”—whip-poor-will!—
I played it again and again, relishing the quirky affectations of
the singers, the pleasing repetitions.

T hat the songs of birds spur our own is such old news, and so
obvious maybe, it verges on the quaint, or precious, or plain
boring, I fear. But I mean to drum on the everyday ground we walk
on, to try to sound what’s beneath it or in the past, the bones that
have been buried below us.
Among the oldest artifacts of our music-making, excavated from
caves in southern Germany, are the bones of birds. Homo sapiens
took up the bones of fallen birds, stripped of meat. They were hol-
low: made to defy gravity and fly long distances, lightweight, good
bones for the animals that were intermediaries to the spirit world,
messengers to the gods, ascending into the canopies, high above

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 79
There was a national recognition that more birds could go extinct.
At the end of July, high summer, the whippoorwill must have
been singing in rural Southwest Virginia, just a little ways north
of Bristol, where both Dunford and Stoneman lived. It was only
one of dozens of songs recorded over the course of a few days by
a producer named Ralph Peer, who worked for the Victor Talking
Machine Company in New York. Those sessions are now referred to
as the Bristol Sessions, which some have come to call the Big Bang
of Country Music. “Hillbilly” music had already been laid down on
record in New York studios a few years previous. But by lugging his
recording equipment down to Bristol—the largest urban area in the
Southern Appalachians at the time—Peer drew scores of rural mu-
sicians out of the woodwork during ten days of recording in which
he paid artists fifty dollars cash for each record side they made. In
the Bristol Sessions, Peer recorded the Carter Family and Jimmie
Rodgers, both of which would come to define the evolving genre.
Uncle Eck and Hattie Stoneman’s song is one of the lesser-known
ones of the famous sessions, but nonetheless: the whippoorwill was
there at the beginning, flitting through the understory.
“T he beginning,” this big bang: when my grandmother was four
years old in East Tennessee, my great-grandparents alive.
Having grown up in the odd remnants of the rural, and now living
rurally by choice, maybe I dug toward something ancestral. Maybe
I was homesick. I wanted the dark of the mountains and their quiet,
far from the honky-tonk lights of Nashville. To hear the beginnings
of the genre intertwined with the whippoorwill’s melody I heard as
a child set unexpected whirlwinds of sentiment astir in me.
Not nostalgia, for childhood was bad for me, as I’ve said, and
nostalgia is dangerous, especially for descendants of white settlers,
especially in a nation in which the rural agricultural economy less
than two centuries ago was based on a system of slavery. But I thought
of Thoreau, who spoke bitterly about the rapid industrialization of
New England and the loss of the rural while he also advocated for
disobedience against a government that instituted slavery and war,
an economy that operated on the same extractive principle when
80 WINTER 2022
logging forests and expanding commerce as when treating Black
bodies as property and as farm equipment. Thoreau advocated
for the nation’s moral advancement and never accepted that the
destruction of its lands and the wildlife that makes a home there
was called “progress.”
The last time I visited my grandmother, I had read her collection
of Thoreau’s writings, flipping through Walden and Civil Disobedi-
ence while she dozed in her recliner. I pulled out the extensive notes
she’d tucked in between the pages throughout, handwritten and in
cursive—her never-realized attempts at an essay, which were put on
the back-burner as she wrote recipes on notecards, detailing dishes
she would cook for her husband. Reading her notes on Thoreau, I
peeked over intermittently at her to see her eyes closed, wool blanket
covering her feet and shins.
“O h, pray”—whip-poor-will!—“Now, pray”—whip-poor-will!—
“We hear”—whip-poor-will!—“His lay”—whip-poor-will!—
I n May, the birds return from their wintering grounds at the very
edges of the Southern Coastal Plains, the Florida panhandle,
along the East Coast of Mexico, and deep into Central America. I
wanted to travel deeper into the breeding range, deeper into my
home, where I had a better chance of hearing one, but over the
phone Chris, the wildlife biologist who said I could accompany her
on a whippoorwill survey, told me she was still wrapped up doing
a survey of golden-winged warblers. And anyway, we needed to
wait until the moon was waxing closer to full. “Whippoorwills don’t
like to call if the moon isn’t shining,” she told me. The bulk of the
bird’s food source is moths, probably large-bodied ones like the
magnificent Luna moth, pale green and velvety in the night. They
hunt them by sight, scanning with their black saucer eyes for moth
wings backlit by the moon.
Chris sent me some old naturalist reports, which she liked to collect.
A Mr. Howard Cleaves wrote in 1945 that, “Moonlight unquestionably
exerts a stimulating influence on Whip-poor-wills. On dark nights,
even during the height of the nuptial period, birds may call for less
than an hour.” But “on clear, moonlit nights the resounding cry…
can be heard all night long.”
As if a mark of this, the throat of a whippoorwill has a moon in
it. In 1751’s A Natural History of Uncommon Birds, George Edwards
wrote, “On the Throat it hath a Half-Moon, like Spots of White, the
Corners of which turn up towards the Ears.”
The moon on its throat is a thin crescent. That was the phase the
moon was in. We needed a moon fifty percent or more illuminated—
anywhere between first quarter and last quarter, with a full moon
being peak—to give us the best chance of hearing them.
So, I waited while the moon grew, dug for more songs, and made
a whippoorwill constellation of tunes to hang in the country music
firmament, traced the lines between them. As we gaze across space
and glimpse old starlight, light that has traveled many years and
miles, so I bent my ears to hear, across the distance of time and
space, the glimmers of years long gone.
I heard the delightful “Call of the Whip-Poor-Will,” recorded in
Atlanta in 1928 by the Stapleton Brothers. One of the brothers
whistles a not-entirely-accurate yet lively mimic of the bird’s song.
Imitation birdsong had always been an art form, but it became a
part of popular culture during the vaudeville era, and a market later
developed for whistling on record.
I was transported by West Virginian Roy Harvey’s 1931 rendition
of “Where the Whippoorwill is Whispering Goodnight,” a song he
also recorded with Charlie Poole’s North Carolina Ramblers in 1930.
“In that quaint old-fashioned home tonight I’m list’ning, where the
whippoorwill is whispering goodnight,” sings Harvey in a strange,
pinched but lilting tenor.
Bradley Kincaid’s “The First Whippoorwill Song,” recorded in
1933, is a simple tune featuring only a guitar and his mellifluous
voice. “Meet me this evening, when you hear the first whippoorwill
song,” he coos. “We will meet in the woodland, far away from the
hurrying throng, and whisper our love to each other, when we hear
the first whippoorwill song.” A cover of Kincaid’s song was released
the following year by North Carolina’s Early Skyland Scotty, featuring
another imitation-birdsong whistler, who trilled joy into my insides.
An archivist at the Library of Congress sent me a 1937 recording
of the Bogtrotters Band, made in Galax, Virginia. Uncle Eck Dunford
was a member of the Bogtrotters, and the song is the same as that
first one I had come across from 1927, this time with Mrs. Kate Hill in
the part of the whippoorwill, along with a man who goes unlisted.
A field recording made by folklorist John Avery Lomax, it’s raw and
ramshackle in the best of ways.
The Delmore Brothers’ “When It’s Time for the Whip-poor-will
To Sing,” released in 1941, had an earnestness to it that made me
ache. It was a popular tune of theirs on the Grand Ole Opry radio
broadcast throughout the 1930s. “She is mine and the thought of
her grows sweeter when it’s time for the whippoorwill to sing,” the
brothers warble in harmony.
Everywhere across the country-music universe, I heard the wan-
dering cry of the whippoorwill, a song that, it seemed, was eternal
and could not fade out.
“Hear that lonesome whippoorwill, he sounds too blue to fly,”
Hank Williams crooned in 1949. “The midnight train is whinin’ low,
I’m so lonesome I could cry.” The song is meted out in measures
regular and calm, the rhythm guitar and bass plodding along, but
the steel guitar bends toward ecstasy, and Hank’s voice veers toward
complete undoneness, some kind of inner combustion of desire. It’s
as unforgettable as the whippoorwill’s song.
And the train’s whine—that auditory emblem of industrialization,
of rural people going off to faraway cities and leaving the country
behind—is now heard alongside the whippoorwill, who sounds too
blue to fly.
S ome of the recordings, including the last, I had in my vinyl
collection. I set a galaxy of songs spinning in my head, in my
living room, got lost in the orbit of records on rotation. I lay on the
floor, the crackle and static of dust under the needle.
The moon waxed slow. The universe is vast. The Big Bang was not
a beginning, of course, only a particular moment, fifty years after
Edison and others had invented the phonograph, that revolutionary
technology that recorded sound. And Bell’s telephone came into
being a year before that, and both were followed shortly by the
radio. The ways that people were listening through time and space
were changing.
A Duplex Phonograph Company ad read: “The voice, formerly
invisible and irretrievably lost as soon as uttered, can now be caught
in its passage and preserved practically for ever.” An ad for a gram-
ophone stated it was “the only permanent means able to reproduce,
in a natural quality, a living breath of air and speech—of those who
will hereafter pass from this life.” These were the hopes placed on
the technology of sound recording. Everywhere in the rhetoric
surrounding the phonograph, writers spoke of the possibility of
preserving the “voices of the dead.”
I floated in this nebula of country stars who sang of whippoorwills,
trying to imagine myself back to a time when people listened for the
birds’ songs, when their fanciful notes wove into our human lives
and hearts, sparked a feeling, lit a fire inside. Had we quit listening
to birds that way, even as their populations plummeted, as their
music became more rare? In the old recordings—rare now, too—I
felt I could touch a time that was not very distant—that I could pull
the past closer, and the whippoorwills.
T he 1927 recording, the earliest one I could find, kept tugging
me back. When it was recorded—when country music was
born, as some say—Americans had been leaving the countryside
in droves for decades. In a burgeoning capitalist economy, people
were on the move to cities to find work in textile mills, sawmills,
factories, and on the railroads.
The phonograph industry at the turn of the century had been
wholly focused on urban Americans, who were easier to reach with
advertising and were learning to become consumers of entertain-
ment with their wages.
In his definitive history, Country Music, USA, Bill Malone writes
that the music of rural people, like the recordings I had been lis-
tening to, was already labeled in the 1920s as “old-time singin’” or
“old familiar tunes” by the record companies. The genre became
hillbilly, and then country. Malone writes that consumers heard it
as “a static or rarefied expression of a dying peasantry, an art form
that could not survive the industrializing process.”
With the phonograph, music-making among common people who
played the old familiar tunes (most of the whippoorwill recordings
are variations of anonymously written old songs) largely faded away
as a daily sustenance, replaced by the consumption of mechanically
reproduced music. Even as voices were preserved, they were buried
by the high turnover of popular records. What the folklorist Arthur
Palmer Hudson called “the singing habit” of Appalachian culture fell
by the wayside that would become a four-lane highway. The whistling
masters of bird impersonation—often associated with the Black
musical traditions and labeled “primitive”—passed out of existence.
B ut we will always have these recordings.
In The Audible Past, scholar Jonathan Sterne writes that
the phonograph emerged within a culture “increasingly interested
in all manners of preserving the dead.” Embalming had become a
widespread practice during the Civil War, when large quantities
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 81
of dead bodies had to be sent back to their homes and loved ones.
Embalming fixed “the tissues by chemical means,” for a while, at
least, and, with the addition of cosmetics, gave the appearance of
life beyond death; rouge on the cheeks and lips to bely the gruesome
fact that blood no longer coursed beneath the skin.
The last passenger pigeon shot in the wild was stuffed and mount-
ed. Hundreds of Carolina parakeets were killed and taxidermied as
their populations plummeted, their vivid green and yellow feathers
no longer ruffled by the wind.
Wax discs from the Bristol Sessions, “The Whip-Poor-Will Song”
included, were shipped back to company headquarters in New York
packed in dry ice.
“Death has lost some of its sting since we are able to forever retain
the voices of the dead,” an early listener of the phonograph reported.
Perhaps it was true. Nearly a century since they were sung, I’d dug
the voices up, to give them life again. Or I hoped they might infuse
new life into the whippoorwill’s song that was fading due to urban-
ization, loss of habitat, the change of climate churned by rampant
global industrialization, deforestation in their wintering grounds,
and the industrially produced pesticides that have been decimating
insects like moths, that primary food source of the whippoorwill.
I listened to the old country songs, voices of the dead, spinning
them into existence again. Or were they haunting me? The moon
waxed to gibbous, and I went to the mountains.
C hris and I trudged along under red oaks and hickories, crunch-
ing through the leaves with our rods of river cane, looking for
an odd bird hunched leaflike.
At high summer in the woods, I am usually gazing bright-eyed
into the sea of green above and the light it filters, whatever colorful
warblers flicker within it. To focus down at the brown leaf litter
shifted my vision. All the rot of past years piling up. All the death
that feeds life, decomposing back into the soil to feed the canopy
above. What I’m talking about is how heartache feeds our songs,
how death can give new breath, how life springs from the ruins.
All I wanted to see in the leaf litter was a female whippoorwill on
her nest, her mottled plumage, the funny whisker-like bristles that
protrude from the birds’ faces I had seen in pictures, eyes wide fixed
on me while she incubated the next generation.
The light shifted into evening. A few nights shy of full, the moon
would soon rise. Before migration was a known fact, it was believed
that birds flew to the moon for the winter. I imagined for a brief
moment the moon’s gray surface aflutter with gold, blue, gray, um-
ber, black, indigo, and teal wings, all the world’s songbirds gazing
down on us from the heavens. Many cultures believe our once-living
ancestors are in the stars. The report I read detailing the whippoor-
will’s decline estimated that the continent’s landbird populations
have fallen by a billion in my lifetime. Twenty percent of our 448
landbird species are headed toward extinction.
“There’s a very loud Eastern towhee,” Chris said. Its mnemonic—
the English words that birders and ornithologists transpose onto the
bird’s calls, so that they can better remember them and teach them
to others—is “drink your tea.” Its song shot across the canopy again:
82 WINTER 2022
Drink your tea tea tea tea tea! it yelled to us.
Whippoorwills, of course, “say their own names,” which makes
the brain do a little backflip: as if we gave them the name first, and
then they began to say it. Or as if they always had their names, and
we simply listened and transcribed it. This naming, this language, is
how we send our calls to birds as they call out to us. Who was poor
Will?, I wondered. What was the birds’ name to the Cherokee, those
who lived here before settlers?
In bird songs, we also listen for language of another kind, as their
migration and breeding patterns speak to us of seasonal changes that
give our lives rhythms. “As soon as the Indians are informed by its
notes of its return,” wrote the English settler Jonathan Carver, in 1778’s
Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America, “they conclude
that the frost is entirely gone…and on receiving this assurance of
milder weather, begin to sow their corn.” Time-keepers, whippoorwills
signaled the seasons’ changes, before time was standardized by clocks
ticking on wrists and chiming from mantels. In summer they were the
daily sound of nightfall. And so their songs became associated with
meeting lovers on warm summer nights, the birds’ desires for mates
mirroring and sparking our own longings. What would the earth be
without its moon, and what would we be without the birds that encircle
our lives, pull on hearts as our satellite pulls the tides?
“Oh, listen!” Chris cried, pointing up to the canopy. “Some warbler
nestlings are begging for food!” I perked my ears. “Hear them?” Chris
asked, smiling. “They sound like little whispers.” She imitated them,
squeezing air through her teeth. Then I heard them, sounding as
she had mimicked them, but a little different. Her mimic opened a
new passageway into my ears. I wondered, when birdsong-whistlers
were common, mimicking the songs they heard, if they served as a
conduit between our language and that of the winged ones.
Chris found her path to ornithology after getting a degree in biol-
ogy. She worked on a summer job with a professor who continually
played birds’ songs, asking her to identify them. She discovered she
was quite good at it, that she had an ear for it. If she heard something,
she remembered it.
“Do you hear the wood thrush?” asked Chris. I needed no help
recognizing it. It fluted, its notes riffling along the trees’ crowns.
It was my favorite song of the high-summer Appalachian forests,
bouncing off the canopy’s ceiling in a way that had always given
the woods an interiority, a sense that I was inside the lives of the
birds—in their world, not that they were in mine.
The wood thrush’s song hushed me. I wanted only to listen. But I
also felt they were listening to me.
When I was teaching children some years ago, I led them daily into
the school’s woods on quiet walks, challenging them to take the most
silent steps they could along the path, as if their shod feet were the
soft paws of a coyote or fox. Without fail, though, we always startled
the birds, and they sent out their alarm calls, which are different
than their melodic songs. These sharp and pointed shrieks spread
word of our presence, carried bird to bird long-distance like a radio
broadcast. The deer, the squirrels, the chipmunks, the bobcats—all of
whom are listening, too—receive the message and skedaddle. Much
stays hidden, listening for our footsteps to pass.
“Oh, there’s a black-throated green warbler singing,” Chris said.
Chris liked to say the names of the birds she heard, and of the
trees she walked under. “Why do you think you like to name the
birds when you hear them?” I asked.
“I feel like the ground is going to fall out from under me if I don’t
know the names,” she said. “When I can’t remember them, I feel
disoriented.”
“Maybe the ground is falling out from under us because we’re
forgetting to learn the names,” I said.
I told her that in the town of Brevard, the county seat, I asked
around, at a restaurant, at the campground where I slept, a coffee
shop, a bookstore, if people heard the whippoorwill calling that
summer. No one knew what I was talking about. “What’s that?” they
asked me. What if, even where whippoorwills still sing, we are no
longer listening?
“I want people to know what a whippoorwill is,” Chris said. “Who’s
going to teach people what these birds are?”
I’d been reading the book Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping,
Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, by an ethnographer named
Steven Feld. In his study among the Kaluli people of the Papua New
Guinea rainforests, who know birds’ songs intimately, Feld opened
the way for a new “anthropology of sound.” In the book, he recounts
an incident when he was asking questions to a Kaluli informant each surface. Flutter, rouse. I could not see, but I heard the lay of
named Jubi. “With characteristic patience, Jubi was imitating calls, the land around me, and the old meaning of lay was a song or poem,
behavior, and nesting,” Feld writes. “Suddenly something snapped; Uncle Eck had taught me. Whippoorwill, with its voice, made all
I asked a question and Jubi blurted back, ‘Listen—to you they are the land sing.
birds, to me they are voices in the forest.’” And then we heard two whippoorwills, then three.
Feld writes that he continued to learn that to the Kaluli, “bird
sounds are simultaneously heard as indicators of the avifauna and
as ‘talk’ from the dead…‘in the form of birds.’”
Voices of the dead. This shook me. Whereas our phonograph
records preserved the voices of the dead, the Kaluli people’s birds
did the same thing.
O n the occasion of the phonograph’s invention, a writer in
Scientific American wrote that, “Whoever has spoken or who-
ever may speak into the mouthpiece of the phonograph, and whose
I thought of my grandmother, who we called Moon, born just a words are recorded by it, has the assurance that his speech may
few years before the “The Whip-Poor-Will’s Song” was first recorded. be reproduced audibly in his own tones long after he himself has
She told me several times that her mother asked to be buried in a turned to dust.”
“mourning-dove gray” dress, and that every time she heard the bird But hasn’t art, from the earliest cave paintings of palms stenciled
cooing she thought of her mother. I, in turn, on hearing it, now think against stone, from the earliest songs, the ballads and oral histories,
of my grandmother’s story, and of the great-grandmother who lived the myths, always held within it this effort, this hope? Hasn’t it always
before me. I know her dying wishes as if they were put on record, meant both to express the life of the present moment, the moment
though they were just passed down in this story, and in that way I we’re leaving behind, and to touch those who aren’t yet living, with
know something of my lineage. a hope that our kind will continue beyond our lifetimes? Don’t birds
Fifteen years ago, in her first year on the job, Chris heard “older do the same with their songs, expressing the life that beats within
folks” saying they didn’t hear whippoorwills as much as they used their feathery breasts right now while passing the ancient melodies
to. That’s why we were out here now, collecting data so that she on to fledglings?
could get a better idea of their local populations. In one of the old writings Chris sent me, a naturalist described
the birds’ mating dance that he’d had the good fortune to witness:
“The male called from a low branch overhead, while the female
strutted on the gravel path below, with wings and tail outspread and

T he moon was up.

It was time to quit looking. With our divining rods we had not
found the place where song grew in the leaf litter. Chris stashed the
head lowered, and sidestepped back and forth, half way around to
the right, then to the left, all the time uttering a curious guttural
chuckle.” I imagined the birds out there dancing in the dark where
river cane back in the truck. The other birds would soon fall silent. we couldn’t see them. Do-se-do and round and round.
The whippoorwill’s time to sing was nearing. Would we hear them,
though we had seen none? I imagined the arc of shadow rolling across
the mountains as the earth turned away from the sun.
The sky darkened to a deep powdery blue and we stood at the
edge of a field, the woods crowding against it, pines becoming black
silhouettes. The moon was a cantaloupe. No clouds. A couple of stars
T he whippoorwill kept singing, a wild surge.
I reached for my recorder, but I knew there would be no
way to record it, not really. And I reached for my pen, but I knew
shone through the gloam’s curtain, and the dark deepened. my language would fail me. But I tell you this story that happened
And then it sang. The folds and creases of the mountains that anyway, once upon a high lonesome. What I’m talking about is how
rolled around us, their hollows and ridges and bedrock and granite out of the darkness a kind of music can happen. How it is happening
outcrops: the whippoorwill’s voice bounced along the contours of now—though this moment has passed.

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 83
84
 he world of the word-searchable online databases of
old-newspaper archives can be an eerie place—both
a consoler and an extender of insomnia. The searcher
moves down hallways full of blue ghosts who play
out human destinies, who are always flickering into a
kind of early-cinematic life. You witness things. That
famous scene in Blade Runner, when Rutger Hauer is
talking in the rain, remembering spaceships on fire?
You feel like that sometimes. People ask what you’ve
been doing, and you say, “Research.” Occasionally,
you come across something you can’t just shuffle into
a folder called “Amazing leads for down the road” or
whatever. You can hear it crying out that it wants to
be known.
Such is the story of Rackback Tom and Mattie Floyd,
which has its whole existence in a smattering of doc-
uments and news items from East Texas in the 1870s and ’80s. I
encountered it in the fourth column of the third page of the Austin
American-Statesman of June 6, 1883. I don’t precisely remember the
path of keywords and search-terms that led me there, but I know that
I had become interested in the town of Longview, Texas, about for-
ty-five miles from the Louisiana border, because of an extraordinary
hanging that had occurred there five years prior, in 1878. Actually,
the hanging was probably the opposite of extraordinary. A Black
man named Diomed Powell, from Fannin County, and a mixed-race
man from Nashville, Tennessee, by the name of Ben Hadley, had been
convicted of murdering a local German grocer and were about to be
executed. Both had confessed to involvement. They had bludgeoned
him and cut his throat with a cheese knife. What’s extraordinary is
how the talk in their cells, before they were led to the gallows, got
recorded down to the word by some unusually intrepid and metic-
ulous reporter. It’s rare to be able to hear, especially at that level
of accuracy, across a hundred and fifty years. A Baptist preacher
was present, a Rev. Mr. Booth. The prisoner Hadley started making
speeches, asking the reporter to take down a “Letter to the Boys,”
which he had composed. It was full of bluster. “If it could not be
done without blood spilt, we feared no man or anything.” The Rev.
Mr. Booth did not like it. He had been in charge of the men’s souls
during the preceding days, and now he felt publicly embarrassed
by this display of hard-heartedness. He “kneeled down suddenly
near the door of Ben’s cage.” He said, “Ben, you have shown in your
statement a spirit of vengeance and viciousness that proves you have
not profited by my prayers.”
Ben —Mr. Booth, I have nothing to say ’bout it. I say all them
things to the world; they are not my feelings.
Mr. Booth (with some excitement) —You can’t with my sanction
send out such statements as your feelings. There is no hope for
you now.
Ben —I think there is hope, Mr. Booth.
Mr. Booth —No, no; there is no penitence; you justify your crime.
Ben —Sorry you think that way, Mr. Booth.
Mr. Booth —No, sir; you will go from the gallows to hell.
Ben —Don’t say that. I have been trying to get shut of this con-
fession a long time. I hope God will hear your prayer.
Mr. Booth —My prayers avail not for such a spirit as yours.
Ben —When I came to Texas there was the worst mob law in the
world here. Got we boys started and—
86 WINTER 2022
Mr. Booth —I am imploring you, as your friend and minister,
to turn while yet—
Ben —If I had not listened to your prayers so solid for me I
would have killed myself in here, and they would not have the
pleasure to hang me.
Mr. Booth —It is loss of time to pray for a hardened man, who
wants vengeance for his race.
Ben —When the world was discovered; but I am sorry to hear
you talk that way, Mr. Booth.
“When the world was discovered”—those are the little bits of
language that don’t get preserved. The strange things we say.
That all got me interested in Longview, and I spent a couple of
hours hunting for other early mentions of the town. Established
just after the Civil War, it was a fantastically violent place during
its first two decades of existence, especially when you consider the
tiny population. Somebody was always blowing somebody’s brains
out with a Derringer over a petty slight. A relatively innocent sen-
tence from the winter of 1885 does work that a long list of gruesome
examples could only attempt: The skating rink opens up, and the
management finds it “needful to prohibit tripping and fast skating,
to prevent rows and murders.”
In the year 1883, two things were happening in Longview. The
racial tension, never absent, suddenly flamed up. The reasons aren’t
clear. There had been an incident at the start of the year. A group
of Black men had “attempted to rescue two negro prisoners in
charge of a white officer.” Despite the fact that there was a whole
“gang of negroes,” three of them were killed, but only one white
man (strange how often it happened that way). This event may have
caused unrest in the town. Later that year, the papers reported that
the whites of Longview were living in fear of “a murderous outbreak
of the negroes” and standing guard day and night. Soon a “reign of
terror prevailed in every portion of the country around Longview.”
The white farmers started keeping their wives and children in the
gin houses for safety. Hundreds of men were “buying ammunition
and Winchesters.” There were, moreover, “indications that as much
fear has been excited among the negroes as among the whites.” An
anonymous correspondent added, whether with tragic irony or
cold-blooded mockery, it’s hard to tell, “We are inclined to think
the fatalities will be found mostly on the negro side.”
The other thing happening in Longview during that same time
was a minor suicide epidemic. Donald Carter, a prominent citizen,
“suicided by taking morphine.” His young wife had died, one of “the
most charming young ladies in Texas.” Brooding over the loss, he
“finally determined on self-destruction.” J. W. Cheatham, on trial for
insurance fraud, “obtained permission of the officer guarding him
to go to the jurors’ room in the courthouse to rest, and when in the
room he by the aid of a small piece of looking-glass cut a deep gash
in his head back of the ear, laid down and bled to death.” At one
point, there was an outbreak, three suicides in one week. It’s in the
reporting on that little cluster of deaths that Rackback Tom makes
his first appearance. The first article is a dark, lost American poem.
It even has a kind of sonnet form.
LONGVIEW.
Two Departures via the Morphine Route—a Heavy Rain.
[Special to the Statesman.]
Last evening a deformed negro called “Rack Back Tom,”

emptied a bottle of morphine down his throat, from the effects
of which he died this afternoon.
W. H. Williams, a tie contractor on the International
and Great Northern for the last eight years, bought a bottle of
morphine this morning with which to deaden the pain occa-
sioned by a large boil on his hand, and was dead at 4 o’clock
this afternoon, having swallowed the entire amount. His friends
think he acted intentionally.
A tremendous rain, lasting nearly the whole evening,
fell here to-day.
The last part: a quietly sublime American sentence. Rackback:
probably scoliosis. Nine months later, this time in the Galveston News
of March 31, 1884. Galveston is almost one hundred miles south of
Longview—the story was being picked up by other Texas papers, a
piece of colorful melodrama from a small town:
LONGVIEW.
Found with Her Throat Cut—Buried—Political.
[Special to the News]
Mary Floyd, a colored woman, was found with her throat
Previous Spread: Illustration by Carter/Reddy.
Source Photos © Adobe Stock. Razor: Vlad Ivantcov; Bottle: Walter Cicchetti; Roses: alesikka
cut, in tho [sic] negro
burying ground, this
morning. She was alive,
but as she will have no
care will doubtless die.
She was the wife of the
negro, Rack Back Tom,
who committed suicide
here last August on ac-
count of her infidelity to
him, which has preyed
upon her, until she says she
received a message from
him last night to come to
him.
Elder Richard Perry, one of
the most noted colored men
in Northeast Texas, died yes-
terday, and was followed to
tha [sic] grave to- day by over a thousand negroes,
who stood about in groups, unmindful of the sui-
cide, who lay weltering in her blood close by.
Another candidate for mayor and two for al-
dermen were added to the list yesterday.
The “negro burying ground.” That’s probably the
Union Post Oak Cemetery, about ten miles outside of
town, in what the very helpful Longview Director of
Grant and Human Services, Laura Hill, described as a
“historically more black portion of the county.” Elder
Perry was the founding preacher of Bethel Baptist
Church in Longview. The church still exists. Notice
that the article has the same three-part structure,
two paragraphs of profundity and one of mundanity.
Who was writing them? Someone worked as a “special
correspondent” to a larger network of Texas papers.
The only person I could find identified as a journalist
in Longview during these years was a white man named Harry
Woods, from Altoona, Pennsylvania. He was said to be “employed
on a paper called the Longview Democrat.” He sent a copy of the
Democrat back home to his friends.
One thing: “as she will have no care.” I think that means that she is
refusing care. But it could mean that they do not intend to provide it.
Variant versions of the article include different (though never
contradictory) details. It seems that Harry Woods, if that’s who’s
writing these, was fattening his paycheck (only slightly, no doubt)
by sending different copy to different newspapers for which he
served as Longview correspondent. An item appeared in the Fort
Worth Daily Gazette.
LONGVIEW.
Death of Elder Perry—The Tragic Tale of Rack-back Tom and
his Repentant Spouse.
Special to the Gazette.
One of the most noted negroes of Northwest [sic] Texas,
Richard Perry, died yesterday. At least 1,500 colored people
were present at his burial.
Last August a colored man, Rack-back Tom, committed
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 87
 suicide because of his wife’s unfaithfulness. This seems to have
partially crazed her, and this morning she was found near his
grave with her throat cut. She was not quite dead, but said Tom
had sent for her and she was going to him. Of all the multitude
in attendance at the burial for Elder Perry, none heeded the
half-crazed dying suicide.
One candidate for mayor and two for aldermen were
added to the number yesterday.
Another version, this time from the Dallas Daily Herald, gives
still more color.
LONGVIEW.
Mattie Floyd (colored) attempted to cut her throat with a razor
yesterday. Her husband died about a year ago, and as she says
appeared to her Friday, told her he wanted her to come to him
to cook for him and wash him a shirt. Saturday she cut her
clothing to shreds, broke up the furniture and with a razor on
Sunday morning inflicted two gashes in her throat from which
she may die, falling over her husband’s grave.
Here her name—Mary, in the first piece—has become Mattie. The
latter turns out to be correct. She and Tom are there in the 1880
census for Gregg County, Texas. Thomas and Mattie Floyd. He’s a
laborer, she’s keeping house. He’s twenty-one, she’s twenty. Neither
of them can read or write. Their marriage certificate, from 1878, also
exists. They were married by the justice of
the peace. That document gives her maiden
name: Martha Sapps. Thomas Floyd married
Martha Sapps.
Tom’s 1883 suicide attempt was successful,
but in 1884 Mattie’s failed. We know because
a year after it, in July 1885, she was charged
with attempted murder and convicted. Here’s
another special dispatch from Longview,
in the Dallas Herald. Seems to be the same
person writing.
four-foot-six and 118 pounds. Her complexion is on the lighter end
(“Mulatto”). Her habits (there was a column for “Habits”) were “Int.,”
i.e., intemperate. She worked as a cook. The “Conduct Register” for
Rusk Prison records that on at least one occasion she was punished
for “Abandoning work.”
She got out in 1887. I lose her after that. A handful of Mattie Floyds
and Mattie Sappses surface later in different parts of Texas. One got
into trouble with the law, one was murdered herself, one married
another man and had a bunch of children, and she lived to be old.
None has a better claim than the others to being the same Mat Floyd.
Part of what makes the story of Mat and Tom disturbing is the
racialized context in which we experience it, namely, white Southern
newspapers of the 1880s. These accounts are not sympathetic, or not
sympathetic enough. There is a leering quality to the language, and
in reading them, one has at times a sensation like complicity. Stories
like this were printed, in too many cases, to make white people feel
better about their own lives, or to elicit head-shaking and laughter.
As readers, we become another person at the funeral, refusing to
pay attention to Mattie as she lies there, or worse, maybe, trying to
pay attention but finding that she will receive no care. The suffering,
hers and Tom’s, has a nobility and a terror that are independent of
us and beyond us. If we were to do away with these compromised,
unfriendly sources, the couple would not come into sharper focus,
they would disappear. Should they be allowed to do so? It seems
unacceptable.

LONGVIEW.
Mrs. Mattie Floyd, colored, plead guilty of
an attempt to murder Cary Post and was
given two years in the penitentiary. It will
be remembered Mattie was the wife of
“Rack Back Tom,” who committed suicide
a year ago, and Mattie procured a razor
and went to the grave of her departed
husband and cut her throat, but survived.
She stated that she had promised Tom to meet him in hell the
next morning.

I couldn’t find out anything much on Cary (or more properly,

Carrie) Post—except that a white woman by that name did live in
Longview—nor about what had happened that Mattie tried to kill
her, or if that accusation was even true. What’s clear is that Mattie is
there in the Texas prison records for 1885. In the “Convict Record”
book for the newly constructed Rusk Penitentiary in Cherokee
County (built to relieve overcrowding at Huntsville) she’s listed
as Mat Floyd. That must have been her nickname. She was small:

88 WINTER 2022
90 Photograph © Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The everlasting legend of Tanya Tucker
BY JASON KYLE HOWARD
91
 n a cool night in downtown Los Angeles in January
2020, barely six weeks before the world closed
down, Tanya Tucker stood on an island stage at the
Grammys in the middle of the cavernous Staples
Center, alone except for Brandi Carlile, who was
hunkered behind a Roland baby grand piano. For
a moment there was silence, even stillness, and
then the audience began to applaud and yell. As
Carlile struck the first chords of “Bring My Flowers
Now”—a song she co-wrote with Tucker and Carli-
le’s bandmates Phil and Tim Hanseroth—television
cameras captured Tucker in a candid moment of
vulnerability she rarely displays.
The then-sixty-one-year-old veteran performer
took a deep breath. The beading of her suit, along
with her platinum hair, streaked bubblegum pink,
glowed in the spotlight. She reached for the drape
of her exquisitely tailored jacket, stroking it for
reassurance, or perhaps to ground herself in the
moment she must have thought would never come.
Then the muscle memory of nearly fifty years in the business—five
decades of playing barrooms, casinos, rodeos, state fairs, arenas,
even the Super Bowl; five decades of peaks and valleys, of being
lauded as an innovator and dismissed as a has-been—took over. She
straightened her posture and began to sing.
The very sight of Tucker at the Grammys, much less standing
center stage in primetime, was an unlikely one, and not just because
she had been in semi-retirement from recording for over ten years
before the release of While I’m Livin’ to universal critical acclaim
in 2019. Backstage at the awards show in 1992, Tucker pulled what
might have been her Biggest Badass Moment in a career that boasts
a legion of strong contenders for the honor. Across the nation,
country music’s popularity was exploding. People who had previ-
ously derided the genre as tired and hokey were now embracing the
genre-blurring sounds of Wynonna Judd, the acrobatic showmanship
of Garth Brooks, the sophisticated balladry of Trisha Yearwood,
and the fiery sex appeal of Tucker. But the Grammys, at least in
Tucker’s estimation, had not caught up. To her, this was evident in
the number of country awards being given earlier in the afternoon
(away from the main stage and the attention of the world’s media),
and in the way she and other country performers were treated back-
stage, relegated to sharing dressing rooms with backup singers for
pop acts. After presenting three country awards onstage with Chet
Atkins, Tucker made her way as instructed to the press room when
something came over her. She felt a need to defend the honor and
integrity of her native genre.
“I’m gonna tell you people something,” she announced. “Country
music is the greatest music in the world, and I’m proud to be a part
of it. We come to these Grammy Awards and you all act like rock
and roll is the only music in America. We come here as representa-
tives of our music, and we get treated like redheaded stepchildren.
I for one am getting pretty damn tired of it, and you can stick your
awards up your butt.”
But that wasn’t all. In a moment captured by a People magazine
photographer, Tucker turned to leave and, moved by the moment,
flung a chilly look over her shoulder, calling attention to the plung-
ing cut-out of her gown that revealed her creamy bare skin. “See
this back? That’s the last you’re gonna see of me.” And with that she
92 WINTER 2022
turned on her stilettos and flounced from the room.
Nearly thirty years later, Tucker had set aside her rancor and
stood at center stage, looking for a new beginning with the indus-
try. Earlier that afternoon, in presentations still not deemed high
profile enough for the primetime telecast—a move that must have
rankled her still—she had taken home two Grammys out of four
nominations. At the podium expressing her gratitude for being
awarded Best Country Song for “Bring My Flowers Now,” she turned
nostalgic. “You know, after almost fifty years in this business, after
many dreams, it’s still unbelievable to me that I’d still have a few
firsts left. So after fourteen trips, fourteen nominations, this is the
first win and”—interrupted by applause, which was led by Brandi
Carlile standing beside her, Tucker became emotional and seemed
at a loss for words—“I can’t believe it…And I just want to say, no
matter how young or how old you are, never stop following your
dreams. Keep going.”
But her triumph wasn’t over. Soon, she was called back to the stage
to accept the award for Best Country Album. This time Carlile, who
produced While I’m Livin’ alongside Shooter Jennings, spoke: “Me
and Shooter asked Tanya why she hasn’t made an album in almost
twenty years, and she said it’s because when her mom and her dad
died, she just couldn’t do it anymore, and she thought that it meant
there was more love behind her in her life than ahead of her. And
she knows that’s not true right now.”
That must have been what Tucker was feeling on that island
stage: that somehow, all the years of struggle, grief, and loss had
been worth it. Her rough-hewn voice—now huskier, wiser, leathered
from cigarettes, drink, and living—filled the arena with its emotional
precision and honesty: Bring my flowers now while I’m livin’ / I won’t
need your love when I’m gone. Between the lines of those poignant
lyrics, there is an unmistakable message.
This is what you’ve been missing. There are stories in this voice.
Listen.
B efore anything else—before the drug use, the provocative
outfits, the stint at Betty Ford, the tabloid focus on her ro-
mances and offstage antics—there was the voice and the stories it
told. Always sounding older than her years, capable even at thirteen
of accessing reservoirs of emotion and knowledge that rightfully
belonged to a woman twice her age, Tucker instinctually knew how
to use her voice to tell a story.
While every song tells a story to some degree, not all songs are
“story songs.” These function as musical short stories or even novellas,
compact narratives filled with characters, plot, sense of place, and
drama. Think Bobbie Gentry’s classic “Ode to Billie Joe,” one of the
greatest American songs ever written, and its evocative beginning:
It was the third of June / another sleepy, dusty Delta day. When
married with the song’s languid shuffle of guitar and moody strings,
that becomes the stuff of great musical narrative.
Now primarily the territory of the Americana genre, such story
songs were once the lifeblood of mainstream country, and Tucker
is one of the form’s finest interpreters. She cut her musical teeth on
them. If you mine the narrative terrain of her first three albums,
which she recorded between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, you’ll
find a landscape populated with them. The legendary Billy Sherrill,
her first producer, knew what he had on his hands: a prodigy who
could wrap her voice around a lyric, who knew how to sing of grief
and longing, of danger and revenge.
In “The Jamestown Ferry” (number five on the Billboard coun-
try charts in 1973), included on her debut album, she inhabits the
character of a woman abandoned by her man. “What’s Your Mama’s
Name” (number one in 1973), the title track on her second album,
tells the story of Buford Wilson, who is searching for a woman he
once knew in New Orleans who has given birth to a “little green-eyed
girl.” The chilling “Blood Red and Goin’ Down” (number one in 1973)
sees Tucker as the young girl riding through rural Georgia with her
daddy as he looks for his cheating wife and, after an act of violence,
sees her mother and her mother’s lover “soakin’ up the sawdust on
the floor.” In “The Man That Turned My Mama On” (number four
in 1974), she becomes another young girl, this one curious about
her absent father. “No Man’s Land,” which was never released as
a single, is perhaps the darkest tale of all. Tucker transforms into
Molly Marlo, a young rape survivor who later gets revenge on her
attacker while serving as a prison nurse. (It’s at once incredible and
disturbing that she recorded this song
when she was only fourteen.)
Even as Tucker got older, moving
from adolescent hitmaker to a sophis-
ticated twenty-and-thirty-something
NEARLY THIRTY
with a remarkable run of successful
chart singles beginning in the late
YEARS LATER,
Eighties and continuing through the
mid-Nineties, she remained faithful to TUCKER HAD SET
the form of the story song, recording
them with more contemporary, and ASIDE HER RANCOR
often uptown, twists. The scorching
“I’ll Come Back as Another Woman” AND STOOD AT
(number two in 1987) endures as one
of country’s greatest kiss-offs, with a CENTER STAGE,
wronged woman vowing to seek her
revenge in reincarnated form. “Two
Sparrows in a Hurricane” (number two
LOOKING FOR A NEW
in 1992), a tender ballad that endures
as one of Tucker’s signature songs,
BEGINNING
chronicles different eras of a romantic
relationship, with artifacts—such as a
WITH THE INDUSTRY.
set of car keys—that recur in moving
ways, the last instance in old age.
And then there’s “Delta Dawn,” the most famous song in her
extensive catalogue, which marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2022.
Written by Alex Harvey and Larry Collins, it depicts a faded forty-
one-year-old beauty who, haunted by the man she lost years before,
roams the town of Brownsville, Tennessee, in expectant, futile pursuit
of him. The fact that Tucker even recorded it is a bit of a miracle.
The story goes that one night, her producer Sherrill tuned in to
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and saw a then-unknown
Bette Midler perform the song. Sherrill was so taken with Midler and
“Delta Dawn” that he tried to sign her, but upon learning she had
already secured a record deal, he took the song to Tucker. It became
her debut single, rocketing to the top ten of the country charts when
it was released in April 1972 and establishing the thirteen-year-old
singer as a star.
Although Midler recorded “Delta Dawn” first, and although Helen
Reddy took it to the top of the pop charts in 1973, it is Tucker’s ver-
sion that has stood the test of time. There’s a reason why, on Spotify,
Tucker’s “Delta Dawn” has notched nearly 40 million streams, com-
pared to 6.5 million for Reddy and, as of this writing, 439,000 for
Midler. A saccharine facsimile of Tucker’s down to its distinctive a
capella opening, Reddy’s cloying delivery simply lacks authenticity.
Midler’s is far better; in her hands “Delta Dawn” becomes a different
song altogether. She infuses her vocals with a gentle loneliness,
following the music’s build from a quiet opening to a torch finale,
replete with r&b flourishes.
But even The Divine Miss M can’t approach Tucker’s performance,
which is rendered with a toughness and vulnerability that haunts
the listener. There’s something about the a capella opening of the
chorus—how her young but implausibly careworn voice soars over the
resonant backing vocals of the Jordanaires, who function throughout
the song almost as Brownsville townsfolk bearing witness to Delta
Dawn’s heartache. The way Tucker renders the word dawn—pro-
nouncing it with a long o, doan, and dipping the first syllable down
one note before returning the second to its proper place—roots it
in a distinctly Southern and rural set-
ting. When she unleashes her vibrato,
which sounds like a bucking bronco she
is just learning to tame, Tucker lends
the title character’s search an urgency.
She makes it clear that Delta Dawn’s
hunger is not just emotional; it’s also
carnal. The effect is a sung short story
that is immediate, innate, inhabited—
qualities a producer might recognize
and encourage but could never teach,
not really.
When she sang “Delta Dawn” as her
encore in January 2020 during a two-
day sold-out residency at the Ryman,
Tucker held the capacity crowd in the
palm of her hand. As she belted the
lyrics, strutting the stage in an all-black
ensemble—a lace top and form-fitting
trousers, an enormous bejeweled belt,
and fringed boots—the audience sang
along. Some had tears in their eyes from
Tucker’s emotional delivery. Along with
my husband, I was sitting with two re-
markable Americana singer-songwriters, Hayes Carll and Allison
Moorer. A lauded vocalist and Academy Award nominee who has
given and witnessed hundreds of remarkable performances, Moorer
grabbed my hand at one point and mouthed Wow. Somehow, de-
spite singing “Delta Dawn” thousands of times across five decades,
Tucker was able to still fully embody the lyrics and convey the rich
emotion of the character.
Perhaps that’s because in addition to her innate talents as an in-
terpreter, Tucker is also a student. You can hear shades of Connie
Smith in her voice—in her phrasing and inflections, such as the way
she sometimes punctuates the end of a line with the hint of a sob.
Loretta Lynn, whom Tucker counted as a close friend up until her
death in October, is there too, her homespun moxie felt in Tucker’s
unapologetic bravado. But above all there is Elvis Presley, whom
Tucker has long idolized and to whom she has often been compared
in her sensuous live performances. In her memoir Nickel Dreams:
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 93
My Life, Tucker recounts how Presley once gave her a lesson in
stage presence. Back in the mid-Seventies, Tucker and her sister
attended one of his concerts in Las Vegas. Presley got word the
young country ingenue was in the audience and, in the middle of
the show, he descended from the stage. Tucker writes that Presley
“leaned over me, sexy as all get out, swinging his body around and
smiling at me, ‘This is how you do it, girl.’ I knew he was right, too.
He had the moves and I wanted to have them, too.”
Apparently, she already did. When Tucker played Denver, Presley
returned the favor and slipped into the wings of a club to watch her
perform. Before he left, he turned to Mae Axton, the legendary song-
writer who had co-written “Heartbreak Hotel” and who was also a
friend of Tucker’s, and observed, “She’s a female Elvis Presley.” Even
today, at sixty-four, there are few performers in any genre who can
match the electricity and sensuality Tucker brings to the stage. Her
entire body becomes part of her interpretation of a song, swaying
and strutting and moving her hips, submitting to the demands of
the song’s mood and rhythm.
Despite all of this—her undeniable
gifts as an entertainer, as a vocalist,
as a musical actress even—somewhere
along the way the industry’s, and even
sometimes the public’s, awareness of
her substantial talents got lost. And it
took a respite from the pressures of the
business, and the demands she placed
on herself, to bring it back into focus.
E ver since she was a teenager, Tuck-
er has always lived her life on her
own terms. When she was fourteen,
she recorded David Allan Coe’s erotic
ballad “Would You Lay With Me (In a
Field of Stone)” over her parents’ ob-
jections—and took it to the top of the
country charts and number forty-six on
the Billboard Hot 100. Even then, she
knew her own mind.
By the time she was coming of age in
the late Seventies, Tucker was itching to venture into new artistic
territory. She had changed management, moving from Nashville to
L.A., and her new representatives were encouraging her to try her
hand at rock. The result was TNT, an album better remembered now
for the provocative poses Tucker struck in the album’s artwork. No
longer the demure adolescent decked out from neck to ankles in
gingham, on the cover she sports skintight black leather pants and
a flirty button-up. Her lips are parted in a come-hither look with a
microphone held near her mouth, its cord snaked between her legs.
On the interior sleeve, the camera captures her looking over her
shoulder, a crimson spandex suit hugging her body as she clutches
a bundle of dynamite.
While TNT didn’t exactly create an explosion on the charts, it
did signal a new period in Tucker’s creative and personal lives. To
many country fans, she had gone Hollywood in both music and im-
age. She was also living in the fast lane for the first time, drinking
and experimenting with drugs. Then she fell into a relationship
94 WINTER 2022
with Glen Campbell, the Rhinestone Cowboy and member of the
fabled Wrecking Crew, the group of studio musicians who played
on everything from Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night” to the
Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.
Tucker was twenty-two, Campbell was forty-four, and that marked
age difference, coupled with rumors of rampant cocaine use and
physical violence, created a tabloid firestorm. Although the intense
relationship lasted just over two years, Tucker has long maintained
there was real love there—and that she and Campbell could have
made it had it not been for the drugs. When he died from Alz-
heimer’s-related complications in 2017, she mourned him deeply,
releasing a tribute song in his honor.
In the wake of their tumultuous breakup, Tucker increasingly
turned to partying and garnered more headlines in the tabloids
for her love life—both real and imagined. There were rumors of a
reunion with Campbell that turned out to be false, although Tucker
later admitted in Nickel Dreams she would have been willing to
take him back. When she ran into Clint
Eastwood, an old acquaintance, at a bar
in Aspen and was pictured with him the
next day on the ski slopes, the National
Enquirer cooked up a romance. “By the
time it made the papers, I’d broken up
Clint’s long-term love affair with Son-
dra Locke,” she wrote in her memoir.
But one thing was true: “I was wearing
down. I looked older than my years,
and I was exhausted a lot of the time.”
Her fans began expressing concerns,
including one elderly woman she re-
membered who approached her after
a show in Fort Worth. “‘You gotta start
takin’ care of yourself, child,’ she said.
Nobody knew that better than me, but
I wasn’t taking the good advice.”
Worried for her health, Tucker’s fa-
ther stepped in and moved her back east
to Nashville in the mid-Eighties. The
industry didn’t roll out the red carpet;
they considered her washed up. She
wasn’t even thirty. But she, along with
her father and her producer Jerry Crutchfield, managed to resurrect
her stalled career with Girls Like Me, an album that produced a num-
ber-one country hit with “Just Another Love” and three other Top
Ten singles when it was released in 1986. Still, her family staged an
intervention, and Tucker spent twelve weeks at the Betty Ford Center.
In her memoir, Tucker explains that she went unwillingly, only
to please her parents. While the stint in rehab slowed her down, it
did not completely tame her; she continued to enjoy the occasional
drink. But it did give her a clearer perspective, which paved the way
for a meaningful romantic relationship with burgeoning actor Ben
Reed, with whom she had two children: a daughter named Presley
in 1989, and two years later, a son, Beau Grayson. (Another daugh-
ter, Layla, with Nashville musician Jerry Laseter, would follow in
1999.) While her romantic relationship with Reed did not last, the
two maintained a friendship and co-parented their children. And in
yet another Badass Moment, Tucker called out Vice President Dan
Quayle in the wake of his 1992 attack on single mothers via Murphy
Photograph © Globe Photos/ZUMA Wire/Alamy
Brown, the television character played by Candice Bergen. Quayle’s
comment set off a national firestorm, and just like she had done at
the Grammys earlier that year, Tucker felt compelled to respond.
“Who is Dan Quayle to go after single mothers?” she asked the
New York Daily News. “What in the world does he know of what it’s
like to go through pregnancy and have a child with no father for the
baby? The real trouble with these situations isn’t the women having
children out of wedlock, it’s men with no backbone like Dan Quayle
who don’t understand their plight.”
During this period, the continued salacious stories in the tabloids
of Tucker’s colorful personal life sometimes subsumed her music.
Did these depictions match reality? In some cases they did, as she
has readily admitted in interviews and in her candid memoir. Sim-
ilar behavior by the likes of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Hank
Williams Jr., and George Jones enhanced their status as outlaws,
earning them the status of anti-heroes to be venerated and emu-
lated. But while Tucker’s press coverage might have increased her
fame—“This bad reputation has made me a damn good livin’,” she
jokes in a new documentary—much of it was rooted in misogyny,
such as when People magazine observed in 1988 that Tucker “has had
more boyfriends than some people have had hot meals.” As was the
case with other female artists who refused to toe the conventional,
proper, patriarchal line, the breathless stories about her were often
inflated and conflated to create a caricature that overshadowed an
astonishing artistry.
During Nashville’s annual awards seasons, she was often over-
looked. Despite five nominations as Top Female Vocalist from the
Academy of Country Music, Tucker never won the award. She fared
slightly better with the Country Music Association, which had nom-
inated her six times before she finally won their Female Vocalist of
the Year award in 1991. (“Thank God,” her celebrated contemporary
and fellow nominee Reba McEntire was quoted in Nickel Dreams as
saying. “Thank God she finally won that award.”)
And yet the quality of her singles from this period remains incon-
trovertible. Listening to “Love Me Like You Used To,” her number-two
single from 1987, offers a master class in vocal restraint. Tucker’s
plaintive vocals, delivering lines that cut to the emotional quick—we
used to play around under the covers / but now it’s just a place to
watch TV—capture a yearning that is at once emotional and sexual.
The dark, bluesy groove of “Some Kind of Trouble,” which appeared
on her album What Do I Do With Me and peaked at number three in
1992, sizzles with Tucker’s trademark sass. As she sings about being
behind on her rent, learning her boyfriend is cheating, and losing
her job, you can hear the lived experience in her voice. Her playful
vocals on “Down to My Last Teardrop,” when she puts her straying
man on notice with the suggestive lyrics I don’t care who or what
you’re doin’ / Ain’t gonna be no more boo-hoo-in’, capture Tucker
at her feisty best.
Beyond their commercial performance, songs like these endowed
Tucker with an identifiable quality. In a genre that prides itself on
creating and maintaining a close, personal connection with its lis-
teners, it’s little wonder that Tucker’s songs were so successful. She
had been there too, her fans believed. Her songs appealed especially
to women—particularly single women and newlyweds—and to rural
gay men, who recognized in her all the characteristics of a good fag
hag: acceptance, campiness, a shoulder to cry on, and a wild streak.
This knowledge must have sustained Tucker in the late Nineties,
when her long period as a chart powerhouse began winding down
after the release of Complicated in 1997. Only the single “Little
Things” reached the Top Ten. Although she continued to tour, her
recording output became sporadic. Following the release of Tanya
in 2002, the highest single of which charted at number thirty-four,
and the deaths of her beloved parents, Tucker fell into a depression
and lost much of her creative drive. She spent a lot of time on the
beach in California and on her ranch with her beloved horses. My
Turn, her 2012 album of country covers she had long wanted to
make, proved a creative disappointment. Tucker didn’t know if she
would ever record again. She was mistaken.
I n The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile, a doc-
umentary that premiered at South by Southwest in March 2022,
director Kathlyn Horan skillfully and tenderly captures Tucker’s
return to the studio to record While I’m Livin’, her first album of
original material in seventeen years. The night before the recording
sessions began in January 2019, Carlile realized they should be doc-
umented. She had been talking with Rick Rubin, who had expressed
regret that he hadn’t filmed in the studio when he helmed Johnny
Cash’s American Recordings, which kickstarted a creative and
critical juggernaut in the singer’s last decade. Heeding his advice,
Carlile got in touch with Horan, whom she had met through her wife
Catherine Shepherd. As a fellow fan of Tucker’s, Horan responded
with an emphatic Hell yes.
“The moment I first spoke to Brandi, I hoped there would be a film,”
Horan says. “As we began to roll, it was obvious there was something
extraordinary happening…By day two, I knew we needed to keep
filming beyond the recording session and there was an opportunity
to tell Tanya’s story in a new way.”
The Return of Tanya Tucker is compelling, captivating in its por-
trayal of Tucker as an artist who, despite all the gold and platinum
records and the decades of experience, is plagued with insecurities.
“I’ve come back so much they don’t believe it no more,” she says. What
emerges from the film is the courage it must have taken Tucker to
enter the studio with new producers who are a generation younger
than her and to be vulnerable in front of them—and the cameras.
Horan explains, “She didn’t approach this with the protections
and preciousness one might expect from such a legend. Tanya is
generally a pretty open person, which is one of the reasons she’s so
compelling to be around and I think why her fans are so devoted
to her. Tanya has always presented as tough, so I think the level of
vulnerability we see [in the film] has an even bigger impact…I think
revealing the artistic process in such depth is something she hadn’t
done. She is a total perfectionist and vocal master, so having that
access was pretty incredible and [something] we didn’t take lightly.
I don’t think Tanya thought about allowing this to happen at the
time, I think she just trusted us.”
Tucker was initially hesitant to make While I’m Livin’. Although
she had known producer Jennings most of his life via his famous
parents, Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, she was unfamiliar with
Brandi Carlile and her music. (“I didn’t know who the hell she was,”
she confessed to Entertainment Weekly.) She was also not convinced
about the songs. A creature of the old ways of Nashville, when artists
and producers would scour a stack of demos they had been given and
attend guitar pulls in living rooms and writers’ nights at the city’s bars
in search of new material, Tucker has long prided herself on being
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 95
able to pick hit songs. Her track record, after all, speaks for itself.
Tucker had recorded some of the biggest-selling country singles of
the 1980s and 1990s. Over the course of her career, she has released
ten number-one singles, a staggering forty Top Ten hits, and eight
Top Twenty recordings on the Billboard country charts. The songs
Carlile brought along were different; they hit especially close to the
bone. Carlile, along with her bandmates and songwriting partners
Tim and Phil Hanseroth, had studied Tucker’s life and career, and
then set out to write songs that built a near-mythical narrative around
her. Except for a few notable tracks like “Changes”—which Tucker
co-wrote in the aftermath of her breakup with Glen Campbell and
which stands as one of her finest, if largely forgotten, songs—she
had typically steered clear of memoiristic material, preferring to
immerse herself in character. This time, the character would be her.
While she considered these songs, evaluating their messages and
quality, Tucker knew in her bones this would not be a commercial
record that would blaze up the country charts. Were she to proceed,
she would need to let go of her entrenched expectations and learn
a new way to work.
“Mustang Ridge,” the album’s spirited opener, captures the pull
of the road for Tucker—and her ambition to leave her native Texas
behind in pursuit of her musical dreams. “The Wheels of Laredo,”
an epic track that is one of the album’s highlights, captures vivid
scenes from along the Mexican border that are infused with equal
measure of beauty and longing. Tucker’s devotion to her beloved
father is present throughout the album, but especially on “The Day
My Heart Goes Still,” a ballad of unconditional, undying love. For
good measure, she covers Miranda Lambert’s “The House That Built
Me,” easily one of the finest mainstream country tracks of the century,
and plumbs new depths of emotion with her gravelly vocal. While
I’m Livin’, of course, wouldn’t be a Tanya Tucker album without
a boot-kicking track, in this case “Hard Luck,” which could easily
serve as a summation of Tucker’s artistic drive and stubborn will:
Hard luck, keep truckin’ / I was born to a hard luck world.
As Carlile and Jennings coaxed her into the process, Tucker finally
saw she had little to lose. The last twenty artistically fallow years
had been a struggle. She knew she had more to say, more to give.
Maybe she called up a memory: the spark of ambition she felt as a
child back in St. George, Utah, one day when she and her father Beau
were on the way to Los Angeles in search of a recording contract.
The young Tucker had started to enjoy school and had momentarily
placed it before her music. As they were leaving St. George, Beau
Tucker pulled over and asked his daughter a question. “What’s it
gonna be, Tanya? We can keep on trying or go home and you can
have this regular life you’ve started to love so much.” Her reply was
emphatic, if silent. She pointed in the direction of L.A., and her
father began to drive.
That spark, Tucker decided, was still there. It just needed to be
kindled—and Brandi Carlile was just the person. It helped that
Carlile had been raised on Tucker’s music and knew her extensive
catalogue inside and out. Although Tucker was unfamiliar with
the younger artist, at their first meeting she recognized in Carlile
a kindred spirit, someone she could trust, and she slowly began to
let down her guard.
An acclaimed singer-songwriter with a cult following, Carlile had
seen her own career explode to stratospheric heights after she sang
her song “The Joke” on the Grammys in 2019, a performance so riv-
eting that she went from playing small theaters to Madison Square
96 WINTER 2022
Garden almost overnight. Like Tucker, Carlile is also a consummate
student who enjoys paying homage at the feet of her elders, including
Joni Mitchell, Elton John, and the Judds.
While she treated Tucker with the respect she deserved, Carlile
was also determined to challenge her. When Tucker doubted the
quality of her vocals—wishing she had held a note longer, or pushed
her voice higher—Carlile reassured her, and even tenderly laid down
the law, a moment that is captured in the documentary. This album
was a portrait of Tanya the Vocalist, not Tanya the Entertainer. What
mattered most were the layers of emotional authenticity that were
naturally present in each take.
Carlile and the Hanseroth twins also managed to draw out a song
from Tucker, one she had begun composing decades before but
had never quite been able to finish. The Return of Tanya Tucker
captures the moment when Tucker offhandedly sings the chorus,
fully formed except for a word or two, and provokes an immediate,
emphatic response from Carlile: “That belongs on this record.” The
track, “Bring My Flowers Now,” becomes the album’s beating heart,
telling the story of a woman who, after a lengthy career spent in
the public eye—enduring dizzying heights of phenomenal success
and periods of being undervalued and written off—is insisting on
her due here, now, while she is still around to appreciate it. Don’t
spend time, tears, or money / Over my ole breathless body, Tucker
warns. If your heart is in them flowers, bring ’em on.
When it was released in August 2019, While I’m Livin’ received
widespread acclaim, with the New Yorker opining that it “might be
the best record of Tucker’s career; it is certainly one of the albums
of the year.” While I’m Livin’ appeared on a slew of year-end lists,
including those of Billboard, Variety, NPR, Stereogum, Paste, and No
Depression, and topped Rolling Stone’s ranking of Best Country and
Americana Albums. This reception, coupled with Tucker’s triumph
at the Grammys, revitalized her career and introduced her to a new
generation of admirers. Among music fans and industry insiders
alike, there was a newfound respect for Tucker and her talents;
the New Yorker heralded her as “one of America’s great vocalists.”
Although Tucker hadn’t changed, the times had. She had made the
right album at the right time. Despite mainstream country’s continued
domination by Bro-country acts, whose songs about beer and trucks
are nearly indistinguishable, the growth and success of Americana
over the past twenty years has opened up space for artists like Tucker.
Instead of relegating them to “Legacy Artist” status, a pejorative
death knell for those considered to be no longer commercially viable
because of their age, Americana welcomes seasoned performers and
songwriters with open arms. Album releases by the likes of Emmylou
Harris, Rosanne Cash, and Lucinda Williams are treated as Events.
The genre places a premium on honoring both tradition and artistic
innovation, and its listeners and record executives alike have a finely
tuned ear for rich narratives and characters.
What’s more, American culture itself had finally begun to change.
After all these years, Tucker was finally being valued not in spite of
being country’s Original Female Badass, but because of it. Her wild
streak, for which she had previously been essentially slut-shamed in
some quarters, was now seen as pioneering. She was embraced as a
feminist icon who had owned her sexuality at least twenty years before
Shania Twain scandalized Nashville in the mid-1990s by revealing her
navel. She had survived a relationship fraught with domestic violence.
She had given birth to three children while refusing to marry their
fathers, and what’s more, she had taken the vice president of the United
States to task when he condemned single mothers. She had more than
earned the moniker emblazoned on one of the t-shirts available in her
online merch store: Tanya Mother Tucker.
In demand for the first time in years, she slowly began playing
higher-profile gigs. Tucker also returned to acting. (A little-known
fact is that, as a child, she gave an affecting performance in a crit-
ical scene with Robert Redford in the film Jeremiah Johnson and
later took acting classes with Lee Strasberg at the Actors Studio.)
In September, she appeared in a cameo on the new television series
Monarch starring Susan Sarandon, Anna Friel, and Trace Adkins,
and she recently wrapped a six-week shoot on a holiday film.
Tucker has also expressed her appreciation to her gay fan base,
who have stuck by her through thick and thin. An icon to rural
queers since she first began recording, Tucker had become an ally
in the 1980s—quite the risk for a mainstream country star these
days, with the genre’s largely conservative fanbase, and even more
so then. In Nickel Dreams, she movingly recounts her friendship
with Michael Tovar, a hairdresser who came to be counted among
her best friends, and his death from AIDS. Recent years have seen
Tucker starring as a guest judge on episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race;
recording “This Is Our Country,” a twangy track with RuPaul that
celebrates empowerment and inclusion; appearing at gay country
singer Ty Herndon’s groundbreaking Concert for Love and Accep-
tance in 2020; and headlining the Nashville Pride Festival in 2022.
But her rekindled love for music remains her focus. She and
Carlile, along with Jennings, have completed a highly anticipated
follow-up to While I’m Livin’ that is set to be released in 2023. This
time around, Tucker has recorded a duet with Carlile of “Breakfast
with Brown Eyes in Birmingham,” a song given to them by the
legendary Bernie Taupin. The pair have also continued their own
writing partnership on a track that features one of Tucker’s finest
vocal performances. Titled “Ready As I’ll Never Be,” the song offers a
poignant, gospel-tinged reflection on her relationship with country
music and all those she has lost—her parents, but also her heroes in
the industry, like Loretta Lynn—and the process of pulling herself
together in the wake of grief. Her voice, deep and resonant, glides
over Jennings’s placid piano, a gorgeous pedal steel, and background
vocals from Carlile and the Hanseroth twins, as she addresses all
you outlaws and the Opry queens. The song’s placement over the
end credits of The Return of Tanya Tucker offers a stirring coda to
the film. To Horan, it’s a song felt in the chest, recalling Tucker’s
early work, along with “a little TNT edge [and] a distinct Elvis gospel
crescendo.” “Ready As I’ll Never Be” seems crafted to receive an
Oscar nod for Best Original Song.
Like a character in one of the story songs she began singing all
those years ago, Tucker has finally—almost—come full circle.
Y ears ago, when Tucker was raising hell in bars on Nashville’s
Music Row, the legendary songwriter Harlan Howard told her
she was “a writer trying to get out of a singer’s body.” Since then,
Tucker has sometimes proven Howard’s observation true.
In the late Seventies, when she was recording her notorious rock
record TNT, Tucker co-wrote “I’m the Singer, You’re the Song,” a
tender ballad that reached the Top Twenty on the country charts
and marked only the second time she had recorded one of her own
compositions. After the now-classic barn burner “Texas (When I
Die),” it’s the finest track on the album, telling the story of a young
woman determined to defy the odds and reach the top, accompanied
hand-in-hand by the boy she loves. We won’t hear a word they say,
Tucker croons in her velvety, yearning voice. We’ll just do it our own
way / And I know we’ll show ’em all someday.
Looking back, there’s more than a hint of prophecy in those
words, which foretold how Tucker would chart her own course and
confound the naysayers, and in other lyrics that follow: Ain’t had
much time to look around / But I know I’ve found / A place in space
where I belong / I’m the singer, you’re the song.
It’s clear that one place Tucker belongs is on the road. She thrives
on touring and lives to be onstage. But after fifty years in the busi-
ness, after millions of singles and albums sold, hundreds of concerts,
there’s another place where she belongs.
The rotunda of the Country Music Hall of Fame is filled with
legends—creative pioneers and artistic innovators who have made
“significant contributions to the advancement of country music.”
Connie Smith is there, inducted in 2012 as “one of country music’s
premier vocalists.” So is Loretta Lynn, whom the hall celebrates
as “one of country music’s most popular performers [who] broke
ground for numerous female singers who followed her.” Tucker’s
idol Elvis Presley is a member as well, honored for his country
roots and “strong influence” on the genre and country charts “for
his entire career.”
Garth Brooks and Alan Jackson are there already, despite the fact
that they began recording almost twenty years after Tucker’s debut
album was released. Randy Travis is there, inducted in 2016 for a
career that began in 1985. Other stars of the Eighties and Nineties
have been honored: Reba McEntire and Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs.
The Judds are there too, finally inducted in 2022 after being shame-
fully excluded for at least two decades—despite being one of the
bestselling and most popular duos in country music history.
In considering Tucker’s exclusion from the rotunda, it’s possible
that over the years her remarkable commercial success has counted
against her, leading her to be dismissed as a mere hitmaker and
entertainer, and not properly recognized and appreciated as the
groundbreaking, influential artist she is. To some degree it’s an
almost understandable error. Tucker is just so damn good, and she
has been around for so damn long, that she has made it all seem
effortless. And yet it hasn’t been. “I’ve been kickin’, fightin’, scratchin’
all the time,” she observes in The Return of Tanya Tucker. Later,
she offers a revealing aside: “If I were to pay attention every time
my name wasn’t mentioned I’d be upset all the time.”
The fact is that, like mainstream country itself, the Hall of Fame
membership continues to be dominated by men, whose numbers
outrank women to a shocking degree. Of its 175 members—a tab-
ulation that includes individual members of musical groups—only
twenty-four are women. For a genre and industry that was built on
the sound of Maybelle Carter’s guitar, on the defiance of Loretta
Lynn’s voice, on the lyrics of Dolly Parton, this is a travesty.
Even in the absence of this grossly lopsided gender disparity,
Tanya Tucker merits a plaque on those walls alongside her heroes
and peers, as well as the performers who followed in her wake,
their paths made easier by the trail she blazed. If country music is
indeed about truths expressed in unvarnished language with voices
that pierce the heart, then Tucker surely ranks as one of the genre’s
greatest storytellers.
Bring her flowers now.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 97
98 Photograph by Sid O’Berry. Courtesy the Grand Ole Opry Archives
Buddy Harman and the quiet
revolution of country drumming

99
 hen Delta families gathered on humid Sundays
in white-painted, wood-floor churches to sing
the gospel by ear and rest their weary planters’
bodies, they didn’t bring percussion. When
cowboys in mud-flecked boots built fires in the
shadow of the Rockies and shared high-lone-
some musical lore, they carried guitars and
harmonicas, not sticks and mallets. Among the
Appalachian Scots-Irish, one cardinal instru-
ment—the banjo—belied an African origin,
but its drum was purely a resonator; mountain
music was strings or vocals only. And even
though rhythm was central to breakdowns and
fleet soloing, the instrumental thinness was
purposeful. Back to its earliest forms, before a
genre called “country” had even emerged from
the primordial ooze, it was keening and skeletal, not beat-driven.
Country musicians’ skepticism, even antagonism, to drums per-
sisted well into the twentieth century. But today, country and rock
have been so thoroughly absorbed and reflected into each other that
it’s impossible to tell which is a subgenre of the other, and drums are
now as fundamental as electric guitar or pedal steel. Before World
War II, this was music for barn dances, and by the mid-Sixties, it
was built for expensive hi-fis and rock clubs. For such an inherently
conservative tradition, that’s a veritable revolution.
It happened in a relatively few years, and not noisily. Drums snuck
into country music. None of its parent genres—gospel, western, or
hillbilly—relied on percussion beyond maybe a church tambourine.
But when those varied roots entwined in Nashville around the late
Thirties, they became the playthings of record producers with
hit-making on their minds. And for this new omni-genre to leap
and snap like “pop,” it needed drums. That’s what distinguished the
reigning swing bands of the day and, within a few years, the hottest
Southern-inflected r&b groups and Chicago electric guitarists.
Whether in jazz, gospel, or country blues, drums were the addition
that made regional folkways into cultural phenomena. The bigger
the beat, the more easily adopted by a national audience in the U.S.
But the delicate components of country music at that time, including
close harmonies and acoustic instrumentation, ensured that drums
would only play a supporting role. Even in this new commercial
country, there could be no equivalent to Benny Goodman’s 1937
“Sing, Sing, Sing,” in which Gene Krupa invented the drum-showcase
chart hit, even though a decade earlier Krupa had recorded a few
sides accompanying blackface yodeler Emmett Miller.
Instead, drums were used as texture, first just a snare played lightly
with brushes. Take an archetypal 1950s waltzing crawler, Jim Reeves’s
“He’ll Have to Go.” It’s the kind of airy, romantic Nashville cheese
that Reeves reveled in and humbly diminished as “lazy man’s music.”
You might have to lean forward to catch the metronomic, cotton-soft
snare pattern keeping time beneath the piano, guitar, vibraphone,
and backing vocals. But without it, this pillowy arrangement would
float away. That unstraying drum part gives a basic shape and speed
to an overly prettified, quite simple ballad. It adds a steady heartbeat
to a recording that’s otherwise all smooth edges.
It’s such a simple performance, you might not think the session
required a drummer per se—any studio hand with good rhythm could
do. But that snare credit belonged to Buddy Harman. And “He’ll
Have to Go” isn’t even high on the list of Harman’s most ubiquitous
100 WINTER 2022
or successful sessions, just as Jim Reeves barely rates among the
veritable deities that Harman recorded for and with.
Before “He’ll Have to Go,” which went to number two pop and
number one country, Harman had already drummed on a handful of
epochal rock & roll records, including some by the Everly Brothers
and Elvis, though he was just embarking on a country-industry ca-
reer that would soon match any Nashville Cat’s. Along with a small
brotherhood of fellow Music Row percussionists, he reared country
drumming from its infancy into adulthood. No one recorded or did
more on the instrument than Buddy Harman during the time when
the instrument became crucial. He never played a solo or sang a
chorus, but Harman was one of the genre’s transformational figures.
U nbelievably, his mother played drums, a rarity now and a
near-scandal for 1928, when Buddy was born in Nashville.
His youngest memories include a house littered with percussion
instruments thanks to his parents’ husband-and-wife music duo.
But his own interest didn’t arise until after the band ended and Mrs.
Harman had sold it all.
He was the perfect early adolescent age when “Sing, Sing, Sing”
mania arrived. Buddy worked as a movie theater usher to afford a
set of white-pearl Slingerland Radio Kings, Krupa’s kit, which he
bought for seventy-five dollars and paid off in three-dollar monthly
installments. He listened to Benny Goodman and Buddy Rich on
78s to hear his new heroes, he took private lessons, played in the
school band and the marching band. As often as he could, he went
to gigs in town just to watch other drummers and steal tricks. The
instrument consumed him. He joined the Navy at eighteen just so he
could get G.I. Bill funding for music school. It was 1946, a merciful
time to enlist, and by 1949 he was enrolled at Chicago’s Roy Knapp
School of Percussion.
At that point Buddy’s taste and career prospects rested on dance
bands—swing bands. The best-known name in country drumming
then was Smokey Dacus, late of Bob Wills’s Texas Playboys, and
Dacus, too, had come out of the pop-jazz world. But instead of a life
on the bus and the bandstand, Harman was blessed to return home
and find local touring and recording work with singer Carl Smith, an
eventual member of the Country Music Hall of Fame who was one of
the first Nashville stars to bring drums into his band. That attracted
the attention of Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley, dual architects of
the ascendant Nashville Sound, who put the vibraphones and lounge
piano in honky-tonk songs.
Atkins was an instrumental and technical savant, a pioneering
electric guitarist with flawless technique who also established mul-
titracking as a standard recording practice. Bradley, for his part,
was a protégé to legendary broadcaster and producer Paul Cohen
and a onetime employee at Cohen’s Castle Recording Studios, the
first commercial venture of its kind in Music City. Bradley was also
an executive for Decca Records’ Nashville division.
In other words, these were men of resources and their creative
ambitions reflected that. The defining element of Nashville Sound
country is that it feels expensive: the strings, the gauzy choral
groups, the depth and richness, the dependable brilliance of every
musician involved. It’s a luxury brand item. That’s not reflective
of country’s roots, of course, but Nashville Sound producers were
unique for not worrying if a few of those roots were lost altogether.
It wasn’t like Bradley or Atkins lacked respect for
tradition, they were just young creative minds with
access to a postwar deluge of new technology and
new money. And for all its success, the Nashville
Sound was controversial for certain stakeholders
in a subculture that fetishizes purity. There have
always been people who think country should only
have fiddles, not violins. But Nashville is where a
sweaty mess of regional influences became known
as “country music,” sellable item, in the first place,
and Atkins and Bradley were the engineers who
designed the factory.
When they first called in Buddy, he had already
played on “Bye Bye Love” and “Rockin’ Around
the Christmas Tree,” bouncy pop tunes with a pro-
nounced swing. Atkins produced “He’ll Have to Go”
and other Jim Reeves masterpieces. But in 1960,
Decca signed a young Virginia native named Patsy
Cline, and Owen Bradley was suddenly gifted a
voice worthy of his broadest talents. Patsy’s Decca
sessions with Bradley include many of her enduring
and popular tracks, including “Always,” “I Fall to Pieces,” and “Sweet Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman,” another rock staple. But “Crazy”
Dreams,” and Harman played on all of them. is in its own category, with its own still-vexing atmosphere. Harman’s
Remember that there was no template for drumming on country drumming is just as indelible here as in his louder performances. To
records by this point, especially not in a studio like the one that play such a gentle, unobtrusive pattern, confident that it will carry
Bradley infamously built in a customized Quonset hut, with state- music of this slow power and weight, is a form of musical genius. It
of-the-art mics and precision track separation to ensure perfect reveals an expert, empathetic listener.
clarity and detail on every instrument. Harman was used to really
pounding his drums on those rock & roll sessions with Elvis, but
these twangy ones required the opposite: He had to play like his kit
was made of lace. Sometimes, he remembered later, he made the kit
disappear and simply impersonated it: “Instead of playing drums,
they had a mike in front of my face. I was going chhh, chhh, chhh.”
“C athy’s Clown” and “Oh, Pretty Woman” showed that Harman
was becoming, in his words, “a little bit braver” behind the
kit. But the Nashville producers, “they wanted it straight-ahead. A
More often, he’d add a hint of backbeat with a little rim-click on top lot more limited.” In country, the drums were mere underlining.
of his snare brushing, as on Patsy’s “She’s Got You.” Virtuosic singers and string players still provided every necessary
With Patsy Cline, Buddy Harman had such a freakishly, multifac- emotional shade or instrumental achievement in this music; drums
etedly talented client that he got to play everything for her: light just kept everything running on the same track, whether with an
shuffles, torch songs, bluesy rave-ups, orchestral pop, hardcore energetic train beat or the fragile, heavy sway of a heartbreak ballad.
country, and a few dozen future American standards and karaoke That wasn’t a small assignment, especially not in the world that
stand-bys. And she appreciated him: Harman told a twenty-first-cen- Atkins and Bradley built in the 1960s, when Buddy Harman was their
tury interviewer that Patsy liked a lot of drums, perhaps because first-call drummer. He was the most in-demand percussionist of the
of her own early affinity for swing groups and Elvis. The music he unofficially named Nashville A-Team, the rotating house band for
recorded with her, especially the tear-stained songs that defined her the label studios on Music Row, and played an estimated eighteen
legacy after she died in a 1963 plane crash at age thirty, is cherished thousand sessions for George Jones, Johnny Cash, Tammy Wynette,
Americana, remarkable for its mystique and control. She elevated Roger Miller, Ray Price, Loretta Lynn, and just about every other
her material like no one else in the genre or elsewhere, and Bradley’s major country star through the 1970s. Harman kept as busy as anyone
arrangements were wide open and full of space, with each instrument in town, often playing four sessions a day for years.
free-floating and unhurried, an elegant backdrop that honored her A studio musician lives while the red light is on. Everything in their
voice like the diamond it was. Hearing those songs, even now, is like lives and their style is oriented toward doing exactly the right thing
a glimpse through a camera obscura—simple and otherworldly at when the engineer points the finger through the console glass. And
once, a down-home and unpretentious songbook lavished with the personal expression isn’t a high priority when a national corporation
utmost care and talent. is paying by the hour. Your job is to do your job—well and quickly,
“Crazy” was about as far from “rootsy” as a country song could then move on to the next one as soon as possible. Even though the
be in 1961. Only its lyrics bear a resemblance to Hank Williams; mu- A-Team was a shifting combination of the same players, the band
sically, it’s a web of jazz changes with a rollercoaster vocal melody, had different guises when they played behind different singers. They
arranged like a lush cabaret performance. Not long before this, knew how to switch from being “the Possum’s band” to “Loretta’s
Harman contributed the classic snapping drum track to the Everlys’ band,” and they knew how each of them sounded best. Harman was
“Cathy’s Clown,” and in 1964 he created the immortal beat behind a master of country drumming’s very limited technical repertoire,

Promotional photograph of the Tunesmiths OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 101


and that was plenty. His brushwork in “Ring of Fire” is sprightly and
springy, while his part on “Stand By Your Man” is far more dramatic,
with greater dynamic range and even a deep bass drum.
That latter hit came in 1968, by which time the Nashville Sound
was running headlong into contemporary fashion. “Stand By Your
Man” was produced and co-written by Billy Sherrill, who would
soon become the hottest producer in Music City. He borrowed the
Nashville Sound’s most pop-friendly excesses (namely the strings)
and added a little muscle. His signature works, like Charlie Rich’s
1973 Behind Closed Doors, or George Jones’s The Grand Tour from
1974, had the requisite Nashville stateliness but reflected the fact
that viable country was now coming out of Bakersfield, L.A., even
Austin. Harman, Jerry Carrigan, and Kenny Buttrey played regularly
on Sherrill productions, and even sometimes used two sticks.
E ven as players like Harman, Carrigan, and Buttrey revolutionized
country behind the scenes, Nashville gatekeepers still denied
the drums a part in the music’s public image. Back in 1935, Bob Wills
was already a celebrity bandleader when he invited Smokey Dacus
on board, and apparently the drummer was mystified: “What in
the hell do you want with a drummer in a fiddle band?” he asked,
and Wills replied, “I want to take your kind of music and my kind
of music and put them together and make it swing.”
Western swing became its own phenomenon and Wills reigned
as the Texas country king for decades, but his innovation—just one
snare!—wasn’t welcomed by the ultra-conservative Nashville main-
stream. In 1944, Wills was finally invited to the Grand Ole Opry but
was told to put his drummer behind a curtain onstage—and even
more hilariously, to not even mention the instrument on the air. When
he gleefully defied both orders during his performance, the Texas
Playboys were never asked back to country’s most hallowed stage.
It wasn’t only Wills, though. Drums were held behind the Opry
curtain for decades, including when Buddy Harman became a regular
performer in 1954. It wasn’t until 1974, when the Opry moved to its
extravagant new Opryland venue, that a full drum set was allowed
102 WINTER 2022
on stage and visible to all, and Buddy Harman
was the most routine presence behind it every
week for decades longer.
The Nashville drummers that emerged in Har-
man’s wake were used to playing a full kit from
the start of their careers. Long gone were the days
of single snares or literal whispers in the studio;
Eddie Bayers Jr. and John “JR” Robinson had
real backbeats and multiple crash cymbals. They
made country sound appropriate for drum-heavy
1980s radio and the booming Opryland stage.
Country music is tradition but Nashville is
commerce, and commerce eats tradition every
time. By 2000, when Buddy Harman was seven-
ty-two, he and other old-timers had become too
old-fashioned for the Opry band. He survived the
crossover of country and rock because he lived
that crossover himself, but how can any 1950s
beatmaker hope to survive in the age of “Man! I
Feel Like a Woman”? Pop once meant a swinging
snare pattern; now it meant drum programming
and amplification. Garth Brooks and Faith Hill weren’t going to reach
the back walls of arenas with brushes.
C ountry strings are tremendously expressive; twang is a guitarist’s
approximation of human speech. Bends and microtones on a
pedal steel are like a trumpet growling from behind a plunger mute—
an evocation of spoken drawls. Even in string bands and drum-free
bluegrass combos, the mandolin and upright bass can approximate
a backbeat well enough that the music is truly propulsive.
Actual drums are granted no such range. They deepen a country
song’s charm but rarely define it. If a producer needs arena-sized
volume, a Nashville drummer needs to supply that. Buddy Harman’s
Opry exit wasn’t surprising—it was inevitable in a community that
always follows the market. The surprise was his longevity during a
time of huge Nashville change. His career is both vast and simple,
almost a series of Zen koans: how to spend decades mastering re-
straint? To play so much music so unhurriedly, so consistently? To
sublimate your own ego for the strict needs of your genre, especially
after idolizing Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa?
For all his laid-back playing, Harman was a machine. “I worked
around the clock,” he told an interviewer in 2003. “I came home one
night and asked my wife, ‘Where are the kids?’ She said, ‘They grew up
and left home.’” In his 2008 New York Times obituary, his daughter said
he was playing drums in his sleep in his final days. He had a smile on
his face and his hands were moving, an image that reminds me of John
Coltrane supposedly practicing fingerings on a broom handle while
grocery shopping, keeping a ceaseless silent connection to the muse.
Harman’s role was simpler, his revolution was tectonic. He slowly
opened the music’s sound and intensity without ever threatening to
distract from the stars on the track. He smuggled percussion into
the country charts, then kept it there, almost in hiding, until his
influence spread so far he could finally lead his peers out of literal
anonymity. Buddy Harman entered country music as a novelty and
when he left, drums were a necessity. He gave this music a heartbeat
it didn’t know it needed.
Photograph of Chet Atkins, Floyd Cramer, and Bob Moore. Courtesy Buddy Harman Jr.
 One Small Step, 2019, oil paint, sand, vinyl glitter on canvas (48” x 48”), by Jamaal Peterman
104 © The artist. Courtesy Vigo Gallery, London
How trickster tales,
diasporic toasts,
and James Brown
shaped a genre

105
 y chest still swells when I hear Big K.R.I.T.’s
2014 “Mt. Olympus.” I put it on at least week-
ly. I think that’s part of what it means to grow
old in hip-hop. You don’t listen seasonally
anymore, to what is new, at least not as a
matter of ritual. Instead, you listen to what
you loved and what continues to speak to
you long after its newness has worn off. I
am a fifty-year-old Black American wom-
an. This means that hip-hop is one of the
soundtracks to my life. And more than most, I
have a Rolodex of rhymes in my head that are
triggered with the slightest reference point.
But there’s something about that particular
track: the way it marks not only a Southern
but a country geography to the art, one that
has little to do with the standard professional
accolades but everything to do with mastery
of craft and an active connection between emcee and the people,
that does it for me. It tells a story, suppressed but essential, of the
origin of hip-hop.
Although I can remember the first hip-hop record, and even the
first time I heard “Rapper’s Delight,” I am the first to admit I began
on the outskirts of the art. I was not a New Yorker, and even as a
teenager in the Northeast, I missed each summertime season of hip-
hop (the best season for new music!) because I was in Chicago where
house music was king, and Birmingham—my birthplace—where r&b
and soul held sway much longer.
I loved hip-hop though, from the first time I heard it. Full of both
ideas and feeling, the pulse of my generation, the children who
were left after Civil Rights were won and then lost. And I felt it had
something to do with me long before I ever set foot in a hip-hop show.
Even though I couldn’t rightfully claim the geographies it shouted
out, it helped me organize my thoughts about the politics of race,
the political economy, gender, place in the world, and generation.
It gave me a language for falling in love with the word and writing,
and I guess that’s probably why my first book was about hip-hop.
Decades later, my college student son is in a course about hip-hop
history and as often happens the past seems to kaleidoscope into
the present. Hip-hop is everywhere. And I wonder about the simul-
taneous feeling of deep intimacy and remoteness that always was
and perhaps always will be part of hip-hop to me. Where does that
tension come from?
I have an answer, I think. It’s about where the music came from
and the name it isn’t called.
Let me begin at the beginning.
e, who were not in or of New York, and especially we who
W were of that place endlessly marked out of step, “The South,”
heard something new and something we knew simultaneously when
hip-hop emerged. But it wasn’t so easy to testify to. Because by the
time Kool Herc was collaging the sounds he’d heard on turntables
in his native Jamaica and his best friend Coke La Rock was chanting
over them, much of these Black folks’ past had been discarded to
make a new home in New York City. By then toasting ballads, born
in the early twentieth-century Southeast and repeated by Black
106 WINTER 2022
radio DJs across the country, had become an inspiration for Count
Machuki. Machuki innovated the way toasts would be remixed in
Jamaica for the dance floor. Toasts were also re-made into comedy
records by entertainers like Arkansas native Rudy Ray Moore, who
built his career in Los Angeles, and then mixed yet again with im-
migrants and migrants to the west coast. By the time all this became
the root of rap records, a standard practice of mocking country folk
was already settled. As early as 1948, the great Oklahoma-born and
Tuskegee, Alabama–educated writer Ralph Ellison looked pityingly
on those who shared his country roots and were trying to make their
way in New York:
…in the North he surrenders and does not replace certain
important supports to his personality. He leaves a relatively
static social order in which, having experienced its brutality
for hundreds of years—indeed, having been formed within it
and by it—he has developed those techniques of survival to
which Faulkner refers as ‘endurance,’ and an ease of movement
within explosive situations that makes Hemingway’s definition
of courage, ‘grace under pressure,’ appear mere swagger.
Years later, this is how the new art form, hip-hop, was seen by
many. As mere swagger. For their part, the swagger was seen as
having little to do with where their parents and grandparents had
come from. Even those among them who had been sent to country
homes for summers were not eager to claim their origin as source.
Think about your uncle saying, “You don’t know nothing about this
right here…” before grooving to a classic song. It is as if, instead of
reminding him you’d heard it your whole life, you just said, “Sho
don’t,” and kept moving. That is what it was, a refusal of whole-body
laughter, drawls, and the markers of wisdom without slickness.
But country ways snuck in and stuck to hip-hop. Thank goodness
for writers and scholars like Kiese Laymon, Regina Bradley, and
Zandria Robinson, who have testified to this. Consider this piece
my effort to follow them, and to repeat and recast something I tried
to say in my 2004 book Prophets of the Hood. In that text, I traced
a genealogy of hip-hop going back to the plantation and to West
African aesthetics, noting the consistency of forms and sound ideals.
What I didn’t account for was the role of sensibility. And that is at
the heart of what I would call a country idiom in hip-hop.
or decades, scholars of Black studies grappled with the concept
F of retention, as it related to West African culture. How much
was intact after the slave trade, they debated. But I have grown to
think that retention is a deprived concept. Of course, people hold
on to the past. Culture is arguably best described as collective ways
of doing. It’s never born at a single moment. It is collaged from what
folks know, learn, and feel, together. Culture is never static. Rituals
shift, some habits are discarded, new ones are taken up, and ways
of doing things change. And yes, some ways are held on to tightly.
Some of that holding on is deliberate, most is not. People naturally
keep what they need. And that’s part of why country remains in
hip-hop. It’s a matter of word, sense, and sound.
The word is clear as a bell. Storytelling of the plantation South,
what Zora Neale Hurston as anthropologist (and my mama as a
woman from Alabama) called “telling big lies,” is at the heart of hip-
hop. Heroic tales of subversive slaves who turned the tables on the
master class with power and wit were prevalent. Captives held fast
to land, imprisoned on it, admired those who could turn power on
its head, even if only in fabulist form. In the best stories, they could
travel and transcend circumstance. That practice was rooted in an
even older grammar. West African animal trickster tales took on a
new world urgency. B’rer Rabbit was neither predator nor powerful,
but his wit gave him the upper hand when he faced adversity. The
Signifying Monkey, in repeated extended rhyming ballads, talked
shit about big animals Elephant and the Lion, unleashing their
wrath. But the smaller yet more clever creature always managed to
escape harm. These stories were not just morality tales, they were
a kind of freedom dreaming.
Many expected that migration would mean these types of stories
would peter out. Alain Locke, who described the New Negro Renais-
sance in Harlem of the 1920s, was fond of announcing how Black
folk culture was dying. The old ways would be lost, he wrote, so
we’d better document what they had been. The documentation was
worthwhile even though people like Zora Neale Hurston and Ster-
ling Brown, who argued back that folk culture was, indeed, intact,
appear to have been closer to right than Locke. The documentation,
whether it’s of stories, or blues, or ballads, makes clear how much
has remained. It had to, because, as Faulkner said, the past wasn’t
the past. All of that movement on trains, buses, and boats, all of
that searching for something and someplace new yielded a painful
truth: a captive condition followed them across borders and zones
with different tongues and new laws and fewer trees.
As many critics have noted, hip-hop emerged at a telling moment.
The Seventies were the dawn of mass incarceration and deindus-
trialization. Ghettoization persisted. Held captive yet again, telling
Hip-hop grew with
fantastic tales of
beating circumstance,
stories that fed
hungry souls.
big lies came back full throttle. Hip-hop grew with fantastic tales of
beating circumstance, stories that fed hungry souls. This time the
kids, not the grown folks, were telling them. These were kids who
witnessed dreams and their deferral. Kids who could remember
hearing, “Ain’t no stopping us now,” “Wake up all you sleepers,”
and “I know a place where ain’t nobody crying.” They’d felt the
joy of big Afros and stacked heels and had been told we were on
the move. And just as they began to see the world beyond their
households, they recoiled at what crack did to mothers, and cops
did to sons, and fathers locked away, and their buildings burned
for insurance money, and work disappearing. Sanely, they held on
to shreds of the hopefulness of their childhood.
The country hero sound of James Brown was the backdrop. Au-
gusta dripped from his mouth. He hunched down low, a cape like a
death shroud was draped over his shoulder before he would shoot
up, knocking off the cape and returning to his ebullient corporeal
performance. He was more hot than cool, always willing to break
a sweat. He was appropriately theatrical—country folks love to
play-act, but reject posturing. Though Brown’s flashy embodiment
was deemed inappropriate for imitation to New York kids who had
adopted a learned watchfulness, they kept him as the backdrop.
Nostalgic youth kept the dashed, earnest hope of just a few years
prior within a beat’s reach, holding fast to a time before the 1980
presidential election, when the country voted against Black free-
dom dreams.
If you want to see the racial divide in this country at its starkest,
ask people about how they remember Reagan. He gets no encomia
from Black folks. We knew he was a throwback when he announced
his candidacy for president in rural Philadelphia, Mississippi: where
three civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner,
and James Chaney, were murdered in 1964. As SNCC veteran Dave
Dennis recounts in Dave Dennis Jr.’s book The Movement Made Us:
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 107
A Father, a Son, and the Legacy of a Freedom Ride, in the recovery
effort for their bodies, a whole graveyard of murdered Black folks
were brought up from the water. That was where Reagan began.
nd so country ways were necessary, even unconsciously. An
A important note to make: Country and Southern are not the
same, but there’s a lot of overlap. Country is more than region, it
is found in disposition. It is earnest and it is honest about the body
and feeling. An analogy might help: Country is to Southern as rusty
is to ashy, rusty as in “sharp as a tack, rusty as a nail, ain’t took a
bath since Columbus sail.” (That’s an old one. Lest you forget, we’ve
been rhyming couplets and stanzas for at least a century in the Black
South.) It’s the rougher side of truth.
The country idiom of hip-hop was there since the beginning and
remained a minor note, perhaps a grace note, for a long while. You
can see it if you search hip-hop lyrics websites for words like collard
greens, granddaddy, big mama, cuss, coming out of the mouths
of people from New York and Los Angeles. And also in the blues
inheritances—twelve bars extended to sixteen in which a tragic
story with a hero’s transcendence is a cathartic message. As much
as jazz critic and novelist Albert Murray dismissed hip-hop, he could
have been describing it when he said of the blues: “It’s an attitude
of affirmation in the face of difficulty, of improvisation in the face
of challenge. It means you acknowledge that life is a low-down dirty
shame yet confront the fact with perseverance, with humor, and
above all, with elegance.” Despite the decrying of elders, there was
nothing new to the wild stories of bad men breaking all the rules,
meeting hard luck, and winning anyway.
That said, something changed in 1995 at the Source Awards when
the Atlanta duo OutKast won the award for New Artist of the Year
(group). The crowd booed. And André 3000 said the phrase that
reverberated around the industry: “The South got something to
say.” Within five years the South was at the very center of hip-hop,
and so were unapologetically country ways.
here had been Southern hip-hop since the beginning. And some,
T like Scarface out of Houston who—through collaborations
with Kool G Rap, an icon of East Coast hip-hop, and Ice Cube of the
West—gained mainstream hip-hop recognition along with his group
the Geto Boys by the early 1990s. However, outside the South, our
hip-hop was mostly mocked, though sometimes imitated. With its
percussiveness, drawls, and bacchanalia, it was seen as less lyrical
and less serious. Yet, here was OutKast, a lyrically masterful wholly
ATL “Jawja” group, taking center stage.
But it wasn’t just them who shifted things. A lot changed between
1995 and 2000. The deaths of Tupac in 1996 and Biggie in 1997 seemed
to be the terrible conclusion to regional bigotries. Snoop Dogg’s
Calibama cadence (you could hear his parents’ Mississippi mouths
coming out of him) had primed a public for Southern sounds. And
the public had expanded. Hip-hop had become incredibly lucrative,
and capitalism thrives on the constant cycle of new products. Looking
South made sense.
That doesn’t tell us why the core Black youth audience of hip-hop
listeners who validated music and drove the attention of the much
108 WINTER 2022
larger public arena wanted that sound—brown liquor soaked, church
inflected, and yet young, streetwise, rich with the language play of
today—a sound that captured the present without leaving behind
the past. Tragedy, I think, tells part of the why and the way back
home. Bill Clinton’s welfare reform bill passed in 1996, immediately
throwing poor people into extreme poverty. Again, a period seen
as a triumph for the nation was devastating to Black communities.
Rates of incarceration in the United States grew by 47% in the 1990s.
As Wall Street boomed, so did crack. Y2K fears (everybody was
afraid the grid would fail and we would be cast into chaos) led to a
constant buzzing anxiety. As people do, they returned to the root.
The mistaken assumption made with migration and immigration
is that the place from whence you came remains the same. But every
place changes. I promise you this, as someone who has been coming
and going from the Ensley neighborhood in Birmingham my whole
life, more often gone than present, that even with what Amiri Baraka
called the “changing same” evident in the resilient architecture and
the reliability of that refrain “mhmm” said round robin, the changes
are remarkable. There are loft apartments now, and a hotel on the
West Side, and sushi spots. Still, places with unbroken relations to
the ancestral land and language have what we might call grammars
of the past readily available. All of the ways of doing can be remem-
bered and therefore remixed.
In the beginning of the twenty-first century, the particularities of
various country ways and Southern spaces gained huge popularity
in hip-hop. There were the Tidewater and Hampton Roads sounds
of Pharrell Williams, Missy Elliott, and Timbaland and Magoo. The
rolling New Orleans tongues of Master P, the Hot Boy$, and the Big
Tymers, and later iterations with Young Money and bounce. Other
subgenres like the chopped and screwed style DJ Screw gave to
Houston, and crunk, out of Memphis. Southern geographies—the
car culture of Houston, the Atlanta strip club alongside the Ashe-
ville-born, Atlanta-made innovations of Jermaine Dupri—made
us question where exactly the Black metropolis actually was when
the gutbucket places were so appealing. The South was called “the
dirty,” appropriate for the proximity to both the soil and funkiness.
Nelly called what was happening by its name with his debut album
Country Grammar in 2000. It catapulted him to stardom. Nelly was
crisp, clean cut, always smiling, St. Louis-by-way-of-Texas-country,
looking just like a football player from a small-town high school.
No ice grilling was necessary even with diamond glistening fronts.
When Nelly received the BET I Am Hip Hop Award in 2021, he gave
a heartfelt speech, recalling his loneliness in the music world. “Just
to be clear,” he said, “I never had a co-sign. Nobody stood on stage
and put their arm around me. Nobody put a chain around my neck.
I got thrown in the deep end and was told to swim.”
That vulnerability is the country idiom. Even when drawling
rappers took the limelight, they carried an ever-present awareness
of being seen as less-sophisticated, and therefore, less-than. And
that’s a necessary story to pass on.
Because being country is also keeping a sense of your value in
the face of diminishment. How else did they survive sharecropping,
Jim Crow, and lynching? How else did the people living under the
thumb of the planter class change the world from the underside,
twice? First in the Civil War and second in the civil rights revolution.
 n old head now, I listen to music of twenty to forty years ago
A more often than new songs, although I find myself especially
taken with the country voices of a new crop of women rappers like
Megan Thee Stallion and Latto who challenge the masculinist pose
that dominates hip-hop just like it did with the toasts before it. Like the
blueswomen who adorned themselves in sparkling finery and boasted
of their own prowess, these lyrical daughters of Ma Rainey and Ida Cox
are reminding people that organic feminism is a country thing, too.
And when I’m feeling vulnerable myself, I listen to Big K.R.I.T.’s
2014 “Mt. Olympus” on repeat. It was K.R.I.T.’s response to what we
might term the dawning age of Kendrick Lamar, specifically his verse
on Big Sean’s 2013 track “Control,” in which Kendrick dissed major
names in the industry. Before the Pulitzer and all the Grammys,
K-Dot had been crowned the greatest. And K.R.I.T. was supposed to
be flattered to be mentioned. As the lyrics unfold, he makes clear he
isn’t flattered at all. Because the status of the industry isn’t his own.
His distrust is earned. “You tellin me I can be king of hip-hop when
they wouldn’t give it to Andre 3000, Nigga please…” The industry
Hood Dreams, 2019, oil paint, drywall on canvas (48” x 48”), by Jamaal Peterman
© The artist. Courtesy Vigo Gallery, London
isn’t where he experiences his affirmation but rather with his folk:
“You ain’t sell out a show until you sell out one in Mississippi.” That
is ethos and testimony. K.R.I.T.’s assertion that “What’s good for hip-
hop may not be good for my soul” is not a new formulation. Black
musicians have long found themselves vexed when an organic form
of music is celebrated by the recording industry. There is a cost to
institutionalization and mainstream recognition. In K.R.I.T., I hear
an echo of the musicians who disavowed the word “jazz” once it
had become a gatekeeping term for critics and scholars of what is
known as America’s classical music, in favor of “Black American
music.” After all, what mattered most is that it came from the people.
Once upon a time, the finest bluesmen came out of Parchman state
penitentiary. Covered in funk, long-abused, familiar with the hot sun
and high cotton, they served as America’s blue note, that unstable,
worrying position in a composition that is indispensable to American
sound. With all its anguish—more and more rappers locked up and
shot down, swimming in depression and addiction—hip-hop is a
country blues blue note to our world today. I recommend you listen.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 109
110
 The mostly true legend of
Hank Williams BY DAVID RAMSEY
Photograph © Archive PL/Alamy 111
 B U T S L E E P WO N ’ T C O M E
t seems fitting to begin at the end. The
final recording session Hank Williams
had was banged out over a couple hours
in a studio in Nashville on September
23, 1952. Four songs, four classics—in-
cluding “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” That’s
just how it was for Hank, even then,
at the tail end of drinking himself to
death. A little more than three months
later, he died in the backseat of a baby
blue Cadillac. He was in a bad way on
booze and pills and injections, but the
circumstances of his death, like his life,
remain murky. We’ll get to that.
Hank’s second wife swore “Your
Cheatin’ Heart” was about his first wife;
his first wife swore he had written it
about himself. It hardly matters.
On the one hand, we can say heart-
break is an essentially generic topic
for a song, and the lament of the cuckold is a rather sour brand of
the form. Still: Just listen. The lilt and longing in Hank’s voice. The
freakish adrenaline in his delivery. His rubbery tenor, the way the
tune yo-yos up and down like something about to snap. It is just one
of those songs: Slinks up as lazily as a python; before you know it,
you’re smothered. Sometimes I think it’s the meanest lullaby ever
written.
The brief career of Hank Williams became such a definitional
anchor for what was then mostly known as hillbilly music and is
now known as country that you can catch yourself wondering if
the whole genre might have had slightly different preoccupations
if Hank wasn’t so fixated on cheating and drinking. There’s a tear
in my beer, and so on and on. But he was a medium. He knew what
the people wanted.
“If you’re gonna sing,” Hank said, “sing ’em something they can
understand.”
After he died, a Wisconsin woman wrote in to a newspaper in
Montgomery: “We have listened to Hank Williams on disc jockey
shows so often that we felt he was a friend of ours; someone we had
known for a long time.”
Hank called it folk music, before that term took on another con-
notation. Songs for the people. Drinking and cheating are familiar
troubles, but they are also proxies, let’s say. There are so many ways
to feel cheated, so many longings and lacks. There are so many
troubles. I’m not here to tell you what country music is, but that’s
what it is to me. You’ll cry and cry, and try to sleep.
They called him the Hillbilly Shakespeare, but that almost seems
to miss the point. There is no meter to a certain sort of sorrow. Some-
times all we can do is howl. When the light fades to dusk, when the
night is quiet and our mind is not, when the medicine wears off, when
the road is long, when time is short. I got a feeling called the blues.
THE BOOK OF KINGS
H e was born outside of Georgiana, Alabama, to Lon and
Lillie Williams. His first name, according to state re-
112 WINTER 2022
cords, was Hiriam. They meant to give him the Old Testament
name Hiram, but there was a mix-up on the birth certificate.
As a boy, he went by “Harm” or “Herky” or “Skeets.”
His mother ran a boarding house that may or may not have doubled
as a brothel. She was a large, intimidating woman who eventually
worked the door when he played shows. “There ain’t nobody I’d
rather have alongside me in a fight,” her son was heard to say, “than
my mama with a broken bottle in her hand.”
His father sustained a serious head injury during his service in
World War I, which may or may not have happened in a fight with
another soldier over a French girl. Later, Lon had either an aneu-
rysm or something like shellshock, and he left for the VA hospital
when the boy was six years old. Likely in part due to Lillie’s efforts,
he was mostly absent thereafter. He quit drinking eventually, but
his son used to say, “If you think I’m a drunk, you shoulda seen my
old man.” Lillie told everyone that Lon had died, so when he came
back, people thought he was a ghost.
Around the time the boy moved to Montgomery as a teenager, he
invented a new name for himself. He wanted to sing songs with a
guitar and a cowboy hat—to be what we now call a country singer.
As far as we know, that’s all he ever wanted to be.
And so he went by Hank.
ENCORE
T he most hallowed story in the Hank Williams iconography is the
day he debuted at the Grand Ole Opry, June 11, 1949. My mother
was born thirteen days later; WSM’s 50,000-watt broadcast would
have reached her home in Hampton, Virginia—it could reach much
of the United States.
The story goes that Hank, not yet famous, came out onto the
stage at the Ryman Auditorium as a no-name but started playing
“Lovesick Blues,” which had by that point made it as a breakthrough
hit. When the crowd recognized the song, they went wild. He tried
to leave the stage after his number, but the crowd just wouldn’t let
him. He was too magnetic. They yelled for him to return, and he
did, and they yelled for him to return again, and he did. Just kept
on playing “Lovesick Blues,” like a backwoods hypnotist. Hank’s
gloomy groove. And the fans kept screaming to hear that yammer
and yodel again. Like drunks at a bar: Just one more. He did six en-
cores, and people were screaming for a seventh until the host had
to move things along before they ran out of time for any other act.
As the story goes, it was a record: Never before had an act received
that many encores at the Opry. (Strange thing to keep a record on,
but I like that, a Babe Ruth touch to the tale.)
The thing is, this story is probably not quite true. I am sure you
could find old timers who swore they were there and this is just how
it happened. I’m sure you still can. I don’t know. You might as well
be fact checking the legends of King Arthur.
All I can tell you is that I choose to believe it: Hank, twenty-five
years old, salty with ambition, his guitar high and his hat pulled low,
putting a little wobble in his lanky legs, blinking out the sweat that
fell in his eyes, so in tune with the electricity of his audience and
of the particular moment that he could hardly feel the ache in his
back, forgetting himself in the song, in the ache of the song, loving
Nashville and fearing it, hating Nashville but loving it, the way they
called his name, Hank, Hank, the way they loved him, the way he was
loved. The way the stage lights flared like a sign in the firmament.
 The thing is,
this story
is probably not
quite true.
dust from his boots remained. All this history was just background
NEON LIGHTS fuzz, we were just teenagers, trying to get drunk and run around.
Ernest Tubb’s record shop closed last spring. It’s hard to conjure,

W hen the Opry moved out of the Ryman Auditorium for a bigger,
air-conditioned venue around ten miles away in 1974, they cut
out a circle of the white oak and maple stage at the Ryman and
inlaid the six-foot circle into center stage at the new Grand Ole
Opry House. Current country star Brad Paisley likes to say that “the
circle still contains the dust from Hank Williams’ cowboy boots.” To
stand where Hank stood. Hank was a hangdog drifter and a rowdy
shitkicker, but it was still his dream to play the Opry, the old gate-
keepers of genre convention.
now: Nashville as Mecca, Nashville as Gomorrah. When he was alive,
the city had an uneasy relationship with Hank, who was always leery
of the suits and the hucksters, always jittering with resentment. The
Opry fired him in 1952 because he was an unreliable trainwreck. It
was only after he was gone that he became the posthumous king of
this sequined dominion. Or something more than king. As the song
goes: Hank Williams, bless his name.
A P H O R I S M S A N D P R OV E R B S ( 1 )

I went to high school down the street from the Ryman Auditorium.
And from Ernest Tubb’s record shop and the spot nearby where
Hank Williams had tried and failed to make a splash with a Western
wear store. And from where Hatch Show Print used to be, where I
bought posters of Dolly Parton, Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash, and Hank
(“if the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise”).
I sometimes wonder whether it was an accident that I became a
country music fan. When I was five, my family moved, with some
disappointment, from New England to Nashville for my dad’s job.
It was a seedier town than it is now, and stranger. The honky-tonks
downtown didn’t card, so we learned to drink to overqualified cov-
er bands. Drunks at the karaoke bar swore that talent scouts were
hiding in the back. Every waiter was a songwriter. My neighbor was
a songwriter, my baseball coach was a songwriter. My best pal’s dad
had once toured with Willie Nelson; as a toddler he was warned away
S ure, plenty people make fun of me, but I just ignore them.
I figure they’re ignorant and don’t know any better.…The
way I feel is that if you don’t like folk music stay away from my
shows. Personally, I can’t stand classical stuff, but I don’t tell
the world about it. I just turn the radio off. Now why can’t these
folks who don’t like my kind of music do the same?
Hank Williams, 1951
You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing
like a hillbilly.
Williams, 1952
V I TA L S TAT I S T I C S

from the baked goods.

My high school graduation was held at the Ryman, where Hank used
to stumble after one too many whiskeys. I cannot say whether any H e was around six foot one or so. One newspaper account said
he was just 140 pounds, and it reportedly fell lower than that

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 113
when his health got poorly. Bandmates called him “Bones.” He wore
a cowboy hat or a fedora, often a Stetson. He wore suits custom de-
signed by the legendary Nudie Cohn in California. He briefly wore
a toupee at his wife’s urging. It was too hot; supposedly, he threw it
out of the car one day on the road. He frequently referred to him-
self, in the third person, as “Ol’ Hank,” although he never grew old.
He had thirty-five songs make the top ten on the country charts
in just six years, with eleven reaching number one. When a DJ asked
him why so many of his songs were sad, he replied, “I guess I always
have been a saddist.” According to The Hank Williams Reader, at
the time of its publication in 2014, he had been the subject of fifteen
biographies and more than seventeen hundred articles in newspapers,
magazines, and scholarly journals.
After he was born, his parents noticed a small lump on his back.
Hank was likely born with a mild form of spina bifida, which ap-
parently caused him agonizing pain throughout his life. One of the
early songs he wrote was “Back Ache Blues.”
114 WINTER 2022
When Hank was three years old, he sold peanuts at a logging camp
(at least according to Lon, who may have had a propensity to exag-
gerate). Whatever age he started, he sold peanuts and shined shoes
and delivered groceries for years in his youth, plus any other work
he could pick up. A bag of peanuts went for a nickel, same as a shine.
“He was a little bitty feller, with legs no bigger’n a buggy whip,” a
local barbershop owner in Butler County told an early biographer of
Hank. “He hung around here a lot, looking for food and cigarettes.
If he did something for you, you could give him anything—a nickel,
a piece of candy, a few peanuts. If you tossed a cigarette butt away,
he’d dive for it ’fore it hit the floor. Still, he was a happy boy.”
He got a harmonica for Christmas when he was six years old. He
likely got his first guitar when he was around eight. He dropped out
of high school before he turned sixteen.
He died on either the last day of 1952 or the first day of 1953, in
either East Tennessee or Oak Hill, West Virginia, or somewhere in
between. The autopsy stated that his “death resulted due to insuf-
Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys © Archive PL/Alamy
ficiency of right ventricle of heart due to the high position of the
diaphragm with following external edema of the brain, congestive
hyperemia of all the parenchymatous organs and paralysis of the
respiratory center with asphyxia (punctate hemorrhages).” Probably
his heart gave out because of alcohol and prescription drugs, over
the short and long haul.
“Reporters answering telephone queries concerning Williams’s
death said many of the callers cried when informed that the reports
were true,” according to the Montgomery Advertiser on January 2,
1953. The year he died, at least twenty tribute songs to him were
released.
He was twenty-nine years, three months, and fourteen days old.
That might plausibly be in range of the age Jesus was when he
went to the wilderness and fasted for forty days and forty nights.
But, as with Hank, the records are imperfect on that account. Hank
spent time abstaining and time in the wilderness, but it never stuck.
In the Gospels, little is said about the savior’s hunger; no mention is
made of the tempter’s diet. Some stories are a void—as spare as the
desert. Every detail shimmers and fades like a mirage.
I T ’ S N O T H A N K S T O Y O U T H AT
I ’ M S T I L L L I V I N G T O D AY
T he “Hank Williams Syndrome,” according to Waylon Jennings,
who penned a song with that title: “Come to Nashville, write
some good songs, cut some hit records, make money, take all the
drugs you can and drink all you can, become a wild man and all of
a sudden die.”
A C O U N T E R FA C T U A L H I S T O R Y
I f Hank had lived, he would have turned one hundred next Septem-
ber. For context: He was born the same year as Henry Kissinger,
and seven years before Clint Eastwood. For context: He was six years
older than Anne Frank, and Martin Luther King Jr.
If he had lived, he would have heard Little Richard and Elvis and
the Beatles. He would have heard Lil Nas X.
He would have seen his son become an icon in his own right.
Hank Williams Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive” is so righteous in
its way that even this city boy feels big-hearted when it comes on
the jukebox, full of vinegar and dumbass pride.
He would have met his grandson, Hank III, a dead ringer save
for the tattoos.
He would have kept drinking. He would have raised hell with
Johnny Cash. He would have torn it up at Tootsie’s. He would have
sung a duet with Elvis. And Bob Dylan. He would have made Shel
Silverstein buy him another shot of whiskey at a tiki bar in Key West
in nineteen-seventy-something, just because. He would have made
one last masterpiece, with Rick Rubin or Jack White or whoever,
a return to his music’s simple roots. It would have been reverent,
maybe too reverent. It would not, could not, be the same. He would
have kept drinking—of that much, I am sure.
He would have stood on stage like a statue and accepted lifetime
achievement awards. He would have kept playing long past his
prime, and people would have kept showing up. Just to see him.
Just to breathe the same air.
But he did not live. And so he is ageless, of another time. Hank with
his guitar in black-and-white photos. He was signed up to be a movie
star by MGM but he no-showed and was canned. He remains pure,
for the purists. He remains unknowable. Storytellers and historians
hunt through old articles and radio promotional materials. They
double check state records and rifle through legal proceedings and
re-read the transcripts of interviews from decades past with anyone
who might have crossed his path. They gather the whisper of facts
and conjectures from the archives. But this was before we knew
everything about everyone. This was before we’d figured out how
to preserve and catalog every bit of data about every little thing. A
legend forms when much is lost.
Sometime, somewhere, some of Hank’s earliest recordings were
heard for the final time, as the lacquer on the acetate discs faded away.
O R N I T H O L O GY
T he whippoorwill is named for its song.
From the Audubon Field Guide: “Often heard but seldom
observed, the Whip-poor-will chants its name on summer nights
in eastern woods. The song may seem to go on endlessly; a patient
observer once counted 1,088 whip-poor-wills given rapidly without
a break.”
They feed at night. Parents offer meals to their baby birdies by
regurgitating bugs.
The males are the singers. From the Audubon: “Courtship behav-
ior not well known; male approaches female on ground with much
head-bobbing, bowing, and sidling about.”
They migrate through Butler County, Alabama, but typically do
not breed there.
According to legend, a whippoorwill knows when a soul leaves a
body and can capture it in flight.
My favorite line from a country singer about birds comes from
Bob Wills: As I think of the past and all the pleasures we’ve had / As I
watch the mating of the dove. But I also swoon for the country-tinged
“Whip-poor-will” by Magnolia Electric Co., whose frontman Jason
Molina died in 2013 of alcohol-related organ failure: Still waiting
/ For you to sing that song again / The one you were singing at the
very fall of man / It ain’t Hallelujah, but it might as well have been.
William Faulkner on whippoorwills, from his 1939 short story
“Barn Burning”: “They were everywhere now among the dark trees
below him, constant and inflectioned and ceaseless, so that, as the
instant for giving over to the day birds drew nearer and nearer,
there was no interval at all between them.” Perhaps Faulkner was
fond of Emily Dickinson’s verse: “Saying itself in new inflection— /
Like a Whippoorwill—”
Data from birdwatchers’ observations suggests that the population
of Eastern whippoorwills declined nearly seventy percent between
1970 and 2014.
I found a broken robin’s egg in my yard not too long ago. A nest
nearby had fallen from a tree. I thought to give the shell to my
daughter, but then I decided it was best to leave it alone. Robins do
not weep, or savor mementos, but you never know.
L I K E A B I R D T H AT F L E W
“I started writing songs after I heard Hank Williams,” Bob Dylan
said in 1965. In a 1991 interview, he said, “To me, Hank Williams
is still the best songwriter.”
Hank died when Dylan, then Robert Zimmerman, was eleven years
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 115
old. “Kept my fingers crossed, hoped it wasn’t true,” Dylan wrote
later. “But it was true. It was like a great tree had fallen. Hearing
about Hank’s death caught me squarely on the shoulder. The silence
of outer space never seemed so loud.”
A L E T T E R T O M Y DAU G H T E R , A P R I L 2 1 , 2 0 2 0
M arigold, you will not remember this day, when we sang togeth-
er, like every day. We sang the cowboy song, the one with the
whippoorwill. We ate blackberries. We saw a spider crawl across the
cherry blossom petals and we were unafraid. The day was rich and
ordinary. It was the first hot day of spring, and you mistook your
sweat for tears. We went inside to cool off and drank cold water
from little cold silver cups. You held it all by yourself, and said so.
You saw a picture on the mantel of me and your mother in New
Orleans and asked where you were. It was before you were born, I
told you, and you asked me when that was, when was before? I told
you stories from that time.
You made a picture with orange and green paint, all the brush-
strokes in one direction. I named it “Time’s Arrow” and said we
would keep it, and you hiccupped and said that hiccups mean you’re
growing. Sing to me, you said, and it was still stuck in my head, so
I sang it again, the song that always made you fall asleep when you
were a baby. Hear that lonesome whippoorwill.
“You sang that to me when I was a baby,” you said.
“Yes,” I said.
This morning, you corrected your mother when she asked me to
kill a “granddaddy longlegs” in the basement. It’s a daddy longlegs,
you said. It is evening now and you are sleeping, or your mother
is trying to get you to sleep, I don’t know. On my laptop, I scroll
through news articles and there is so much news, the day was rich and
ordinary. Someone in a suit says that we are living through history.
I can see the lines of his makeup in high definition. The spider on
the cherry blossoms will be lost to history. And the daddy longlegs.
Your grandchildren probably won’t know my name.
I am writing these words, and later I will read them, which will
not be the same as remembering. Later, I will read them and it will
be time without texture, a memory once removed. I will still know
the words to the song we sang. That feels, to me, like an important
link. The memory made manifest.
This afternoon, I served you some cheddar bunnies. I asked if you
wanted them in the yellow bowl. “It’s a dish,” you said. Pedantic,
like your granddaddy.
You have so many ways of startling me. I was reading the big red
Bible in our living room and you asked me to read it to you. I asked
where I should read from. “The beginning,” you said, and sat on my
lap. “In the beginning,” I read, and you listened intently all the way
through the first round of begats, the descendants of Adam, which
I’ve always thought of as the boring bit, but you were delighted by
this part of the story.
“Aww!” you said, for each new generation. “Is it a baby? Another
little baby!” Yes, I said. When Enosh had lived ninety years, he
became the father of Kenan.
“Oooh,” you said. “Aww.” Another cute little baby! And it’s true. It’s
a miracle, every one, every generation. I wrapped my hand around
your hand that looks like mine.
This is the list of the descendants of Adam. These are the families
of Noah’s sons. These are the names of the sons of Israel who came
116 WINTER 2022
to Egypt with Jacob.
These are the songs that we sang.
T H E A DV E N T U R E S O F T E E -T O T A N D H A N K
R ufus Payne was born in 1884 on the Payne Plantation in south
Alabama, where his parents had been enslaved. He moved to
New Orleans as a child, but later settled back in Alabama, where
he became a street musician. He always had a flask with him, booze
mixed with tea. They called him “Tee-Tot.”
It was perhaps in Georgiana, or somewhere around there, that a
painfully skinny white boy named Hiram encountered Tee-Tot, who
was one of the best-known street singers in the area. Tee-Tot would
take the train in from his home in Greenville and play events or
just play the corners, where if he was lucky, passersby would drop
a nickel or a dime into his hat. A gaggle of boys would follow him
around from spot to spot, Hank among them.
And Hank kept following him, with a single-minded obsession.
He watched him perform any chance he could. Hank didn’t have a
radio or phonograph at home at the time, so this was as good as it
got. Presumably the boy had a nip of Tee-Tot’s special tea from time
to time. And he’d scrape together nickels from shoe shining or selling
newspapers to trade to Tee-Tot for some musical wisdom. “I’d give
him fifteen cents, or whatever I could get a hold of for the lesson,”
Hank said. According to Lillie, she sometimes gave him meals in
exchange for teaching Hank. Hank’s sister remembered that Tee-Tot
told Lillie that Hank was going to get them in trouble, a white kid
following an older Black man around, but that apparently didn’t
slow down Hank’s pursuit.
What did Tee-Tot sound like? What did Hank learn from him?
We can only speculate, but perhaps Hank’s bluesy edge came from
Tee-Tot—the wicked rhythm, the proto-rock shimmy, the aw-shucks
showmanship. “If Daddy wasn’t a blues singer, just tell me who was,”
Hank Jr. would say later. “Lightnin’ Hopkins, he said that country
music ain’t nothin’ but white people’s blues anyway.” Tee-Tot’s son
Henderson Payne, meantime, recounted that Hank wanted to learn
how to play the blues from Tee-Tot, but Tee-Tot himself actually
wanted to make money playing hillbilly music.
Hank couldn’t read or write in musical notation. According to
Hank, “All the music training I ever had was from him.”
When Hank was in Greenville for a homecoming event in 1951, he
reportedly went in search of his old teacher.
But Tee-Tot had died in a charity hospital in March 1939. On the
death certificate, his profession was listed as “unknown.”
G E O M E T R I C C O M B I N AT I O N S
F or all of his greatness, I do not think that we can call Hank Williams
the very best of singers, or even the very best of mythmakers. Maybe
Dylan was right and he was the very best of songwriters, but there’s
plenty of competition, and at least in songs he wrote for others, he
penned some duds. As a guitar player, he was nothing all that special.
He sang with passion and force; he could conjure a devastating void
in his spare atmospherics; he had a knack for sneaking the boogie in
even as he kept in touch with the buttoned-up traditionalism of his
hero Roy Acuff. But all of this can be said of others, too.
If you can bear with me, here is the baseball writer Bill James on
my favorite baseball player ever, Pedro Martinez:
 I can try to tell you what it was
that made the songs of Hiram Williams
into the genius of Hank,
but I cannot quite make it out.
Seven factorial—that is, seven times six times five, etc.,—is
5,040. Ten is not much larger than seven, but ten factorial is
3.6 million—seven hundred times larger...
I think of that in connection with Pedro. How can he be so
much better than the other pitchers? His fastball is good, but
there are 20 or 50 people in the league who throw just as hard.
His curve isn’t better than anyone else’s, his control isn’t. But he
is vastly better in toto because he has some additional factors—
his ability to change his arm angle, his ability to change speeds
on all of his pitches without losing control—which interact to
make geometric combinations.
I am no music theorist, I just know the way these songs burrow
into me. I just know the way it feels to sing them (I am the sort to
sing along)—alone, or with my friends, or with my wife, or with my
parents, or with my children. I can try to tell you what it was that
made the songs of Hiram Williams into the genius of Hank, but I
cannot quite make it out. As if I am peering through a window darkly
stained. Angles, speeds, geometric combinations.
A P H O R I S M S A N D P R OV E R B S ( 2 )
W hen you get to be a big success, folks have a habit of writing
you and telling you their troubles—all kinds of troubles; if
their husband dies and they’re left with eight starving kids they
write, and if their sweetheart done them wrong they write, and
if they feel sort of blue they write. I dunno, I reckon they think
I’m something like the Red Cross.
Hank Williams, 1951
My daddy, he was somewhere between God and John Wayne.
Hank Williams Jr., 1999
T H E C O N G R E G AT I O N F O R T H E C A U S E S O F S A I N T S
T he hillbillier-than-thou types—never fully hillbillies themselves,
it seems—looked askance at Shania Twain when she arrived on
the scene; same, even more puzzlingly, with Gillian Welch. If Hank
was here, they’d say. When country purists are into their cups, they
are always proclaiming that the man is rolling in his grave. He is a
judgmental ghost, in their reckoning. He is the King of Country, but it
might be more apt to call him the Father. But that would make Hank
Jr. the Son of Country. That seems off, doesn’t it? To be generous
to the purists and the trads, a genre needs an ideal, even if to bend
and break it. It could only be Hank in part because he died young.
He drank and he drank, and he was lonesome sometimes, and he
sang country songs that felt old as soon as they were new. He is fixed,
forever—that clean face, those big country ears, the cowboy hat.
Roy Acuff came before him, and Jimmie Rodgers before that. The
voice and visage of Johnny, and Willie too, are perhaps even more
immediately recognizable and iconic now—surely more famous.
Dolly is a kind of goddess. George Jones the platonic form, the
Carter Family the royal line. Dig deeper still, and as Hank learned
from Tee-Tot, Bill Monroe learned from Arnold Shultz, and Lesley
Riddle scouted songs for the Carter Family. The names of countless
other forebears have been lost.
Nowadays, the music of Hank’s son, in my experience, gets played
more than his own when country boys drink beer in the back of pick-
up trucks in a big old field in the middle of nowhere at all. Townes
and the Flatlanders and Kris were cosmic poets, too. Tanya had the
voice that felt closest to the Spirit, ever since she was thirteen years
old. Merle and Waylon had the wild redneck edge in their bloody
souls. Loretta, too, in her own way. Charlie Daniels, Charlie Rich,
Charley Pride. Kitty, Patsy, Tammy. Conway, Buck, Marty. Just the
names are a constellation.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 117
 My tastes lean toward country music made before I was born,
but there are people on the radio now that my grandchildren may
revere as I revere Hank. Part of the country genre’s very form is
icons: reverence and tradition depend on kings and queens. There
are so many, and there will be so many more.
And yet. Hank is the keeper, the watcher, the guardian. Country
music had its roots in the Old Country, found its way to our acres of
farmland and our hideaways in the mountains, mingled with the tunes
and rhythms of people brought here in chains. It was of the South,
an honor culture that disgraced itself—a peculiar place that could
be unthinkably cruel and violent, but always had a soft heart for its
own weirdos. Country music was saturated in cinema, which grew up
alongside it, and the legend of the American West. Cowboys and gun-
slingers and whiskey and big empty sky. Country came of vaudeville
and medicine shows, the church and the brothel, the hoedown and
the family porch. It was born in a long, strange century, and Hank
was there, and all he wanted to do was sing country songs. After three
hundred thousand years or so of human beings trudging around and
feeling sometimes scared and sometimes worried and sometimes
lonesome, a particular manner of song came to be. And Hank heard
that sound, and he knew that it was true. Forgive my blasphemy, but
when it came to that particular manner of song, Hank Williams was
the Alpha and the Omega. He left us records, and we play his music
still: As sacred as the earth beneath our feet, a country of his own.
CORRESPONDENCE
F rom letters to local newspapers in the wake of Hank’s death:
Hank Williams traveled with me on many a pleasant mile and sang
for me many pleasant hours.…I feel I have actually lost a friend.
Alex E. Jones of Clarksville, Tennessee, to the Tennessean
We listened to the sad news and prayed that it was all a mistake,
Hank. But there comes a time when reality tells us that our
fears are real and that’s when we face the truth. There was no
mistake; our beloved Hank was dead.
Retha Mae Brewer, 19, and Nettie Jean Brewer, 14, Hohenwald,
Tennessee, to the Tennessean
Those of us who like and enjoy hillbilly-folk music...have lost
a great friend.... So many of his songs so aptly expressed the
loneliness, disappointment and hardship so many of us at one
time endure.
Letter to Montgomery Advertiser
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
M arilynne Robinson wrote that “in the West ‘lonesome’ is a word
with strongly positive connotations”:
I think it is correct to regard the West as a moment in a history
much larger than its own. My grandparents and people like
them had a picture in their houses of a stag on a cliff, admir-
ing a radiant moon, or a maiden in classical draperies, on
the same cliff, admiring the same moon. It was a specimen of
decayed Victorianism. In that period mourning, melancholy,
regret, and loneliness were high sentiments, as they were for
118 WINTER 2022
the psalmist and for Sophocles, for the Anglo-Saxon poets and
for Shakespeare.
In modern culture these are seen as pathologies—alienation
and inauthenticity in Europe, maladjustment and depression in
the United States. At present, they seem to flourish only in vernac-
ular forms, country-and-western music being one of these. The
moon has gone behind a cloud, and I’m so lonesome I could die.
Hank was country, but he was no cowboy—he came from lumber
towns and spent his teenage years and adulthood in cities. His music
was hillbilly through and through, with hardly a hint of Western swing
(“longhair crap,” he called it). But he clearly had a hankering for the
myth of the West. He loved Western movies as a boy. He named his
backing band the Drifting Cowboys. He collected, wore, and sold
Western clothes. And he conjured a Western atmospherics for his
downhome songs. This became the vernacular of country music,
so deeply ingrained that it is hard to imagine it any other way: The
horror and the possibility and the glory of the frontier, the beckoning
of vast sky and wide open country. It is in large part fiction, this dusty
vision of America, but the story is so vivid that it might as well be real,
with an eager audience far from the South and far from the West—a
fishing town in Maine, an army base in Germany, a dairy farm in the
Midwest, the highway stretching before a trucker on the long haul.
T H E WAY H A N K D O E S
“M y brothers and I weren’t used to anyone that country,” Vic
Willis, a member of the Oklahoma Wranglers, a Western
swing band that backed Hank on an early recording session, told the
Hank biographer Colin Escott. On “Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul,”
the band was supposed to join in, but they sang “poor wicked soul”
while Hank kept singing “purr wicked soul.” Finally, the producer
said, “Damnit, Wranglers, sing it the way Hank does.”
THE MOON JUST WENT BEHIND THE CLOUDS
H ow is it that “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is the perfect
song? Let’s assume that the reasons are endless, but here is
one—Hank had an ear for taking the familiar motifs of country
music and transfiguring them. The song is cozy and soulful, but it’s
bent. No one will agree with me if I say that Hank was psychedelic,
but I know what I mean.
A second reason: Hank had an insight, or an intuition, whether or
not he would voice it quite this way, that would shape country music
forever. It was an insight best expressed, it turns out, with twang
and steel guitar and fearsome warbling through the nasal passage.
(This would get a little lost, later, in the smothering schmaltz of the
Nashville Sound, but not yet.) Here is what Hank knew, somehow:
The human experience of loneliness is cosmic. It is not narcissistic;
it is where the Holy Spirit dwells. The universe, like the West, is
mostly empty space.
Less than a week after I got the assignment to write this story,
my father passed away. On the plane, I was listening to “I’m So
Lonesome I Could Cry,” partly because of the assignment, but also
partly because it is a comfort to me, a lullaby I sing to my children
and to myself. Hank in his groove riffing on classic themes: trains,
birdsong, the night sky, unipolar depression. Cowboy stuff. It sounds
like a murder ballad, but there’s no one else there. Which makes it
a suicide ballad, I suppose. It is so brittle, somehow, so fragile. Has
there ever been a song as haunted by a silence implied? The melody
seems to reverberate in a void space, the words echoing in a lacuna.
The day after my father died, I held his cold hand and I kissed his
cold forehead and I lingered with the knowledge that his absence
was now a presence. That his otherness would now be a memory.
I took his wedding ring and put it in my pocket. He was the only
man I knew my entire life. I had never thought of that before. I
understood that I would wear this new lack like a necklace. My
father was, I think, an atheist—or maybe a pragmatic agnostic. I
have no good news to spread on that front, other than this: The
brand-new lonesomeness at his passing felt like nothing so much
as a presence.
Somewhere on the planet, far from the hospice, I reckoned that
the silence of a falling star lit up a purple sky. I am a loud singer,
but I sang softly to my father: “And as I wonder where you are, I’m
so lonesome, I could cry.”
B U T I D O N ’ T T H I N K H A N K D O N E I T T H I S WAY
T he anxiety of influence has a nearly moral component in country
music. As Waylon sang, “Are you sure Hank done it this way?”
Hank biographer Paul Hemphill’s dad asked him whether his new
Chevy Blazer had a radio that would pick up country music.
“Of course it will,” he told his dad.
“Must be a hell of a radio, then,” his dad said. “Ain’t been no
country music since Hank died.”
UNTIL I’M PETRIFIED
W hen he was around eleven years old, Hank started drinking.
He kept drinking.
Moonshine sold around Georgiana could be had for about thir-
ty-five to seventy-five cents a pint. But Hank’s move was to wait for
upstanding Baptist grownups to hide their stash in the bushes. Hank
would get a nip here and there, wherever he could.
His aura in the country music pantheon is so stately, his songs are
so beautiful, that it is hard to countenance, but he was a bad drunk.
Not just outlaw drunk, not just rowdy-friend drunk. “You don’t know
ol’ Hank. Hank don’t just have one beer.” He’d get ornery, then reck-
less, then he’d start falling, then he’d come to in the jailhouse. But I
guess it’s all the same: Booze is Romantic until it’s not.
At least a couple of times, he allegedly shot his pistol at or near
his wife Audrey, widely assumed to be the villain in his lovesick
anthems. Once, according to June Carter, the young Carter family
singer and future wife of Johnny Cash, Hank nearly killed June when
she was with the couple in their driveway. He took a shot and the
bullet whizzed right by her head. When June fell to the ground in
fear, Audrey screamed that Hank had killed her. He drove away. “I
realized he really was crazy,” June said later, adding, “We knew he
was going to die, and he was going to die soon.”
Maybe no one really knew Hank Williams—read the various bi-
ographies of him and that’s a recurring theme. But plenty of people
knew how he acted when he had too much to drink, and that includes
plenty of stories about violence—including violent behavior toward
the women he loved—that, if true, is hard to forgive. When he sang
about whatever deep harm was within him, it spoke to people through
radio transmissions or jukeboxes, and it was like he was a friend,
putting his hand softly on the chest of all of us who have our own
aches, which is all of us. Then later on cassettes, CDs, streams—he
is still this friend to the lonesome.
I am not here to knock down any statues, just here to tell you the
truth, as best as I can make it out from an imperfect record: When
the man who sang these songs lived, and started drinking to cool
whatever deep harm was within him, he could be a monster.
T H E G O S P E L AC C O R D I N G T O M I N N I E P E A R L
O n the first time she met him: “The man looked like he was down on
his luck. He was wearing a tan suit, boots and a cowboy hat that
was slightly soiled. He was tall, thin—terribly thin—and hollow-eyed.”
On Hank at his peak: “He was the biggest thing country music had
ever seen, and the fans absolutely adored him. His charisma on stage
was unsurpassed. Elvis later had that effect on an audience, but in
the beginning most of his fans were teenage girls who responded
to his gyrations as much as to his music. Hank appealed to all ages,
and both sexes, and he didn’t have to move a finger.”
On his mama: “He told us he used to get into a lot of honky-tonk
brawls when he was still a kid living at home. One night a guy beat
him up so badly he was left for dead in a roadhouse parking lot. A
cab driver had been called by someone else, and when he pulled in
to pick up his fare the headlights hit Hank, lying there unconscious
in a pool of blood. The cabbie recognized him and took him home
to his mother. She looked at his wounds, then said, ‘First we get you
sewed up; then we go get him.’”
On the end: “I was trying to think of anything that would take
his mind off whiskey, so I said, ‘Come on, Hank. Let’s sing.’ I started
singing ‘I Saw the Light,’ a gospel song he had written several years
earlier. He joined in, his voice cracking and off-key, then suddenly
he stopped and looked at me. He put his hand on mine and said,
‘That’s just it, Minnie. There ain’t no light. It’s all dark.’”
And after the end: “Over the years he has been immortalized and
is now considered a legend in our business. He would have found that
amusing. He was just a regular funny ole boy raised in Alabama, as
down to earth as dirt. But he had that awesome talent.”
HOMO BULLA
O pry star Johnnie Wright estimated that even in the best of times,
Hank would either fail to show up or show up too drunk to give
much of a show about fifteen percent of the time. When things got
worse, it was about half the time. The treatment of alcoholism as
a disease was then in its infancy. Many of the people close to Hank
would have thought it was just weakness, or a failure to get right
with the Lord. There were no fancy treatment centers. He was in and
out of sanatoriums and jailhouses throughout his period of stardom.
His handlers were more likely to give him an upper and shove him
on stage than try to slow him down.
He was no doubt in part medicating for the brutal pain in his
back, and the rabidly tumultuous relationships he had with the
women in his life: his first wife Audrey, his mother, and nineteen-
year-old Billie Jean, who he married onstage in New Orleans to
create a money-making show if it, less than three months before
he died. He had spinal surgery at Vanderbilt in 1951. The pain con-
tinued. He became incontinent. Nothing worked. He kept drinking
and taking painkillers.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 119
 The “doctor” he believed in most was a quack, a con man with a fake
license who prescribed him chloral hydrate, an extremely powerful
sedative. Hank used to work the medicine shows, but this time he was
the mark, hiring the con man on a three-hundred-dollar-a-week retainer.
Chloral hydrate can be highly dangerous if taken with alcohol or beyond
the normal dosage. Hank, of course, did both. It is also not to be taken
with heart disease, which Hank likely had at this point (he may have
even had a heart attack late in 1952). He was also taking morphine by
injection. And who knows what else.
Toward the end of 1952, Hank had been sick for weeks with a flu,
he was popping capsules of chloral hydrate, getting winded when he
walked, running out of money, running out of chances. Hank had just
lost his house in Nashville in his divorce and sold his farmhouse in
nearby Franklin at a loss, but he was still dreaming and scheming in his
narcotic fog, telling Billie Jean, “Hey, baby, let’s us move to Nashville
and buy one of them big houses.”
He had dates booked for New Year’s Eve in Charleston, West Virginia,
and New Year’s Day in Canton, Ohio, which he was in no shape to try
to go to but did anyway. He hired a driver, seventeen-year-old Charles
Carr, to take him from Montgomery to Charleston. According to Billie
Jean, the night before he left, he told her, “Every time I close my eyes, I
see Jesus coming down the road.” That morning, she asked if he was sick
and he said, “No babe, ol’ Hank just wants to look at you one more time.”
A lot happened on the trip and it’s hard to make out what’s what: He
had some liquor and maybe a morphine shot in Montgomery before
they left and bought a six-pack of Falstaff beer on their way out of town;
might have had a few women stop by his hotel room in Birmingham; got
a haircut, shave, and some whiskey in Fort Payne; perhaps had another
morphine shot and got on a plane in Knoxville when he realized he
wouldn’t make it to Charleston in time; the plane turned around and
went back to Knoxville about an hour and a half into the flight because
of bad weather and that night, Hank had to be carried by the porters
into his room at the Andrew Johnson Hotel in Knoxville; then a doctor
came to the hotel to give him two shots that likely contained morphine,
to cure convulsive hiccups.
They kept driving, now heading to Canton for the New Year’s Day
show. Somewhere around Blaine, Tennessee, their car was pulled over
by the cops (for the second time on the trip). “He’s not dead is he?”
the patrolman asked.
As they neared Oak Hill, West Virginia, early on New Year’s Day, Carr
realized something was wrong. “I thought he was asleep,” Carr said.
“I reached over and touched him. He was cold.” Hank Williams was
pronounced dead around 7:00 A.M. The autopsy noted he had recently
been badly beaten, and there was an unexplained welt on his head.
But then Hank often had a lot of bumps and bruises. An inquest found
no foul play. His quack doctor suspected suicide, that perhaps Hank
charmed his way into enough barbiturates in Knoxville to end his life.
The embalmer had trouble finding workable veins.
The very next day, H. B. Teeter was ready with a story in Nashville’s
Tennessean. A few months prior, according to Teeter, Hank had told
him: “I will never live long enough for you to write a story about me.”
Before he was buried, Hank’s mother had the morticians break his
ankles so he could be laid to rest with his boots on.
A LETTER TO MY SON, OCTOBER 4, 2022
O nce upon a time, Cosmo, was a man who went by Hank.
Son, I want to steer you clear of oblivion. It is so seductive—the
120 WINTER 2022
way that if you turn up the volume loud enough, everything gets
quiet. I want you to dance in the front row; I want you to be sweet.
Anyway, you’ll be who you’ll be. It is the way of sons, to stumble
and wobble into a future that is yours, not mine. May you live a
long and wild life. We are of few days and full of trouble. You and
me, all of us. When my time has come, will you and your sister
sing to me, the way I once sang to you? What a righteous way to
go, if I should be so lucky. I would die a happy man.
Once upon a time was a man who went by Hank. His daddy was
gone when he was young. I can’t fathom it, you know? If I’m away
from you for just a day, it feels like something is askew with the
universe. Hank sang songs and then I sang them to you. Maybe
you will sing them someday to your own child, maybe not. The
future is yours, not mine.
Folktales favor bright lights that burn out too quickly. But you
may find that there is so much light in the ordinary stretch of days.
A P H O R I S M S A N D P R OV E R B S ( 3 )
H ank Williams wrote his life.
Rev. Henry Lyons at Hank Williams’s funeral, 1953
When I find a note that I like, I wanna hold it long as I can.
Hank Williams, 1948
N O M O R E DA R K N E S S , N O M O R E N I G H T
T here is a woman in a car in America. She’s driving on the high-
way, lost again. And she’s listening to the radio. And there it
is: “Move it on over, slide it on over.” Hank, who loved to play the
ham, explained the supposed genesis of the song to the Montgom-
ery Advertiser in 1948: “Well, I was just talkin’ to the dog. There
ain’t a man livin’ who hasn’t talked to his dog. If he tells you he hasn’t
you [best] not believe him anymore. I was just talkin’ to the dog.”
Move over little dog ’cause the big dog’s moving in. She takes
an exit and heads in what feels like the right direction and turns
on to a dirt road. She is even more lost, but something about the
bounce in the song or the color of the sky commands her to go
heavy on the gas and so she does. And there is dust everywhere,
she cannot see. And it scares her, the way she cannot see, the way
these imperceptible particles can form a blanket that blinds her.
And then the dust dissipates, like breath, and there is nothing left
but open road, nothing left but everything. Like saying goodbye
to a ghost. Know what I mean?
Or it’s me, say, at the tail end of September, driving with my
family, fleeing a storm, every song a reminder of my children
and of my father, of what I have and what I’ve lost. And we’re
listening to “I Saw the Light,” say. This one has a hokey origin
story, too, though I don’t quite buy it: Supposedly Hank and
company were on their way back from a dance in Fort Deposit,
Alabama, Hank was passed out in the backseat, and someone
saw the beacon light at the airport in Montgomery—“Hank, wake
up, we’re nearly home. I just saw the light!” Then he wrote the
song on the way home.
We’ll go honky-tonkin’, honky-tonkin’. What is it about Hank?
I don’t know. The myth is solid stuff. But the songs, the ones I
keep so close, are ghosts and dust. They are baffling medicine,
as present as my breath.
FIND YOUR SOUTH

30TH ANNIVERSARY SALE

SAV E 3 0 %
WHEN YOU SUBSCRIBE TODAY!
 P R E S E N T S

GOOD

LIVING
GOOD

READING
GOOD

TAST I N G
GOOD

LISTENING
As the OA’s 30th Anniversary celebration concludes,
it’s the ideal time to reflect on the past year and
give thanks. Reader, we are thankful for you! With
the holidays upon us, please consider the following
pages—they are full of experiences to share
with those who mean so much.
 Visit the Country Music
Capital of East Kentucky

A visit to Paintsville would not be

complete without a tour of “Butcher Holler.”
Tour the U.S. 23 Country Music Highway
Museum. Enjoy live bluegrass music during
Front Porch Pickin’ every Thursday at 7pm! paintsvilletourism.com
 G O O D L I V I N G , G O O D R E A D I N G , G O O D TA S T I N G , G O O D L I S T E N I N G

Elizabeth Bick
Jovencio de la Paz
Jan. 14 - Feb. 25
LEARN MORE AT
halsey.cofc.edu

“Nack-A-Tish” džƉůŽƌĞƚŚĞŽůĚĞƐƚƉĞƌŵĂŶĞŶƚƐĞƩůĞŵĞŶƚŝŶƚŚĞ>ŽƵŝƐŝĂŶĂ
WƵƌĐŚĂƐĞ͘&ŝŶĚĐĞŶƚƵƌŝĞƐŽĨŚŝƐƚŽƌLJ͕ĐƵůƚƵƌĞ͕ĂŶĚŶĂƚƵƌĂů
ůĂŶĚƐĐĂƉĞƐ͕ƌĞĂĚLJƚŽďĞĞdžƉůŽƌĞĚďLJĨŽŽƚ͕ĐĂƌ͕ŽƌďŽĂƚ͘

800-259-1714 • www.Natchitoches.com

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

THOUSANDS OF STORIES.

FREE ADMISSION
1000 Rosa L. Parks Blvd. Nashville, TN
615.741.2692 • TNMuseum.org
 G O O D L I V I N G , G O O D R E A D I N G , G O O D TA S T I N G , G O O D L I S T E N I N G

New from the University Press of Mississippi

Available at your local bookseller. upress.state.ms.us

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

 G O O D L I V I N G , G O O D R E A D I N G , G O O D TA S T I N G , G O O D L I S T E N I N G

OZARK FOLK CENTER STATE PARK GEORGE’S MAJESTIC LOUNGE

SEEK MORE

SOUTHERN SOUND

From historic venues like George’s Majestic Lounge and

Ozark Folk Center State Park to iconic artists like Sister
Rosetta Tharpe, Arkansas has a rich musical tradition. Seek
out Arkansas’s southern sound and you’ll find the deep roots
of Americana music. Hear it for yourself — plan a trip at
Arkansas.com. arkansas.com SISTER ROSETTA THARPE

Creativity lives here.

Nashville and the Vanderbilt MFA:
A community of talented people making art.
A great mix of progressive Southern culture,
creative energy and academic distinction.

You belong here.

Taught by Vanderbilt’s award-winning faculty and part of a
small group of writers making art and serving the community.
Our creative writing community includes poets Rick Hilles,
Didi Jackson, Major Jackson and Sandy Solomon, fiction
writers Lydia Conklin, Tony Earley, Sheba Karim, Lorrie Moore,
ZZ Packer, Nancy Reisman and Justin Quarry, and nonfiction
writers Amanda Little and Margaret Renkl.

Alumni include poets Destiny Birdsong, Tiana Clark, Anders

Carlson-Wee, Edgar Kunz and Nate Marshall, and fiction
writers Matthew Baker, Bryn Chancellor, Simon Han, Lee
Conell and Kevin Wilson. For more information visit as.vanderbilt.edu/english.

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

 upcoming
events
2022
• 12/31 – Ground Zero New Year’s Eve Party

2023
• 1/27-29 – Clarksdale Film Festival & Music Events
• 4/13-16 – Juke Joint Festival & Related Events
• 4/16 – Cathead Mini Blues Fest
• 5/6 – Caravan Music Fest
• 5/19-20 – Women in Blues Festival
• 6/17 – B.A.M. (Birthplace of American Music) Festival
• 8/11-13 – Sunflower River Blues and Gospel Festival
• 9/2 – Red’s Lounge Old-Timers Music Fest
• 9/22-23 – Mighty Roots Music Festival
• 10/1 – Bad Apple Blues Guitar Festival
• 10/12-14 – 31st Mississippi Delta Tennessee Williams Festival
• 10/12-15 – Deep Blues Festival
• 10/29 – Hambone Festival & Cruzn The Crossroads Car Show

Download the app!

MUSEUMS
In Mississippi, LOCAL TOURS
we’re just 75 miles HISTORY MARKERS
CANOE TRIPS ON
South of Memphis. THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER

Listen to the “BLUES TRAIL REVISITED” podcast available on our website.

 G O O D L I V I N G , G O O D R E A D I N G , G O O D TA S T I N G , G O O D L I S T E N I N G

Art & Music Lovers... We Are Your Type

double decker arts festival celebrating food, music & the arts
April 28-29, 2023
on the historic downtown oxford square
doubledeckerfestival.com
@

R O OT S M U S I C F R O M L S U P R E S S

The Rise and Fall of
Paramount Records
A Great Migration
Story, 1917–1932
BY SCOTT BLACKWOOD
9780807179147
$34.95 | HARDCOVER
This is a tale about the sheer force
of the Great Migration and the
legacy of the music put down
into the shellacked grooves of
a 78rpm record: Black America
finding its voice. It is the story of
how blues, jazz, and folk music
transcended boundaries, and
how that almost never happened.
Slim Harpo The Next Elvis In Tune The Downhome Sound
Blues King Bee of Searching for Stardom Charley Patton, Jimmie Diversity and Politics in
Baton Rouge at Sun Records Rodgers, and the Roots Americana Music
BY MARTIN HAWKINS BY BARBARA BARNES SIMS of American Music BY MANDI BATES BAILEY
9780807177297 9780807157985 BY BEN WYNNE 9780807179604
$29.95 | PAPERBACK $26.00 | HARDCOVER 9780807179956 $30.00 | PAPERBACK
$28.00 | PAPERBACK
“Thoroughly researched, “The Next Elvis is a fascinating “Using a sophisticated mixed-
painstakingly written and addendum to the story of one “Anyone interested in the methods approach, Bailey elevates
richly illustrated . . . Hawkins of the greatest record labels roots of American popular our understanding of Americana
tells Slim Harpo’s story while of all time and a snapshot of music will find this book a music, its culture and community,
simultaneously describing the record business during one valuable addition to their and the power of roots music on
the hard world from which of the most exciting eras in personal library.” unfamiliar listeners. An excellent
he came.” American music.” —Journal of Southern History read.”
—Offbeat —Memphis Commercial-Appeal —Adolphus G. Belk Jr., coeditor of For
the Culture: Hip-Hop and the Fight
for Social Justice

LS U P R E SS .O R G

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI • APRIL 26 - 29, 2023
FREE TO THE PUBLIC

C O M M U N I T Y C O N C E R T S | PA N E L D I S C U S S I O N S | E D U C AT I O N E V E N T S

Meet us in St. Louis! Join the Oxford American for No

Tears Project–St. Louis: a multi-day residency of free
events that will use music and conversation to engage
communities in civil rights education and storytelling.

The No Tears Project jazz ensemble, led by pianist

Christopher Parker and vocalist Kelley Hurt, will
premiere new works created by and in collaboration
with luminary composer Oliver Lake, poet Treasure
Shields Redmond, dancer Ashley Tate, and singer
Brian Owens that recognize St. Louisans and the
city’s legacy in the broader American civil rights story.
The band will also play selections from the No Tears
Suite, which Oxford American commissioned in 2017
Christopher Parker & Kelley Hurt
to honor the Little Rock Nine.

Oliver Lake Treasure Shields Redmond Ashley Tate Brian Owens

More information at OxfordAmerican.org/ntp-st-louis

P R E S E N T E D I N PA R T N E R S H I P W I T H M A D E P O S S I B L E BY

Gateway Arch National Park

135
136 WINTER 2022 Linda Ronstadt, Dolly Parton, and Emmylou Harris © 1978 Ed Thrasher
On Linda Ronstadt and her gal pals
by Rebecca Gayle Howell
rio turns thirty-five this year. A
historic album of historic covers,
Trio features Linda Ronstadt, Em-
mylou Harris, and Dolly Parton
singing the songs of Jean Ritchie,
Jimmie Rodgers, and, wait for it,
Phil Spector. But it was not just
another supergroup moment. Trio
weaved country traditions and the
ease of pop music with the wounds of patriarchy. In delicate,
healing truths Ronstadt and her friends reached out—and
then all across the South, in carpeted bedrooms with doors
closed, mothers and daughters reached back.
If progress were linear, the 1990s would have given us the
first generation of U.S. white women to be well and truly lib-
erated. But in the time between Trio’s first release (1987) and
the group’s second and last—Trio II (1999)—Andrea Dworkin
would prophecy the War on Women, an anti-abortion mi-
nority would become a movement, and the country would
meet and loathe Hillary Clinton. Allison Yarrow called these
years our “bitchification”—the effects of a media narrative
in which women in the public sphere were vaunted for their
sexuality, only so they could be demeaned, then weaponized
against all women. (Think: Monica Lewinsky.)
This effect was particularly powerful in the South, where
evangelical purity culture had already cemented the founda-
tion needed to believe such narratives. Yarrow is Southern
Girrrl Gen X, like me. She grew up in Small Town, Georgia,
and I grew up in Small Town, Kentucky. We were the young
regional bitches, born to ourselves like a threat. We were
children in rayon and shoulder pads, sweating through an
untried twenty-four-hour news cycle that told us, constantly,
by way of cable TV and Christian radio, sermons and pot-
lucks, and shocking election results, that we girls were living
in bodies that someone else needed to manage.
But Ronstadt made it possible for us to imagine that a
woman could be in charge of herself.
Ronstadt is Mexican-American, born to a Tucson ranching
family in a time when the Sonoran Desert border was porous,
no fence. The cultural border was also porous, both across
the desert and within Ronstadt’s childhood home. She grew
up gathering with her family to sing the songs passed down
from her Mexican-German grandfather, Federico José María
Ronstadt, a philharmonic musician and local arts patron.
They spent their evenings enjoying concerts by the family’s
dear friend Lalo Guerrero, a master Chicano folk musician
who would one day receive the National Medal of Arts. Her
aunt, Luisa Espinel, was leaving her vaudeville celebrity
to become a published songcatcher. Mexican radio filled
the house. Linda Ronstadt belonged not to a nation, but
to a desert.
This is to say, Ronstadt’s inheritance was freedom, and she
projected it into her public life. She was just twenty-two years
old when she released her first solo record—Hand Sown…
Home Grown—which featured arrangements that exhibited
her curatorial range and genius. Songs by Wayne Raney and
Jimmy Bryant are performed next to songs by Bob Dylan
and Randy Newman. She became famous overnight, as did
her love life. She balked at marriage and serially dated. She
paid no attention to the attention being paid to her.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 137
 Still, the music industry made sure its message was clear: a
woman could be in charge, so long as her lips were pouty enough.
By Ronstadt’s second solo record—Silk Purse (1970)—she had al-
ready released her first big hit, “Long Long Time.” The lyrics were
written by a guy named Gary Wright, and through him, Ronstadt
lilts such lines as “I can’t say you hurt me when you never let me
near/ And I never drew one response from you / All the while you
fell all over girls you never knew / ’Cause I’ve done everything I
know to try and make you mine.” Poor girl. Poor, tragic, sexy girl.
Silk Purse’s album art features a Kodachrome Ronstadt wear-
ing an Elly May costume that makes her look questionably legal,
but with an “I-know-what-I’m-doing” smile. In the picture, she is
sitting on the floor of a sty, somehow still clean, surrounded by
sows. Penthouse cheered: “There’s something distinctly average
about Linda Ronstadt, but perhaps that’s one of the things that
makes her so ravishing. She is the high school girl you dated once
or twice and remembered for the rest of your life.”
But Ronstadt was distinctly not average, and she did know what
she was doing. Or, would: “Competition is for horse races, not
for art. I had to face all that when Emmylou came on the scene.”
Emmylou Harris was still Gram Parsons’s Fallen Angel then, an
unknown until Parsons invited her to travel the country as his
backup sweetness. It was his solo debut they toured that year,
but it was her precise soprano that made it cosmic. “Everyone
was telling me for two years that there was this girl who was
doing everything that I was doing, and they were raving about
her. I felt threatened by it. I was scared; I was afraid to meet her.
I thought, ‘Oh, no, what if she’s better than I am?’ and I met her,
and she was.” Ronstadt continued, “Not to say that it doesn’t
hurt you when you know somebody can sing better than you
can, because there is envy. I do envy Dolly. I do envy Emmylou…
but I don’t begrudge them their success. I wish I could sing that
well, but I can’t. Them not being able to do it is not going to
make me sing any better.”
Ronstadt is famously unassuming and generous. But what I hear
is the clever wisdom of baby-boomer feminism: she’s refusing to
“catfight.” Harris met Ronstadt in 1973, the same year Gram Par-
sons was found dead from morphine in his desert motel. If Harris
felt lost to herself, she came to when she began collaborating
with Ronstadt. They started singing together shortly after they
met, recording their sublime version of “I Can’t Help It (If I’m
Still in Love with You).” In it, Ronstadt offers up her signature
operatic vibrato, cut by the belting power of rural Mexican folk
traditions, dragging her voice against the air like a grief. Harris
keens behind her, with an eerie verisimilitude. She means it.
Ronstadt remembers being changed by those early days of
friendship with Harris: “Gee, I wish she didn’t miss Gram so
much. I’d like to ride off into the sunset and be a duet with Emmy.
I wanted us to be The Everly Sisters.” Instead, Ronstadt used the
power she’d gathered to herself in the bullying music industry
to argue that Emmylou Harris deserved a solo contract. By 1975,
Harris had released Pieces of the Sky.
That record is, in some ways, a first glance at Trio’s potential:
Ronstadt sings on “Queen of the Silver Dollar,” and Harris cov-
ers Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors.” In 1976, Ronstadt and
138 WINTER 2022
Harris appeared together on Dolly!, Parton’s syndicated variety
show, and soon thereafter cameos began to appear on albums
like Harris’s Roses in the Snow (1980) and Ronstadt’s Get Closer
(1982). All the while, Ronstadt and Harris did indeed become as
close as family, with ever growing astonishment at each other’s
skill. “[Linda Ronstadt’s] probably got the most beautiful voice,
bar none, of any singer in the 20th century,” Harris confessed.
“Her and Maria Callas.”
And they were both gaga for Dolly. As the story goes, Ronstadt
picked up the phone and it was Harris telling her that Parton
was at Harris’s house. Ronstadt lived forty minutes away, and
she says she got there in twenty. When they sat down together,
Parton began trilling “Bury Me Beneath the Willow,” and before
she knew it Ronstadt and Harris were improvising, inventing
the harmonies that would become their shared legacy. Each of
them tells the story in a way that amounts to this: When they first
heard—or, felt—the sounds moving through them, something
in the air changed, a transcendence. “Oh, it was just chilling,
chilling, chilling,” Parton remembered.
Trio was released in 1987. It sold four million copies and was
nominated for a Grammy for Album of the Year alongside Mi-
chael Jackson’s Bad, Prince’s Sign O’ the Times, and Whitney
Houston’s Whitney. (And—they all lost to U2’s The Joshua Tree.
A startling year for music.) I was eleven years old. It was the end
of Reagan’s reign. And my family, like so many, was in economic
crisis—and splitting apart. I cut off all my hair and started to
wear my dad’s military jackets. I wanted to be tough, tougher
than worry. But on my walk to school, I’d pop the Trio cassette
into my old Walkman, put on those cozy foam earphones, and
float on the sound of women rising.
I didn’t know yet how difficult things would get. The 1990s
were indeed the surge of a war on women that has not, for one
day since, let up. An unholy force that allied James Dobson with
Newt Gingrich turned a whole South of women against each other
and ourselves. It is the same force that now rejects our medical
autonomy. After all, a Southern white woman made the Dobbs
ruling possible.
Trio’s album art makes for an important diptych with that
of Silk Purse. On Trio, Ronstadt sits elevated, atop a horse-rail
fence, backdropped by an unbound Arizona landscape. She
wears a black western dress and a dark bob that is only slightly
less pointy than her black cowgirl boots. Her eyes look at the
camera, straight on. She’s flanked by her besties, Emmylou and
Dolly, both in sunrise pink and red. Between them, she’s home.
Without Trio, is there a Sarah McLachlan? A Joan Osborne?
A Lilith Fair? I’m sure it wasn’t always easy between Ronstadt,
Harris, and Parton. Still, they chose each other. And because they
did, we could, too. Among those confusing and mean days when
we Gen Xers were first taunted by right-wing media to hate our
mothers, hate each other, win—there on our stereos were our
mothers, singing out the softest of soft girl vibes, singing songs
of the heartache we knew, not alone but together. And in their
singularly voiced, seemingly harmless pastel tone—they snuck
the truth across our borders: “When a flower grows wild / It can
always survive / Wildflowers don’t care where they grow.”
 ...like watching the sunset over the water on an
afternoon sail, relaxing on the warm sugar-white
Ã>˜`] œÀ i˜œÞˆ˜} >˜ ˆ˜Ìˆ“>Ìi iÛi˜ˆ˜} œv w˜i
dining. Plan a romantic getaway on the beautiful
beaches of the Alabama Gulf Coast.

GulfShores.com
OrangeBeach.com
877-341-2400
 Place Embodied
The sonic landscapes of Solange’s When I Get Home

by Noah T. Britton

voice like God called The compilation of songs by Willie Nelson,

her back into the
Houston sun. Light
filled a room baptized
in Florida water, can-
dles burning in the
ritual of Sundays at
St. John’s. Live mics anticipated hints of
melody, a half hour of tape until the ex-
act note landed, discipline manifested as
epiphany. Her soprano ringing in the air,
she might pause, taking in a venerated
image there beside her.
Solange carried photos of cowboys into
the spaces where she recorded When I Get
Home, part of a mood board that guid-
ed the album’s sound. Figures in flared
chaps or wide-brimmed hats, like the
neighbors who would clip by Solange
when she was a child in Almeda, her eyes
barely level with their sleek boots. Their
outlines on the horizon connected to the
centuries-old tradition of African Amer-
ican cowboys out West, frontier rumble
beneath the clap of hooves on pavement.
“She didn’t say a ton about [the images],”
producer John Carroll Kirby told Pitch-
fork, “but they were always up and it was
always unspoken.”
When I Get Home revels in the land and
the lore of its origins, paired with a visual
adaptation—directed by Solange—that
spans Texas’s country sprawl. Solange ties
her own creation story to that of frontier
legends, claiming herself in the acts of ode
and reinvention.
Waylon Jennings, Jessi Colter, and Tompall
Glaser leads with Jennings’s wistful “My
Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys,” in
which the high-riders of his youth stoop
a little now, scuffed leather astride “worn-
out saddles.”
A slow-rolling guitar riff evokes endless
terrain, haunted by a bass line that sows
isolation into the vacancy. In his own West
Texas warble, Jennings mourns the prom-
ise of the frontier, dominion fully realized
as spiritual displacement. Resigned to the
cowboy’s special “brand of misery,” he
ambles about the foundation of his own
myth-making, wondering at the loose soil
and cracked clay.
Where Jennings grieves barren land as
the basis for life unlived, Solange sees the
magnitude of home as a place of spiritual
guidance. “I can’t be a singular expression
of myself,” she affirms early in the album.
“There’s…too many journeys, too many
mountains, too many rivers.” This same
scenery commands the visual adaptation An entire lifespan courses through the
as Marfa splays out, an Eden in green and first notes of “Time (is),” an impression of
warm umber. Heavenly tones usher in keys sustained into holy silence. The music
mountains obscured by mist; even when her stretches across a vast sonic landscape
own image is not used on screen, Solange’s as the song tracks the early stirrings of a
voice hovers over country that articulates hero’s journey, the breadth of the frontier
hidden depths, accessing manifold selves. reinterpreted here as abundance, a place
“Time (is)” frames a group of cowboys of self-expansion.
in easy rapture against this backdrop, men Solange lingers in these moments of
from South Texas convened by rider Gary stillness, the kind of quiet possible beneath
Richard, an elder and record-setter of cumulus skies, places where stars are visi-
professional circuits. A humble rodeo ble. Maybe this is the bravery of her music:
arena, the only structure for miles, splits to journey to the end of itself, to meet

T he earliest country hits projected a sim-

ilar mythology, with sparse production
spurred on by acoustic nostalgia. Wanted!
The Outlaws, released in 1976, became the
first country album to go platinum, secur-
ing outlaw country’s waywardness as the
genre’s “most marketable brand,” Kelefa
Sanneh writes in his book Major Labels.
the earth like the slim distance between a
garden and greater wildness. As an ivory
bull charges through the chute, each man
enters this careful dance: rider, fighter,
witness, one dependent on the other. Their
strength is self-possessed, not so much
intent on taming. Their contest becomes
an act of community.
the expectation of sound with a calm too
deep and full to be heard as an absence.
Each note turns inward, and she invites us
into the private work of introspection. A
probing bass line explores some internal,
edifying distance.
That emphasis on space grows as an
echo effect trails her delivery and produc-

140 WINTER 2022

tion. Solange staggers her initial no—fear
of leaving a safe place for a free one—over
three breaks, an internal crack registered
in the shock of a round vowel. The trail-
ing oh lands in waves, clear, convicted,
collapsing, until it recedes with the quiet
of the keys.
Near the end of the first verse, a
determined we gotta go radiates outward,
go drawn into the next line in its rebound.
Onscreen, we watch with the cowboys
from one side of the ring as the bull an-
gles, hooves scraping the ground. We
hear an echo and see the plains it covers,
slopes in the background reflecting the
sound—an interior world in aerial shots,
mapped onto the geography of home in
this custom of daring. The verse’s last line
descends from our perspective overhead,
a familiar command from the heavens,
urging go.
Photograph by Julia Reinhart/Redferns
A persistent call winds through the cho-
rus as the song relays this final instruc-
tion, you’ve got to know, in a succession
of extremes. Sampha, co-composer and
co-lyricist on this track, eases into his low-
er register here, a slow valley beneath Sol-
ange’s steep pitch. The graded harmony, a
kind of vocal relief, conjures what Audre
Lorde imagined as the fullness of intimacy
in Zami, “to be both man and woman…
to share valleys and mountains upon my
body the way the earth does in hills and
peaks.” The union of pitches allows for
infinite expression, the combined wisdom
of the versions of ourselves we become in
any journey.
W hen I Get Home thrives as place em-
bodied, country landscapes carved
into the wide expanse of the album’s pro-
duction. Solange intones a memory, and
the sound comes back as summons, past
and future potential held in the echo of
inherited myths. Country music’s fixed
nostalgia clarifies her own effort toward
wholeness, the same way that Betty Davis’s
“The Lone Ranger” swells her capacity for
pleasure, or how a ranchera might bask
in rural views that tease eternal refuge,
as in Jorge Negrete’s classic rendition of
“México Lindo y Querido.” For Solange,
the frontier plays host to a hero’s journey
invested in growth, a catalyst for greater
fulfillment. Home is sometimes the place
we leave on the way back to ourselves, even
as we carry its shape with us.
As Solange delivers the final refrain, a
pair of cowboys races across a wide-open
plain on horseback. You’ve got to know
rings out from the distance, somewhere
out of frame, and they ride into the horizon
toward some new truth.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 141
 How to find our way back

by Gretchen Peters

here is a word in the Welsh language—hiraeth (heer- omniscient storyteller who sees humanity
ath)—that has no direct English translation, yet the idea it from a bird’s-eye view. The narrative trope
contains is so ingrained in country music that it seems to of the displaced farm boy surely gained
be part of its DNA. It may well have come to the Americas traction from the twentieth-century mi-
on the boats with poor Scots, Irish, and Welsh from the gration of rural Southerners, both Black
British Isles, who brought their melodies and their fiddles and white, who traveled to large Northern
and their dark ballads, and not much else, with them to cities to find work when there was none at
the New World. Hiraeth is a kind of nostalgic homesickness for a home you home. It’s not hard to see that the city was
can’t return to, or quite possibly one that never existed. It’s a deep yearning a place where hardship, temptation, sin,
for a rootedness that’s irrevocably lost. and, ultimately, ruin, are around every cor-
There is, arguably, no other genre of music that celebrates, idealizes, ner. “Streets of Baltimore,” by songwriting
and mythologizes the idea of home as much as country music. Home, in a greats Harlan Howard and Tompall Glaser,
country song, is both a fantasy and a real place, seen through a misty lens begins with this simple scene:
and spoken of reverently. In many country songs, the narrator is an exile from
their homeland by way of economics, progress, societal mores, or fateful I sold the farm to take my woman
circumstance. Home is almost always a kind of rural paradise, especially Where she longed to be
seen in hindsight, as in Mac Davis’s classic “Texas in My Rearview Mirror.” It’s We left our kin and all our friends
equated with goodness, simplicity, honesty. The city is a place where people Back there in Tennessee
only go if they’re forced or lured. In most country songs, the Big City looks less
like the land of opportunity and more like the backdrop for a cautionary tale. And ends with this one:
Of course, the idea of home in country music is also firmly planted geo-
graphically in the South. Mostly, it’s not the South as it is, but the South as it I did my best to bring her back
never was—a place where a prodigal child is always welcomed back into the To what she used to be
unconditional embrace of family and neighbors. This South isn’t dark and But soon I learned she loved
violent, but benign and bucolic. This South doesn’t talk about its haunted past, Those bright lights more than me
only a sepia-toned one. Loretta Lynn’s origin story, “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” Now, I’m going home on that same train
doesn’t shy away from describing the poverty of her childhood, but neither That brought me here before
does it dwell on it: While my baby walks
The streets of Baltimore
In the summertime we didn’t have shoes to wear
But in the wintertime, we’d all get a brand new pair In the 1960s, the Vietnam War presented another lens through which
From a mail order catalog, money made from sellin’ a hog country songwriters viewed their homeland. It’s easy to think that country
Daddy always managed to get the money somewhere music, long associated with “love it or leave it” conservatism, would have
wholeheartedly embraced the war effort, but songs like Tom T. Hall’s “Mama
From a songwriter’s point of view, the exiled Southerner makes a useful Bake a Pie (Daddy Kill a Chicken)” present a much more nuanced attitude
and convenient narrator; isolated and markedly different from their new toward the war. The song is sung from the point of view of a wounded veteran
neighbors, they are the perfect observer of people and their inevitable faults returning home without the use of his legs. The home and family he return to
and failures. The outcast, the wanderer. Almost always romanticized in country are well-meaning but ill-equipped to understand where he’s been and what
songs, they are the clear-eyed speaker, sometimes moral arbiter, a sort of he’s been through.

142 WINTER 2022 Illustration by Mike Reddy

 As a country music fan, and later as both a songwriter and a country music
artist who was born and raised just a few miles from the quintessential Big
City—New York—I felt conflicted about this romanticization of ruralness and
home for a long time. On the one hand, the idea of actually belonging to a
place was irresistible to me. Coming from the North (notably a place where
people don’t automatically self-identify as Northerners), and from a far-flung
family, the pull toward something permanent, sustaining, and self-defining
was strong. I was in thrall to the idea of a home that would feel like Home. I
knew hiraeth. On the other hand, I’ve lived in Nashville, often referred to as
“the Buckle of the Bible Belt,” for thirty-five years now, and. . . .it’s complicated.
In some recent country songs, this equation of home with goodness has
calcified into a sort of predictable nostalgia where the narrator’s small town
looks the same as every small town in every TV advertisement (there is no
decaying downtown or suburban meth lab, no stultifying poverty in sight)
and the main activities revolve around pickup trucks, beer, and young, in-
terchangeable women. I don’t know whose heart this kind of longing speaks
to, but it’s not mine.
But the best country music acknowledges, even if only glancingly, both the
longing for home and the knowledge that it has never been, and can never
be, perfect. It recognizes the Saturday night/Sunday morning dichotomy
that runs in the blood of every Southerner and rests comfortably, or at least
tolerably so, in their soul. The best country songs acknowledge the perfectly
imperfect memory of home and family, as the great songwriter Bob McDill
did in his masterpiece “Good Ole Boys Like Me”:
Then daddy came in to kiss his little man
With gin on his breath and a Bible in his hand
He talked about honor and things I should know
Then he’d stagger a little as he went out the door
I can still hear the soft Southern winds in the live oak trees
And those Williams boys they still mean a lot to me—Hank and Tennessee
I guess we’re all gonna be what we’re gonna be
So what do you do with good ole boys like me
Here, for someone like me—a transplant to the South, a place I’ve lived twice
as long as any other place but in which I will forever be an outsider—is the crux
of the matter. Here is the contradiction, the complexity, the impossibility of
reconciling the dysfunctional home with the idealized one. Here is the difficult
reality of holding two conflicting truths in one’s heart. It’s the recognition
that your parents are flawed, and so is the place that raised you. Home is a
conundrum, a myth, a yearning for something that never was precisely as
you remember it. Hiraeth. And yet we long for it. That is a longing that speaks
directly to my heart.
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit
Oxford American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 143
 If You
Don’t Like
Millie
Jackson ...
Before there was a Yeehaw Agenda

by Charles Hughes

ountry music always

felt like home to Mil-
lie Jackson. “Growing
up in the country,”
the Georgia-born
r&b star told writ-
er Jack Lloyd, “we
didn’t have black
radio, so I’ve always
been a country-rocker at heart.” Even as she
gained fame in the 1970s with frank, funky
discussions of love and sex like “It Hurts So
Good” and the Caught Up albums, Jackson
made room for her earliest musical love.
“I’ve included at least one country song on
just about every album I’ve ever done,” she
noted, even scoring a top five r&b hit with
a smoldering take on Merle Haggard’s “If
We’re Not Back In Love By Monday” in 1977. But, even after this accompanied by a white horse and tuxedoed male companion
success, one barrier remained solid. “I’ve wanted to do a country as city lights sparkle behind them. While not a commercial or
album for a long time,” she told a reporter in 1981, “but [the critical success, and largely forgotten in subsequent decades, Just
record company] never let me.” a Lil’ Bit Country is a compelling example of how Black country
That changed later on that year, with the release of Jackson’s artists have historically remixed and reimagined a genre that too
album Just a Lil’ Bit Country. Recorded in Nashville, the album often ignores or overtly excludes them. It is also a great record.
features Jackson performing country hits in her trademark Two crucial changes led to Jackson’s ability to release a country
vocal style that interlaced breathy intimacy, sweeping power, album. First, she renegotiated her record deal, which allowed
and an easy familiarity that made each listener feel like they her greater creative control. Second, country was then cresting
were in private conversation. She delivered these performances the wave of the soul-and-disco-influenced Urban Cowboy boom.
over arrangements that ranged from faithful interpretations Just as earlier generations had adopted (and appropriated) blues,
to transformations driven by disco rhythms and rock guitars, jazz, and r&b into their recordings, now the country charts
supplied by a group of studio pros, including bassist Bob Wray pulsed with hits that incorporated the sounds and energies of
and drummer James Stroud. This juxtaposition was signaled the dance floor, from the Bellamy Brothers’ “Let Your Love Flow”
on the album cover. Eschewing rural or old-fashioned imagery, to Dolly Parton’s transcendent “9 to 5.” Jackson—and her label,
the image features a beaming Jackson in a frilly spangled gown Spring Records—recognized an opportunity to bridge a seeming

144 WINTER 2022 Photograph © Glasshouse Images/Alamy

cultural divide. “The time seemed right for a country album
now,” she said in 1981, “with the ‘Urban Cowboy’ thing and all
of those black folks going around with cowboy hats and boots
these days.” The album thus offered a disco-era reiteration of
Black cowboy iconography that stretched back to the nineteenth
century and has most recently been revived through the social
media–driven rise of the “Yeehaw Agenda.” As in those other
moments, Jackson’s remix intervened in a larger moment of
discussion over the meanings of country culture and the specific
role of Black people within it.
J ackson was hardly the first r&b artist to record country music.
Most included country songs on their albums, and several
stars—from Tina Turner to the Supremes—recorded entire al-
bums of country material. The most important was Ray Charles’s
groundbreaking 1965 smash Modern Sounds in Country and
Western Music. As evidenced by the title, Charles paired well-
known country songs with lush pop and jazz arrangements: His
mission was less to evoke the music’s past than to signal where
it might go next. He succeeded. For the next nineteen years, up
through Urban Cowboy, country artists and producers increas-
ingly incorporated the sounds, songs, and even studio personnel
behind r&b into their hitmaking formula. Contrary to its rootsy
reputation, country had always been absorptive, bringing in suc-
cessful pop styles to keep the music commercially relevant and
commercially successful. Black pop had always been a favorite
source, and country artists from Barbara Mandrell to Waylon
Jennings incorporated the sounds of soul into their recordings,
often backed by r&b-rooted producers like Billy Sherrill and mu-
sicians who started in Memphis or Muscle Shoals before making
their way to the bright lights of Music City. R&b and soul kept
country modern, pushing it to new levels of crossover success
and cultural prominence in the 1970s. By 1981, Charles’s work
seemed even more prophetic.
It makes sense, then, that Jackson opens the album with “I Can’t
Stop Loving You,” the Don Gibson song that Charles made into
Modern Sounds’ biggest hit. But Jackson was not interested in a
throwback: As she said at the time, “I took these country songs
and funked them up a little.” Indeed, Jackson turns the swooning
ballad into a luxurious dance-floor jam. She even steps aside at
one point for the band to dive into a polyrhythmic breakdown
that would’ve been equally at home in a disco DJ’s mix, the
breakbeats of early hip-hop, and the country dance clubs where
“Urban Cowboy” country took flight. Adding the modern sounds
to Modern Sounds, Jackson paradoxically sends the song in new
directions and brings it all back home.
The album proceeds in this spirit, as Jackson both responds
to individual country songs and remixes the larger assumptions
of the country genre. Her stomping take on “Pick Me Up on Your
Way Down” inverts the original’s bemused resignation into an
assertive demand that recalls contemporaneous rock-influenced
work by LaBelle or the Pointer Sisters, both of whom recorded
country songs. Her take on Tammy Wynette’s hit “’Til I Get It
Right” adds a horn section and insistent background vocals that
reshape Wynette’s resignation into bluesy insistence. Jackson’s
facility with country’s musical and lyrical tropes extends to her
two original contributions, which fit seamlessly alongside the
established genre standards. Jackson’s song “Loving You” maps
shared terrain between pop, country, r&b, and adult contem-
porary, with Jackson’s lyrical invocation of “quiet storm” as the
most direct linkage to the simmering sub-genre.
Even more impressive is “I Laughed a Lot.” On this original,
Jackson offers a first-person narrative that charts the protagonist’s
journey from cotton fields to Hollywood glitz. Such stories are
common in country, usually serving to authenticate the singer as
a true purveyor of the country spirit. For Black country artists,
such songs take on additional meaning. The need to demonstrate
musical and cultural bona fides has been critical to Black country
artists, especially those whose original fame came in other genres
and particularly in moments (like Jackson’s) when country’s
racial borders have come under challenge. While not necessarily
autobiographical, the song has a resonance with Jackson’s own
journey from Georgia farm family to musical stardom that adds
a layer of reality to her finely crafted storytelling.
Over a bubbling arrangement of picked guitar and punchy horns,
Jackson’s protagonist recounts the experiences that brought her to
where she is today. She acknowledges the “hard work” and “pain”
of her rural youth while also fondly recalling her family’s strength
and humor. Then, when she gets to Hollywood, she indulges in good
drugs and bad love before emerging as an independent woman
who can take care of herself with “her fans and her money” to help
her. Contrary to tragic narratives of big-city alienation or romantic
“old home place” nostalgia, Jackson cherishes all her experience
as evidence of her strength and ingenuity. And unlike the fallen
women or saintly mothers that populate country history, Jackson
is on her own and having a good time too. She literally cackles
at the end, reminding us that “Damn right! I’m having big fun!,”
and then calling us to join her on the dancefloor: “Party disco,
baby! Get it on the one!” Black statements of country authenticity
simultaneously echo and subvert genre expectations; they reiter-
ate well-known genre tropes while expanding understandings of
what—and who—counts as country.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the last song on Just a Lil’ Bit
Country. Jackson ends with a version of Kris Kristofferson’s “If
You Don’t Like Hank Williams,” a boisterous ode to the outlaw
country and Southern rock artists who emerged in the 1970s as a
seeming counterpoint to the stifling music and politics of Nash-
ville. Kristofferson shouts out artists like Willie Nelson and the
Allman Brothers in his roll call, and at the center stands perhaps
the most recognizable icon of rugged country realness: “If you
don’t like Hank Williams,” Kristofferson gruffly assures, “you
can kiss our ass.” Also recorded in 1980 by scion Hank Williams
Jr., the song isn’t overtly exclusionary. But—like so many “real
country” arguments, even in the supposedly liberated world of
outlaw country—there are no Black frontmen included in the
list of friends and heroes.
Jackson’s version flips the script. She turns the song not only
into personal celebration—now it’s “Anybody That Don’t Like
Millie Jackson” who gets the kiss-off—but also an all-Black all-star
team, shouting out r&b and funk artists from Otis Redding to
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 145
 the O’Jays. But, unlike the disco-fied grooves or slow-burn soul
of earlier tracks, Jackson sticks to the original arrangement, as
steel guitar and fiddle drive a stomping honky-tonk two-step.
“Y’all didn’t think we Black folks could sing no mess like this, did
you?” she says at one point. “Well, y’all ain’t heard nothing yet!”
Staking her claim and laughing at your foolishness, Millie Jackson
is ready to confound any expectations. “I’m not saying that I’m
the first,” she notes at the very end, and “I may not be the last.”
She certainly wasn’t the last. The album was not a hit, which
Jackson chalked up to a lack of record company commitment
to the project that included, in her recollection, being booked
to perform at the Grand Ole Opry but pulled from the show
beforehand. The white critics who covered the album largely
dismissed it as a perhaps pleasurable novelty, although Billboard’s
Nashville correspondent Kip Kirby said it “proves that experi-
mentation doesn’t damage
country music.” It quickly
became a footnote in Jack-
son’s remarkable career.
Jackson’s profound influ-
ence on subsequent gener-
ations of r&b and hip-hop
performers has only come
into greater focus: her pro-
to-rapping, funky medi-
tations on love and sex,
and uncensored artistic
persona serving as model
for artists from Lil’ Kim to
Erykah Badu. In a moment
when the genius of Black
women is the center of pop
music both commercially
and creatively, it’s easy to
hear Millie Jackson in art-
ists from Lizzo to Cardi B.
But her country album—
one that brought her back
to her roots and that she fought to make—has largely slipped
through the cracks.
Still, four decades after its release, Just a Lil’ Bit Country has
never sounded better. The performances and arrangements
remain vibrant reminders of Jackson’s unique craft and the skill
of the musicians with whom she worked. Her interpretations of
country standards show the songs to be rich and durable, and
her own compositions earn their place next to the more famous
tracks. Its specific reaffirmation of country’s links to dance music
and its sincere-but-not-too-serious approach have aged particu-
larly well. The album is thoughtful, striking, and—perhaps most
importantly—deeply pleasurable.
Just a Lil’ Bit Country has also never sounded more important.
I hear it as a link in the long and ongoing history of how African
American musicians have added new chapters in country’s de-
velopment rather than simply serving as static influences from
a semi-mythical past. It predicts the centrality of Black women
146 WINTER 2022
to recent conversations about country’s racial politics, and I
hear Jackson offering a precursor to the calls by artists from
Mickey Guyton to Rhiannon Giddens and many more who have
offered a historical corrective to marginalization and demanded
greater recognition going forward. I hear Just a Lil’ Bit Country
as a signal of how the best country music—whether mainstream,
traditional/Americana, or whatever—always has one foot rooted
in the past and one pointing toward the future. In its joyous
irreverence and hybrid sound, I hear Lil Nas X, who performed
similar trickster transformations in 2018 with cowboy fantasia
“Old Town Road.” And I hear and see the mix of pop glamour and
country realness that characterizes not only Lil Nas X, but also
Megan Thee Stallion and Beyoncé, two key voices of the Black
South whose artistry, frankness, and engagement with “country”
as sound and identity suggest an additional kinship with Millie
Jackson. (The visual similarity be-
tween Just a Lil’ Bit Country and
Beyoncé’s Renaissance is only the
most recent resonance.)
I also hear Just a Lil’ Bit Country
as a powerful rejoinder to toxic
narratives of country authenticity.
The idea of a stable and discrete
“real country music” is pure fic-
tion, denying the stylistic blends
and pop impulses that have mo-
tivated the genre’s musicians—
Black, white, or otherwise—from
the beginning. Moreover, this
purist impulse fuels bigoted ideas,
placing certain communities of
people outside the circle and sug-
gesting that they are interlopers at
best and corrupting influences at
worst. Moments of crossover—like
“Urban Cowboy”—are demonized
in coded language, while the ac-
cepted icons of country realness
remain largely male, assumedly straight and cis, and almost entirely
white. In this case, African American country artists are forced
to repeatedly demonstrate their musical and cultural legitimacy
to white gatekeepers who either implicitly or explicitly assume
them to be outside of the traditions they helped originate and
still re-create. And, as in everything, it’s even harder for Black
country women.
In its stomping funk and aching ballads, in its heartfelt pleas
and loud laughter, Millie Jackson’s Just a Lil’ Bit Country both
convincingly debunks such nonsense and gleefully insists on a
different conversation. The question isn’t whether Black people
love country music. Black artists and audience members have
shown that they do over and over again throughout country’s
history. The real question is whether country music—and the
country it claims to represent—will love them back. That question
remains unanswered. But one thing’s for sure.
Anybody that don’t like Millie Jackson, you can kiss our ass.
Photo by Carter/Reddy
 2022
30TH Anniversary
PA R T N E R S
A special thanks to all of our advertising partners listed below for helping to make the Oxford American’s
30th Anniversary year a true celebration. Your support plays a crucial role as we continue exploring
the complexity and vitality of the American South through exceptional writing, music, and visual art.

Thank you to all who appreciate and celebrate the music and culture of the South:
Acadia Parish (LA)
Allen Parish (LA)
Arcadia Publishing (SC)
Arkansas Parks & Tourism (AR)
Arkansas Single Parent Scholarship Fund (AR)
ATO Records (NY)
Belmont University (TN)
Blue Ridge National Heritage Area (NC)
Books Along the Teche Literary Festival (LA)
California State University, Northridge /
CSUN (CA)
Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning (KY)
Carson McCullers Center for Writers &
Musicians (GA)
City of Charleston (SC)
Coastal Mississippi (MS)
Columbus Museum (GA)
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (AR)
Delta State University’s
Delta Music Institute (MS)
Discovery Park of America (TN)
Don Black (MD)
Georgia Music Foundation (GA)
Greater Birmingham CVB (AL)
Gulf Shores & Orange Beach Tourism (AL)
Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art /
College of Charleston (SC)
HarperCollins / Ecco Press (NY)
Hilliard Art Museum /
University of Louisiana at Lafayette (LA)
Historic New Orleans Collection (LA)
Horse & Buggy Press and Friends (NC)
Jefferson Parish (LA)
Lafayette (LA)
LSU Press (LA)
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (TN) The Momentary (AR)
Memphis Tourism (TN) Trala (IL)
Mercer University Press (GA) Tupelo (MS)
Merge Records (NC) UCA College of Fine Arts &
Michael C. Carlos Museum of Emory Communication (AR)
University (GA) University of Central Arkansas (AR)
Mississippi Arts & Entertainment University of Mississippi Museums and
Experience / THE MAX (MS) Historic Homes / Rowan Oak (MS)
Mississippi Book Festival (MS) University Press of Mississippi (MS)
Mississippi Department of University of Arkansas Press (AR)
Archives & History (MS)
University Press of Florida (FL)
Mississippi Film Office (MS) University of Kentucky Press (KY)
Mississippi Museum of Art (MS) University of Tennessee Press (TN)
Missouri Tourism Office (MO) University of Texas Press (TX)
Mobile Museum of Art (AL) Vanderbilt Creative Writing Program (TN)
Nasher Museum of Art at Visit Baton Rouge (LA)
Duke University (NC)
Visit Clarksdale (MS)
Nashville Ballet (TN)
Visit Greenwood (MS)
Natchez Literary & Cinema Celebration (MS)
Visit Macon (GA)
Natchitoches Convention &
Visitors Bureau (LA) Visit McKinney (TX)
Visit Meridian Tourism (MS)
Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art (MS)
Visit Mississippi (MS)
Paducah Convention & Visitors Bureau (KY)
Visit Natchez (MS)
Paintsville Tourism (KY)
Visit Oxford (MS)
Pearl River Resort (MS)
Visit Ridgeland (MS)
Rabun County Tourism (GA)
Visit South Walton (FL)
Sabine Parish (LA)
See Rock City (GA) Visit Vicksburg (MS)
Sewanee School of Letters (TN) Walter Anderson Museum of Art (MS)
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (DC) Wickles Pickles (AL)
Southern Environmental Law Center (VA) Yazoo County CVB (MS)
Tennessee State Museum (TN) Yoknapatawpha Arts
Council (MS)
Tennessee Williams Festival /
Clarksdale (MS)
The City With Soul - JXN (MS)

We invite the OA audience to engage with all our partners to show your appreciation
for the positive impact and influence they have on our region and our lives.
 RAMBLING
HOME
The living tradition
of an Irish ballad

by Brían Mac Gloinn

I
t was a Sunday night, December 2018, in
Early’s Bar on Arranmore Island—Árainn
Mhór in Irish—off the coast of Donegal
in the northwest of Ireland, where my
mother and family are from. Jerry Early
accompanied his dad Andrew on the guitar in a
universal country-folk style as they sang a broad
mix of music: anything from Frankie Laine to Hank
Williams and Johnny Cash to traditional Irish songs
known from the greats of the 1960s and ’70s. We
sat with our backs to the blazing fire while the whole
room’s attention centered on Andrew and his son. It
was, and still is, an inclusive, unpretentious space,
where people of all ages are part of the music. Every
so often a few people might jump up to waltz, jive,
or two-step around the bar. My dad knows the keys
of everyone’s songs and has his harmonicas laid
out on the table. This is not what people think of
when they hear “Irish singing tradition,” but it is
the living tradition.
Andrew Early was a dear family friend and in his
late eighties at the time. That night, he sang one of songs, and music were the main entertainment, y son you have gone to a strange
his favorites—a song called “No One to Welcome
Me Home.” At the time, I was deep-diving for old
and this all took place in people’s homes. A teach
airneáil was the name in Irish for a house session—a
“M foreign land,
And you’re leaving your old folk alone.
traditional songs, but this didn’t sound like one to rambling home. Andrew spent many evenings in And when you return to the land of your birth
me. The waltz rhythm, the three-chord I-IV-V pro- Róise’s house when he was a boy, listening to her There’ll be no one to welcome you home.”
gression, the syncopated delivery of the lyrics, the singing and telling stories. He told me that Róise
chorus, the image of the lonesome rambler far away also sang a lot of English-language songs, but very “Did you get that now?”
from home, along with Andrew’s style and singing in few of these were recorded. “No One to Welcome
that setting, all sounded a bit American and country. Me Home” was overlooked back then, in the exact This has just been sung to me across a packed
I loved how Andrew sang it, but with my tradition same way that I hadn’t taken notice of it in Early’s room. A single resounding voice fills the bar—a large
blinders on, it passed straight by me. It was only Bar, and only Andrew had kept it safe in the store square room filled with singers and listeners on low
when Andrew told me that he had learned the song of his memory. stools, attending to one of their most cherished
directly from Róise Rua that my ears perked up. It could have been an old ballad from the oral local singers. Teapots, mugs, pint glasses, and
Róise Bean Mhic Grianna was the best-known tradition or it might have been a modern Amer- empty sandwich plates litter the tables. Bright
traditional singer to come from Árainn Mhór. She ican country song Róise picked up in the 1930s sunlight beams through the windows, reflecting
was known locally as Róise Rua—red-haired Róise— somewhere. I tried searching archives and online, off the shining rain-drenched fields, roads, and
and Róise na nAmhrán—Róise of the songs. Andrew but just found myself flooded with another song heathery hills outside.
was her friend and was in the room when she was recorded by the Blue Sky Boys and Hank Williams, Annie Hirrell is a woman in her eighties with
recorded by Radio Éireann and the National Folklore and one reference to the song I knew, but sung short white curls and thick-rimmed glasses. We’re
Commission in 1953. to a different melody. The country roads were so in the North Pole Bar, on the Inishowen peninsu-
Not too many islanders of Róise’s generation numerous, I decided to take a different route in my la in Donegal, at the very northern tip of Ireland.
could read or write, so the culture was oral: stories, search for the song. Inishowen is home to a strong oral tradition of

148 WINTER 2022 Illustration by Mike Reddy

unaccompanied singing, and I’ve just been involved
in a significant exchange.
It’s March 2019, and I’m here for the annual
singing festival, where singers and enthusiasts
from around Ireland, the UK, and farther afield
gather to sing and listen to unaccompanied sing-
ing for three days and nights. This community
is naturally non-hierarchical—there are no stars,
famous “artists,” or egos here. All are referred to
simply as “singers,” and everyone sings a song at
some point while everyone else listens. Bars like
the North Pole are packed with young and old,
and a rare space is held for these songs where
they don’t have to compete with other music or
noisy crowds. You’ll hear people sing songs that
have been in their families and communities for
generations. The crowd often joins in on the last
lines of verses. Enthusiasts, students, academics,
living legends, tradition bearers, mischief makers;
landscape gardeners, truck drivers, school teach-
ers, farmers, van-dwellers, and filmmakers; singers
of every kind are part of the crowd here. If you’re
looking for information on any old ballad, this is a
very good place to start.
A few moments earlier I’d mentioned “No One
to Welcome Me Home” to a friend of mine, Brian
Doyle, a musician who lives locally and also works
for the Irish Traditional Music Archive (ITMA). I was
curious if he’d ever heard it or knew anyone who
sang it. Not only did Brian know the song, but he
told me that Annie, the local singer who knew it,
was sitting in the next room. Brian quickly passed
on my request to Annie and the room fell to a hush
when her name was called.
“There’s a wee boy here who wants to hear me
sing ‘No One to Welcome Me Home’—where are you?”
Having found me, she started singing in her low,
warbling, broad Donegal accent. Annie has extra
verses and I only have one shot at catching this:
a tearful mother waves goodbye to her son as he
sails away from “the Queenstown dock.” She gives
him a locket with a photograph inside. He wanders
alone in the twilight of foreign streets, dreaming
of his family he left behind in their cottage “at the
foot of the hill” and then the familiar heartbreaking
chorus repeats:
“No one to welcome me home, far away,
Far away o’er the dark raging foam.
Fatherless, motherless, sadly I’ll roam,
I’ll have no one to welcome me home.”
hen Irish people of Róise and Andrew’s gener-
W ations emigrated to America, they landed in
a strange new country, with a new culture and lan-
guage. But the songs and tunes they had brought
with them were still as valuable as they had been at
home, and they could slot them into new rhythms
and melodies quite easily. They could bridge the
gap across the Atlantic and return home, if only for
a moment. “No One to Welcome Me Home” was
as true a song as could be sung for a lot of those
people. And as they dreamt of the homes they’d
left behind, they also re-imagined them.
A similar process was taking place back in Ire-
land. Old ways were being left behind in favor of a
promising, empowering, new Ireland of free educa-
tion, electricity, televisions, radio, cars, and dance
halls. Irish people were trying to get ahead: moving
toward a new language, culture, and identity. They
too were gone to a strange foreign land, without
moving anywhere.
The old unaccompanied songs of the teach
airneáil felt less relevant—but new American folk
music being sent home to Ireland could bridge the
gap. Adding a guitar and a harmonica to their old
local songs, alongside new songs featuring places
like West Virginia and New Orleans, people could feel
part of a bigger, newer world. Country-folk music fit
right in with the emerging modern Irish identity, and
created new routes for people’s imaginations and
dreams, outwards from Ireland and across the sea.
All of this can still be seen happening in Ireland.
In Connemara, an Irish-speaking region in west Gal-
way, and a place well known for its sean-nós singing
tradition (a very old form of unaccompanied, or-
nate, Irish-language singing), a distinct version of
countrified folk music is popular—Gaelcheol tíre,
or Irish-language country music. The songs are
ultra-local, sung about local events by local people
in a local dialect of Irish, recorded and broadcast
all on local radio or record labels; yet stylistically
they draw heavily on American country and folk
music. I asked Dr. Síle Denvir, a musician and singer
from the area and Gaelcheol tíre scholar, why she
thought these songs resonate so deeply with peo-
ple in Connemara: “They’re so honest, so simple
and so direct. I think people really want to just hear
stories, tell stories, dance, be in a community—have
fun, and sometimes sean-nós has been given a
lot to carry. There’s a lot on the shoulders of the
tradition itself and people feel that heaviness.”
Similarly, on Árainn Mhór today, it’s quite rare to
hear an old song sung unaccompanied out in the
pub, but accompanied on guitar and sung alongside
a country sing-along, they make sense and feel
lighter. Some newly written songs in a country-folk
ballad style have made their way into sessions on
the island too.
“A lot of it is to do with belonging, and I think that’s
a lot of what country music is in its essence… So it
just fits into whatever genetic memory we have of a
teach airneáil,” says Dr. Denvir. “It’s part of that whole
pub scene but it’s echoing, in a way, what would have
happened in the homes in a real nutshell.”
Generations of Irish people had borne the trau-
ma of the famine, of violent colonial rule, of the war
of independence and then a bitterly divisive civil
war. In the mid-twentieth century, in America and
in Ireland, many took on a new culture, language,
and identity that would free them from the weight
of the previous hundred years: When they used
country music to re-imagine their homes, they
were re-imagining themselves, too.
ndrew would often tell me about his visits to
A Róise Rua’s house, and how he wished he had
paid her more attention, but he and his friends
were young and distracted. When they would get
up to leave, Róise would ask Andrew to stay and
sing a few songs just to him before he’d go. Unlike
the recording session, this was her space, and she
could choose which songs to give this young boy.
When it was finally time to go, it would be dark and
there was no electricity or streetlights on the roads
at the time. Róise would take an ember from the
fire on a fork and hold it into the wind outside the
front door until it caught alight, before handing it
to Andrew to light his way home.
Songs were valuable social currency back then.
With them you could hold the attention of a whole
room, maybe even catch the eye of someone spe-
cial or make a good first impression. You couldn’t
sing a song someone else was known for if they
were present either, so you had to have your own
songs. To be given a song was a precious gift.
I had known Andrew since I was a small boy. As I
grew older, we grew closer and connected through
singing. It took me awhile to realize, after he had
sung “No One to Welcome Me Home” and some
other songs to me a few times, that he was giving
me these songs, too.
Through my search for this song, I’ve discovered
field recordings of singers on Árainn Mhór, in Clare
and in Cork, all with different melodies. I’ve found
ballad sheets, printed music, and references to the
song from the 1860s. I’ve found field recordings
from the U.S. too, such as Elmer George in East
Calais, Vermont, in 1939, who learned the song
from a wandering lumberjack, and sang it unac-
companied. And I found a version of it backed up
on guitar, sung as a country song, from a man
named Melvin Rogers in Ava, Missouri, from 1975.
Remarkably, again thanks to Brian Doyle of the
ITMA, I also heard a recording of a young man
from my home county of Carlow singing the song
in a German P.O.W. camp in 1917. I can only imagine
what dreams he held of his home in that setting.
In Early’s and the North Pole, potent moments
of transmission opened my eyes and ears to the
broader boundaries of what tradition can mean.
The feeling is almost electric; a presentness; an
emotional charge that special exchanges of music
and song create. In the same way that the contours
of land give the river its flow, I think it’s this emo-
tional charge that keeps songs moving through our
shared traditions. The line between one tradition
and another is sometimes almost impossible to
define, in the same way that it’s hard to define
the difference between two oceans when they’re
all just the one body of water.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 149
 “For My Lover”
Tracy Chapman on the rewards of risk and love
by Sarah Smarsh
eing in love is a state of madness that may
compromise decision-making abilities. Sac-
rifices made for a romantic partner should,
therefore, be examined.
In Tracy Chapman’s “For My Lover,”
from her 1988 debut Tracy Chapman, the
narrator acknowledges that others think
she’s nuts and wonders whether the rela-
tionship is worth the losses and risks she
has incurred: doing time in a Virginia jail, coming up with bail
money, lying to authorities to cover for her love.
The chorus, though, returns to her conclusion: It’s the world,
not her, that’s crazy. I believe her. When Chapman sings “you”
over and over with her iconic contralto, it doesn’t sound like
codependency. It sounds like ardent longing and frustrated
adoration, conditions that plenty of good, sane, worthwhile
partnerships will endure in hard times.
Those hard times echo in the instrumentation. Chapman’s
guitar licks are simple and haunting, like something one might
strum in a county cell where a small square of light streams from
a high window with bars across it. Steel guitarist Ed Black pulls
one note down the scale for a full measure, again and again,
suggesting the long arc of justice bending down to find the for-
gotten. The end of the song contains a muffled harmonica, such
as that you might hear through a wall.
Is this person for whom the singer burns really worth two
weeks behind bars? More privileged listeners of the classic album
might say no, assuming such allegiance is wasted on a bad person.
There are places in this country, though—poor places, Black
and brown places—where the criminal justice system is often
immoral, and the accused, incarcerated, or fleeing are less the
perpetrators of wrongs than the victims of structural inequality.
I come from poor, white, rural Kansas, a place that had in com-
mon with communities of color a well-earned aversion to the police.
While we did not face the mortal peril of white supremacy, to which
Chapman alludes as a Black woman imagining time in a Southern
jail, the majority of people in my family have been in handcuffs.
Their offenses usually amounted to behaviors required for surviv-
ing working poverty. As a poor teenager and twenty-something, I
committed some of those crimes myself—petty theft so that I could
eat, falsifying a loan application for my mother, driving without
insurance or current tags. While I never got caught for anything
worse than speeding, growing up I felt a mix of dread, shame, and
guilt when I saw flashing red and blue lights.
I am now a law-abiding citizen with relative economic privilege,
but I remain critical of a legal system that disproportionately
150 WINTER 2022
punishes people in poverty and people of color. In some cases, I
might lie, like the storyteller in “For My Lover,” to protect people
I love from the prison-industrial complex, which profits from the
castigation of mental illness and substance use disorder. As for
the twenty-thousand-dollar bail Chapman mentions, you can find
a hungry bondsman who will post bond for five percent, which
is half the usual rate, so that someone you love can co-sign and
spring you for a grand; if you show up for your court date, the
rest is forgiven. Where I come from, these are not scandals. They
are the known surcharge for being poor.
When I met my husband, he had recovered from trauma-in-
duced addictions and propensities for aimless bad behavior. He
still has an edge, though; a radical environmentalist, he has told
me he fantasizes about taking illicit, disruptive action on behalf
of the planet. He wouldn’t, he assured me—less because those
actions would be felonies than because they are ineffective strat-
egies in a society where massive, underregulated corporations
easily rebuild and renew their grip on ecosystems.
I fell in love with him because of that audacity crackling within
his gentle spirit. Some of his ideas for change—the kind that
Chapman talks about on the album’s first track, “Talkin’ Bout
a Revolution”—are so uncomfortably severe and inconvenient
as to affront the law. By my estimation, those are the only sort
of ideas that will do for dismantling old systems engineered to
maintain inequality and ravage the earth.
After five years, our life together has never required any major
sacrifice from either of us. There is, nonetheless, a sense that we
have teamed up against destructive forces and that we have each
other’s back. Within the electricity of that knowing, the love is
steady and the sex is hot.
In the long tradition of songs about how others just don’t un-
derstand someone’s commitment, “For My Lover” stands out by
conveying a feeling not of foolish desperation but of courageous
passion. Unlike male singers of outlaw country from the same
period, the woman of “For My Lover” has abandoned no one for
the sake of freedom. Rather, her loyalty has made her a rogue
who stays. While so many cowboys of song float on a breeze of
self-absorption, she revels in the most daring pleasure of all:
true devotion.
Photo © Christophe Ketels/Alamy
COUNTRY MUSIC
WASN’T OUR GENRE BUT
PATSY CLINE WAS
A voice that conjured a secret love
by Madeline Weinfield
P
atsy was tall, like us. She had a round
face that somehow reflected both
of our own. Her mother propelled
her forward—forward into music
and upward into a realm of success
dominated by men. Patsy sang about lost love
that we could tell she was remembering through
rose-colored glasses. (Could it really have once
been so good that it was now so bad that she was
walking up to a weeping willow?) She was a roman-
tic, a day-dreamer, a success. She was a comet in
motion, burning quickly, and then not at all.
It was winter and gray and cold. I remember
patches of snow on the ground at Sideling Hill, the
rest stop of choice along our route. It was a few days
after Christmas and a few days before New Year’s,
and just the two of us—my mom and I—were driving
west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Our destination:
Perryopolis, a nowhere town just north of the West
Virginia border (but fiercely not West Virginia) and
the home of my mother’s extended clan. Patsy
Cline, and her greatest hits, were coming too.
My mother didn’t learn to drive until she was
well into her thirties (a decade Patsy barely entered
before she died). Her mother—my grandmother—a
daughter of Ukrainian immigrants, had been born in
western Pennsylvania steel country and eventually
made her way east to life in New York City. It was
there she met my grandfather while working at a
sandwich counter, and together they settled into a
life in Queens. Of their four children, the youngest,
and only girl, was my mom. There had been no need
for a driver’s license in New York City, for neither
my mother nor her mom. The subway took them
most everywhere they needed, or wanted, to go.
I don’t know exactly how we came to have that
Patsy Cline CD. It was certainly the only country
music album we owned. Maybe I checked it out of
the library or maybe I bought it with babysitting
money the year I started to fall in love with coun-
try music. My curiosity had blossomed over the
course of Saturday afternoon horseback riding
lessons where the radio in the local barn’s dusty
tack room was perpetually tuned to “92.5 Phil-
Illustration by Mike Reddy
adelphia’s Country!” At first, I alone loved each
track of The Greatest Hits, their cumulative sum
representing the greatest pain and glory of love
(pain and glory I knew little of as a pre-teen girl).
But then we loved it.
“I’m crazy…crazy for loving yooouuuu.”
Our drive that winter would be the first time my
mother made the trip west to Perryopolis while
behind the wheel. She showed me where the brake
was, the gas pedal, and the emergency brake too.
Just in case. No matter that it would be half a de-
cade before I could legally drive.
My mom’s oldest brother, a city boy born and
raised, had moved from Queens with his Queens-
born wife to that far corner of Pennsylvania from
which his mother came. It was the 1960s, and my
mother was still a girl listening to the Ronettes
and the Rolling Stones on LPs when they took out
a mortgage on a ramshackle shingled farmhouse
that somehow still stands today. Their brood grew,
one by one, and then by two when twins arrived,
until they swelled to a tribe of eleven children firmly
rooted in a world very far from New York City.
My mother had visited steadily since her brother
first moved. At first the visits were with her parents,
and then with my father, and then with our family of
five—my two sisters and me, and then just with me.
Time worked differently in Perryopolis than in New
Jersey where we lived, almost as if on a different
angle or a different tilt. Life there was slower and
more crowded, and we stayed up much later, eating
and laughing and playing games. My girl cousins
taught me how to crochet while my boy cousins
drove quads in the woods. My uncle’s hunting rifle
hung on the wall above the door of their house, and
we were told we could look with our eyes but not our
hands. Casseroles and salads and desserts were all
made with mayonnaise. I loved everything about it.
Country music was what played inside on the
radio in my aunt and uncle’s painted purple kitchen,
on the perpetually tuned FM in my cousins’ cars,
and what we karaoked to one summer at the state
fair. Kenny Chesney and Shania Twain and Tim
McGraw were the soundtrack of those visits, the
songs of my cousins and their world, a place I
would dip into throughout childhood. It was never
my music, it was never my mother’s music, it was
the music of Perryopolis, of my youngest cousin
applying acrylic nails on my tween hands, of my
aunt’s ever-expanding brood of dogs, of the gold
mine discount store Gabe’s, and also of the long
afternoons at the barn near home—the music of
the freedom all of those things represented.
At home my father played Bach and Schubert on
the piano, an old baby grand wedged in the corner
of our living room. In her car, my mother played Cole
Porter and the Beatles on plastic cassette tapes.
And I, in my tiny wallpapered bedroom, played
country music on a small blue CD player, turned to
the lowest volume, hiding my growing attraction to
the genre like a small, dark secret close to my heart.
Things changed when I found Patsy Cline and
her greatest hits. Patsy, I wanted to sing. Patsy, I
wanted to share. Patsy, I didn’t hide.
On that drive to Perryopolis—the first my mother
and I made alone—Patsy’s voice radiated a nostal-
gia for something I wasn’t sure I had ever lost, or
had ever had, but was sure I could feel. And I was
sure my mom could feel it too. It was almost as if
Patsy was singing of leaving New York and Pennsyl-
vania and New Jersey—all of them rolled into one. It
was as if she knew about the house full of cousins
and—as I grew older—of both wanting to stay in
that chaotic warmth and also of never wanting to
return. As if that long walk after midnight Patsy
sang about, those miles along the highway, were
really about a longing for a brother who moved to
a different world and always felt just beyond reach.
It was as if Patsy knew about coming home, to a
new home you make for yourself. Like she knew
about long winter drives that are both monotonous
and an act of independence. Like she knew about
a memory, forming. Like she knew life was brief,
and bright, and sad. Full of contradictions. As if she
knew what it was like to play the radio really low
and then sing out loud.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 151
 Fairytale
The Pointer Sisters, the Great Migration,
and the soul of country
by Carina del Valle Schorske
nita Pointer wrote the first draft of the coun-
try song “Fairytale” at a motel in Woodstock
while she and her sisters were on tour singing
backup for Dave Mason. She was still reeling
from the revelation that her new boyfriend, a
San Francisco radio DJ, had been married all
along—a story so common she’d call it cliché if she didn’t have
to plot the next chapter herself. That night she stayed up late
running her favorite James Taylor tape on repeat, and the lyrics
she wrote channeled his plainspoken style: There’s no need to
explain anymore—I tried my best to love you, now I’m walking
out that door. Once the tour was over, Anita’s baby sister Bonnie
provided the bright and buoyant melody, as if to sustain the
momentum of departure.
“Fairytale” became one of several throwback tracks on the
second Pointer Sisters album, That’s A Plenty. They also covered
the bebop classic “Salt Peanuts” and composed the cheeky, citi-
fied “Shaky Flat Blues.” Even the album art looked like an old
Aaron Douglas illustration: four women in silhouette, wearing
caps and drop-waist dresses, hooked in a Harlem-style chorus
line high-stepping offstage. The figures faced left, a subtle sign
that this music would move against the grain.
In 1975, “Fairytale” won an unexpected Grammy for Best
Country & Western Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group, and
Elvis himself recorded a cover. The Grand Ole Opry invited the
Pointer Sisters to Nashville, making them one of the first Black
acts to headline the genre’s high church—always an ambivalent
distinction. When they arrived, racist protestors held signs say-
152 WINTER 2022
ing, “Keep country, country!” as if American music were private
property and the Pointer Sisters were trespassing from elsewhere.
Anita remembers hearing a man shout, “Hot damn, them girls
is Black!” But after they performed “Fairytale,” the crowd got
quiet, then loud: “Sing it again, honey!” Which they did, three
times through. Sometimes, the most familiar stories are the
ones that bear repeating—as if, in listening to a new rendition,
we might pick up tones, textures, histories, and meanings that
reveal hidden hatches in the trap.
Just as we understand love affairs best in retrospect, I hear the
meaning of “Fairytale” most clearly in the outro. For a few bars,
the pedal-steel guitar and hi-hats drop out, and Anita abandons
her place as the song’s lovelorn protagonist to fall back on the
steady refrain of Ruth, Bonnie, and June: move on—got to move
on. There’s still a walking bass line and some gospel on the keys,
but the spell of the song is broken, and those grown-up girls are
left alone with the consolation of each other’s company and the
stripped-down rhythm of real life. The great big fairytale is over,
and the train is churning through the station. Where will it take
them? What kind of future will they find once they stop waiting
on the false promise of American romance?
In “Fairytale,” the lead singer’s got to move on from a faithless
man, but the outro reverberates with the more collective journey
of the Great Migration away from the South—and maybe, for
the next generation, on up to a greater day, as Curtis Mayfield
demands in his classic soul anthem. “Move On Up” was recorded
just a few years before “Fairytale,” in 1970, and the brash horns
and frenetic percussion dramatize this transition—how the
children of Southern migrants born in Chicago (like he was)
or Oakland (like the Pointer Sisters) would have to survive the
crushing disappointments of the Civil Rights Movement, and
learn to live in the burning cities that once signified liberation.
“Move On Up” makes a break with the past—your folks might
understand you, by and by—in the name of progress. “Fairytale”
is a quieter kind of wake-up call: if so many problems stay stub-
born across time and space, then maybe the old styles—blues,
jazz, swing, country—still have work to do.
Photo © Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy
 Reverend Elton Pointer and Sarah Pointer migrated from
Little Rock, Arkansas, to Oakland, California, in 1943; all four of
the girl children were born out West. The household was strict:
they weren’t allowed movies or rock & roll, but they sometimes
got away with Elvis—“Crying in the Chapel” sounded like a
gospel ballad—and they sang in the youth choir sponsored by
the Church of God in Christ. Ruth, the oldest girl, described
her mother as “very naïve: she never drank, she never smoked,
she never danced, she never wore makeup—we were the ones
who introduced her to all that stuff!” I wonder if Sarah’s pious
rigor was really that ignorant, or whether she’d made conscious
choices, on her journey, to maintain a way of life that still served
her well in the new world.
Every summer, Sarah sent the children South to stay with her
parents in Prescott, Arkansas, where they listened to Hank Wil-
liams and loitered by the jook joints, too scared to step inside.
Anita liked Prescott so much she persuaded her parents to let her
spend fifth, seventh, and tenth grades at the local school. Later,
when critics treated “Fairytale” like a novelty, Bonnie defended
the group’s country bona fides: “People think we’re not sincere
because we’re always trying something different. Like country
music. But for us, it’s no joke.” The Pointer Sisters were moving
among many worlds: they had to learn to sing in several keys,
to harmonize the dissonance between genres. They must have
recognized the Southern sounds of Delta blues and folk ballads in
the rootsy records of California bands like Creedence Clearwater
Revival and the Grateful Dead.
The Bay was busy back then—campus protests, the rise of
Oakland’s Black Panther Party, San Francisco’s bohemian music
scene—and the Pointer Sisters didn’t sit on the sidelines. Anita
brought a sermonic cadence to the poetry she performed along-
side Angela Davis. Bonnie and June started gigging at nightclubs
when they were still teens, adapting those beautifully blended
gospel harmonies for the late-night sinners’ congregation. Soon,
all four sisters came together to sing backup for Grace Slick, Taj
Mahal, and Sylvester. There were psychedelic drugs, interracial
love, and children out of wedlock. Sylvester’s matrimonial fes-
tivities in Golden Gate Park were rumored to be the city’s first
gay wedding. The Pointer Sisters lived out this subversive spirit
through their music, too, turning Allen Toussaint’s “Yes We Can
Can” into a funky, slow-burning movement anthem. Anita’s ad-
libs charged the final measures with almost erotic frustration:
How can you sit there / like there’s nothing to do, like you don’t
care / what the world’s coming to?
The counterculture produced real social changes, but the
Pointer Sisters were always tuning in to deeper traditions of
refusal. For working-class women—the women, for example, who
sang the blues—the bourgeois marriage plot had always been a
fairytale at odds with lived experiences of abandonment and vio-
lence, as well as the pains and pleasures of forced independence.
Ethel Waters recorded “No Man’s Mama” in 1925: I can say what
I like, I can do what I like, I’m a gal on matrimonial strike! The
Pointer Sisters came from a respectable, religious family where
marriage mattered—but these other stories, transmitted by music
and kitchen table talk, must have been an equally useful inheri-
tance. Ruth and Anita were both single mothers by the time they
joined the group. “Fairytale” does not express the disillusion of
innocents, or a revolution in the relations between women and
men, but a knowing, almost ironic riff on a refrain that stays
classic because the problem stays contemporary. “Fairytale”
admits more tenderness than “No Man’s Mama.” Still, there’s a
bluesy thrill in the song’s parting kiss: I’ll bet you won’t forget
me when I go. The details might get redacted from the record,
but the music will make the memory last.
In the early years of their career, the Pointer Sisters often
performed in vintage hats and dresses from the 1940s. The looks
were coordinated, but never Motown matchy-matchy. They
didn’t have money to spend on store-bought costumes, so they
raided Oakland thrift shops and the attics of church ladies for
little fascinators with netted veils, platform heels, and furs—a
practical solution that came to seem like a campy commentary
on the way Black women’s lives and music have always been out
of step with dominant narratives, at once ahead of their time and
still caught up in predicaments we’d prefer to leave in the past.
In my favorite live footage of “Fairytale,” Bonnie’s hair is
smoothed into victory rolls, while June wears hers in a neat
Afro. Ruth and Anita have big flowers pinned in their pageboys.
If nostalgia requires reverence, there’s nothing nostalgic in the
way they carry the country tune: The harmonies are seamless
but the dancing is unruly, almost slapstick, as if history’s a cho-
reography you should never learn too well. Soon, they’d stop
wearing old-timey dresses on tour—that fragile silk wasn’t made
for hot stage lights, and sometimes, Ruth says, they’d peel them
off their sweaty skin in ragged strips when they got back to the
dressing room. The past was never precious for them unless it
was something they could use.
In a recent interview with Anita and Ruth on his podcast
SUPREME, Questlove called the Pointer Sisters “the ultimate
metamorphosis in Black music.” They’ve been difficult to chart,
veering from funk to jazz to rock to disco through the decades:
move on—got to move on. Casual listeners are usually familiar with
only one or two of their many incarnations—maybe the sultry
Springsteen cover, “Fire,” or the 80s dance hits—“I’m So Excited,”
“Automatic,” “Jump! For Your Love.” But if you sit down for the
whole story, it’s possible to perceive a deeper continuity—not
only between phases of their decades-long career, but between
sounds and sensibilities that sloppy critics try to segregate. To
my ear, “Fairytale” is not their only country song: Anita uses a
similar vocal tone in her version of Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work,”
and there’s a plaintive twang in the synthesizers of “Slow Hand.”
These sonic echoes reward repetition and renegotiate the rhythm
of liberation: I want somebody who can spend some time, not
come and go in a heated rush. Bonnie and June are ancestors
now; Anita is retired. But the Pointer Sisters persist—not only
as a repertoire of songs, but as a feminist legacy and a live show.
Ruth still performs sometimes with her daughter Issa and her
granddaughter Sadako under the poetic promise of the family
name. In this fairytale, moving on does not require letting go.
Maybe the freedom to remember is just as revolutionary as the
freedom to forget.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 153
KEEP SOUTHERN MEDIA ALIVE & INDEPENDENT

Your gifts have helped nurture this magazine and its accompanying programs: the Points
South podcast, our live music events, and our partnerships with organizations across the
U.S., which bring the OA to young readers, aspiring artists, incarcerated readers and writers,
and readers and writers from resilient communities. Your gifts help us Southerners speak
for ourselves, and keep the roots of truth and independence growing strong.

Independent journalism is rooted in reader support:

subscriptions only cover 12% of the cost to create the
magazine you love. To continue to thrive, we rely on your
gifts. Help the OA thrive for 30 more years: please donate
today. Your support comes with great perks:

$100+ $250+ $1000+

• Membership in • Membership in • Membership in
the OA Society the OA Society the OA Society

• One-year subscription to • One-year subscription • One-year gift subscription

the Oxford American to the Oxford American to the Oxford American

• Limited edition OA print
(exclusive perk for gifts received
through December 31, 2022)
• One-year gift subscription • Texas Love Letter LP TEXAS
LOVE LETTER
(while supplies last)
to the Oxford American LP

• Limited edition OA print • Limited edition

SCAN (exclusive perk for gifts received OA fine art print
through December 31, 2022) (exclusive perk for gifts received
TO through December 31, 2022)
DONATE
NOW • Texas Love Letter LP
(while supplies last) • A lifetime subscription

Donations at any amount make a difference. We appreciate all of our readers, subscribers,
and supporters. The name of every donor who makes a contribution by January 1, 2023,
will be printed in the next issue. Thank you for keeping us a vital part of the Southern
landscape for 30 years.

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG/DONATE
PUBLISHER’S CIRCLE
Contributions of $5000 or more in the past year
Arkansas Arts Council · Arkansas Humanities Council · The Watson-Brown
Foundation · R. Christian Ford · Community of Literary Magazines & Presses·
Massey Family Foundation · Stella Boyle Smith Trust · National Endowment
for the Arts · National Endowment for the Humanities · Redwine Family
Foundation, Inc. · Julia Child Foundation · Richard “Disceaux Dickie” Sheeren · Amazon Services
LLC / Amazon Literary Partnership · University of Central Arkansas · Windgate Charitable
Foundation · Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation

EDITOR’S CIRCLE
Contributions of $1000 or more in the past year
Anthony Arrigotti · Shaun Barnes · David Cunningham · Tom Doneker · Ronald M Feder and the R&B
Feder Char Foundation · William Isaacson · Connie and Samuel Pate · Keith Pryor · Matthew P. Quilter ·
Manning Roundtree · Thomas & Janice Wilson · Heath Shea Wright

LITERARY CHAMPIONS
Contributions of $250 or more in the past year
Sidney Ansbacher · Viva & Neil Araki · Colleen Bartlett · Charles Beach · Michael Berkshire · Xavier Beynon · Jeff Brothers
· Alice Calhoun · Joe Camp · Afton Cooper · David Coppe · Fred & Sarah Beth Davis · Brad Dowler · Shane Estep ·
Michael W Feldser · Peter Gartrell · John Goodwin · James Grube · Paul V Guagliardo · Adrienne E Hanna · Meggan Harris
· Ryan Harris · Carolyn & Ron Harris · Natalia Hodge · Catherine Hughes · Sara Hurst · Samuel S. Jackson · Keith Kelley ·
Sean Kelly · Katie Kimbrough · Keith Larson · Atheil Lashley · Ina B Leonard · Robert and Nell Lyford · Ashley Matejka
· Lisa Darnay Meadows · Randall Morley · Sallie Oliphant · Kevin Patterson · Joel T Patterson · William Peters · Jimmie G Purvis ·
Kim F Quillen · David Radulovich · Robert Rettig · Kirk Reynolds · Dudley C Reynolds · Bernie Rosman · Ashley Ross
· Michael Sapeta · Jeffrey Schlatter · Chad Schrock · Daniel and Jennifer Smith · Ray Smith · Andrew Smith ·
Aaron and Anna Strong · Jane Tatum · Mary Truslow · Todd Tyson · Millie Ward · Ralph Webb · Douglas White

OA BENEFACTORS & TRAILBLAZERS

Contributions of $100 or more in the past year
Virginia Simpson Aisner · Lawrence Albarado · Amber Albritton-Reiman · Sharon W Alexander · Leslie Allen · John Anders · Patrick Anderson · Ryan-Ashley Anderson
· Angela Arcese · Susan Arnold · John Aselage · Tom Auron · Jody Avirgan · Eleanor Bain · Harry Bainbridge · Wales F. Barksdale · Chris Barton · Jeanne Beatty ·
Daniel Beckman · Judith Biersdorfer · Richard Blanton · Paul Body · Kat Bogacz · Michelle Bondy · Linda Booker · Susan and Robin Borné · Treasia Bouton · James C Bowers
· Jeff V Bradley · Carol Brantley · Chad D Browning · Jeff Brum · John Bunten Jr. · Rick Bybee · Jason Cagle · Jim Campbell · Anthony Cantor · John Carmody ·
Paul Cawood · Robert TJ Childers · Justin Chimka · Richard Chlopan · Scott Clackum · Edward T Claghorn · Joan & Bruce Coffey · Ruth Ann Cooper · G. Dale Cousins
· Heather Coyne · Andrew Crispin · G. B. Crump · Kimberly Daggerhart · Robert K Dawson · John Dennis · Donna Thompson Douglas · Mark Drury · Theodore DuBose ·
Sara Dunnie · Jon H Edwards · Mark H Ellis · Julie R Enszer · Rebecca Evans · Robert Fallon · Richard Faszholz · Deborah Fisher · Ben Fountain · Linda Fowler
· Rex Friedman · Slaton Fry · Tom Funderburk · Katherine Z Gailliot · Randy Gardner · Ron Gephart · Philip W Gibson · Ali Gleason · Ann Goette · Howard Gordon ·
Kristina Grace · Melanie E Gray & David Rubin · Laura Green · Sarah Greenberg · Michael Gresham · Ann Marshall Grigsby · Leonard Grinstead · Chad Gusler
· Mark Hagerstrom · Frank Hamrick · Helen & Alexander Harris · Marshall Harris · David Harrison · Robert Hart · Henry G Hartzog IV · Randy and Gael Hees ·
Thomas G Hendricks · Barbara A Herring · Marnie Heyn · Samuel Hinojosa · Mindy Hodges · Jack M Holland · Adele Holmes · Janet Holmes Uchendu · Amy Holt
· Joe C Horton · Tom and Renee Hudson · Andrew Humphries · Laura Ingram · Glenn Jacobs · Frank Jelnicky · Michael N Johnston · Steve Jones · Matt Jones ·
Michael Jones · Tim Jones · Danny Kahn · Tom and Jane Keene · Jane R Kell · Robert K Kettenmann · David King · Kathleen King · Mal King · David Kirby · Andy Knott
· Mark Land · Katherine Landrum · Holly Lange · Jean Larson · Jasper Lawson · Tracy Lea · Thomas Leavens · Jessica Lee · Harris Levy · Jerilyn Lewis · Howard Ligon ·
Jason Linetzky · Buz Livingston · Elizabeth Lynch · Michael Maloney · Stephen Manella · Randall L Mark · Steve Marston · Mark Marymont · Bryan Mathis · Laura McCarty
· Patrick Mccoy · John McElwee · Jim B McGee · Richard McGuire · Dwight McNeill · Chris McNew · Georgia McPeak · Shannon McQuiston · Frances M McSwain ·
Paul Means · John and Meg Menke · Chalmers Mikell · Gammy Miller · Rosanna Miller · Walter Miller · Erik Moore · Abigail Moore · Patti Moran · Dorothy Morris
· Fred Mozenter · William M. Muller · Dean Neff · Evelyn Nelsen · Marion Nesterenko · Mike Nichols · Catherine O’Brion · Christine A Ohlman · Rod O'Mara · Rebecca O'Neil
· Beth L Orlansky · Larry Ortega · Elizabeth Owen · Ann & Rick Owen · Elizabeth Owen · Cliff Oxford · Martha & David Pacini · Barbara Palmer · Gene F Paquette ·
Robert Parker · Pamela & Larry Pearce · Dee Dee Perkins · Russell Phillips · James Powers · Jeanie Ramey · George Redlinger · Jeffrey Richardson
· Catherine and Whit Robben · Alex R Rodriguez · John Rollins · George Rothert · Alan Rothschild · Fred Rudofsky · Nancy Rudolph · Robert Rychlicki ·
Jeanette Saddler Taylor · Kelly Samek · Barbara S Saurborn · Rob Sawyer · Archie Schaffer III · George Schimmel · Mary Jo Schrade · Howard Scott · Casey Secor
· Quin Segall · Milton W Seiler, Jr. · Bill Semich · Brian Shivers · Adam Short · Ralph Simpson · Kate Small · Irvin Smith · Ray Smith · Jonathan Spencer · Eric Spratford ·
Eric Steele · Paul D Steinke · Eric Stone · Steve Straessle · Christopher Strawn · Wally Strong · Dinah Sunday · Lynette Terrell · Joe Thomas · Tom Thomas · Garland Thorn
· Don Tippman · Harrison Tome · Roger Trapp · Ben Van Dusen · David L VanLiew · Gerald D. Wages · Tim Walker · Christopher Walters · Doug Warren ·
James A Washburn · Penny Weaver · Randy Wilbourn · John Williams · Reba Williams · Cary Wilson · Kevin Wilson · Lynn Witherspoon · William T. Wright · Vickie Wyatt
· David Wysocki · Randall Yauss · Yeary Lindsey Architects · Sherry Young · Randy Zielinski
 GLITTER,
COWBOYS,
AND TEARS
Orville Peck’s queer honky-tonk

by Carter Sickels

O
rville Peck’s stylized, campy, joy-
ous music video for “C’mon Baby,
Cry,” one of the lead singles from
his 2022 album Bronco, opens in
a red-lit honky-tonk, a place we
think we know, except the bartender is an Asian
woman (comedian Margaret Cho) and the cowboy
she hands a beer to is a brown-skinned man with
a dark mustache and scruff. As the camera draws
the viewer further into the room, the light shifts to
a strange luminous green and reveals the singer:
Orville Peck in a cowboy hat and silk shirt embroi-
dered with sparkling saguaro cacti. Blue eyes glint
through his signature domino mask, this one black
leather with a curtain of delicate fringe that falls
to his chest. Here is our hero, our queer country
music outlaw.
When his first album Pony was released in 2019,
Orville Peck seemed to appear out of nowhere, the
mysterious cowboy riding up into the dusty West-
ern town. Since then, although he’s performed on
Jimmy Kimmel Live!, appeared in numerous media and which has been used to exclude people of color including “C’mon Baby, Cry,” “Hexie Mountains,” “Let
outlets including Rolling Stone and GQ, and toured and the queer community. Me Drown,” “The Curse of the Blackened Eye,” and
extensively across North America for the release Peck conveys a deep love and appreciation for “Daytona Sand,” all directed by New York–based
of his sophomore album Bronco, he has not shown country music through his storytelling lyrics about filmmaker Austin Peters, are expansive and rich, and
his face in public and maintains a shroud of mystery heartbreak and living on the run, and by embracing express Peck’s penchant for stylized aesthetics and
about his identity, sharing only a few key biograph- classic country sounds, like the lonesome pedal steel vivid colors. Peck has spoken of his love for David
ical details. Peck was born in Johannesburg, South sighing throughout Bronco or the melancholy riff Lynch films, and the influence is obvious. David
Africa, where he lived until he was fifteen, and then of a plaintive harmonica, while also inviting in the Lynch—except more joyful, queerer, and sexier.
moved with his family to Canada. He trained in ballet influences of lush California sound, new wave, and “C’mon Baby, Cry” is a perfect amalgamation of
for twelve years, dabbled in acting, and drummed psychedelia. He flings open the gates to make the Peck’s embrace of camp, glitz, and tenderness. Set
in punk bands. These experiences rattle the glass genre more inclusive, and his music videos include in a saloon with paintings of horses on the walls and
case protecting the myth of who gets to be a country people of color and queer and trans people. They’re liquor bottles lining the bar, its main character is a
singer, but it’s his identity as an out gay man singing also beautifully shot and choreographed. From his lonely, heartbroken cowboy who sips his beer from
about other men that shatters the glass. Peck’s back- first album Pony, the video for “Hope to Die” includes the shadows while watching Peck perform on stage.
ground and bold queering of country-western music a glorious, sensual dance scene in a barn, and “Queen Peck urges him to let go of the pent-up pain, to cry
challenges the simplistic, narrow narrative around of the Rodeo,” which runs eight minutes, features the and express his vulnerability: “I can tell you’re a sad
authenticity and masculinity that the industry has two-spirit drag performer Thanks Jem and celebrates boy just like me / Baby don’t deny what your poor
been so invested in manufacturing and sustaining, femininity. The videos of the releases from Bronco, heart needs.” The video playfully and kindly satirizes

156 WINTER 2022 Photo © Julia Johnson

the country music tropes of heartache, loneliness,
and getting drunk—with the bartender pouring
from a bottle of Fistful of Bourbon—but in Peck’s
storytelling, the cowboy’s heart has been broken
by another man. As Peck sings and dances on stage
with big, flourishing hand gestures and graceful
moves, a few angry men throw beer bottles at him,
an acknowledgment of the threat of homophobic
violence built into such spaces, but they can’t stop
him from telling his truth. The camera shifts to four
women—including Cho and Kornbread, a trans
woman and a former contestant on RuPaul’s Drag
Race—posing in front of the bar, all four poker-faced
and snapping their fingers to the beat, a collective
force of protection and glamour.
Peck’s growing fame has expanded his die-
hard fan base, who playfully refer to themselves
as Peckheads. One night, happily escaping into
a rabbit hole of Peck videos on YouTube, I started
reading the comments. The most compelling came
from queer people who grew up in rural places and
had always been made to feel excluded from the
culture around them:
being someone whos trans n gay in the south
is hard, it’s hard to align yourself with events
and aesthetic without feeling inherently
threatened or like you have to shed the truth
of being trans or gay
As a little gay boy out in bumfuck who always
felt disenfranchised by country music. I love
seeing an openly gay man becoming success-
ful trailing a path forward
i’ve always been hesitant to embrace being
from the south as there are such...heavily
religious and intolerant tones, especially as a
gay trans man. thank you so much for showing
that i am allowed to be a part of this, not de-
spite being lgbt, but embracing and accepting
both parts.
I understand this kind of exclusion, which is part
of why I feel seen by Peck, and why this music
video in particular is empowering and refreshing.
As a queer trans man, I do not feel comfortable
sauntering into a honky-tonk, and the few times
I’ve been to such places, I’m looking over my shoul-
der, constantly aware of how I’m presenting, how
others are perceiving me. But a few years ago,
when I lived briefly in Seattle, my partner and I
went to the Cuff Complex, a gay dance club that
devoted one room to country-western dancing on
Friday evenings. The dancing started at 7 P.M. and
stopped at 10, and since most gay clubs don’t really
get started until closer to midnight, I arrived with
low expectations. But the dance floor was packed
with people two-stepping and line-dancing to the
DJ’s set, mostly commercial country hits from
the 1990s—the catchy guitar opening to Shania
Twain’s “Any Man of Mine” summoned everyone to
the dance floor. Disco lights refracted and reflected
across a gloriously queer crowd: muscled gays in
cowboy boots, queer women in plaid button-downs
and cowboy hats, a drag queen in a pink gown and
Dolly-size wig. Embroidered shirts, bootcut Levi’s,
big belt buckles mixed in with neon tank tops and
tight muscle tees and chest harnesses. And, of
course, chaps.
As Peck celebrates country music’s pageantry
and opulent style, he demonstrates that queer
aesthetics are nothing new to the genre. Where
would country music be without sequins, wigs,
and rhinestones? He also understands that coun-
try stars tell a story with their style. On the cover
of Bronco, Peck, standing slightly bowlegged in
front of a rearing horse with dust kicked up, wears
a gleaming gold leather suit, consisting of tight
pants and lace-up chaps and a fitted vest that
exposes his sinewy tattooed arms, and a mask
with long gold fringe. Peck’s hand-sewn masks, all
with fringe of varying lengths, of course evoke the
Lone Ranger, the solitary cowboy fighting for justice
and always on the move. But it’s also a playful nod
to the leather and BDSM communities; the mask
provides anonymity, allure, and power. The masked
hero, the loner, the queer cowboy.
The “C’mon Baby, Cry” video tells a story about
masculinity and vulnerability that threatens the
status quo established by the hecklers throwing
beer bottles. The sulking cowboy looks up with
yearning from under the brim of his hat, and Peck
implores: “Been so long since he called your name
/ On the run from a losing game / Just bat your
eyes, baby, let me feel the pain.” Peck takes the
heartbroken cowboy by the hand and leads him
through a charged, dreamy space of moody red
lights, and then back to the stage where Peck’s
cowboy hat and shirt suddenly light up, a sweet
nod to Robert Redford in The Electric Horseman,
still sexy and silly, but now so queer that glitter
rains from the ceiling.
The figure of the lonesome, tough but ten-
der-hearted cowboy has long held a homoerotic
allure. For many men, especially of a certain genera-
tion, Brokeback Mountain captured something we’d
dreamed about but didn’t know how to articulate.
Watching two cowboys gaze tenderly into each
other’s eyes felt revolutionary, but that story—and
so many stories about rural queers—operates on
shame and violence. Peck’s music tells a different
kind of queer story. He and his characters are not
struggling with coming out, and they don’t suffer
because of their queerness. That doesn’t mean
Peck ignores pain or loneliness—many of his songs
are about heartache and unrequited love, and in
“The Curse of the Blackened Eye,” he writes about
queer intimate partner violence. But he also sings
about love and desire, and embraces and subverts
the trope of the brokenhearted cowboy hiding be-
hind his code of masculinity with camp, tenderness,
and a queer sexiness that his fans adore:
I love how it feels like he’s some kind of be-
nevolent, omnipotent Cowboy God in this that
came to give his blessing to the rodeo
His presence and voice is so captivating. I’m
a proud fan and this song is a genius poetry
for men to show their vulnerability. Absolutely
beautiful.
Orville is serving Brokeback at The Mountains
of Madness and I need more of it.
So many iconic Queens in this video. My old
gay country heart can’t almost take it!
His voice is like being spooned by a big mus-
cleman who smells like whiskey and a camp
fire and all he want is to make you feel safe
His voice. Many of the YouTube commentors want
to talk about Peck’s enchanting voice. Though
his glamorous cowboy style and alluring mystery
bestow Peck with a particular electric presence,
it’s his voice that truly captivates critics and fans.
Peck’s voice shines like an unearthed jewel, a deep,
full, expansive treasure layered with vintage country
à la Hank Williams via the baritone of Johnny Cash,
as well as with the brooding ache of Chris Isaak, the
powerful range and force of Roy Orbison, and the
smoothness of another queer singer from Canada,
k.d. lang. Peck’s voice is all his own though, rich and
velvety and as yearning as the last days of summer,
touching something true and tender and deep.
In the last part of the “C’mon Baby, Cry” video,
as the song reaches its climax, Peck’s vocals soar.
He stands on the stage at the top of a staircase
outlined in burning blue and pink track lights, and
he leans back, a silhouette of lithe muscle and
glamour posing in front of a neon sun. Then he
jauntily descends the steps, all delight and joy. And,
finally, I think, that’s what this video encompasses,
even through the pain and heartache: pure queer
joy. Peck brings us into a place we thought we knew,
the honky-tonk, but turns it into a communal space,
closer to a disco or the gay club in Seattle, where
queer joy can’t be stopped. A baptism of glitter. The
hecklers, won over by Peck’s performance, break
out in applause, and the heartbroken cowboy, his
face sparkling with glitter, finally wipes away a tear,
free. Peck delights in camp—there is no cynicism
here. His presence and his music reverberate with
sincerity, the real authenticity that country music
advocates. As Orville Peck sings to the cowboy
in the video, he’s also singing to us, his devoted
queer audience, promising he sees us and we are
welcome here: “I don’t want you to be afraid.”
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 157
 Olivia Newton-John’s
Catalog of Emotion
And the quiet power of her voice

by Annie Zaleski

livia Newton-John
recorded just three
takes of her first U.S.
number-one pop hit,
“I Honestly Love You.”
As detailed in her 2018
autobiography, Don’t
Stop Believin’, she
used the first try for the final version. “I’m
not a power singer but more of an interpre-
tive one,” Newton-John wrote. That certainly
became obvious when you compared her to
contemporaries like Barbra Streisand or Anne
Murray, both of whom belted out hits like they
were on a grand stage; instead of nuance,
they preferred more direct deliveries. But
Newton-John’s self-assessment undersells the
fact that her interpretive gifts possess immense
power; much like Karen Carpenter—who was
also a vocalist who exuded quiet strength as
she sang—Newton-John dug deep into and
empathized with the emotional core of a song.
In practice, that meant Newton-John didn’t
hold back during good or bad times, and she
wasn’t coy about her feelings. This gave her music a rich emotional her stamp on any kind of material.
range. For anyone going through major life changes, she was an Once she embarked on a solo career and made a push for
upbeat presence, a friend extending a hand to the bereft via songs mainstream success, Newton-John became known as a nuanced
that were wistful yet reassuring. Yet Newton-John didn’t shy away vocalist who slid comfortably between adult contemporary, Top
from hard truths: When she sang about romantic disappointment, Forty, and country. Her voice was filled with gratitude on her
she didn’t sugarcoat the heartbreak, acknowledging in a weary cover of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows,” but she balanced
but knowing tone that life could be bittersweet. But when life complex feelings—hesitancy, loneliness, regret—on “I Honestly
was going well, Newton-John’s innate, sunny optimism shifted Love You.” It’s no wonder she eventually succeeded in acting. As
to the forefront and exploded into effervescence. a vocalist, she fully inhabited the characters in her songs: the
Such transparency and vulnerability were enormously ap- spurned lover overcoming wounded pride (“You Ain’t Got the
pealing, and led to commercial success on both the country and Right”), an ambitious girl leaving home and striking out on her
pop charts. Newton-John’s mellifluous voice also made her work own (“Country Girl”), someone resigned to change and looking
distinctive. She learned from the best, as she’d grown up listen- for a new place to belong (“Home Ain’t Home Anymore”).
ing to expressive soul and r&b stars such as Dionne Warwick, This emotional depth came in large part from long-time, trusted
Ray Charles, and Nina Simone on the radio. Folk music taught collaborator John Farrar’s gifted production and arrangements.
her how to harmonize. Years of performing live in clubs and on (On early albums, co-production also came from Bruce Welch, a
army bases with her friend Pat Carroll, under the moniker Pat member of Australian band The Shadows.) The strings on “Coun-
& Olivia, made Newton-John comfortable and confident putting try Girl” possessed cinematic drama, giving her tale of leaving

158 WINTER 2022 If Not for You released in 1971 by Festival Records. Photo by Carter/Reddy
home the grandeur of a Hollywood movie. A wriggling pedal
steel on the Bob Morrison composition “The River’s Too Wide”
or solemn gospel choir on “Take Me Home Country Roads” gave
her songs measured contours. Even if her music was fussed-over,
it wasn’t overly fussy.
Despite this lyrical focus on interior lives, Newton-John’s ca-
reer was often defined by larger-than-life moments. As Grease’s
girl-next-door-turns-rebel Sandy, she created the blueprint
for countless teen movie leads, dazzling as an open-hearted
romantic with enviable poise. In the wake of Grease’s success,
Newton-John starred in the disco-era dud Xanadu—itself an
over-the-top display of retro pizzazz—but rebounded into pop
superstardom. The sinewy 1980 pop number one “Magic” hinted
at the kind of pleasures detailed more explicitly in her synth-rock
wink “Physical.” The latter song spent an impressive ten weeks
atop the U.S. pop charts in late 1981 and into 1982. These movies
and songs propelled Newton-John to dizzying levels of fame in
the late 1970s and early 1980s. But Newton-John’s wholesome
glam is forever fascinating: Her fizzy 1983 hit “Twist of Fate”
even received a bump after being included in the season two
finale of Netflix’s Stranger Things.
Newton-John’s ubiquity no doubt had much to do with her role
in Grease. Yet, while she was embraced in Hollywood, Nashville
was another story. Born in England but reared in Australia,
Newton-John didn’t have the history with Music City or the
relationships that most country artists had.
The dynamics within her vocal performances were often over-
looked. Upon the release of her 1971 debut album, If Not For You,
critics quickly came to a consensus about Newton-John’s vocal
timbre and delivery, frequently using words like “soft” and de-
scribing her approach as “wispy breathless, unoffensive. . . .Janis
Joplin’s stylistic antithesis” (Pensacola News Journal). Once she
started landing country hits and winning awards, Newton-John
was forced to defend her sound and music.
In a 1974 interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal, she
had an even-keeled response when questioned about not hav-
ing a country twang. “I don’t put on an American accent or a
Nashville accent. When people sing, they pronounce words in
a different way.” Her disinterest in conforming to tradition or
one dominant style ended up being a strength—and it proved
enormously influential on country music for decades to come.
After Newton-John’s death in August 2022, I couldn’t help but
think that the glossy moments and characters unfairly overshad-
owed her country stardom. Before she was perky, leather-clad
Sandy or a spandex-wearing video star, she was a genteel and
meticulous steward of folk-pop. Unlike much easy listening
from the Seventies, which faded into vanilla sonic wallpaper,
her albums sounded warm, intimate, and compelling. Being a
Nashville outsider served Newton-John well, as it gave her space
to define her voice on her own terms. She recorded versions of
songs by John Denver, George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin,
and Bread, as well as originals penned by close collaborators like
John Farrar and John Rostill. She made unexpected choices, too,
covering the Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe” and the Beach
Boys’ “God Only Knows.” Newton-John didn’t feel beholden to
musical tradition; she saw possibilities, not limitations, within
country music. During the first era of her career, this steered
her toward material with more depth than people might realize.
“ I F N O T F O R YO U ”
On paper, the romantic lyrics of Bob Dylan’s 1970 ramshackle
country-rock tune “If Not For You” are about as vulnerable as
Dylan ever got: “Without your love I’d be nowhere at all / I’d be
lost if not for you.” He knows the song is meant to make up for
an indiscretion; this charm offensive even rhymes at points (“sad
and blue” and “if not for you”). A whiff of apology seeps through
Dylan’s gruff voice. George Harrison’s folk-driven approach to
the song, as heard on his 1970 triple album All Things Must Pass,
strips away Dylan’s bashful subtext. With a smoky voice, Harrison
affixes his heart to his sleeve, declaring fidelity and fealty. The
doubt coursing through the original version falls away. If Dylan
is trying to convince his beloved to care once more, Harrison
knows his relationship is secure, and expresses gratitude and
affection for his significant other.
A year later, Newton-John covered the song on her debut. It
spent three weeks at number one on Billboard’s easy listening
chart and was a Top Forty pop hit. Through a modern lens, the
country and Americana flourishes are obvious; her take is more
easy-going, less brash.
Newton-John wasn’t overly enamored with the song, at least
at first. “I didn’t think it was my type of song at all, and I had a
little bit of trouble being convincing in putting it over,” she is
quoted as saying in the 2008 biography, Olivia. “But everyone else
was so enthusiastic that I came around to liking it eventually.” It
wasn’t a question of taste, as Newton-John grew up harmonizing
with Dylan’s music and channeled his nuanced vocal delivery.
Listen closely, and Newton-John’s interpretation of “If Not
For You” might not be a straightforward love song. She picks up
on the desperation weaving through Dylan’s version; in a later
verse, her voice soars upward sharply on the lyric, “My sky would
fall,” rendering the line in a grief-stricken vibrato. Elsewhere,
her vocal delivery trembles with nostalgia and ripples with mel-
ancholy; it’s easy to interpret the song like she’s imagining this
perfection, rather than living it. Newton-John is tending to the
happy memory like one would a flourishing garden, nurturing
it so it sustains during darker times.
“LET ME BE THERE”
Newton-John came into her own as a country artist in 1974,
which is when “Let Me Be There” became her first top ten U.S.
country and pop hit. In March, the song also earned her a Gram-
my Award for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. This win
foreshadowed bigger honors. Later in the year, she won Prom-
ising Female Vocalist of the Year from the Academy of Country
Music Awards (ACM) and Female Vocalist of the Year from the
Country Music Association (CMA). In a taped acceptance speech
for the latter honor, Newton-John went out of her way to praise
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 159
 Music City. “It’s a long way from London to Nashville, but I’d
like to take this opportunity to say a big hello to all the friends
I made on my last visit there,” she said. “And I hope to see you
all soon when I fulfill an ambition of mine to record an album
in your hometown.”
The olive branch didn’t help. Despite this benign greeting,
Newton-John’s win angered Nashville traditionalists. On Novem-
ber 12, 1974, a group of fifty country A-listers gathered at George
Jones and Tammy Wynette’s house. The occasion was to convene
a new organization called Association of Country Entertainers
(ACE), whose goal was preserving the status quo—capital-A,
authentic country music.
The language used by ACE participants was suspicious, blaming
what seemed like a musical strawman for perceived usurping. “Our
gripe, if we have one, is that these people want to come in and take
our music away,” musician Bill Anderson told the Associated Press,
adding that he meant artists “not willing to stand up and say, ‘I am
a country artist.’” Billy Walker was more explicit, blaming outsiders
who infiltrated Nashville. “These people came in and prostituted
our business and watered down our music. This was done by big
money on the East and West Coast.” At a press conference about
the organization, Newton-John was singled out specifically for
being considered a country interloper; namely that she was one
of the artists refusing to label herself as a country artist.
Newton-John gamely told the Associated Press in 1974 that
she didn’t “think it was too much planned that I’d become a
country singer” and that her producer encouraged her to go in
that direction. That didn’t necessarily help her cause, although in
the end she had high-profile defenders in country music circles,
like Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn. (In a 2016 social media post,
Newton-John praised Lynn for her 1970s support.)
Newton-John wasn’t hiding her influences and, more impor-
tantly, she didn’t back down or change her approach due to
the exclusion or criticism, carving out her own way within the
genre. Her 1973 LP Let Me Be There, which included songs from
her previous albums, topped the Billboard country charts. New-
ton-John belted out versions of “Angel of the Morning” and “Me
and Bobby McGee” with the confidence of a rock band leader;
dipped into gospel for “Banks of the Ohio” and “Take Me Home
Country Roads”; and turned in a gorgeous version of Gordon
Lightfoot’s heartbreak anthem “If You Could Read My Mind”
full of sighing vocals and weeping strings.
The LP’s title track was a turning point in her confidence.
Written by John Rostill, the song is structured as a plea from
one person to another. The narrator shows willingness to be a
support system to a special someone (“Let me be there in your
morning / Let me be there in your night”) and to fix whatever’s
wrong. “Let Me Be There” increases in musical intensity, building
on a foundation of wiry pedal steel and acoustic guitar by piling
on darting strings and vocal layers.
British musician Mike Sammes contributed deep harmonies
in the background that add weight to and echo certain lines
(“Make it right,” “Oh, let me be there”). By the final verse, a
dramatic key change lifts the song, turning it almost into a
cathartic church hymn with Newton-John singing near the top
160 WINTER 2022
of her soprano range. It’s clear she is all-in on the relationship;
however, it’s unclear whether the other person is. “Let Me Be
There” is a leap of faith, a prayer tossed out into the world from
one believer to another.
“ H O P E L E S S LY D E V O T E D T O Y O U ”
For country artists looking to switch to pop music, a gradual
evolution tends to be more successful. By jettisoning familiar
sounds all at once, musicians run the risk of alienating existing
audiences or sounding insincere. Shania Twain made this move
masterfully in the Nineties, recording two versions of Come On
Over to appeal to country and pop audiences and then assimilat-
ing both genres seamlessly on 2002’s Up!. In the following decade,
Taylor Swift also followed this blueprint as she transitioned from
country stardom to stadium pop, releasing different mixes of her
2012 single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” on the
equally eclectic Red. Like Newton-John, both received pushback,
but were proven correct in their approach.
Newton-John helped develop this crossover-success playbook,
although she had a distinct advantage because she was used to
sliding between pop and country. But prior to the release of
Grease in 1978, her country fortunes had faded. She hadn’t had
a top ten country chart hit since she released her 1976 version
of the Bee Gees’ “Come On Over” and began inching toward
mainstream rock and pop sounds. Her first solo album post-
Grease stardom, 1978’s Totally Hot, featured a twangy ballad,
“Dancin’ ’Round and ’Round,” but the rest of the LP was fiery
disco and rock.
John Farrar was by her side throughout. She navigated evolving
trends so well because of Farrar’s production, which eschewed
then-contemporary techniques that might have made the music
sound dated, instead developing arrangements and material
suited for Newton-John’s voice and style. And for Newton-John’s
solo showcase in Grease, Farrar wrote and curated “Hopelessly
Devoted to You,” a song that applied a Fifties pop sheen to her
early country work. The single was a top twenty hit on the U.S.
country charts, reached number three on the pop charts, and
was also nominated for an Oscar.
“Hopelessly Devoted to You” suits a Hollywood film: Brassy and
polished, it incorporates waltzing pedal steel, anguished strings,
and an imperceptible groove driven by soft, clicking rhythms.
Lyrically, there’s no room for ambiguity; “Hopelessly Devoted
to You” is firmly wallowing in heartbreak. Newton-John sounds
subdued on the first verse, almost as if she’d just had a good cry,
as she softly sings, “I’m not the first to know / There’s just no
getting over you.” Then her voice intensifies as she declares her
distress: “I’m out of my head / Hopelessly devoted to you.” These
extremes settle into sorrow over the rest of the song, and when
she repeats her lament (“Now there’s nowhere to hide / Since
you pushed my love aside”) the resignation stings. “Hopelessly
Devoted to You” is a country weeper in the grand tradition of
lonely teardrop songs masquerading as a manicured pop con-
fection. It was a perfect way to close the book on the country
chapter of her career.
We Put the OA in Holiday
In celebration of our
30th Anniversary, take

your entire
OA Goods order!

Just scan the QR Code or visit

OAG Goo
ods.org
g and enter
the code ROO
OTS3
30 at checkout.
 Will the Real
Mr. Heartache Please
Stand Up and Cry?
The surreal tragicomic legacy of Johnny Paycheck and David Berman
by Rebecca Bengal
nside the metal trash can are two things: a white
angel sculpture and a McDonald’s cup. Ceramic
and Styrofoam. I’m standing in the wake of the
graveyard lawnmower, which is now prowling
somewhere on the far side of the grounds. Fresh
cuttings stick to my boots as I loop around the
studded, sloping hills of Woodlawn Memorial Park,
scanning names for the country and famous. Two
headstones sing to each other… My Blue-Eyed King.
My Green-Eyed Queen... he died six years before she did. Maybe
they’d written their engravings together, picked out their plots,
and gone out somewhere nice to lunch.
It’s October 2020 and I’m in the early stages of a drive from
North Carolina to Tucson. In western Tennessee, even the I-40 rest
stops are musical. Fill up your water bottle near a portrait of Tina
Turner, walk your dog on the—of course—Rufus Thomas trail.
On the side of a Nashville freeway, my hotel room is decorated
with a photograph of John Prine and another of the Mandrell
sisters putting on makeup backstage. Cemeteries, the side trip
of the pre-vaccine days of the pandemic—dead people don’t
mind a visit, which is how come I end up having coffee among
the burial plots and ashes of Tammy Wynette, Marty Robbins,
Little Jimmy Dickens, Webb Pierce, Lynn Anderson, Red Sovine,
Porter Wagoner, and too many other country singers to name.
Within the heart of the place is a fancy, fenced enclosure and
an invitation: STEP RIGHT ON IN!, dominated by a massive arch
inscribed POSSUM and a montage of renderings of George Jones.
The grave of Johnny Paycheck rests somewhere a little south of
Jones’s bootheels. My grandma would’ve approved of the match-
ing, seasonally appropriate artificial flowers—in jarringly bright
shades of orange, red, yellow. I approve of how Jones paid for
Paycheck’s plot when his longtime friend and onetime bass player
died, allegedly broke, at sixty-four. I especially approve of how
he had him buried by the spot he’d marked for his own, as if to
also ensure a lasting place in country music for Paycheck, un-
derappreciated and misunderstood, and often whittled down by
shoddy collective memory to the legacy of a single hit. The outsize
162 WINTER 2022
popularity of Paycheck’s rendition
of David Allan Coe’s “Take This
Job and Shove It” is equivalent
to that of his good friend Merle
Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee,”
blighting out Paycheck’s remark-
ably varied catalog that swung
from Orbison-like amplified psy-
chedelic loneliness to the late Sev-
enties radio-gold polish of “Slide
Off of Your Satin Sheets.”
Jones and Little Jimmy Dickens
were among the two-hundred-
some attendees at Paycheck’s
memorial, where there was also
a sizable contingent of Hells An-
gels, who were as loyal pals of the
notoriously hard-living singer as
Haggard. “By and large, it was the
roughest-looking funeral crowd I have ever seen,” the “Nashville
Skyline” columnist wrote in the CMT. At the end of it, when
Paycheck’s own favorite of his songs was performed, perhaps the
most personal, they all stood in an ovation. “The Old Violin” is a
ballad of rock-bottom despair: “I feel like I could lay down, and
get up no more / It’s the damndest feelin’, I never felt it before.”
Like the best of Paycheck’s songs, it warps utter hokiness into
unvarnished feeling. When Paycheck leans on the trope of staring
into a mirror, seeing in it a mirage of the instrument, what flashes
into the mind is the cover of Armed and Crazy, Paycheck looking
a little stunned and preening, hands awkwardly attempting to
tuck into tight, too-small vest pockets, face half swallowed by
one of the gigantic hats he’d wear to offset his 5'5" frame. It’s hard
to shake the memory of that wild-eyed gaze as he cranes into a
vocal register of lonesome yearning. But where Hank might have
yodeled, Paycheck carries the melody to a place that feels at once
too much, too obvious, and yet totally startling and stunning in
its plainspoken admission. “And just like that, it hit me / Why,
Photo © Bobbi Fabian
 to a swaying drawl laced
with pedal steel. Up there
with the duets of George
and Tammy are vocals
by Berman and his wife,
Cassie, especially on “Ten-
nessee” and, on the Silver
Jews’ final album, Lookout
Mountain, Lookout Sea,
“Suffering Jukebox” and
“We Could Be Looking for
the Same Thing.”
Side two of Purple
Mountains begins and
ends with two perfect
country songs: “She’s Mak-
ing Friends, I’m Turning
Stranger” and “Maybe I’m
the Only One for Me,” both
swimming in the milieu
of Johnny Paycheck and
maybe also Gary Stew-
art. Both bring levity to
the album’s other songs
of grief and solitude: “I
Loved Being My Mother’s
Son” and “Snow Is Falling
in Manhattan.” But it’s side
one’s “Margaritas at the
Mall” with its end-times
call-and-response, that
hammers in my image of
Berman as an inheritor to
Paycheck, perhaps unlike-
ly to some, but whom he’d
name-checked in poems
and cited in interviews for
that old violin and I were just alike / We’d give our all to music years. How long can this world go on, under such a subtle god?
/ And soon, we’ll give our life.” Berman sings, as if standing in the middle of the shuttered
At Paycheck’s grave I had David Berman on my mind too. I’d Applebee’s and Sbarro, a minimum-wage worker sweeping up
come to reappreciate “The Old Violin” via the musician and poet, around the last-call drinkers.
who posted a number of Paycheck songs at the beginning of 2019 In some of the first press leading up to the release of Purple
on his blog mentholmountains, a sporadic collection that drifted Mountains, with the writer John Lingan, Berman brought up
freely between a post titled “Cowboy Overflow of the Heart,” Paycheck again: “He wasn’t much of a writer. He’s a dumb fuck,
readings from Robert Walser, and, in the months before Berman as anti-intellectual as it gets. There’s not much to like about
took his own life, paragraphs from numerous books by Thomas him as a person. But there’s ten or fifteen songs of his that I put
Bernhard. In July 2019, Berman released Purple Mountains, his above all other music. I relate to him as an outsider. His voice is
first album since disbanding the Silver Jews in 2009, the group so moving. The tear in his voice.”
he’d started twenty years earlier with Stephen Malkmus and Ten years earlier, in a 2009 interview in the zine Minus Times,
Bob Nastanovich of Pavement. The group released a half-dozen Berman regretted being too hungover to make it to Paycheck’s
albums. Their enigmatic lo-fi sound became increasingly country public funeral: “That evening at the Western Room a friend told
as time went on, at a time when country wasn’t cool in indie rock, me he’d gone. I was struck by my inability to ever do the right
unless maybe it harkened back to Gram Parsons. On Bright Flight, thing.” It was as honest an admission as any surrounding Paycheck,
the Joos covered George Strait’s unabashedly forthright early whose propensity toward liquor, drugs, and breaking the law
Eighties honky-tonk hit “Friday Night Fever,” slowing the tempo was legendary even in proportion to the sizable constitutions

OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 163
 of his hard-living friends. In Mike Judge Presents: Tales from
the Tour Bus, Swamp Dogg (who composed the soapy Seventies
crooner “She’s All I Got,” a big hit for Paycheck) and members
of Paycheck’s backing band recount the time he illegally “test
drove” so many vehicles after hours at a car lot that he stole the
whole board with every key on the lot and dumped it in a creek.
Once when he was backing Patsy Cline, he decided to take off
in her car. Locked inside the gates of the fair where they were
playing, he drove it around and around the perimeter until it ran
out of gas. Before Paycheck got sober, his musicians reckoned,
he’d go for a four-year stretch before he was apt to find a way
to upend his entire life all over again. At a televised celebration
for Paycheck in his sober years, Haggard took a seat on a sofa
next to his friend, jokingly searched for a story about him clean
enough to tell on air, and eventually came up with one dating
back to “when they still put cocaine in Coca-Cola,” turning to
the studio audience with an exaggerated wink.
A t various times, Berman and Paycheck each landed in Nashville,
where Berman survived an overdose in 2003, but otherwise
came from vastly different places. Paycheck, born Donald Eugene
(“Donny”) Lytle in Greenfield, Ohio, was playing talent shows by
age nine and hopping freights across the country by fifteen; he’d
eventually earn his GED in one of his many stints in jail, the last
time after his gunshot grazed the head of a man who’d offered to
cook him turtle soup. “What do you think I am, a country hick?”
Paycheck allegedly said before he fired a shot. He’d changed his
name legally to Johnny Paycheck in the mid-Sixties, adopting the
name of a heavyweight boxer, and started spelling it PayCheck in
his later years. Berman, the UVA grad who’d grown up between
divorced parents in D.C. and Virginia and Texas, guarded art for a
living in New York and wrote poems that strike a chord with the
work of his mentors James Tate and Charles Wright, collected in
his 1999 collection of poems, Actual Air. He would work his Jewish
heritage into his band’s name, and when he eventually broke up
the Silver Jews, he denounced his father, the corporate lobbyist
Richard Berman who was nicknamed Dr. Evil on 60 Minutes for
his aggressive tactics in favor of big tobacco and alcohol and
against labor unions. In 1978, Paycheck showed up at a United
Mine Workers rally where he performed his most famous hit, a
jolt to the resistance.
Vocally they were opposites. Berman’s deadpan baritone un-
derscored the tilted humor and searching wisdom of his own
lyrics, whereas Paycheck’s craned upward into the altitudes. As
his New York Times obituary put it: “Mr. Paycheck’s voice was
high, searing and unusual: he bent vowels into a curious mixture
of mid-South and Cockney, resulting in locutions like noit-spawt
for nightspot.” Some of Berman’s own favorite Paycheck songs feel
like they could take a page inside his Silver Jews lyrics, or inside
Actual Air, in the way they assuage the most cosmic, bizarre,
and mundane aspects of the universe and attempt to reckon
with them all on an equal emotional register. But the material
world is forever at awkward odds with the spiritual, and their
failure to converge produces the comic gap between the banal
and the sublime. In Berman’s poem “Governors on Sominex,” a
164 WINTER 2022
boy kicks ice buckets behind a Marriott, the moon “hung solid
over the boarded-up Hobby Shop,” and “Tammy called her
caseworker from a closed gas station / to relay ideas unaligned
with the world we loved.” In Paycheck’s mid-Seventies recording
of “The Feminine Touch,” he inhabits a character who watches
the significant products of his love slip away:
And I cancelled our subscription to the Ladies Home Journal
And told Avon not to call anymore...
The clock by our bed just gave up and stopped ticking
And the flowers on the mantel have died
The dust is gettin’ deep on everything but the ceiling
And I’ve lost all my homeowner’s pride.
Country songwriting has long leaned on exaggerated meta-
phors, the tropes of the down and out, underdogs and the tear
in the beer, but often with a veil of irony. Lift that and you have
a song like the Silver Jews’ “Honk If You’re Lonely,” from Amer-
ican Water, which lends a jagged, lovely, bittersweet melody to
a bumper sticker platitude. If you can picture a door that swings
open between love and bleak loneliness, between the existential
and the comic, between the mystic and the familiar, Paycheck
and Berman worked its hinges.
In the early Sixties, Paycheck released records on his own label,
Little Darlin’, wandering to its far-out margins with personal,
deeply felt, and just plain strange and surreal songs. They yearn
for deliverance (Paycheck escaped from prison twice; the singer
of “Ballad of Frisco Bay” is ready to die trying to swim from Alca-
traz) and romance (the plaintive “Apartment No. 9” which would
become Tammy Wynette’s first single) and ironically reckon with
their rotten luck in love [“He’s in a Hurry (to Get Home to My
Wife)” feels like a predecessor of Berman’s resigned character
in “She’s Making Friends, I’m Turning Stranger”].
Ever heard an abject country song about nuclear holocaust?
The narrator of “The Cave” picks his way through a desolate
landscape, witnesses a “ball of tiny light,” and is left, at last,
staring at the “shambles of a town / Where people used to live
before the bomb came down.” In the dark and weird Little Darlin’
corners of Paycheck’s catalog, “The Cave” sits alongside songs like
“(It’s a Mighty Thin Line) Between Love and Hate” and “(Pardon
Me) I’ve Got Someone to Kill.” “Now that’s the Blue Velvet shit,”
says my friend Cecile Duncan, host of the now dormant country
radio show Downhill Swing.
They are also among his most forlorn. When Paycheck sings,
“Will the real Mr. Heartache please stand up and cry?” he extends
his voice pleadingly, piercingly, just to the point of cracking.
In retrospect, his first hit, with Hank Cochran’s “A-11,” or his
“Jukebox Charlie” (“I wanna play that jukebox and hear that
song / Tells me how I feel since Baby’s gone”) might seem to be
materially kindred to the Silver Jews’ “Suffering Jukebox.” But
like Paycheck’s old violin in the mirror, staring down its inani-
mate loneliness, the jukebox stuck “in a happy town” is a nihilist
avatar for the singer. It’s an anthem for the workingman artist,
echoed by the swooning harmonies of its chorus: “Such a sad
machine/ You’re all filled up with what other people mean.”
A TALE OF TWO SONGS
Love lost, love found
by Rodney Crowell
M
y wife of twelve years fell in-
stantly in love with the New
York–based record produc-
er I’d invited to dinner at a
restaurant near our home in
Nashville. Or at least, that’s what I see in hindsight.
If I was oblivious to the sparks flying across the
table that fateful night, it’s because I, too, was
beguiled by our guest. Having caught wind of his
talent, I’d flown up to New York to enlist his help with
an album we were starting work on the next day.
I remember not appreciating at first the integ-
rity exhibited by my soon-to-be-ex-spouse as she
alerted me that her feelings for my new friend
and collaborator were strong enough to end our
marriage. Although I sensed something akin to
divine consciousness imposing its will on all of
our lives, and the future still seemed filled with
promise, I preferred to take the news personally.
And, as time went on, even the crisis in confidence
I indulged for longer than was useful turned out to
be a gift from on high.
In the days leading up to our amicable divorce,
mostly in service of a bruised ego, I came up with
a romp-in-the-sack ode to some yet-to-be-named
knockout, shamelessly titled “Lovin’ All Night.”
Thinking I’d likely stolen the melody from Chuck
Berry, I forged ahead, scribbling on the back of an
envelope a lust-riddled homage to bedroom hijinks.
I knew the song wasn’t in a league with “Lay Down
Sally” or “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” but
the time had come to assemble another album. And
who better than my ex-wife’s new boyfriend to help
transform a mediocre tune into a decent record? I
wasn’t surprised when the record company brass
chose the song for release as a single, but I was
dumbfounded when they approved a six-figure
budget for the promotional video.
Having been hired to produce grand results with
the corporate bigwigs’ money, my friend Joanne
Gardner sat at the kitchen table outlining a concept
in which she and I would fly out to Los Angeles and
work with an eccentric director whose visual flair
we both admired. “Great idea,” I said truthfully.
“But we can’t do that. We have to shoot this video
in Nashville. And you have to direct it. Think how
much fun it will be to tell the folks at Sony we’re
cutting the budget in half. They won’t know what
to do with themselves. Besides, there’s someone
I’m going to meet who will be important to me.”
Photograph © Ralph Dominguez/MediaPunch/Alamy
The principal actor I’d
picked out of a stack of
black-and-white eight-
by-tens was three hours
late for the first day of
filming. Ever the profes-
sional problem solver,
Joanne located a profes-
sional model and actor
who could be on set in
twenty minutes. The cam-
eras had been in place for
close to two hours when
Joanne introduced me to
the video’s new love in-
terest. Suddenly, the idea
that she planned to film me kissing this stunningly
beautiful woman on the lips made me painfully shy.
Me: “I’ve never kissed anybody in front of a
camera. Have you?”
She: “Yes.”
Me: “Is it okay if I try to make it look real?”
She: “Yes.”
One kiss and I was staggering drunk on her for
the next year and a half. That is, until a blinding fear
of commitment crept into my psyche.
’d decided to end the relationship when a parcel
I arrived in the mail from the legendary lyricist Will
Jennings. A package from the man so revered in
songwriting circles for his work with blockbuster
film composers and rock stars was a welcome
sight. In contrast to the dynamic that made him
one of Hollywood’s leading wordsmiths, our col-
laborative efforts involved me conjuring lyrics to
fit his melodies. Scrawled across the top of the
cassette he’d sent were the words REMEMBER ME.
Inside was arguably the most compelling piece of
music he’d ever composed.
In the beginning, I didn’t see the emerging song
for what it was: a painful denial of a kind woman’s
love. I more or less pictured “Please Remember
Me” as a relatively considerate way to break up
with my fabulous girlfriend. It wasn’t until I finally
got around to playing the song for her that the
truth hit home: I was a coward.
“That’s a good song,” she said quietly when
I finished. “But I don’t buy it. You and I belong
together. Go on and do whatever it is you think
you’re supposed to do. You’re a smart man. You’ll
figure it out.”
Of course, I went on and did what I thought I
was supposed to do—mope around the house for a
couple weeks, book a studio and some musicians,
and try to make a demo of the very song that had
made me so damned miserable. And then, midway
through the session, she walked through the door
looking like the first day of the rest of my life. The
musicians stopped playing instantly. The bass play-
er, a close friend who was aware of the situation,
turned to me and mouthed, “Last chance, pal.”
Someone called out “smoke break” and we were
left alone in the studio.
She: “For my peace of mind, I needed to say
goodbye in person.”
Me: “You look great.”
She: “I don’t feel great.”
Me: “How about I cook dinner for you tomorrow
night?”
She: “Are you sure that’s what you want?”
Me: “I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”
The next day I called the saxophone player, Jim
Horn, whose culinary skills are nearly as famous
among musicians as his flute solo on “California
Dreamin’.” His recipe for baked salmon with orange
wedges and red onions sealed the deal forever.
(To date, Claudia and I have been together for
thirty-plus years. Rosanne Cash and John Leven-
thal, even longer. “Lovin’ All Night” made the top ten
on the country music charts. Tim McGraw’s version
of “Please Remember Me” was the number-one
country song in the nation for five consecutive
weeks. It also reached the top ten on the pop music
hit parade.)
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 165
 Future Roots
Tomás Doncker on his twenty-year
collaboration with Yusef Komunyakaa
as told to Larry Kay
usician Tomás Doncker and poet
Yusef Komunyakaa met and began
collaborating over twenty years ago.
Keenly aware of the common bonds
between the roots of country and
blues—poverty, the church and gos-
pel, and a telling of truths cloaked by
folklore and tales that go back generations—Komunyakaa and
Doncker tap into that commonality with reverence and respect.
The result is something entirely new and genre-defying: Black
Americana. It’s a re-imagining of American roots music that looks
to the past and future simultaneously while touching on an array
of twentieth-century influences from country to blues to soul.
Doncker details the process behind their unique collaboration
and how the records they’ve made together touch on different
aspects of the roots music canon:
“COUNTRY IS A FEELING”
When Yusef and I first started working together, he made it very
clear where his musical interests lie. He’s one of the great collab-
orators, but he’ll never say something specific like, “We’re going
to do a blues record”; he contributes overall thematic concepts
and ideas that help define our starting point. He’s the lyricist
and I’m the primary songwriter in this relationship, so the tone
and vibe of the lyrics are paramount and the music must serve
that. The music we’ve created over the course of our relationship
can’t really be easily ascribed to any genre. It’s as much blues as
it is country, as much psychedelic as it is folk; it’s a feeling that
stems beyond tradition. Listen to Son House’s “Death Letter”—
he’s country, no doubt. The sound of his guitar playing supports
the pain in that lyric. We have no idea what his process was, but
it’s a complete experience when you hear that song. The music
and the lyric are one thing: an experience unto itself. Very early
on in the course of our conversations, before we’d even made
any music together, or even conceived of The Mercy Suite [their
first collaborative album], Yusef said, “We need some new blues,
blues that doesn’t rhyme with worn-out shoes.” I looked at him
and thought, “I like this guy; this is how I think.”
Blues is a feeling in the same way country, at its core, is a
feeling. It transcends traditional subject matter, it has to move
beyond those old forms for the genre to grow and expand. We
set out to create our own blues and arrived at a place we’ve
alternately called Black Americana or Future Roots Music. We
only came up with those monikers because people kept asking us
what we were doing. Our music wasn’t easily defined; it didn’t fit
into any traditional conventions. Americana, in my opinion, is a
relatively new marketing term. Its obvious immediate attachment
is to country music, but one could make a very valid argument
that all three truly original American musics—jazz, blues, and
country—are all Americana by virtue of their existence. We’re
not talking about what’s very often identified as the country

166 WINTER 2022 Photograph courtesy True Groove Records

music that came out of Nashville after WWII—these are the real
roots; country music whose bonds unite the backwoods of West
Virginia with the Mississippi Delta, the Louisiana swamps and
the Appalachians, which is regional and national at the same
time via the same shared experiences.
“ W I L L I E D I XO N , C O L E P O R T E R ,
A N D H A N K W I L L I A M S A R E B A S I C A L LY
THE SAME PEOPLE”
When we started using the term “Black Americana,” the most
frequent response was, “Oh that’s so radical!” Really? Anything
a black man does is American. Who built this nation? We came
up with it as a blatant “fuck you” to anyone who had to have a
genre-specific description of what we do.
We also call it Future Roots Music, which is
both an oxymoron and a metaphor. Where
do you go, musically, when you want to
create something new that still embraces
aspects of the past? You look back with one
eye and forward with the other. Yusef was
saying he’s tired of hearing the same sub-
ject matter over and over, the same blues
stories and tropes that have been told for
the past fifty years. When we were working
on our second album, Big Apple Blues, we
spent a lot of time listening to, enjoying,
and absorbing the work of the great Willie
Dixon. His songs take you on a journey. We
were reveling in the power and simplicity of the storytelling;
you can see the characters.
Take a song like “Wang Dang Doodle.” You know who these
people are; their situations transcend race and geography. These
are songs about anyone’s home, community, and neighborhood.
They’re universal stories and they celebrate the commonality
in human beings and, more often than not, these stories are
undermined by the need for genre-specificity in today’s world.
We don’t subscribe to that, we just don’t. That’s part of the thing
that’s clipping the wings of the music. You can take almost any
Willie Dixon song and it would work equally well if it was sung
by Hank Williams or the Carter Family; the truths in the lyrics are
universal. In The Last Waltz, Levon Helm called Muddy Waters
“the king of country music,” and that’s what it’s all about. Take
one of those storytelling building blocks: poverty. The notion of
poverty being just a rural thing is long gone. It’s an urban thing.
It’s a lens through which life’s stresses are experienced. In the
same way the landscape through which country and blues have
expanded, Yusef and I have expanded our work. From these
fundamental starting points in American music we’ve stretched
into rock and roll, funk, soul, rhythm & blues, and even songs
in the style of the Great American Songbook. We see them all
through the same lens; we see them all as coming from that same
Willie Dixon place. If you look at it, Willie Dixon, Cole Porter, and
Hank Williams are basically the same people: their songs are all
equally descriptive, just the genres they write in are different.
Endangered released in 2022 by True Groove Records. Courtesy True Groove Records
“ A L L T H E R O O T S G E T TA N G L E D U P ”
Yusef and I have also written songs that deal specifically with his
experiences as a soldier in Vietnam. It has been my honor and
privilege to lend my voice to the telling of these stories from his
youth. I’ve never served in the armed forces, nor would I assume
to fully understand that experience, but there have been many
times I’ve felt the anxiety, anger, fear, and confusion that comes
with walking in those shoes. From the moment we recorded
“Whenever I Close My Eyes” [for The Mercy Suite], the journey
of my life was forever changed. It was a very conscious choice
during the creation of the song for us to tell a story that’s not
so much about one man’s relationship with a woman, but to
the ass-whupping one man can receive from the whole idea of
being in love. Other songs from The Mercy
Suite that tap into those universal truths are
“Shook Down” and “Ride the Wind.” The
determined, uplifting, gospel-country-blues
stride of “Ride the Wind” was deliberately
designed to celebrate the internal strength
and resilience one finds through faith—any
form of faith.
Big Apple Blues is connected in many ways
to The Mercy Suite. The album had a decid-
edly electric, Chicago blues vibe, but at the
same time it ventures into psychedelia and
even the traditions of the Great American
Songbook, so, again, all the roots get tangled
up, but still make musical sense. And the
same could be said about our third album, The Black Magnolia
Project. If you really listen you’ll hear elements of a classic two-
step interlaced with psychedelic alt-country and gospel blues.
“ N E W C H A P T E R S T H AT R E A D L I K E O L D T E X T S ”
Our new multimedia album, Endangered, picks up almost exactly
where The Black Magnolia Project left off, four years ago. We
expanded our collaborative sphere by bringing in visual artist
Floyd Tunson and using his work for inspiration. It’s the most
futuristic of our records, constructed as a travelogue through
contemporary black music styles. The ever-present influence
of the blues looms large, but it touches on everything from
hip-hop to afrobeat to hill country blues to southern-fried soul
to Negro spirituals. It’s the distilling point of The Mercy Suite
and Big Apple Blues. It was a collaborative, face-to-face project,
where the artists and their respective disciplines converged. We
mine the common ground which all of this music came from a
hundred years ago (or more!) and try to write new chapters that
read like old texts.
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit
Oxford American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 167
 O A C U LT U R A L G U I D E

Play All Night! Arkansas Single Parent

Duane Allman and the Journey to Fillmore East
By Bob Beatty
Scholarship Fund
“Beatty writes with Arkansas Single
the heart, emotion, and Parent Scholarship
passion of a fan; the Fund helps
authority of an expert; hardworking single
and the deep analysis and parents earn a
factual grounding of a degree — and that
historian. This book is a changes everything.
valuable addition to the
Allman Brothers canon.” DONATE AND
VOLUNTEER NOW AT
—Alan Paul, author of One Way
Out: The Inside History of the aspsf.org
$28, paperback Allman Brothers Band

O R D E R A T 8 0 0 -2 2 6 -3 8 2 2 C O N TAC T U S AT I N F O @A S P S F.O RG
O R U P R E S S .U F L . E D U O R ( 47 9 ) 9 2 7- 14 0 2

Diary of a Rock and Roll

Tour Manager
2,190 Days and Nights with the South’s Premier Rock Band
by Willie Perkins
PRESENTS

Peter Olson: Year of the Plague Diary of a Rock and Roll

Tour Manager chronicles the
Peter Olson’s Year of the Plague is
a ceramic series from the hybrid triumphs and tragedies of
photographer-ceramicist, taking the day-to-day touring of The
on the shock of 2020 and its Allman Brothers Band from
reverberations. For the artist most
known for his street photography,
1970 to 1976, detailing their
portraits are obviously and most rise from obscurity to the
noticeably absent-replaced by voids absolute pinnacle of rock super
and shadows. Each ceramic form with
imagery pairs with a shadow piece;
stardom. Perkins shepherded
the pairs create a series of garnitures the band from their lowly
forming architectural statement. beginnings in smoke-filled bars
Now is a time of reflecting on such
upheaval and loss.
to six figure payoffs before
hundreds of thousands of fans
Now on view through March. in outdoor venues.
$25, paperback

G E O RG E O H R .O RG O R D E R A T 8 6 6 - 8 9 5 - 147 2
3 8 6 B E AC H B LV D. B I L OX I , M S 3 9 5 3 0 O R W W W. M U P R E S S .O RG
@ O H RO K E E F E M U S E U M

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

 READ. RELAX. REFRESH.

THE 34TH ANNUAL

The Carson McCullers Literary Festival
CSU’S CARSON MCCULLERS CENTER Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration
and the CHATTAHOOCHEE VALLEY LIBRARIES Present F E B RUA RY 2 3 -2 4 , 2 0 2 3
Graphic Memorist Thi Bui
READING
Friday, Feb. 17,
7:30 p.m.

M A ST E R C L A SS
W I T H T H I BU I
THE BETTER HALF? FACT, FICTION, OR FABLE
Saturday, Feb. 18, List of Speakers/Presenters for the 34th NLCC:
9:00 a.m. Dr. Rebecca Hall Kristen Green Valerie Martin
Dr. Jonathan White Danielle Dreilinger Christine Wiltz
This event is sponsored in part by the Columbus Cultural Arts Alliance, the Muscogee County Friends Dr. Joan DeJean Dr. Thavolia Glymph Alice Faye Duncan
of Libraries, and the National Endowment for the Arts. NEA Big Read is a program of the National Julie Hines Mabus Shelby Harriel Nicole A. Taylor
Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest.
Dr. Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd Dr. Rebecca Sharpless Dr. Leni Sorenson
Dr. Jodi Skipper Diane C. McPhail Dr. Gail Myers
Amy Argetsinger Dr. Sarah Adlakha Dr. Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

Lynda Lee Mead, Miss America 1960

Cheryl Prewitt Salem, Miss America 1980
Kimberly Morgan Myles, Miss Mississippi 2007

McCullers Center FOR MORE INFORMATION CALL

W W W. M C C U L L E R S C E N T E R .O RG 601-446-1104 OR
Chattahoochee Valley Libraries site: E M A I L N L C C @ C O L I N. E D U
W W W.C V L GA .O RG W W W.C O L I N. E D U/ N L C C

Explore the
Blue Ridge Music Trails

Nashville Ballet Company Dancers in Val Caniparoli’s The Lottery, 2019. Photo by Karyn Photography.

Conceived by Artistic Director Paul Vasterling, Anthology is a poignant

Head down the roads of Western North Carolina
exploration of Nashville’s rich cultural tapestry. This brand-new production
will blend music, spoken word, and dance to tell stories of Music City’s to discover renowned bluegrass, ballad singing,
past. Featuring an array of voices and experiences from diverse artists and old-time string band music.
and live music performed by MORGXN with additional music by Jordan
Lehning, Larissa Maestro, Beethoven, and more! BlueRidgeMusicNC.com

TICKETS ARE ON SALE AT

N A S H V I L L E B A L L E T.C O M

SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL SECTION

 The Pointer Sisters photo by Rick Kramer, courtesy wikicommons; DeFord Bailey and his harmonica photo by David C. Morton, courtesy wikicommons;
Revival released in 2019 by Baldilocks; Charley Pride photo by Greg Mathison, courtesy wikicommons; Color Me Country released in 1970 by Plantation Records

170 WINTER 2022

Black at
the Roots
A lesson on country music’s lineage
by Rissi Palmer
y story begins like so many others. I had a
dream to sing on big stages and hear my
music played on the radio. To see my name
in lights. Country music was a big part
of the soundtrack of my life. We listened
to Patsy Cline and Aretha Franklin with
equal fervor. I had my first publishing deal in Nashville at nine-
teen. I sang at Tootsies until the wee hours of the morning and
played writers’ rounds at the Bluebird Café. I endured LOTS of
rejection, which made me appreciate the big yes moments even
more. All the work paid off in 2007, when I fulfilled a lifelong
dream of playing the Grand Ole Opry and became the first Black
woman in twenty years to chart on the Billboard country charts.
When my show, Color Me Country Radio w/ Rissi Palmer, de-
buted in 2020, it was my goal and mission to shine a light on the
often-hidden history of Black people in country music. You see,
I grew tired of reading article after article, listing only five or six
Black artists in the genre and perpetuating the accepted narrative
that our contributions were limited to these particular artists in
modern times. I knew it wasn’t true because I too am a square in
the complicated and colorful quilt of this music.
It was important to me that I had the knowledge it would take
to speak with confidence and authority. For a year, I read and
watched everything I could get my hands on. Documentaries like
Waiting in the Wings: African Americans in Country Music and
Ken Burns’s Country Music got me well on my way, but books like
Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American
South by Charles L. Hughes, Hidden in the Mix: The African
American Presence in Country Music by Diane Pecknold, Black
Country Music: Listening for Revolutions by Francesca Royster,
and Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music by
Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann provided me with a
wealth of knowledge. I read interviews from Rhiannon Giddens
and Justin Robinson from the Carolina Chocolate Drops and spoke
with Dr. Jada Watson and Amanda Martinez. The podcast Cocaine
and Rhinestones by Tyler Mahan Coe added much color to my
research. This collective treasure trove of information changed
the way I look at my own music, as well as the genre itself.
I now know that the Black influence on country music starts at
its roots with the instruments that are at the core of the “country
sound”: the banjo and the fiddle. I also know about Lesley Riddle
who picked and taught the Carter Family many of the songs
they turned into country music canon and influenced Maybelle
Carter’s “bottleneck style” of guitar picking. I know about Rufus
“Tee Tot” Payne, mentor to Hank Williams and Gus Cannon, and
who taught a young Johnny Cash and Arnold Shultz. These artists
have yet to become the household names they deserve to be.
I learned about Louis and Lil Armstrong’s groundbreaking
collaboration with the “Father of Country Music” Jimmie Rodgers
on “Blue Yodel #9” from my mentor and dear friend Alice Randall,
the only Black woman in country music to write a number-one
song, “XXX’s & OOO’s.” Every time I step onto the Grand Ole
Opry stage, I can’t help but think of seminal harmonica player
and original Grand Ole Opry pioneer DeFord Bailey, whose
performances are as iconic and well known as the Opry itself.
I was delighted to find Henry Glover, one of the most influ-
ential and successful Black music executives of the 1940s and
’50s. During his tenure at King Records, he produced and wrote
for the label’s roster of country artists, including the Delmore
Brothers, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas, Moon Mullican,
Grandpa Jones, and the York Brothers.
There is a direct line from Ray Charles’s 1962 genre-defining
masterpiece, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, to
Charley Pride’s Hall of Fame–worthy career. From these artists,
we get O. B. McClinton, Stoney Edwards, Cleve Francis, Darius
Rucker, Jimmie Allen, and Kane Brown. Linda Martell and La
Melle Prince, two of the earliest Black women signed to Nashville
labels, both in 1969, led the way for Lenora Ross, Virginia Kirby,
Barbara Cooper, Ruby Falls, the Pointer Sisters, and Dona Mason,
all the way to Mickey Guyton and me.
I am so sad when I think of how misinformed I was when I
embarked on my career in 2000. I was concerned with my sur-
vival as an artist, as well as proving I knew the accepted history
of country music in order to pass the “authenticity” tests I was
often given. Knowing then what I know now would have armed
me with not only a sense of pride for my people’s collective ac-
complishments, but the feeling of not walking this path alone.
I cherish the information that I’ve learned, and I had no idea of
the many footsteps I was following and the many barriers and
hardships that were knocked down so I could stand on the Opry
stage and climb the charts…and trust me, it wasn’t easy.
Through the show, I have been able to meet and be in conver-
sation with so many pioneers and heroes. I take pride in being a
part of preserving this history for future generations so that they
will never have to second-guess their love for this music like so
many of us have. I know that by saying and acknowledging these
names, these forefathers and foremothers of modern country
music, we make the unbroken circle that Lesley Riddle taught
the Carters to sing about bigger and more inclusive.
My playlist includes many of the names I mentioned above,
as well as a few others who have influenced and innovated the
art form.
Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit
Oxford American Magazine on Spotify to stream the playlist.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 171
 1. WHERE CAN I GO (BUT TO THE LORD)
Brother James Anderson
Backed by insistent clapping and bouncing piano, Brother James Anderson’s
“Where Can I Go (But To The Lord)” takes a traditionally somber spiritual
tune and flips it into an energetic, glorious celebration of faith. The song was
recorded in a 1962 session with famed Memphis guitarists Chips Moman
and Roland Janes at Sun’s Madison Avenue studio, yet was not released
until five years later.
Brother James Anderson’s rendering of the spiritual came at a time when
Sun was lacking in gospel recordings. Unlike other versions of the song,
such as Elvis Presley’s 1967 rendition, Anderson’s captures the passion and
conviction of the Black sermonic tradition to which he belonged.
Traditional / Spiritual
Courtesy of Sun Record Company
2. I LOST IT
Lucinda Williams
First recorded for the 1980 album Happy Woman Blues, “I Lost it” speaks to
the heartache of falling out of love. Williams’s soft, alto, down-home warble
is accompanied by an upbeat fiddle that conveys a quintessentially country
sense of longing for something out of reach. She included the track on her 1998
172 WINTER 2022
LP, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which won the artist her first Grammy. The
spruced-up arrangement had an electric guitar, a bluesier, more languid pace.
But the song retains the spirit of the original recording, included here, and still
sounds like courage and frank reckoning with the fate of a doomed relationship.
WRITER: Lucinda Williams
PUBLISHING: Alpha Music (BMI) / Warner Chappell Music, Inc.
PRODUCED BY Lucinda Williams and Mickey White
Courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
3. LOUISE
The Deslondes
Louisiana is in the DNA of the Deslondes, from their name (pulled from a
street in New Orleans’s Holy Cross neighborhood) to their sound (the upbeat
zydeco flavorings, the backbeat of New Orleans rhythm and blues)—even while
they access broader Southern inspirations like gospel and blues and a Buddy
Holly Americana. 2015’s “Louise” is a tale of heartbreak brought about by
the elusive central woman, and ambles as steadily forward like the train that
upright bassist Dan Cutler sings about. You were the sweetest thing I found,
he tells her, aware of the futility of his pursuit: But I had to catch that train on
out of town / And like that train I’m destined to this ramblin’ life.
WRITERS: Dan Culter and Sam Doores
PUBLISHING: Sousagrass Songs / New West Independent Music Publishing (BMI)
PRODUCED BY Andrija Tokic and The Deslondes
Courtesy of New West Records
4. HAMBONE
the Georgia Sea Island Singers
The Georgia Sea Island Singers’ version of “Hambone,” sounds as though it
was recorded before a live audience in a concert hall. Percussive handclaps
and foot stomps, essential to the song’s performance since enslaved Africans
conceived it on these shores generations ago, ring out across the auditorium.
When lead singer Doug Quimby calls out, Hambone, hambone where you
been? All ‘round the world and back again, we hear in his voice the echo of his
ancestors, Black folks who scholars say used their bodies to beat out rhythms
when their enslavers denied them drums. An early iteration of the Sea Island
Singers recorded this song in 1959. Decades later, Quimby, his wife, Frankie
Quimby, and a new group of Sea Island Singers traveled the world perform-
ing “Hambone” and other tunes birthed long ago by those held in bondage.
Yet, despite the clarity in sound, because this contemporary recording was
taped before spectators, there is a slight feeling of remove. It’s as though
the Quimbys realized they were there to entertain and to teach; that they
needed to show the audience that this song, rendered a cappella with hands
and feet keeping time, has always been a seminal part of American sound.
Age old Gullah rhythms and beats, undeniable cornerstones of country roots.
Traditional
Courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
Mavis Staples & Levon Helm
I 7. SINCE YOU PUT ME DOWN
n 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated,
The Impressions released a song that spoke to the anguish,
despair and rage that marked the year. Curtis Mayfield, lead
singer for the group wrote and produced, “This is My Country,”
which was also the title of the album the song appeared on.
“I’ve paid 300 years or more of slave driving, sweat and welts
on my back. This is my country.” Forty-three years later, the
United States’ first Black president was serving his first term.
But two of America’s musical icons, Mavis Staples and her dear
friend, drummer Levon Helm, reinterpreted Mayfield’s classic,
an acknowledgement that though much had changed since 1968,
the core of the song still spoke to the tension of contemporary
moment. Helm, an Arkansas native and Americana and folk
music legend by then, was near the end of his life after a years-
long battle with cancer. Staples, along with her sisters, Yvonne
and Cleo, and their father, Roebuck “Pops” Staples, had risen
to worldwide fame as one of the most important roots gospel
singers of all-time, before crossing over into soul and r&b. Helm,
and Staples, whose family came from Mississippi, never shook
off their foundational country roots. They reveled in them. Re-
corded in 2011 during one of Helm’s “Midnight Ramble” concert
performances in his Woodstock, New York, barn, the pair, ac-
companied by their combined bands, infused new energy into
the classic. Staples adds a new verse, her raspy voice incredulous
when she asks, And what’s up with these people disrespecting
our president…They’re mixing up the Kool-Aid y’all, passing it
off as tea…I hear a lot of people saying they want to take their
country back / Well, back to the ’50s and the ’60s? That don’t
sound like progress to me. This year, the concert was released
as an album, with “This is My Country” included. The song’s
declaration still feels urgent.
WRITERS: Curtis Mayfield
PUBLISHING: Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Co. (BMI), Administered by Warner
Chappell Music, Inc.
PRODUCED BY Larry Campbell, Mavis Staples, Levon Helm
Courtesy of Epitaph Records
6. AWAKE FOR THE SUNRISE
Flock of Dimes
In an interview about the album Head of Roses, released in spring 2021, Jenn
Wasner, who performs solo under the moniker Flock of Dimes, said the LP was
“about feeling, for me to be able to override that disconnect between my brain
and my heart and my body.” Its penultimate track, “Awake for the Sunrise,”
tells the story of an agonizing sleepless night, but with a twist: its self-aware
narrator confesses culpability in her own misery. I deserve it, she sings, four
times before the song’s end. Wasner’s honeyed yet haunted vocal pierces,
perseveres. By midday, she’ll have alchemized the sadness and carried on.
WRITERS: Jenn Wasner
PUBLISHING: Downtown Music Publishing / Mano Walker o/b/o Moon Expert
(ASCAP)
PRODUCED BY Nick Sanborn and Jenn Wasner
Courtesy of Sub Pop
Margo Price
With its pedal steel guitar and Margo Price’s light country warble, “Since You
Put Me Down” feels like a classic. She spins a tale of a spurned lover (or a
manager that screwed her over, according to interviews). She leans into the
bottle and “kills the angel” on her own shoulder, all while singing her own
harmony. Since the release of Midwest Farmer’s Daughter in 2016, Price has
been called the future of country music. She’s certainly bringing a sound
from the past into the present.
WRITERS: Margo Price and Jeremy Ivey
PUBLISHING: Peach Pit (SESAC) / Fisheye (SESAC) / Good Songs We Love (SESAC) /
RMM 416 Publishing (SESAC) All rights administered worldwide by Reservoir Media
Management, Inc.
PRODUCED BY Alex Muñoz and Matt Ross-Spang
Courtesy of Third Man Records
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 173
 8. DRUNKEN SPREE
Skip James
Released along with a selection of his other recordings with Paramount in
1931, “Drunken Spree” has the quintessential twanginess of the old Delta
blues sound combined with James’s rowdy falsetto. In the ’60s James was
found, ailing, in a hospital in Tunica, MS, then famously went on to play the
Newport Folk Festival and other gigs; the artist became a quintessential part
of shaping a modern idea of blues: “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” from the
same 1931 recording sessions, was rerecorded in 2000 by Chris Thomas King
for the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack. “Drunken Spree” captures
the emotion of a night spent out selling possessions to acquire liquor and
drunkenly asking for forgiveness from the one you love, and subsequently
promising to never drink again.
Traditional
Courtesy of GHB Jazz Foundation
Gillian Welch
T
he penultimate track on Welch’s existential master-
work Time (The Revelator), “Everything Is Free,” brings
a country sensibility to the artist’s fears about losing
a livelihood in music. Welch and her creative partner David
Rawlings wrote the song in 2001, when the duo were fresh-
ly out of their record deal with Almo Sounds and facing the
uncertain prospect of starting their own label in the dawning
age of music streaming and digital piracy. The song distills
the pair’s fear, resentment, and bitter determination into a
few spare verses over bleak acoustic guitar. “It’s probably the
quietest threat ever delivered,” said Welch in a 2018 Rolling
Stone interview. While Time (The Revelator) and Acony, the
label launched alongside it, were more than able to sustain
Welch’s and Rawling’s careers, the ache of the close harmonies in
“Everything Is Free” stands as testament to the heart-deep
tensions between music and the music industry. If there’s
something that you want to hear / you can sing it yourself, Welch
croons. The song’s resurgence in the Spotify era, with covers by
Phoebe Bridgers, Father John Misty, Courtney Barnett, Flock of
Dimes, and others, proves that Welch’s quiet threat still has a
bite over twenty years later.
WRITERS: Gillian Welch and David Rawlings
PUBLISHING: Cracklin Music (BMI), Say Uncle Music (BMI),
Administered by Wixen Music Publishing, Inc. / Irving Music (BMI),
Administered by Universal Music Publishing
PRODUCED BY Dave Rawlings
Courtesy of Acony Records, Administered by Wixen Music Publishing, Inc.
174 WINTER 2022
10. NO WEDDING BELLS FOR JOE
Wanda Jackson
Wanda Jackson may have retired from stage performance in 2019, but The
Queen of Rockabilly’s legacy lives on. Hidden among the slew of singles Jackson
recorded for Capitol Records after meeting Elvis in 1955, “No Wedding Bells
for Joe” is a little-known B-side to the 1958 pressing of “Fujiyama Mama.”
Yet it characterizes Jackson’s voice and storytelling at its finest, her unique
style taking on a deep mourning within the context of the song. She feels for
the brokenhearted Joe, a man abruptly abandoned by his bride-to-be, but
still maintains empathy for the missing Nellajean: “to change her mind /she
said she had the right.”
WRITERS: Jim Coleman and Marijohn Wilkin
PUBLISHING: Southern Belle Music Publishers (BMI) c/o Cminor Music Group,
Administered by Trilogy Music Group LLC
Courtesy of Big D Music
11. MAMA HE’S CRAZY
The Judds
“Mama He’s Crazy,” first featured on The Judd’s EP Wynonna & Naomi and
then rereleased on their first full-length album Why Not Me, follows the
storyline of a daughter telling her mother about a new-found love. However,
the legacy of this song goes beyond the storytelling. “Mama He’s Crazy”
set the benchmark future singers would look to. Wynonna’s powerful voice
pulls twang and emotion into the song’s lyrics while Naomi’s harmonies
float gently alongside her daughter, earning the singers their first number
one spot on the country chart and an everlasting place as one of country’s
most beloved duos.
WRITERS: Kenny O’Dell
PRODUCED BY Brent Maherz
PUBLISHING: Kenny O’Dell Music (BMI)
Courtesy of Curb Records, Inc.
12. FARTHER ALONG
Hank Williams
A classic covered many times over the years by artists such as Dolly Parton,
Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Willie Nelson, and Randy Travis, Hank Williams’s
version of “Farther Along” relays to us the value of knowing that everything
in life happens for a reason, and there’s no use wondering all day about what
you can’t control. Although there’s some debate about who wrote the original
song, Williams was the first to truly popularize it sometime in 1950 when he
recorded it along with several other sides in a series of fifteen-minute radio
shows commissioned by Naughton Farms. He sent the discs of his record-
ings (duly named The Garden Spot Programs) to radio stations all over the
country along with advertisement for the company’s nursery. Williams was
often troubled by any number of things, including lifelong health issues,
and marital struggles, which he often numbed the pain of with alcohol. In
“Farther Along” he seems to let go of some of his sorrow, relaying to the
listener in his comforting twang, Cheer up my brother / live in the sunshine /
we’ll understand it all by and by.
Traditional
Courtesy of Omnivore Recordings
13. AVALON
Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turrisi
Formed in 2005 in Durham, the Carolina Chocolate Drops were an old-time
breath of fresh air, synthesizing African and African-American influences
and winning a Best Traditional Folk Album Grammy in 2010. The band took a
quiet hiatus in 2014, and frontwoman Rhiannon Giddens pursued myriad solo
projects: serving as artistic director for Eurasian cultural collective Silkroad,
working with the Kronos Quartet and Natalie Merchant, and releasing albums
like Tomorrow Is My Turn, Freedom Highway, and There Is No Other. With the
help of multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi, of European early music group
L’Arpeggiata, Giddens’s 2021 LP They’re Calling Me Home paints a rich, pastoral
landscape. On “Avalon,” the artist sings about the titular paradise, her yearning
for a reunion with her family piercingly raw. Yet her voice remains clear as a
bright trade wind—buoyed by the kineticism of Turrisi’s frame drum and her
own viola that sings just as sweetly beneath the words.
WRITERS: Francesco Turrisi, Rhiannon Giddens Laffan, and Thomas Justin Robinson
PUBLISHING: Children of Llyr (BMI), Bring It Forward Music,
Administered by Wixen Music Publishing, Inc.
PRODUCED BY Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi
Courtesy of Warner Music Group
14. HEATHENS
Drive-By Truckers
“Heathens” is acknowledged by Patterson Hood as one of the best songs he’s
ever written. It’s a quiet, acoustic driven cut planted right in the middle of
Decoration Day, Drive-by Truckers’s fourth studio album—the first to feature
Jason Isbell—which centers around love, loss, choices, and most importantly,
consequences. Following an uncompromising relationship, the final lines, “It
just gets so hard to keep between the ditches / when the roads wind the way
they do,” encapsulate an internal struggle to battle a preconceived fate. Hood’s
raw lyricism, Earl Hick’s steady bass, and John Neff’s pedal steel interweaving
Scott Danbom’s fiddle create a magical mix of a country ballad. Isbell, who
has continued to play the song live since leaving DBT, says “I’m not going
to say it’s my favorite, but it’s the one I wind up singing to myself the most.”
WRITERS: Patterson Hood
PUBLISHING: Soul Dump Music (BMI) administered by Hipgnosis Songs Group
PRODUCED BY David Barbe
Courtesy of New West Records
Trio
T
he hills were alive with wildflowers and I / was as wild,
even wilder than they, Dolly’s crystalline voice trills over
the mountain sound of David Lindley’s autoharp. Emmylou
and Linda bloom harmonies to support the refrain, three voices
entwined in affirmation of freedom, resilience, and joy. “Wildflow-
ers” is one of two originals that Parton penned for 1987’s Trio, the
group’s first of two albums. The song subverts the country virtue
of loyalty to a homeplace, instead celebrating the choice to leave
behind the familiar in search of the extraordinary. Parton sings
about having no regrets for her chosen path, the song’s old-time
instrumentation letting us know that she feels just as much at
home with her collaborators in an L.A. recording studio as she
would on a Tennessee hillside. As Rebecca Gayle Howell writes
in this issue, “Wildflowers” exemplifies Trio’s inspiring feminist
spirit: “I’m sure it wasn’t always easy between Ronstadt, Harris,
and Parton. Still, they chose each other. And because they did,
we could, too.”
WRITERS: Dolly Parton
PUBLISHING: Velvet Apple Music administered by Sony Countryside (BMI)
PRODUCED BY George Massenburg
Courtesy of Warner Music Group
Lesley Riddle
A
n African American folk ballad dating back to the dawn of
the railroads, “John Henry” tells a story of a steel-work-
er who labors to his death to prove his might, and his
worth, to his overlords. Henry was, by numerous accounts, a
man who truly lived, and was likely born in a mountain town in
North Carolina or West Virginia. Lesley Riddle’s interpretation
delivers a particular poignancy. Recorded in 1965 with Mike
Seeger in Rochester, Riddle’s version demonstrates the picking
technique he taught Maybelle Carter during the years the musi-
cian traveled with the “first family of country music,” teaching
them songs, some of which Riddle himself had written, along
with new approaches to their craft. Riddle never made a living
from the fruit of his musical labors. Yet the work, and his name,
live and comfort his musical descendants. “I had no idea of the
many footsteps I was following,” writes the singer and songwriter
Rissi Palmer, in this issue. Learning them, she says, has given her
the “feeling of not walking this path alone.”
Traditional
Courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
17. BETTER THAN YOU LEFT ME
Mickey Guyton
Mickey Guyton’s first single, “Better Than You Left Me,” is a tears-of-joy waltz
about what it feels like to realize that you no longer need to fake it until you
make it, because you are genuinely on the other side of heartbreak and the
better for it. Getting over a lost love is a perennial theme in country music.
OXFORDAMERICAN.ORG 175
 A lonesome mandolin opens for Guyton, who builds her
case slowly, with just a hint of pity for the woman she
was when her lover walked away. Verse by verse, her
voice gains grace and confidence as she recounts the
lessons learned from abandonment. Hindsight has offered
strength rather than regret. By the time she belts I laugh
a little bit louder. I smile brighter, and I fly higher, we see
who she sees in the mirror; she is proud of the woman
she has become. Going forward, she’ll set the terms of
her life. This song made country fans take note when it
was released in 2015. “Better Than You Left Me,” declared
that Guyton is a singer in command of her talents and
grounded in who she is, without apology.
WRITERS: Jenn Schott, Jennifer Hanson, Mickey Guyton,
Nathan Chapman
PUBLISHING: Music of Parallel (BMI) / Schott Heard Around
the World Songs (BMI), Sony Acuff Rose Music (BMI) /
Chaylynn Music (BMI), Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp.
c/o Mickey’s Island Publishing, Art In The Pain Publishing c/o
Songs of Universal, Inc.
PRODUCED BY Nathan Chapman, Dan Huff
Courtesy of Capitol Records Nashville

18. WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN COVER IMAGE: Soft and Loud, [2018]. Archival pigment print from silver
The Miller Brothers gelatin painted photograph by Molly McCall. Courtesy the artist

The Miller Brothers, Kentucky bluegrass players by way

of Detroit, pick their way through this traditional gospel rouser, recorded
for their 1972 LP Teenage Angel in Heaven. The album’s cover features the
brothers—Earl, Charlie, and James—posing with their instruments while a
blonde in a Christmas pageant angel costume, complete with a gold tinsel
halo, hovers above their shoulders, gazing down. Like the cover, the Brothers’
performance is filled with both schmaltz and sincerity, their voices keening
close harmonies about the hearse carrying mother away over breakneck
solos from Nolan Faulkner’s sparkling mandolin, James Miller’s three-finger
picked banjo, and Herman Lewis’s fiddle.
Traditional
PRODUCED BY Sun Record Company
Courtesy of Sun Record Company
Wyn Starks, Fisk Jubilee Singers,
Built by Titan
vocal, Starks assures his beloved of his devotion: I don’t need
much, he sings, ’cause I know…I got you. After the murder of
George Floyd, Starks and the producer Built by Titan co-wrote
“Sparrow,” a lilting plea to the divine for an end to the world’s
troubles. In this updated rendition, the Fisk Jubilee Singers join
the duo. They bring authority, witness, and an ageless depth,
courtesy of sonorous harmonies and an intricate call-and-re-
sponse between the lead and the chorus. The Jubilee Singers
began as an a cappella ensemble in 1871 as a way to raise money
for Nashville’s Fisk University, one of the earliest liberal arts
schools for Black students. Facing the university’s closure, the
group toured Europe and the United States, earning enough
money to keep the school open, as well as plenty of acclaim.
Legend has it Queen Victoria told the group they must have
come from a “music city” after watching them perform. On the
surface, “Sparrow,” sounds mournful. Beneath the mourning
simmers another kind of resolute devotion: to dignity, life,
freedom, and sweet, peaceful rest.
WRITERS: Fred Williams and Wayne Starks
PUBLISHING: Mike Curb Music (BMI) / Who Sings That Music (ASCAP),
Administered by Fun Attic Music
PRODUCED BY Fred Williams
Courtesy of Curb Records, Inc.

T
he vocalist and songwriter Wyn Starks, native of Minne- Stream the Country Roots Music Issue Sampler
apolis—town of Prince, the Time, and more than twenty
blue lakes—moved to Nashville, another “music city,” to
try his hand at making a living with his art. He signed a record
deal within six months and released his debut single, “Circles” Scan the code within the Spotify app or visit Oxford American Magazine
in 2019. With twangy strings and a strikingly lucid, soaring, on Spotify to stream the playlist.

176 WINTER 2022

Hear that?
Feel the vibration?
That’s a guitar string.
Country music started here, in Meridian, Mississippi, with
native son Jimmie Rodgers. Meet him at the Mississippi Arts +
Entertainment Experience.

A new kind of multisensory museum. Immersive. Inspiring.

Touch the minds and hearts of Mississippi’s creative geniuses –

Rodgers’ musical descendants like Charley Pride, Marty Stuart,
and Tammy Wynette. Plus Jim Henson. William Faulkner.
Eudora Welty. Howlin’ Wolf. Leontyne Price.
Willie Morris. Elvis. Oprah. All the hits. And
the deep tracks.

This is the place where it started.

Come. Feel it.

Congratulations to
new Mississippi Arts +
Entertainment Experience More than a museum
Hall of Famer Marty Stuart! Downtown Meridian | msarts.org