Hidden country: the secret family tree of country music - Culture and Reviews - Book Review

Reason, Oct, 2002 by Damon W. Root

It was shameful, Tosches argues, that Hurt was "compelled to assume the persona of a backwoods cotton-field coon imposed upon him by a young white America that saw itself as a force for racial equality and brotherhood." Tosches has little patience for those that equate artistic "authenticity" with deprivation and suffering. "The simple and irrefutable truth;' he writes, "is that no human being would rather break his back in the cotton field than take in good folding money by making records." As for the "raw truth" of the blues, "in the recording studio, the blues, like everything else, was...calculated to take the fancy of the marketplace."

Alas, the fancy of the marketplace did not stay long with Emmett Miller. By the late 1920s, when he recorded the politically incorrect songs that now comprise his massively influential yet largely forgotten legacy, the minstrel world he loved was already near death. Vaudeville had eclipsed it, while motion pictures and radio were on a meteoric rise. Had he been born a century earlier, Miller might have become one of minstrelsy's biggest stars. Instead, he performed before ever-dwindling crowds, reduced to an opening act for dancing girls and flickering images. In Tosches' memorable words, Miller "missed the boat, both coming and going."

Slightly further on down the river of American culture was Hank Williams (19231953), Miller's heir, the father of modern country music, and a major influence on rock 'n' roll both as a musician and as a role model. Williams is also at the heart of Barbara Ching's Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture, an engaging account of country's most colorful characters and the acts of self-invention that made them that way.

Ching, an assistant professor of English at the University of Memphis, picks up the tale that Tosches began. She warns readers up front that her "training is in literary criticism and cultural theory," and that "country music offers an important perspective on the bewildering cultural situation, often called postmodernism, in which we find ourselves." But despite a tendency to flaunt her credentials and play loose with the facts, Ching tells her story well.

As she makes clear, Hank Williams not only successfully gathered many dead voices, he inspired many live ones. She is fiercely (if ultimately unconvincingly) wedded to the idea that "hard country music"--a style she calls "self-consciously low, and self-consciously hard, a deliberate display of burlesque abjection"--champions the "resentment and resilience of those whose pursuit [of the American dream] has been arduous." To her, Williams, a man who literally lived fast (pills and booze), died young (at 29), and left a pretty corpse (his funeral was attended by thousands, while tens of thousands stood outside), is a martyr for the Average Joe." The rigors of his job failed him," Ching writes, "and its solaces failed him just as they would so many in postwar urban America."

Certainly, Hank Williams set standards--both musical and behavioral--that popular singers are still struggling to meet today. His voracious appetite for self-destruction is the stuff of legend, while his intimate lyrics and rollicking melodies continue to define hardcore country. His long list of admirers includes Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, and just about every country singer since the early 1950s. Even Tony Bennett was a fan, transforming Williams' high-lonesome lament "Cold, Cold Heart" into a No. 1 pop hit. "A great song from a great artist," Bennett declared.