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

Reason, Oct, 2002 by Damon W. Root

Out west in California, Dust Bowl migrants Buck Owens and Merle Haggard mixed Hank-style hard-luck lyrics with muscular rock rhythms and some honky-tonk twang to create the Bakersfield sound. With their "revved-up percussion" and driving electric riffs on top of fiddles and steel guitars, "they sounded nothing like those coming out of Nashville...in its mellow mid-'60s string-section, backup singer phase," Ching writes. Rising out of Bakersfield's tough, beer-soaked honky-tonks, Haggard scored a string of No. I hits, including "Mama Tried" and "Okie From Muskogee," while Owens achieved pop culture immortality on the syndicated TV hit Hee Haw.

In the 1980s, self-styled Bakersfield heir Dwight Yoakam left Columbus, Ohio, for Los Angeles, where he helped kick off the highly successful "new traditionalist" movement that laid the foundation for the commercial juggernaut of Garth Brooks. Country fans didn't much care where Yoakam, with his stylish good looks and raw, guitar-driven sound, went to high school. As with those Northerners who wrote nostalgic songs about a South they never knew, Yoakam's "authenticity" lies in his audience's response. Since he could walk the walk, talk the talk, and sing lots of Buck Owens songs, his credibility was never in question.

Nobody found Williams a harder act to follow, however, than his son Randall, better known to the world as Hank Williams Jr. This unfortunate son, Ching notes, got his professional start as a prepubescent Hank impersonator, dressed in miniature cowboy hat, boots, and "Nudie suit" (the famous rhinestone-studded variety, named after the Los Angeles tailor Nudie Cohen). At age II Hank Jr. made his debut at the Grand Ole Opry with (what else?) "Lovesick Blues." As he matured, however, he became increasingly anxious to find his own voice, to create his own brand of country. "His career as an imitator was morbidly centered on sustaining sorrow and loss," Ching writes, "a nostalgia act that by definition had no future except as a well-publicized death wish."

By the mid-1970s Hank Jr. had defined himself as the rowdy country-rocker Bocephus (a nickname originally given by his father). Like the Outlaws, he abandoned Nashville, in this case for the woods of Alabama, where "his music is homegrown--as are his other pleasures, wine and marijuana."

His artistic horizons expanded as well. The album Hank Williams fr. and Friends featured members of the Allman Brothers and Marshall Tucker bands, two of the biggest names in Southern rock. "I'm gonna quit singin' all these sad songs, cause I can't stand the pain," Bocephus declared on the album's last track, "Living Proof." His specialties became wild anthems ("Whisky Bent and Hell Bound") and Southern pride ("A Country Boy Can Survive").

In 1989 he became a cultural icon as the rowdy voice of Monday Night Football. These days, Hank Jr. sings his father's sad songs, declares himself the master of "X-Treme Country," and records and performs with his (spiritual, not biological) "rebel son" Kid Rock, the hillbilly hip-hopper whom Spin recently dubbed "the first man ever to cross over from rap to country."