The Gut-Bucket Sound And a Little Slice of Hick

SKEETER says he lives in Hall, Georgia, up near the Tennessee line. But Hall, Georgia isn't on any maps and a curious stranger might spend an entire afternoon driving through the area without ever finding it.

Only after Skeeter says he knows you well enough will he let on that Hall, Georgia is no more. In the thirties, it was flooded over by a T.V.A. damn and the townspeople have moved into the surrounding hills, only to regroup on Saturday nights in Mountain City for the square dance and country music shows.

Skeeter and his friends start down late in the afternoon to buy beer (hard liquor isn't sold in north Georgia after sundown because of the region's astronomical murder rates) and then stop to eat supper at the Brazier Burger. After eating Skeeter gulps down several cans of beer and begins to smile, "Gotta get loose, so I can daince ever' daince," he says.

Inside the cavernous, wooden hall the dancing and singing go on without breaks until the town folk get either worn out or too drunk to stand up. By then, though, it's usually about midnight and the crowd starts heading back to the Brazier Burger.

Skeeter and I sat in the front seat of his '62 Chevrolet and he pointed out some "real good boys" he had gone to school with. "Good fighters too," he bragged, "throw a real quick punch." Then he stopped smiling and said it. "You know any of them goddamned hippies?"

The violence, the undisguised prejudices, the conservatism, the hard drinking-they're all of a piece somehow. Once it was called hillbilly, and for years only politicians, raised to a new social class on their flatbed trucks and pointing to their necks, yelling, "Look, it's red," a couple of songwriters in Nashville and a bevy of Skeeters took them seriously.

About the same time Huey Long and Eugene Talmadge were coming to power, country music was evolving its unique sound, each feeding on the same poor white traditions. Without question discs pressed for political organizations by country musicians helped to shape the ideology of the still new audience.

In 1925 a label called KKK, showing a fiery cross on a scarlet background, featured the 100 per cent Americans playing Why I am a Klansman. Today a comparable mood can be observed in Reb Rebel records whose anti-black jokes on NAACP Flight 105 reportedly sold over a million copies in the southeast..

As important as outlaw record companies was the impact of radio and major recording studios moving into the South. By 1930 country music claimed a rabidly loyal following that traveled to political rallies as much to hear Jimmie Rodgers yodel as to see "The Kingfisher." Even today a rising Southern politician can't consider running for office without a popular country act-perhaps Porter Wagoner and his Po Boys or the Fruit Jar Drinkers-to introduce his speeches. In style and message, the two have become inseparable.

MERLE HAGGARD is representative of the current synthesis of country music and its white, lower middle-class politics. Born into the depression in southern California, Haggard learned as a teenager how to steal and strip cars. Not very much later he was in San Quentin on a burglary charge when he heard Johnny Cash and decided to take up the guitar. By 1964, five years after he was released from prison, he had two records that sold over a million copies and in 1970 his Okie from Muskogee topped a million inside two weeks, won for him the country artist of the year award and a special invitation to the White House.

Haggard now lives in a ranch-style home in Bakersfield, California, and drinks Old Grand-Dad warm out of the bottle.

His music insists on gut-bucket lyrics that embody the simple, almost parabolic forces behind rural southern culture. In the liquor-making, nigger-hating, broad-fucking, communities that spawned country music they wanted to hear it straight and with guts and if that meant doing away with qualifying, complicating details that was O.K.

Haggard's Mama's Hungry Eyes and Okie from Muskogee locate themselves in the center of this ethic, songs he sings without a breath of irony or wavering self-consciousness. His bearing, mannerisms, even Haggard's cocky smile reflect the poor southern white's defiant pride. Constantly faced with social and historical pressures that threaten his social position, the country music has been able to confer on its audience a heroic dimension missing in their lives and politics.

The roots of country music can be traced to the minstrel shows that toured the South in the late nineteenth century. Tony Russell in his book Black White, and Blues found most of the groups were make up of blackened-faced white singers who played "coon ballads," songs most musicographers have followed back to ante-bellum field ballads. The premier groups of the time, The Christry Minstrels and the North Carolina Ramblers, played for both black and white audiences. To set themselves apart from common medicine shows and folk singers, a Christy Minstrel's advertisement read: "Anything appertaining to vulgarity is strictly excluded."

The same moral pretensions have traditionally been a part of country music, persistent themes of infidelity and violence are passed on in a didactic spirit. Until the mid-twenties a considerable stock of music existed that was played by both races ( John Henry, Corinne, Corrina or Dark Town Strutter's Ball ) but only the white singing groups attached to their music an ethical message.

The moral aura around country music becomes clearest in its reaction to rock-n-roll. Until Elvis, white musicians came to the Grand Ol Opry (a converted church still using the original pews) in Nashville to learn country music's own particular styles and techniques. But with Hound Dawg, using borrowed blues lyrics and Elvis's own brand of hard twang country steel guitar, all the walls between black and white music collapsed.

In the Opry, a kind of Plato's Republic for country musicians, the feeling was that their music had been defiled, and to make it doubly painful, the early white stars in rock were turncoat country singers-Conway Twitty, Roy Orbison, Sunny James, Bill Haley, Jerry Lee Lewis and of course Elvis.

But aside from the fear of racial integration and the obvious economic competition, there was an authentic Puritan's outrage against rock's overt/covert sex.

When Jerry Lee Lewis sang Great Balls of Fire, beat his piano and took off his shirt, he struck at the jugular of country music's conservatism. The kid musicians weren't singing about hard-luck or the hell of prison life any more. They just wanted to make people feel good and that usually had something to do with sex.

With this in mind, the Opry prohibited drums and electric amplifiers. Singers were requested to stand in one spot when they sang and wear ties or neckerchiefs.

The sequence of events that led to the emergence of a distinct country style is complicated by a lack of documentation. Pie Plant Pete of the Georgia Skillet Lickers was not overly concerned with his place in the history of country music. Most objective studies have been forced to rely on advertisements, widely scattered interviews that more often than not said nothing substantive about the music, and stories passed on by witnesses.

RADIO in the twenties went a long way towards consolidating what had been up to then several different strains of rural music. In 1922, WSB broadcast from Atlanta the first country music show, with an unprecedented response of 9,000 letters requesting more songs and artists. Record companies brought portable recording studios and the musicians flowed out of the hills.

But all this was just setting the table for Jimmie Rodgers. Taking the week off from his railroad job in North Carolina, Rodgers made his first recording in 1927 in Bristol, North Carolina, and created the country music sound.

His style was a complex amalgam of hillbilly, blues, English ballad, and Hawaiian twang, all coupled with Rodger's own "blue yodel." A mixture of Swiss yodeling and the Negro falsetto, Rodgers took his voice past its highest note and let it break into "T for Texas, T for Tennessee," yodelling on the "T's" and then back into a normal range for the next line.

He recorded with such disparate stylists as Louis Armstrong, Earl "Fatha" Hynes, Howlin Wolf (Rodgers is credited with giving Chester Burnett the name Howlin Wolf), and the usual repertoire of hillbilly musicians whose musical styles defy categorization.

His major contribution was giving a musical outlet to the down-home lyrics of the Southern backwoods singers. Rodgers' twelve bar structures seemed to fit perfectly the region's idiom. Early in Rodgers' very short career (he recorded from 1927 until he died of tuberculosis in 1933) he was able to blend the artifacts of everyday life with religious themes that made the most mundane chore an act of God. He was one of the first to understand the gulf between the grand style of Southern tradition and the dull realities of Southern living. You can still see the conflict in the South, tiresome old cars with a license plate on the front bumper that pictures a Confederate general shouting "Hellno, we ain't quit," or in the elementary schools that teach the kids to sing Dixie with solemnity and pride.

It is a Southerner's stubborn belief in himself and his white heritage of independence and toughness that accounts for his resistance to the personal misery of the blues. His country music looks to social explanations for unhappiness. In tedious love affairs, prisons, or truck-cabs Southern whites feel most intensely the emptiness of their lives. Rodgers sang:

Will there be any freight trains in heaven,

Any boxcars in which we might hide;

Will there be any tough cops for brakeman,

Will they tell us we cannot ride...?

A distinction can be made between the blues metaphorical use of a social world and country music's more literal retelling. When Merle Haggard sings, "I turned twenty-one in prison, doing life without parole," we have to assume he is not happy. Delta bluesman Robert Johnson's delicate poetics leave little doubt:

I got stones in my passway, and my

road seems dark as night. (repeat)

I have pains in my heart, they have taken my appetite.

As a white man's blues, country music deals with the stunted aspirations of a social class caught between a determined pride and an even more determined poverty. Out of their bitterness, they perceive the world as cruel and unforgiving, hence the recurring motif of a country boy helplessly tangled in tragic events he neither caused nor wanted. Often the events center on a woman, either the unfaithful wife or the seductress who doesn't mention her husband until he is already coming at the interloper with a broken bottle. A Hank Williams song says it best:

I've got a tiger by the tail it's plain to see,

I'm losing sleep and looking mighty pale,

It's clear she's gonna make a big fool out of me.

The deeply felt pain of the blues is transposed in country music into feelings of lost prestige, embarrassment, and finally defeat. In the mountain towns of north Georgia, though, it's not obvious at first. Not until you have talked to someone like Skeeter for a while, and he tells you how he doesn't mind working at the textile mill, and how good the women are and how much he loves the South. And he keeps telling you over and over again.