…but he can’t fill my shoes” — Jerry Lee Lewis
You’d think that living in East Tennessee, I would take country music for granted. But driving home from Knoxville tonight I picked up the classics show from WDVX, and I could have been 20 years old again. All these songs and voices so readily identifiable, the liking of which set me apart from my peers in high school…a precursor of sorts to the rest of my life, always being different. In any case, listening to the young voices of Jerry Lee, Loretta, Merle and Buck, Conway Twitty and Marty Robbins, George Jones and Little Jimmy Dickens…I was wishing I was on a dance floor, something I haven’t thought about in a long, long time.
When I was in late high school and early college, we used to play the bars at Matagorda Bay, down along Magnolia Beach and Indianola. If I hadn’t been playing, I’d have been too young to get in. And yet, it always fell to me to sing the country stuff…Fraulein, Cheatin’ Heart, Muddy Water, Pick Me Up on Your Way Down. Low ceilings and low lights, a walking bass, cigarette smoke and juke boxes and alcohol and lonely people…damn! It just don’t get no better than that.
In October 1980 I played a Saturday night party with a band on a flat bed trailer in East Texas and the next day in a Pasadena night club. I loathed the smoke, booze, marijuana, the deafening volume, the debased quality of the band members and the predatory males and females “looking for love in all the wrong places.” I made $100 cash each night but it wasn’t worth it. My parents didn’t raise me to be a honky-tonk fiddler.
Yea, that’s one thing that sets you and me apart. Looking back on it, I find a certain poetry in those old time honky tonks…which in fact is what those great songs were, a form of poetry of that class of rural and semi-rural working people. You can hear it in the pride of Merle Haggard’s “Workin’ Man Blues,” or Dave Dudley doing “Six Days on the Road;” or the simple fun of Hank William’s in “Settin’ the Woods on Fire.” Even up to a few years ago, when you could still find the occasional player’s guitar from that era, opening the case and smelling all the embedded cigarette smoke trapped inside would bring back memories.
But all that was gone by the 1980’s. Really, it was disappearing by the early Sixties…replaced by the commercialism of pop and disco and Sony, Chet Atkin’s and his Nashville sound, Ray Price’s new string sections, John Tavolta and Urban Cowboy. I’d have to agree there, I never found much fun or poetry in any of that. And I’m not sorry that smoking is gone from bars today, or that driving home drunk is anathema. But that doesn’t change the nostalgia of youth and history, or the power of instruments and words and emotions to define an era and an identity, however fleeting. Thinking about that, drug-fueled rock from the sixties and early seventies did pretty much the same thing for the Vietnam War. Who can listen to John Fogerty and Janice Joplin and not think of that?