A Turn in the South (38 page)

The tours of the house and grounds were organized. Visitors couldn’t wander around; they had to be taken from the ticket hall in
special tour buses. On the afternoon I went the tours had been booked up an hour and a half ahead. So I didn’t see the house, and had to be content with the stories of television sets everywhere, the decorations derived from the decorations of Las Vegas hotel rooms, the petty extravagances of a man whose pleasures and palate were simple, who didn’t know how to spend the money he made and got into trouble when, thinking he owed himself more, he looked beyond the simple things he liked best.

And it was easy in the busy ticket hall—Presley songs on the speakers, disturbingly alive: the saint’s immortality—to sense the glamour, the magic of the voice, and the incomprehensible wealth it had brought. The wealth—spent in the way it was known to have been spent: simplicity magnified, and then magnified again—was like wealth for everyone, for all the fat people of the people who—acting on a similar Presley-like principle of expenditure, but restricting it to what was available to them, the fast foods they found eternally tempting, luxurious and within easy reach, like a real-life version of manna or a modern version of something in a classical legend—had turned fulfillment and the glory of abundance to personal fat, fat as a personal possession.

Ever since the Charleston hotel (and especially after the busy business people of the hotel in Atlanta) I had been aware of very fat people, people who had risen (like dough) to special spheres of obesity. Not one or two; they were almost a class. Charleston was a resort town. They had appeared there, in the hotel, in gay holiday clothes that were on them doubly and trebly exaggerated; and they had, bizarrely, also appeared in couples. At one time there were at least four such couples in the hotel—gargantuan, corridor-blocking, and (no doubt the effect of numbers) not without aggression.

I had noticed them in other places after that. But it was Campbell who first spoke to me about the fatness of redneck women, and made it appear a regional or group characteristic. It was at times a pleasure and an excitement to see them, to see the individual way each human frame organized or arranged its excess poundage: a swag here, a bag there, a slab there, a roll there. A kind of suicide, it might have seemed; but I also began to wonder—in the Graceland ticket hall, among all those proud and excited folk—whether for these descendants of frontier people and pinelanders there wasn’t, in their fatness, some simple element of self-assertion.

How was this adoration of the singer to be understood? These people had political leaders; they had sportsmen, film stars; they had any number of heroes. But these heroes were observed from a distance; this singer was a person like his admirers. He was a person his admirers felt they could live through: the singer experienced for them, on their behalf.

In colonial days in the British West Indies—for about a hundred years after the abolition of slavery—the black people had no heroes. They began to get heroes very late, and these heroes were sportsmen, cricketers mainly. No other kind of hero was possible in that limited society. But then, when a political life developed, towards the end of the colonial period, West Indian blacks acquired leaders, union men in many cases, who then became political leaders and later, in independence, prime ministers. For these early leaders who were their very own, West Indian blacks had more than adulation. They wished these leaders to represent them, and more than in a parliamentary way. They wished their leaders (who had started as poor as everybody else) to be rich (by whatever means) and powerful and glorious. The glory of the black leader became the glory of his people. The leader lived (or lived it up) on behalf of his people; and the people lived through their leader. Ordinary ideas of morality and propriety didn’t apply. A leader wasn’t required to be modest and correct; those were the virtues of another world. A leader was invested as a black man with a responsibility: to be grand, larger than life, for the sake of all blacks. This idea of the leader—which has caused such havoc in the West Indies—has changed in recent times, but it is still there.

Something like this black political adulation seemed to be at the back of the Presley cult. It was strange—to me—that music should have carried so much of a people’s emotional needs. And when, in Nashville, Tennessee, I went to a performance of the “Grand Ole Opry,” the long-running country-music radio program, I felt quite apart from what I was witnessing. It was like a tribal rite; it might all have been in a foreign language.

How much talent was there on display? But did talent matter in this setting? It was enough for the famous and the greatly loved simply to show themselves to the audience. The auditorium was full; the aisles were full of people with cameras. The cowboy hats and overalls—working clothes—of some of the performers gave a clue: country music created a community, and was the expression of a community.

Nashville was the center of the country-music industry. It was an industry, but the streets of the music area were full of tourists in holiday clothes.

An elderly black man, driving me back to the hotel one day, said of the visitors, “They’re all white. Do you see? Blacks hate country music. It’s redneck music to them. It symbolizes all that oppressed them and all that they hate.”

I asked whether Presley had that attitude to blacks.

The old man said, “To talk to Presley about blacks was like talking to Adolf Hitler about the Jews. You know what he said? ‘All I want from blacks is for them to buy my records and shine my shoes.’ That’s in the record.”

W
HEN
I
MENTIONED
this to Allen Reynolds, a producer, he said,
“Oh no! Oh no!”

Allen was from Arkansas. He was forty-nine, and I felt he might have been a little weary of defending the South against racial charges.

He said, “I was at the Baptist Hospital in Memphis, and Elvis was there. Not as a patient perhaps—his wife may have been there. I was in a gathering near the elevator. Two black nurses came sailing by in a state of possession. They were saying, ‘He’s here, he’s here.’ Holding their hearts, and flying off to see Elvis. I tell this story because it makes me question that theory that blacks hated Elvis.”

Allen had been educated in Memphis. He loved the city, “musically and otherwise,” until the killing of Martin Luther King in 1968. That killing spoiled relationships with black musicians and other black people. Nothing might have been said, but the killing was there, a barrier and an embarrassment, a cause for silence. (And I was aware, during my own time in Memphis, of the sourness of things there, with the black city an extensive, irretrievable desolation, and with the white people, under siege, living far to the east.)

Allen still had friends in the music business in Memphis. “One of them is Sam Phillips, an independent label-creator. He’s a kind of idol of mine. His achievements still impress me. He did Presley in the late 1950s. He grew up in Mississippi or Louisiana. A big influence on him when he was a boy was black music. We had this blending of music in Memphis. Sam loved black music and he was consciously looking for a
white man with a black”—he searched for the word—“attitude. Black energy.”

I asked Allen what country music meant to him.

“I grew up very close to country music, and I can’t find anyone who can define country music. But to me it’s real people’s music, lyrically and melodically. And it’s directly out of daily life.

“My grandparents listened every Sunday night to the ‘Grand Ole Opry.’ My grandmother was one of fourteen children. And there was a guy called Little Jimmy Dickens who would sing a song called ‘Sleeping at the Foot of the Bed.’ And my grandmother would say, ‘That’s how it was.’ When people would come visiting there would be no question of getting a new bed. The adults would sleep side by side, and the children would be placed at the foot of the bed. Country music at its best comes from the emotions of everyday life.”

In country music, the music itself was not important. What mattered were the words. But the words were few and simple, and the themes were so stylized. Was it hard to judge the quality of a song? Could one be taken in by trash?

Allen said: “I can tell pretty quickly. For instance, I am now working on an album with a singer called Kathy Mattea. She’s a new singer; this is only her fourth album. The way the business works is, there are a number of publishing companies with writers who make it their daily job to go into the office and write songs. I don’t think that’s always a very satisfactory system. It results in a lot of greeting-card stuff. When I announced that we were looking for material for this album of Kathy’s, I got a huge volume of songs—almost all of which is not acceptable—from the publishers and the writers.”

That explained the typewritten notice I had seen on the front door, asking people just to drop their cassettes through the mail slot, and not to come in and talk.

“I must listen to a grocery-bagful of cassettes every week. Nashville is like a Mecca for a lot of dreamers. But at the same time I keep on meeting publishers and writers, because I’m looking for material, and the real struggle is finding the real songs. So the sign on the front door is only partially operative.”

“Are you looking for a song, or for a writer?”

“Both. I am always looking for the real writers. We have some who are very fine. Most of those I know are from simple backgrounds, rural
backgrounds. It doesn’t mean they are not educated. They are from all over the country. But generally they come from a background that is only partially urban. They have a good strong connection to the small towns and the people.”

I thought about other forms of stylized writing—Restoration comedy, the P.G. Wodehouse upper-class fantasy—where a witty manipulation of the form could be art enough.

Allen said, “I know someone from the other end of the country. This person writes a wide variety of music. He has had some success in country with some pieces that I know are just imaginative, and based on the feel this person has for the stylized elements. And yet some of these pieces are very good pieces.”

“But you would say that some of the best work comes from true knowledge.”

“And originality.”

“Is that still possible?”

“Yes. But the industry doesn’t encourage originality much. As with other writing, there’s ten percent that’s original, and a lot that’s quickly here and gone.”

We went up to listen to some of the tapes that had been sent in for the new Kathy Mattea album. In the listening room there were, literally, the grocery bags he had talked about.

Allen said, “The first thing I notice in most of these tapes is how little originality there is in them. Even the titles can be the same. Any number of songs about the fire of love, the flames of love. Many titles like that. The fire of love that can’t be quenched.”

The song we listened to was about love, sentimental, generalized, with no concrete detail to attach it to a setting or a person.

Allen said, “It’s a commercial ditty. Greeting card. Three writers worked on that one, and you can tell they had no purpose except to make some bucks. The music too. It’s a hybrid. A little bit of pop, a little bit of country, a little bit of schmaltz. And not any soul. And back into the grocery bag it goes.”

There were tapes on the shelves of the listening room. And on top of the shelves were clown figures in china.

We listened to one of the songs Allen was going to use in the album.

“It’s called ‘Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses.’ He—the truck-driver—is on his last run home with a dozen roses for her. Now they’re going to do a lot of catching up. It’s not a heavy song. I’m humored by
it. There’ve been a number of songs in country related to the trucking business. A lot of the country audience relates to cars and trucks.”

I picked up separate lines of the song, saw the play on the numbers in some of them: “Eighteen wheels and a dozen roses”; “A few more songs on the all-night radio”; “Ten more miles on his four-day run.”

Allen said, “Eighteen wheels. Everyone knows that’s a big road rig.”

He played another song he had chosen. It was called “Late in the Day.”

He said, “It’s reflective, sad. Dealing with lost affection, lost love.” He quoted a line: “ ‘You don’t know it’s a good thing till it goes slipping through your fingers.’ ”

And we listened again:

Allen said, “I love that song, because the mood and imagery are evocative to me. And the melody alone is dear, is beautiful to my ears.”

We talked about his discovery of music.

“In my life it has been a natural thing to have instruments in the house and to make music for your own entertainment and the entertainment of your friends. When I was a child—in Arkansas—neighbors would come over in the evening with guitars, fiddles, harmonicas, mandolins, and they would sit and sing for hours. They loved it. In my grandmother’s day, during the summer they had teachers who would travel from community to community. They would have singing schools, and children and adults would go every day and learn singing and harmonies. And they would have ‘a big all-day sing,’ as they called it, at the end of that week.

“Part of the attraction of the church in the South was the music. It was the music and the singing and the harmonizing that they enjoyed. For the whites and the blacks, the influence of the church and the gospel music is real apparent to me in the secular music. Some of Elvis’s favorite songs—to sing—were for the church. He personifies the interrelation of secular and gospel, white and black.”

Kathy Mattea, whose new album Allen was producing, belonged to what Allen called “the folksy side” of country music. There was another
side. “One of our great singers and writers is Loretta Lynn, and she is one of the real earthy writers, and a legend. Her music is more connected to barroom and domestic storms. She began singing when she had a house full of babies. It was a manifestation of something natural in her—a natural way of entertaining herself, expressing herself. And she was poor. All she had was a radio and a guitar. A hard life, a poor life.”