A Turn in the South (41 page)

He had an office in a music publisher’s in Nashville, and he had a certain fame for going to his office every working day to write his songs. It was there that I went to see him. On his desk was a lined yellow pad with what looked like a fair copy in pencil of a finished song. There were no other papers on his desk. But there were curious ornaments:
London mementoes—a toy red double-decker bus, a guardsman, beefeaters, a London taxi.

He was forty-three. He was tall and slender. He liked the outdoor life, and went out duck-shooting. (That was the gentleman’s sport here, as Campbell had told me; real rednecks were meat-hunters.) He had been born in East Texas, and had been writing songs since he was fifteen or sixteen. He had always been interested in poetry, music, guitars, drums, banjos, pianos. “Not that I play them all, or play them well.”

He said that the early songs he had written were self-indulgent. “I didn’t learn to write commercially until I was in my late twenties.” The professional attitude was necessary. The songwriter writes for singers, and has a special relationship with singers.

He went to Memphis in 1967 and spent a year there. “In Memphis I tried to write songs for black artists, black singers. I was on the staff of a publisher as a writer, and was also working in a studio as an assistant engineer.” That attempt to write black songs didn’t work. “I could have succeeded if I had had time enough to learn that black mentality, that black approach to music. I was beginning to learn it when I left. You’ve got to say something that the singer wants to say and can identify with. It was the same thing when I moved here. I had to learn this mind-set. I learned this subculture, which wasn’t my own. The vocabulary is very limited. You have to learn to do big things with little words. In both black music and country music, and more so in country music.”

It was such a special art, songwriting, so far from my own. I wanted to be taken into it a little way, and I asked him to talk about the problems he had had with a song.

He chose “Somebody’s Always Saying Goodbye.”

Bob McDill said: “The bridge—between the images of the first two stanzas, the detachment, and the personal thing—that gave me a lot of trouble. Until I hit on the idea of just conversation. It eases the listener into it. There was another problem—I still hadn’t defined the situation between the two people, the lover and the lost one. I had to do that in four lines. It seems so obvious now. But you know how long the obvious takes. I saw that there was no need to make a judgment on the behavior of either party. ‘Somebody is always leaving.’ It sounds almost as if it could be her, the singer. But, for whatever reason, she knows now it was a terrible thing—he threw away a great thing. Two verses of images, and then in seven lines you have to create all that personal thing.

“I also had trouble with it musically. Two long pieces of melody that are complete once, twice. You need relief—and then I hit on the idea of repeating just the second half of the A-section melody.”

When he began to talk about the writing he stood up and looked away.

“Sometimes you begin with an emotion, a feeling about something. Sometimes a title, sometimes a line of the lyric. But then the hard part comes. You take that little thing, that little bit of idea, and build on it and build on it. That’s the tough part. The problem then is not to mess it. Your text is so small that every word has to count. From the very first word you are working towards that center.

“You write line by line. The couple of parts we have to deal with which serious poets don’t have to deal with is the tonality and also the singability. You can’t do complex things and things that are hard to
say. It has to be so easy to say and sing. It has to fall out of the singer’s mouth.”

I asked him for an example of a line that had to be put right. He couldn’t think of anything like that in his own work.

“The computer in the brain is rejecting all the time. It rejects everything that is clumsy, hard to sing.”

And at the end there was no way of defining what a good song was going to be. It was all a matter of feeling.

“If it feels good, if it does something to you, it’s good.”

No amount of questioning, no amount of explaining, even from someone as willing to talk as Bob McDill was, could take one to the magic: the calling up and recognition of impulses that on the surface were simple, but which, put together with music, made rich with a chorus, seemed to catch undefined places in the heart and memory.

Almost nothing at first. But then the images and the associations come: Mama, river, catfish, footsteps, delta, dawn.

Bob McDill said he had had to learn the subculture. But the Southern images and words of his best songs are far from the stylized motifs of a good deal of country music. And though he makes much of writing in an office in a matter-of-fact, day-to-day way—and perhaps because he talks in a matter-of-fact way, since the mystery cannot be described—it is probably true that, when moved, he writes with that most private part of the self with which Proust said serious writers write.

He says that his best song is “Good Ole Boys like Me.”

Every detail there was considered. His aim, he said, was to get as much of the South as he could in a few lines. And the song has become very famous; many people I spoke to referred to it; the mood of the song spoke for them. A “good ole boy” (as I had gathered from Campbell in Jackson) was a redneck; but it was also a more general word for an old Southerner, someone made by the old ways. The song might seem ironical, then celebratory. But below that it is an elegy for the South, old history and myth, old community, old faith.

T
HE
S
OUTHERN
Baptist convention, meeting two weeks or so before in Saint Louis, had voted itself—over strong moderate opposition—into an extreme fundamentalist position. Baptist seminaries were to be purged of people who didn’t believe in biblical literalism. Sunday-school literature was to reflect this new strictness.

Reverend Tom Ward, the pastor of Christ Episcopal Church, said, “The more the Baptist religion is threatened, the more fervent it becomes.” Reverend Ptomey, the Presbyterian, thought that the new moves represented the negative side of Baptist fervor. He said, “They’ve manipulated the political processes within their denomination to appoint people to the boards of their schools who share their perspective on biblical literalism.”

Reverend Will Campbell, more involved than either of these men, was outraged. Will Campbell was a famous local Baptist pastor or counselor. He had no church of his own. He operated informally, from his forty-acre farm just outside Nashville; the informality was part of his fame. In spite of the Thoreau-like setting and his frontiersman style, he had had a formal theological education, including three years at Yale Divinity School. He was in his early sixties.

He had been to the convention. He said: “I cannot analyze why I came out with a near-clinical state of depression. I never was a steeple pastor—I walked away from that thirty years ago—but the Baptist notion historically is a glorious one. This little band of left-wingers, truly radicals, they believed in separation of church and state. No one believes in that any more. They would not go to war; they would not take an oath or serve on juries; they would not baptize their babies; they practiced community of goods. None of this holds good today.

“Moderates and fundamentalists—neither party is historically Baptist. They claim to believe the Bible literally. No one believes the Bible
literally. Ask the man who tells you he does, ‘Shall we start dismantling the penitentiary?’

“I never know if the true Baptist notion ever made it across the Atlantic Ocean. The frontier spirit, the culture, so dominated the religion that what you had was a civil religion, a cultural religion, a melding into one.”

I said, “But it served the people well.”

“It did indeed. But it betrayed the faith.”

Will Campbell had a special idea of the faith. “Religion should not be credal. The great church of Christ came into being by ignoring the life of Christ. What I heard in Saint Louis—what depressed me—was doctrine, doctrine, and its defense. I heard little about discipleship. The churches offer a theology of certainty. And that worries me. Jeremiah said, ‘It is not good to be too sure of God.’ And even Christ, when he was about to be crucified, cried in great agony, and the agony comes over in the translation, ‘If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.’ No great religion can give all the answers to everything. Jesus didn’t tell people what to think. He didn’t prescribe a confession of faith. Christ offered no creed or special theology.”

He seemed to be saying that faith was something that had to be constantly looked for and struggled towards. When I put that to him, he said it was fair. But Will Campbell’s ideas were difficult; and I wasn’t sure whether he wasn’t being polite.

It occurred to me afterwards that only a very devout man, and someone raised within the Southern Baptist church, could ask so much of people. His setting—the forty-acre farm, the log-cabin study where he met visitors—represented something about the man. He gave one an idea of the power of the frontier preacher, and the strength of the old faith.

But it wasn’t only for this that Will Campbell was famous and almost, as someone said, a Southern monument. He was famous for the political positions to which he had been led by his faith. He had done brave things in the civil-rights movement. But he hadn’t stopped there. Religion and a wish to come to terms with Southern history had taken him beyond the black cause to the cause of the rednecks, the haters of the blacks. He had seen both these Southern groups as tragic. And something like a religious conversion (within his already fervent faith) had led him to offer spiritual succor to members of the Ku Klux Klan.

The conversion had come about like this. A mocker had asked one day what the Christian message was. Will Campbell had said that the message was: “We are all bastards, but God loves us anyway.” (It was a version of the illumination he had had at Yale—“God cares about the suffering of his people”—that had taken him beyond the rigidities of his upbringing and had led him to the civil-rights movement.) Some time later a Klansman shot and killed one of Will Campbell’s friends. The mocker then asked Will Campbell, who was full of grief and raging about rednecks and Kluxers and crackers, “Which bastard does God love the most?” The bastard who had been killed, or the bastard who had done the killing and was alive? Will Campbell had no doubt about the answer: he had a mission to the living Klansman as well.

The story of the conversion is told in Will Campbell’s autobiography,
Brother to a Dragonfly
. Things are not always clear in that book. The main narrative is broken into by many little stories and is at times too fragmented. But it seems that with that conversion there came to Will Campbell a fuller and special comprehension of Southern history.

The poor whites, many of them descendants of indentured servants, and to that extent sharing an ancestry of servitude with the blacks, were of no account in the South until the Civil War. Then, because they were needed to fight that war, they were evangelized and given their cause; and afterwards, as rednecks and Klansmen, still poor, still victims, they were held responsible and derided for what was really the racism of the entire society.

The Klan religion, of piety and hate, derived from that war, Will Campbell compares to Old Testament Judaism. And he finds a resemblance to the 137th Psalm (“If I forget you, O Jerusalem”) in a “spirited” Klan song like:

And he explains the resemblance to “If I forget you, O Jerusalem” by means of this paraphrase or transposition: “If I forget you, O Atlanta,
Vicksburg, Oxford, Donelson, remember, O Lord, against the Yankees the night they drove old Dixie down! When Sherman said, ‘Raze it, raze it, burn it down to the ground!’ Happy shall he be who takes your little Yankee babies and slams them against Stone Mountain.”

Will Campbell didn’t talk about the Klan when we met. He gave me a copy of an article he had written, “The World of the Redneck,” which outlined his views and gave the text and analysis of the Klan song. He didn’t refer me to his book,
Brother to a Dragonfly;
that I turned to on my own. We talked of religion and the Southern Baptist convention; and the “liberal wilderness” he said he had walked in for many years. We talked, above all, of the immense Southern past, which—though born in 1924—he carried in himself, and which his setting—a log cabin at the back of his house on his farm—appeared to pay tribute to.