Cigar Box Banjo (27 page)

Part of Dan’s transformation involved another Don Mills kid, Matt McCauley. Matt was a little younger than me, more of a friend to my brother Joel. Matt’s father, Bill, was a musician and a composer, very successful, and Matthew and his brother Tim followed in Bill’s footsteps. Matt composed the string parts for Danny’s early songs—this is the impression I got—and once they had hooked up with Fred Mollin, whose genius is perhaps of a more maverick nature, there was no stopping them. Matthew and my lovely ex-wife, Dorothy, are also friends, which has to do with a connection to Hamilton, Ontario.

Anyway,
the upshot was that Matt McCauley came to visit me at my home. It was a lovely visit, but I had to call it a little short, as I was scheduled to get an X-ray or something at the hospital. Matt kindly offered to give me a lift over there, and as we drove I played him a rough mix of some of the songs I had been working on. Matt listened for a bit, then made me a most amazing offer. “Here’s what I’d like to do, Paul,” he said. “I’d like you to pick three or four of these songs. I’ll write string charts for them, and then we’ll record some players down in Nashville. I’ll book the studio, I’ll hire the musicians . . .”

It reminded me of the joke wherein a comely woman steps onto an elevator with Donald Trump, declares herself a big fan, and offers to give him a blow job. “What’s in it for
me?
” demands Donald.

Bad jokes aside, it was in such a manner that, late last summer, Dan Hill, my brother Joel, and I went to visit the home of country and western music.

WHILE ON the Porkbelly Futures Health Tour, we had passed the Hank Snow Country Music Centre, housed in an abandoned train station near Liverpool, Nova Scotia. As a young boy, when the trains were still running, Hank spent many hours in the station, hiding from an ugly family situation. His parents divorced when Hank was eight—a thing little heard of in maritime Canada, 1922—and he was sent to live with his grandmother, whose lonely house stood on the outskirts of town. Snow’s mother moved to Liverpool proper, where she married a man with dark moods and cruel ways. Snow would go to visit his mother, although he was forbidden to do so by his grandmother, and she often beat him on that account. Driven off by his stepfather, he’d be reluctant to return to his gran’s, so he’d hide in the train station, caught halfway between two little hells.

So desperate was his situation that Hank put out to sea when he was only twelve years old. One good thing his mother had done was teach the lad how to play guitar, and he took his six-dollar department store instrument (a T. Eaton Special) on board with him. The fishermen on the schooners sometimes received commercial radio signals, and that is how Hank first heard Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman. The cabin boy was soon performing “Train Whistle Blues” and “Mother, the Queen of my Heart” for the delighted crew.

A couple of hundred miles up the Nova Scotia coast is Port Hilford, the birthplace, in 1904, of Wilf Carter. When Carter was a boy, a Swiss yodeller passed through town on tour, inspiring little Wilf to become a singer. He left the Maritimes as a young man, travelling to Alberta to work as a lumberjack. He began to entertain out there, largely for the tourists passing through the Rockies. By that time, Carter too had been greatly influenced by Jimmie Rodgers.

Rodgers himself was born in 1897 in Meridian, Mississippi, about twenty miles from the Alabama border. His mother died when he was very small, and Jimmie was sent to live with relatives, sometimes returning to his father’s house. His father worked as a brakeman for the railroad. It is the responsibility of the brakeman, as you might infer, to set the brakes; in the early 1900s, the job involved walking along the top of the train while it was in motion, turning a wheel on each individual car. Once he’d grown, Jimmie Rodgers joined his father atop the boxcars. He learned to sing and to strum the guitar by watching his co-workers, who were mostly black and tended to play the blues.

Jimmie caught the performing bug early. He had his own notions of show biz, a combination of minstrelsy and revivalism. Once he took all the sheets from his father’s house to fashion a makeshift tent. After his father retrieved him, and whupped his ass for good measure, Jimmie astonished the elder Rodgers by producing enough money to buy new sheets, money he’d earned singing the blues. A few years later, his itinerant career was successful enough that he’d acquired a real tent—but it was lost to a hurricane, and Jimmie went back to working on the trains. He suffered a hemorrhage in his lung and, in the wake of that, contracted tuberculosis. Unfit even to work the railroads, Jimmie chose music as his full-time pursuit, knowing very well he would never earn anything like full-time money from it. Rodgers was a hard-luck guy. That lent his eyes a slightly haunted look, which contrasted with the cocky grin he perpetually wore. This combination of qualities intrigued Ralph Peer, the songcatcher.

In naming Peer a songcatcher, I am differentiating him from someone like Alan Lomax, who was a musicologist. The “catcher” part of the appellation points to the slightly esurient nature of Peer’s questing. He was a talent scout, a record producer, mostly in the employ of Columbia and Okeh Records. As such, he recorded what is generally regarded as the first country and western record, “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” by Fiddlin’ John Carson. In 1927 Peer came to Bristol, Virginia, to hold auditions. He discovered two acts of great significance. One was the Carter Family, who sang a lot of spirituals,
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and the other was Jimmie Rodgers.

In a somewhat clumsy way, grappling with rhythm, tuberculosis strangling his range down to little more than an octave, Jimmie Rodgers combined black music (the blues) with white (you can’t get much whiter than yodelling). Folklore has it that his yodelling was meant to imitate train whistles, but Rodgers often explained it as curlicues he could make with his throat. He claimed to have come upon a show of Swiss Tyroleans and been impressed enough to incorporate the technique into his own act. He used yodelling where a black musician might use a guitar or a harmonica fill. Rodgers also interjected spoken comments. “Good God,” he might mutter. In this post–James Brown era, it may appear to us that a white person could never utter “Good God” effectively, but I’m here to assert that Jimmie Rodgers could. He could toss out a “Good God” that contained both despair and hopefulness. Rodgers is often spoken of as the first man to appropriate black music for his own gain. His “Blue Yodel #i”— which we also know as “T for Texas, T for Tennessee”—was one of the first records to sell millions. But whatever spiritual authenticity we might deem necessary to sing the blues, Jim-mie Rodgers had it.

Furthermore, Rodgers seems to have conducted himself with a colour-blindness remarkable for the times. Most famously, he recorded with Louis Armstrong in 1930, “Blue Yodel No. 9 (Standing on the Corner),” with Armstrong’s wife, Lillian, on piano. Even before that historic event, Rodgers had cut a side with a black jazz band in Dallas. And neither is Rodgers’s influence on black musicians to be ignored. Granted, the best-known of his disciples was white country and western star Ernest Tubb, who more or less dedicated his life to following in Rodgers’s footsteps. But there was also Chester Arthur Burnett, a young black kid from White Station, Mississippi. Jimmie Rodgers was Burnett’s idol, too, although Chester was undone by a specific inability. “I couldn’t do no yodellin’,” he recalled later in life, “so I turned to howlin’. And it’s done me just fine.” Chester Burnett, of course, is the man we know today as Howlin’ Wolf.

One of the things that defines country and western music is its instrumentation, which reflects a surprising diversity of influences. The banjo is actually African in origin. The pedal steel is a cousin to the dobro, which was invented and then appropriated by what some people see as opposing camps,
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deep blues and bluegrass. Both the blues and country and western love the slide, which allows notes to slip into rightness or to go hurtfully flat—which is to say, allows them to sound human. Chord changes are quick but a little bit eerie. Eerie and plaintive.

I know, I know, I’ve hit upon exactly what you dislike about country and western music, and I am the first to admit that things can go very wrong.

It’s true that the music seems to claim more than its fair share of pikers, people with little talent and overly elaborate wardrobes. Sometimes the music makes such a virtue of its honesty that it allows room for rudimentary musical skills and—quite often, in my estimation—vocalizations that lack fidelity to pitch. Johnny Cash, for example, could not really sing. He could intone and bellow and execute a passable recitative, but he couldn’t sing. I remember watching
The Merv Griffin Show
many years ago. Jazz drummer and noted dick-wad Buddy Rich was complaining about the state of popular music, and he selected Mr. Cash for special abuse. Griffin, himself a singer, rushed to Johnny’s defence, claiming that Cash sang straight from the heart. “Well,” allowed Rich, “he oughtta put the microphone down there, then, because what’s coming out of his mouth is crap.”

I’ve been talking classic C&W, but these days what they call “New Country” is all the rage. My teenaged daughter, Flannery, likes New Country, and if the two of us are driving in the car, she will argue that one of the myriad of stations proffering New Country should satisfy us both. She is not entirely mistaken in this. Every fourth or fifth song might prove enjoyable, and given the heavy rotation of the tracks on these stations, some songs become favourites through attrition. After the thousandth time one has heard “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy),” one finds oneself nodding in time, mumbling the words through blubbery lips like a broken old prizefighter. But there are also songs I love. Whenever I hear “Probably Wouldn’t Be This Way” on the car radio—recorded by LeAnn Rimes, composed by John Kennedy and Tammi Kidd—I feel the need to pull over so that I can blubber unabashedly.
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This raises another issue about both New Country and the older stuff: it can be emotionally overwrought, and in the wrong hands it is manipulative and maudlin. Listening to an hour or two of New Country, you can start to feel as if you are attending some twelve-step program in which the participants, unhinged from their crutch of dependency, carom wildly from emotion to emotion. “I am a hard-drinking, hard-fighting sumbitch,” they proclaim, and not just the men, as Gretchen Wilson fans will know. “I hold certain principles dear, archaic and simple-minded ones, and I do not need to defend them, because I hold them with such conviction that if you question them, I will need to stomp you in the head. On the other hand . . .” (And I can imagine tears welling now.) “On the other hand, I am the lowliest person who ever trod the earth, and I am undeserving of the love that has redeemed me. The person who loves me . . .” (it could be parent, partner, or child) “. . . loves me with a love that is pure and unsullied.”

One thing that is certain: it’s difficult to get a song played on New Country radio. The gatekeepers seem especially strict. One thing they are patently
not
doing is allowing the previous (and revered) guests to party at the musical mansion. You are not likely to hear Mr. Cash or Dolly Parton or George Jones on these stations. Still, the programmers are deeply suspicious of acts in which people simply don Stetsons and demand a New Country listenership. And a few of the songs are really great songs. This is the market that Dan Hill and his co-writers are aiming for, and every so often they will hit a bull’s eye.

THE TRIP I made to Nashville was my version of a pilgrimage to Mecca, and my spiritual needs were taken care of in short order. On our first free afternoon, Dan and Joel and I went down to the Country Music Hall of Fame. There we found on display a glass cloche filled with little pieces of carved wood that formed perches, tables, musical instruments. Stuffed squirrels were arranged around these items so to suggest a quartet: guitar, violin, stand-up, and pedal steel. These squirrels had been killed by Hank Williams.

I don’t propose to make fun of this enterprise. To me, the squirrel band seems somehow indicative of Hank’s artistry. His songs possess a demographic breadth that is startling, and they have been covered by everyone from Bob Dylan to Perry Como. Here’s the thing: I think Hank took his best shot at the human heart, and it’s kind of neat that just to the side of misery and gap-toothed exultation (I’m referring specifically to the songs “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Jambalaya”) there is a quartet of dead squirrels.

Death, as you may know, pursued Mr. Williams doggedly. Death was like a truant officer constantly pissed off at this one little kid. You have likely heard the story of Hank’s passing, how when his chauffeur pulled the Cadillac into a parking lot somewhere between Knoxville, Tennessee, and Canton, Ohio, on their way to a gig scheduled for New Year’s Day, Williams was dead, filled with morphine and painkillers and a lot of booze. It’s not as if Hank didn’t take a hand in his own passing. Still, when Williams spoke, as he often did, of being pursued by the pale horse and his rider, you had to grant him a little credibility. Hank Williams was just twenty-nine when he died. He had one of those impossibly brief lifespans, like Percy Bysshe Shelley or Franz Schubert.

In my sunnier moods, I remark to myself that I’ve already managed to nearly double up on those brief existences. (Other times, of course, I am less sanguine. Other times, I glare at elderly people, especially if I catch them drinking, smoking, or eating the wrong foods.) But down in Nashville, Tennessee, it occurred to me that maybe I should do something about making my peace with Forever.

I was also making my peace, let me add, with the here and now. My brother and I were more into food than Danny was, and we spent time exploring some famous local eateries. We engaged a taxi driver to take us to the Loveless Café, which lies some miles southwest of the city proper. Me and Joel
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and the driver broke fast on country ham, red-eye gravy, and biscuits. Yummy.