Devil Sent the Rain (11 page)

Elegy for Carl Perkins

C
arl Perkins died this past January, and most of the obituaries have already been written. All mentioned his paternal role in the history of rockabilly music, his authorship of its anthem, “Blue Suede Shoes,” and the fact that his career never quite followed the same upward trajectory as the careers of Elvis, Jerry Lee, and the rest.

Almost all of the obituaries also acknowledged that Perkins had managed to escape, or at least outrun, many of the ravaging effects of what is usually called success in America. By the time he died—of a series of strokes, at age sixty-six—he had beaten alcoholism, throat cancer, and the odds against a public figure growing up and having a meaningful life in this culture.

The following is offered as an addendum to the official eulogies. I spent some time with Perkins in the fall of 1996, when he was visiting New Orleans to film a video. We visited for a while on a bright Sunday morning in a private French Quarter home with a lovely living room, overstuffed pastel sofas, curtains; outside French doors the sun shone in a lush courtyard, a far cry from the rough Tennessee farmland Perkins had grown up sharecropping. When I arrived, Perkins's blue Stratocaster was out, the amplifier on; he and his hosts had been relaxing singing gospel songs. It was clear immediately that he was primarily a country boy; he liked to sit around and tell stories, and sing. He was a man whose first band was made up of his brothers, and whose last was largely made up of his sons. He kept repeating how much he liked New Orleans. The previous night he had played with a local band at the Mermaid Lounge, and he had been greeted by a cadre of rockabilly freaks dressed in retro style. He got a kick out of the way they used period slang when they talked to him; there was one blond girl he couldn't get over, who kept telling him how “cool” he was. His manner was unfailingly generous and self-effacing.

Conversation was interspersed with Perkins's guitar playing, which was crackling, relaxed, and exuberant; he played a quasi–Merle Travis version of “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise,” sang the new tune “Quarter Horse” from his recent CD, and sang a few gospel numbers as well. Then at one point something remarkable happened: Perkins wrote a song on the spot.

Among the first generation of rock and rollers, only Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly stand with Perkins as songwriters. Little Richard wasn't a songwriter, nor was Jerry Lee Lewis, nor Elvis. Perkins's lyrics at their best are wry, sharp, and funny; songs like “Dixie Fried,” “Pointed Toed Shoes” (“Everything's all-reet cause I got 'em on my feet”), “Put Your Cat Clothes On,” “Movie Magg,” and a number of others are rock-and-roll classics.

At one point, Perkins was fooling around with a little whiplash lick in the key of G that he played on the high strings with his index and middle fingers, set against a driving rhythm on the low strings that he played with his thumb. After he played it once through a jumping blues chorus, I asked what it was and he laughed and said, “I don't know what that's called . . . I just been foolin' with that little old lick, hopin' a song'll jump out that I can use it on.” He played it again, and said, “It's just kickin' the string back a little . . .” Then, out of nowhere, over that little rockabilly riff he started singing:

. . . and after a few more guitar licks the songs broke up in laughter. When it was over I asked if that was something he ever played before.

“Naw,” he said, shaking his head once and lighting a cigarette, and laughing. “Just popped out.”

Over the course of a few hours we talked about all kinds of things. Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Elvis (whom he worshipped), Bob Dylan (whom he loved). He spoke frankly about his family, his faith in God, and his struggle with alcoholism (“I
had
to drink. That's where I got the courage to get in front of those drunks in those honky-tonks. If I hadn't been drinking with them I'd-a got scared and run home”).

At the end of our visit, I asked a question that had come to me in an odd moment. Maybe because he was so strongly identified with one tune, “Blue Suede Shoes,” it had occurred to me that the two and a half minutes he spent recording it on that particular day in 1955 became thousands of hours of other people's lives. I started by assuming that “Blue Suede Shoes” had sold a million copies. (It had sold more.) Say you could play the record twenty-five times in an hour. That means you could play it a hundred times in four hours, and in forty hours you could play it a thousand times. So it would take 40,000 hours (238 weeks, or over four and a half years) for everybody who bought the first million records to play the song only once. And we know that people played it a lot more than that and that it sold more than that. So two and a half minutes of his life had become years and years of other people's lives. Had he ever thought about that?

He looked at me for a long moment. “No,” he said, slowly. His face slid into a thoughtful frown. “I . . . I never have. That's awesome. It really is. I . . . I . . . I had never thought of that.” He looked past me, suddenly subdued, thinking about it. “I started getting these awards from BMI [a company that licenses music for radio play] when it passed a million plays. I'm past two million airplays for ‘Blue Suede Shoes.' They have ways of keeping up with this. That's not counting what you're saying—that the kids who buy it, and the people who listen . . . No, that is . . . It's very weird. I never thought of that. I've wasted a lot of people's time.”

As I watched his face I began to realize that he was genuinely disturbed by what I had said.

“They could have . . . built a
city
in the time they spent listening to that tune,” he went on. “I don't know how I feel about that. I feel weird. It's an awesome thought. Maybe on my tomb rock they'll carve the words ‘I'm sorry for taking up so much of your time . . .' ”

This was too much; I hadn't wanted to ruin his sense of what he had done with his life. I explained that I had only wanted to ask him a question I had thought of in other forms, at other times, a mystery close to the heart of any profound human action, a kind of grace, how one moment can expand, like the parable of the loaves and fishes . . . I floundered, trying to articulate what I meant. Perkins listened, seemed to brighten a little, and eventually stopped me.

“I . . . I follow you,” he said. “I'm in that same place that you are. You stirred up something I'll think about the rest of my life. Thank you for working that out. I mean, it is an awesome thing, to think, only two and a half minutes of my life, but look what it spread into, you know. I don't know . . . I never really thought of it that way.” His eyes focused on me again, and he seemed to return to the room. “And I don't know what I'm going to do with it now that I've got it.” And with that he laughed again, and the dark mood broke, and I breathed a little easier.

Later that afternoon he flew back home to Tennessee and never, to my knowledge, visited New Orleans again. I thought many times about our conversation. How many performers would have seen the question I'd asked as anything other than a cause for celebration? Somehow Carl Perkins had managed to stay real enough to think seriously about the value of his life and his actions.

The CD never did engender a Carl Perkins renaissance. I have a feeling that was okay with him. He'd been through it all, and he had achieved something more important than megastardom. I always hoped I'd see him again; he was the kind of person who made you feel that way, as if you had made a friend. And if you expand that feeling through all the people who listened to and enjoyed his music, maybe you have something like immortality.

From the
Oxford American,
1998

Trust the Song

W
e have entered an era of mass confusion between people's ability to perform public tasks for which they are, presumably, trained, and their personal lives, which in healthier times are considered nobody's business. Former vice president Dan Quayle has even announced that marital fidelity will be “the issue” in the next presidential race. Sure—the heck with foreign policy, education, the economy, public works . . .

“Trust the song, not the singer” is age-old wisdom. I'm glad that the singers and musicians, male and female, whose work I have loved over the years did not have to display certificates of marital fidelity in order to qualify as performers. Likewise the fiction writers. No one asked them to be moral exemplars in their personal lives. It was their work that was important.

Lately the agenda of aesthetic discussion, along with politics, seems to have been lifted from an afternoon talk show. One example from recent memory: Philip Roth's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel
American Pastoral
, which I read and admired. At least three quarters of the people to whom I mentioned the book didn't really care what was between the covers of
American Pastoral
, but wanted to know if I had read Claire Bloom's memoir of her apparently troubled marriage to Roth.

To some people, an artist's work is only an avenue by which to get to the real point, which is the artist her/himself. A kind of sacrificial element comes into play, a desire to consume the body and drink the blood. “Who are you,
really
?” is the question. But most creative people are trying to escape from the cage of “who they are.” It is a mistake to think that most artists and creative people are trying to express the self; they are more likely to be trying to escape the day-to-day self, complete it, even find its opposite.

These thoughts are occasioned by the career of the singer and songwriter Gillian Welch since her brilliant 1996 debut CD
Revival
, and perhaps even more so since her second recording,
Hell Among the Yearlings
, was released last year. Both discs consist of original material, strongly inflected by different kinds of traditional music, as well as some rockabilly, folk, and so on. Easily one of the most talented and distinctive singers and songwriters to come down the pike in a long, long while, she and her partner and cowriter, the excellent guitarist and harmony singer David Rawlings, have gained a wide and appreciative following for themselves.

Along with that following, though, like hyenas following a wagon train, has come a chorus of scattered carping voices, issuing from places like the
Los Angeles Times
and
Rolling Stone
, questioning Welch's right to use themes and musical elements from traditional music in her songs. The problem, for them, is that Welch grew up in Los Angeles, to music-business parents. Maybe the writers looked at her picture, thought she was a mountain girl, and then were embarrassed when they realized they'd been fooled. Who knows.

What we can know is that the voices questioning Welch's right to do what she does are putting the emphasis in exactly the wrong place. They are the same type of people who felt betrayed thirty-five years ago when it turned out that Bob Dylan was a Jewish kid from Minnesota instead of Billy the Kid's younger brother. They are operating out of an inquisitional mode that is anathema to anybody who actually derives pleasure from the arts. It is a particularly creepy form of puritanism.

Here's the thing: First of all, Gillian Welch is not playing, or claiming to play, “traditional music,” strictly speaking, any more than Bob Dylan was. She knows the repertoire and some of the techniques, but there are all kinds of elements in her music that are hardly orthodox old-time elements, and that are clearly there as part of an intentional effect. As for the often rural, and even rural-gothic—murder, moonshine, failed crops—subject matter of her songs . . . well, what about it? “Caleb Meyer,” the song all the reviewers mentioned from
Hell Among the Yearlings
, is about a foiled rape attempt somewhere in the vicinity of “them hollering pines.” It's a good song, and I don't believe one needs to have been the victim of a rape attempt or live near the hollering pines to have written it, or to appreciate it. If there's a better devotional song than “By the Mark,” from
Revival
, I don't know what it is. It makes no difference to me whether Gillian Welch believes in Jesus or not; the song carries its own weight. Besides, it is about a kind of truth in life that one can recognize as truth whether or not one believes in Jesus in the first place. But both discs are full of terrific songs (and singing)—“Good Til Now” (with its faint echoes of Blind Boy Fuller's “Weeping Willow”), “Acony Bell,” “My Morphine,” “Winter's Come and Gone,” “Barroom Girls,” “Only One and Only” . . . To make an issue of who is behind the lyrics and the voice moves the discussion into a completely different arena.

It seems to me that it takes an extreme poverty of imagination to propose, implicitly or explicitly, that people can write only about their personal experience (or, worse, about the experiences peculiar to their ethnic/gender/regional/national group). It takes poverty of imagination, and hostility to the idea of the free human spirit. Any hope one might have left for a society like ours depends on the constant assertion of the possibility of that kind of empathy. Of course, as an artist, the further from your personal experience you try to reach, the more effort, intuition, honesty, humility, and/or luck it takes. The further you reach, the easier it is to do something that just doesn't work, doesn't ring true. But the question is
whether it works
, whether it rings true,
not
whether you have an inherited visa to enter that territory.

A few years ago, while I was attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Saul Bellow came to talk to us for a few days. In addition to a reading, he conducted a workshop and a question-and-answer session. During the Q&A one student asked him about “stealing” from other writers—borrowing techniques, structural ideas, entering other cultural milieus. Bellow smiled wanly and said, “You are entitled to steal anything you are strong enough to carry out.”

Amen.

From the
Oxford American