Merle Haggard: I Take a Lot of Pride in What I Am

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Merle Haggard was probably the greatest singer-songwriter I’ve ever seen. The only artist I can think to compare him to is Sam Cooke, who like Merle possessed the gift for writing songs that were at once both deeply personal and universally applicable to the human condition. Merle’s were a lot more mournful, it’s true (think “If We Make It Through December,” “Things Aren’t Funny Any

More”, “I Can’t Be Myself When I’m With You” – not to mention “Mama’s Hungry Eyes”) – but they were no less expressive of the kind of unnameable yearning that none of us can escape, and no less eloquent in their empathy for people from all walks of life, the ability to bring to life circumstances and events that only in their emotional impact (but totally in their emotional impact) resemble the singer’s own.

Like Sam Cooke, too, he possessed a voice unmatched in its expressiveness, its seemingly effortless conveyance of nuance not only in his own music but in his brilliant interpretations of others, particularly two of his greatest heroes, Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills. His impeccable musicianship, the extraordinary band that he assembled and added to over the years (what else could they be called but the Strangers) ensured that he was able to present his music the only way he could conceive of it, just as he heard it in his head. When I first met him in 1978, he told me he was  about to publish a book of poems called A Poet of the Common Man (don’t look for it, it never came out – but I’ll bet it would have been great), along with two novels he was working on, one of which  he said would be a comedy-mystery. He was a man of limitless imagination, someone who found order in his art, and yet at the same time he seemed not only to thrive on, but to create, chaos all around him. (“You know, I’m a strange kind of person,” he told me, “the more that’s going on, the more life I’m able to be involved with and learn about, the more it seems to replenish my well of ideas.”)

I guess that would be one way of looking at it – but Merle was a man beset by demons that he couldn’t always control, publicly or privately. I remember one time seeing him play for an auditorium full of people who kept cheering him wildly, even as they could barely hear his voice coming out of the PA system. Any number of technical fixes were proposed, both from the audience and onstage, but it soon became evident that Merle simply didn’t feel like performing that night (this was not the only night I saw this happen), as he stood at a disdainful distance from the mike and the soundman kept raising the the sound level until the feedback became almost painful. A couple of times he would move in a little closer and say, “Is that any better?”  as the crowd yelled enthusiastic encouragement – but then he just stepped away again.

You got the feeling that he was mocking both the audience and himself, as he responded to a request for “Okie From Muskogee,” perhaps his most famous song, a call for a return to a mythic past in which Merle himself could never have lived (it depicted a land where no marijuana was smoked, “and the kids all respect the college dean”), whose origins as a goof on middle-American political correctness, would immediately become apparent to anyone who ever set foot on Merle’s bus. It didn’t matter: the audience continued to cheer lustily, and Merle continue to look thoroughly disgusted with himself, like a man trapped in a world he had never meant to make. Just for the record: Merle canceled the rest of the tour the next night.

But then there were the nights on which his face was wreathed in smiles, when he was carried away by the music and would spend as much time encouraging his fellow musicians to surpass themselves as he did claiming the spotlight for himself – in fact, the spotlight never entered into it at all. That was what you heard on the best of his songs, the most inspired of his recordings, where even Merle’s black moods were transmuted into a tender regard for all the multifarious sources of his inspiration, all the diverse people and places his imagination was able to take him to. There – in the songs – he seemed able to set aside all of the insecurity, all of the anger, all of the looming fears and resentments, and place them at the service of his art.

He liked to talk about the songwriting sometimes, about the role that art played in his life (check out the enhanced eBook edition of Lost Highway for an insightful meditation on the range and ambition of his writing). He always made the distinction between formulaic songs like “Swinging Doors” and songs that created their own reality, like “Footlights,” “Leonard,” “Shelly’s Winter Love”). He would always sing the songs the people called for – he owed it to his audience, he said – but the others he sang for himself.

Things I learned in a hobo jungle
Were things they never taught me in a classroom,
Like where to find a handout
While thumbin’ through Chicago in the afternoon.
Hey, I’m not braggin’ or complainin’,
Just talkin’ to myself man to man.
This ole’ mental fat I’m chewin’ didn’t take a lot of doin’.
But I take a lot of pride in what I am….
I never been nobody’s idol
But at least I got a title
And I take a lot of pride in what I am.

He did. And there is no one who deserved to more. But remember (sometimes it’s hard): that’s not Merle who grew up in the hobo jungle, that’s Merle casting his poetic eye on the world and, at his best, always finding a place in it for himself.

The last time I saw Merle in concert, he was playing the Ryman with his then-19-year-old son Ben, who had taken over as lead guitarist for the Strangers a couple of years earlier. Ben proved to be a virtuoso performer, incorporating all the outstanding licks from all the outstanding lead guitarists, from Roy Nichols and James Burton to Redd Volkaert, Grady Martin, and then some, as Merle’s face reflected undisguised pride. But that, of course was not the point – at least not the whole point. This was one of the few shows that I ever saw, maybe the only one, where Merle confined himself to electric guitar pretty much exclusively. (Merle had learned to play fiddle in his thirties to be better able to interpret Bob Wills’ music.) But not just electric guitar – he got into a guitar duel with Ben which I’m sure he would have been perfectly willing to concede he could never win, as they traded stinging licks, and Merle was as engaged in every song as I’ve ever seen him. “A lot of people may not realize it,” says his ex-manager Tex Whitson, “but Merle would have been happy just playing guitar.” And now, in his own way, he was realizing that ambition.

If you want to catch a glimpse of Merle as he was that day, check out the link to the panel he did at the Country Music Hall of Fame with longtime Strangers Norm Hamlet and Don Markham earlier that afternoon. He had not been billed on the panel, in fact he didn’t commit to it till the last moment when he showed up unannounced, taking the place of Fuzzy Owen, his oldest associate, and looking like someone who had just wandered in off Lower Broad. Here you’ll see Merle as he rarely presented himself in public: relaxed, engaged, emotional, and funny, with a warmth and graciousness that precludes nostalgia but celebrates instead an unconditional embrace of a shared past. At one point, talking about his ex-wife and lifetime partner Bonnie Owens, he comes close to tears, but what is most striking is the way in which, without ever surrendering that keen-eyed gaze, his face continues to be bathed in smiles. As Merle himself might have put it, quoting from the lyrics of one of his more upbeat songs, “I can’t say we’ve had a good morning, but it’s been a great afternoon.”

Waylon, Willie and the Boys

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http://youtu.be/Zt-b7B3gK7I

I’m giving a talk – well, it’s a conversation, really – on “How Waylon Jennings Changed My World” at the Country Music Hall of Fame on January 25.

This video shows some of the reasons why.

One of a series of five segments from a 1984 TV special called “The Door Is Always Open,” it exhibits all of the qualities of raffish good humor, self-deprecating charm, soulful expression, and plain-spoken truth that first drew me to country music – and it is curated by Waylon, who provided me with a personal introduction a decade earlier. It’s all in tribute to Sue Brewer, den mother to several generations of Nashville singer/songwriters, who managed George Jones’ club, Possum Holler,  but whose home served as both creative exchange and refuge for every one of the performers featured here, up until her death in 1981.

Waylon proves to be the most sardonic (make that “most genuine”) of genial hosts, introducing a beardless and thoroughly engaging Willie Nelson (“We used to go by Sue Brewer’s house,” Waylon says, “and listen to Willie smile”) who opens with a vibrant “I Gotta Get Drunk,” then seconds just about everyone else on guitar, including Faron Young on “Hello Walls,” Willie’s first #1 country songwriting hit. In addition, you get Roger Miller’s irrepressible energy, contagious good humor, and inimitable sound effects (Roger Miller is one of the few artists who could be accurately described as having arrived, purposefully, from another planet), all accompanied by the appreciative laughter and encouragement of every country music legend in the room.

This is what I encountered when I first met Waylon Jennings in 1974 – well, not so much the irrepressible humor but the individualism, the embrace of life (the embrace of the future), the appreciation of eccentricity, the denial of category that has marked every great American artist from August Wilson to Merle Haggard, from Howlin’ Wolf to Mark Twain. It was the beginning of the so-called “Outlaw Movement” – but that wasn’t what drew me to Waylon or the music. It was, rather, his existential embrace of the moment so perfectly exemplified in his collection of Billy Joe Shaver songs, Honky Tonk Heroes. It was that same celebration of everyday reality, without any need  for adornment or prettification, that I had first found in the blues.

I remember seeing Willie Nelson at Fan Fair around this same time, just after Red Headed Stranger came out (not long after his other great “concept album,” Phases and Stages) and being just as mesmerized. Neither Waylon nor Willie was selling anything but the truth. “Country music is just as serious as any other kind of music,” Waylon told me then, speaking of a proposed national television appearance. “They wanted me to do ‘We Had It All’ sitting on a horse. I couldn’t do that shit. I told them to fuck themselves. To them [country music] ain’t nothing but a goddamn joke.”

This was the new world I sought entry to. It seemed like everything was possible. (“I think right now that the country’s in the best shape for the future that it’s ever been,” said Waylon, “because the kids are thinking and worrying about things that never even occurred to me when I was a kid.”) If you want a quick run-down on some of that raw, undiluted feeling, check out this video series. You’ll get everything from Hank Williams Jr.’s witty take-off on his own renunciation of respectability, “All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down” to the painful beauty of Mickey Newbury’s “Sweet Memory” to Webb Pierce’s shattering “There Stands the Glass,” branded by his peers as “The National Anthem.”

Traditional country, folk country, outlaw country, classic compositions by Harlan Howard (“Busted”) and Kris Kristofferson (“Sunday Morning Coming Down”) – just set aside any preconceptions, these are performances and performers that defy categorization or idealization. They are simply proudly, defiantly, and irremediably themselves. Just like they should be.

Saturday, January 25, 2014 : 1:30pm

Special Program: Peter Guralnick in Conversation with Robert Gordon

Museum admission or Museum membership required for program admittance. Due to limited seating, a program pass is required for your complimentary seat. Passes will be available for pick-up at the Museum two hours prior to the start of the program, on a first-come, first-served basis. Your pass does not guarantee you a seat after the program begins.

MEMBERS ONLY:Call 615.416.2050 or email Reservations@CountryMusicHallofFame.org to reserve your program pass in advance. Reservations will be accepted until 48 hours before the program, or until the program is at capacity. Your pass does not guarantee you a seat after the program begins.

Jack Clement: “When I Dream”

I’m not going to even write about this.

This is the start of Jack’s inspired – even more to the point, inspiring – set at the “Cowboy Jack Clement Tribute Concert” on January 30.

I wrote about it, and included my introductory remarks, in my February 4 post – so just scroll down the website if you want to read more about it. And as a surprising (and truly heartening) update to that post: Jack has just been named as one of the three 2013 inductees in the County Music Hall of Fame.

But see if you don’t find this as heartbreaking as Eddy Arnold did when he heard Jack perform the song in his residency at the Country Music Hall of Fame a few years ago. Eddy Arnold was in tears – and I don’t think there was anyone at the Tribute Concert who was any less moved.

Jack has often been depicted as a Shakespearean clown – maybe even a tragic clown. But here he simply reveals himself as an artist who has never been afraid to bare his soul. Sometimes. At his own discretion.

Wait for the concert film for the full stereoscopic version of Jack’s haunting set (not to mention all the other genuinely moving performances), but for now this will just have to do. And it does.

Sam Phillips Talking (Lost Highway Video Companion: Part 5)

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This is the fifth in our five-part series. I thought it would be really fun – and it was. As promised, we’re going to combine them all in one giant Lost Highway video playlist.
Next: Feel Like Going Home!

 

Epilogue

SAM PHILLIPS TALKING

 I’ve got the same problem here as in the last chapter – only more so. So I’m just going to throw together a serendipitously arbitrary (and, suited to its source, unquestionably oddball) selection to show off a little bit of the range of talent that Sam Phillips discovered and produced, from Howlin’ Wolf to – well, just follow the bouncing ball. But remember: this is the merest sampling. We’ll do a really comprehensive selection when the Sam biography comes out. (And just to anticipate another question, I’m working on the final draft now – hoping to finish by the end of the year.)

Howlin’ Wolf: “Evil”

You knew I couldn’t resist.         

Sam Phillips’ favorite artist, along with Charlie Rich. They were the two, he always said, who had the greatest reservoir of talent (though he would give nobody the edge over Elvis in the way of charisma or Jerry Lee in terms of sheer performing genius). But each of them, he said, possessed a depth – of knowledge and emotion – that couldn’t be measured. The Wolf, Sam said, volunteered scarcely anything when they first met – he would have been very easy to underestimate. And yet, Sam felt, he possessed “a certain element of confidence, he knew he had something to say,”and as they talked, Sam could sense that as much as he might be reading the Wolf, Wolf was reading him, too.“He was highly, highly intelligent,” Sam said, “in many ways the sweetest man you’ll ever know, and the strangest man in many ways, too.”

Harmonica Frank: Untitled (by me), “Ditchin’ Man Blues,” “Shake a Little Shimmy”

Sam recorded Harmonica Frank at almost exactly the same time as Howlin’ Wolf, and Frank’s first single came out on Chess, too – though unlike Wolf, Frank would eventually have his own Sun release, which came out on the same day as Elvis’ first record in July 1954. According to some revisionist thinking, history might have been different had it not been for that confluence of events, but Sam Phillips was under no illusions about Frank’s commercial potential. To him Harmonica Frank was not a great artist but a great original. “Frank Floyd was a beautiful hobo. He was short, fat, very abstract – and you looked at him and you really didn’t know what he was thinking, what he was going to say or sing next. He had the greatest mind of his own – I think hobos by nature have to have that – and that fascinated me from the beginning. And then he had some of these old rhymes and tales and stuff that he had embellished, and some of them were so old, God, I guess they were old when my father was a kid.”

If you weren’t doing something different, according to Sam you weren’t doing anything. And Frank was definitely doing something different. Check out the way he holds the harmonica in his mouth, like a chewed-up old cigar, as he sings. Listen to the eccentric tone and phrasing and the cheerful non-sense of the songs – kind of like a demented Woody Guthrie.

Dr Ross: “Dr. Ross Boogie”

This is a clever video collage (you should recognize the MC from the Big Joe Turner clip) of a Dr. (Isiah) Ross recording derived from “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie,” once again from 1951 and once again released on Chess. It should be noted that though Dr. Ross was in fact a one-man band, the guitarist on this selection was his friend Wiley Galatin. And it should be further noted that this song pretty much sums up Sam Phillips’ rhythm impulse and the inexorable forces that were leading him from his earliest recordings of Wolf, Ike Turner, and B.B. King to find the path to rock ‘n’ roll. As Dr. Ross proclaimed in a 1954 Sun single, released in the midst of all the excitement about Elvis: “Gonna boogie for the doctor/Gonna boogie for the nurse/Gonna keep on boogiein’/Till they throw me in the hearse.” Or as Jim Dickinson declared in a mantra that has never ceased to have relevance: “World Boogie Is Coming.”

Carl Perkins: “Matchbox”

This is the song that Carl was cutting with an unknown Jerry Lee Lewis on piano, when Elvis walked in and interrupted his December 1956 session – and then joined in for what would become known as the Million Dollar Quartet (if you include Johnny Cash, who was only there for the picture-taking). Here we have Carl a year or two after his departure from Sun, with a performance nowhere near as cleanly chiseled as the Sun sides, and a persona far removed from his latter-day incarnation (see below). But there’s a spark to this that brings to mind some of the desperate drive that Carl depicts in his terrific biography/autobiography, Go, Cat, Go! (written by and with David McGee), and the song itself (a wonderful example of the shared black and white tradition that goes back at least as far as Blind Lemon Jefferson’s 1927 recording) was by his own assessment, and Sam’s too, about as good as rock ‘n’ roll music could get. You should definitely go back to the original with Jerry Lee firing boogie woogie fusillades at Carl and Carl shooting back with triple-string runs of his own, but this has a crazy concatenating logic of its own. And, of course, you wouldn’t want to miss the hop-skip-and-jump move (delighted or demented?) that signals Carl’s enthusiasm (and that might suggest a little bit of the reason that Carl Perkins could have never have been Elvis – though Elvis could never have been Carl Perkins either), or the great Merle Travis’ (“Sixteen Tons,” “Dark as a Dungeon” – he’s on the far right, playing a very controlled rhythm) appreciation for some of the boogie-woogie fever that his own music has spawned.

Jerry Lee Lewis: “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On”

I know, I know, this is the most obvious choice, right? But it isn’t, exactly – this is Jerry Lee’s second appearance on Steve Allen after his first, two weeks earlier, broke the record wide open. (If you don’t believe me, note the proliferation of chairs, benches, and piano stools flying back and forth across the stage. In his first appearance, only the piano bench came sailing back, after Jerry Lee, presumably to his host’s surprise, kicked it away as he launched into his ecstatic conclusion.) And, you know, it’s kind of like with the earlier Big Joe Turner selection, it’s not just because it’s an iconic moment, it’s because it’s “the best.” By which I don’t mean that it’s The Best – just that you need to see it for its sheer abandon (to use a Sam word), for its irrepressible exuberance and for its embodiment of the Life Force that Sam was seeking in all of his recordings (and probably found the most perfect expression of in Jerry Lee’s music). And once you’ve watched it four or five times, then you need to spend the next two weeks watching nothing but Jerry Lee Lewis videos – any era – including the first.

Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Eric Clapton: “Matchbox”

I think Sam must have really gotten a kick out of this – I’m sure he did. Here we have another Million Dollar Trio, with Johnny Cash not only singing but taking the lead this time. There are lots of great clips of the original Johnny Cash trio from early in his career (I’m sure we’ll get to those eventually, at least with the video companion to the Sam Phillips biography), but what I think is so cool here – and one of the things that Sam admired most about an artist he found almost as original as Howlin’ Wolf in his sound, with the added originality of his songwriting, too – is the direction, the command, and the graciousness that John displays, as he did on every one of his television shows. Also the freedom. Starting with his duetting with Bob Dylan, his special guest on the very first Johnny Cash Show. It’s hard to imagine something like this happening today (though I don’t know, maybe it does – and don’t forget Tom Jones’ brave musical adventures with all of his guests, from Jackie Wilson to Jerry Lee). Carl is at his gentlemanly best, Eric Clapton (on the show with Derek and the Dominos) is properly deferential but musically unabashed. And Johnny Cash’s hums and shouts of encouragement keep up everybody’s spirits through yet another spontaneous iteration (you’ve got to check out Jerry Lee’s early version on Sun as well) of Carl’s very spirited, very Sister Rosetta Tharpe-influenced classic blues.

 Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

The Blues Roll On: Lost Highway-- A Video Companion (Vol.4)

Part Four: The Blues Roll On

THE HOWLIN’ WOLF

“How Many More Years”

What can I say? The single greatest performance of all time on TV. Well, The Wire could probably give it a pretty good run for the money – and you could always argue it’s a different genre. But where else are you going to find such profundity, humor, intensity, showmanship, ferocity, and flair, all in a single package? “How Many More Years” was Wolf’s very first release, recorded by Sam Phillips in the summer of 1951 and put out by Chess Records in the fall, with “Moanin’ at Midnight” as the B-side. I don’t know that there’s ever been a greater single (don’t let me be accused of understatement here). Sam Phillips always said that of all the artists he ever recorded the Wolf and Charlie Rich were the most profound – they were the ones he would have most liked to have worked with until the day he died. Well, here’s why.

OTIS SPANN: Blues Is a Man’s Best Friend

“Ain’t Nobody’s Business”

Spann was the blues pianist’s blues pianist – not to mention his “brother” Muddy Waters’ stalwart accompanist from early on. No one outside of Big Maceo comes close to offering the same combination of wistfulness, delicacy, and rhythmic drive. The Canadian compere speaks of his “hazy” sound, but I think haunting would be more like it, as Spann gives his dramatic all to an old standard, conveying the leave-me-alone message with sweetness, sincerity, and a kind of indomitable joy (the paradoxical pull of the blues), even at its most dismayingly bloodthirsty moments.

BIG JOE TURNER: Big Joe Rides On

“Shake, Rattle and Roll”

Speaking of joy, I think everything about this video suggests it, from MC Willie Bryant’s hepcat intro to Big Joe’s suave-walking entrance (speaking of which watch Bryant’s more than equally suave exit), to the song itself (which could in many ways be considered the first rock anthem) to its performance, complete with cool finger-snapping, circular hand motions, chanted encouragement to the soloists, improvised lyrics – above all THAT VOICE, which never needed a microphone to get across. Whew, that’s a long sentence. You can have your Django Unchained (not that there’s anything wrong with that) this is all-out, unchained exuberance. When I spoke with Joe, his pianist was the great Lloyd Glenn, who, you may remember, shows up in the earlier T-Bone-B.B. duet, and he took a lively and informed part in our conversation. In fact, I was almost as knocked out by Lloyd as I was by Joe. “Do you understand this man?” Lloyd challenged me. “He’s telling you, in song, his life. That’s the subject. He’s just not going into detail about what’s going on in his life. That’s it.” And it was.

Two footnotes. When I met Ray Charles a couple of years later – well, I should start by saying that Lloyd was the headliner the first time Ray went out on the road, while he was still living in Seattle. Anyway, when I mentioned Lloyd to Ray, he was so excited to hear about him (and to get Lloyd’s phone number) that for a while I thought it might totally derail our conversation. It didn’t – but in the process I got to learn a lot more about Lloyd!

Second footnote. I took Sleepy LaBeef to see Big Joe at Sandy’s in Beverly, I’m not sure if it was at this time or a little later. I don’t think I have to point out that it was Joe’s big-voiced (huge-voiced) stentorian style that provided Sleepy with a model, but Sleepy had never seen him in person before. It was pretty cool.

JUKE JOINT BLUES: Chicago, 1977

You know, I think this collage chapter is best served by a video collage of great performances that will simply induce you to go looking for more.

Jimmy Johnson: “As The Years Go Passing By”

How soulful is this? By one of the most underrated, incisive, and to-the-point blues singers of his generation. Jimmy is Syl Johnson’s (“Take Me to the River,” “Is It Because I’m Black?”) brother (also bass player Mac Thompson’s). Here he is performing a classic number by Fenton Robinson, another underrated, and woefully neglected, great.

Hound Dog Taylor: “Wild About You Baby”

Two versions of the same song, the earlier one showing Hound Dog in his more formal, polite, Elmore-emulating style – but elevated by the presence of Little Walter (in a rare video appearance, just a year or so before his death) on harp. The second is truer – it’s very true – to the completely untrammeled, freeform Hound Dog I encountered at his regular Sunday-afternoon gig at Florence’s in the company of Bruce Iglauer, who was just about to sign Hound Dog to his soon-to-be-born Alligator label.

Magic Sam: “All Of Your Love,” plus “Lookin’ Good” (well, Instrumental Boogie anyway)

I don’t think any of his contemporaries got so close to the bone. I can’t imagine any greater intensity than you get out of the combination of Magic Sam’s wailing, vibrato-laden voice, a borrowed guitar, and the beat! the beat! the beat! – which none of his West Side confreres, including Buddy Guy, could ever quite match. Check out West Side Soul (Delmark DD-615) if you haven’t already. It’s one of the cornerstones of modern Chicago Blues and a tantalizing reminder of just how much more Sam Maghett might have had to contribute if he hadn’t died at the tragically early age of 32.    

Junior Wells and Buddy Guy: Just to Be With You”

http://youtu.be/cbYFn5RkX0U

(this video can’t be embedded, but you can link to youtube above)

Here we are back at Theresa’s on a night like many nights – you never knew exactly what was going to happen or where the improvisational music and lyrics might take you. Here we encounter an improbably but not atypically coutured Junior singing the Muddy Waters hit with all of his usual extravagance and braggadocio – but for all of the affectations, I go back to my original question: how soulful is this? Dig Buddy’s sparely interjected guitar (not to mention Junior’s supremely unaffected harp) – it’s so surprising, it’s the kind of thing that just doesn’t exist any more for – of all things (and, of course, all grimaces aside, facial, vocal, and cinematic)  – its paradoxical sense of musical restraint.

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 5

Lost Highway: A Video Companion (Part 1)

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This seemed like it might really be fun. It was a lot of fun to put together anyway!

Here’s an erratic, eccentric collection of video clips to accompany the book, available at the time of posting anyway, and subject to addition, subtraction, suggestion, and revision – but whichever the case, it should in the end simply lead you to discover – lead me to discover, too – more music.

This is the first of four installments, covering the first section of the book: “Honky Tonk Heroes.” Once we’ve posted all four, we’ll put them together in one giant  Lost Highway video playlist! 

Part 1: Honky Tonk Heroes

ERNEST TUBB: THE TEXAS TROUBADOUR

“Waltz Across Texas" and “Walkin’ The Floor Over You”

Two of Ernest’s most iconic songs, delivered in typical sledgehammer fashion.

It doesn’t hurt that he is joined by a young, energetic Merle Haggard, taking his place as an honorary Troubadour on “Walkin’ the Floor Over You” and clearly inspired (like nearly everyone who met him – or saw or just heard him) by Ernest’s transparent sincerity.

This must have been around the time that I am writing about in the book, when Ernest, old, ill, suffering from emphysema, would still wait around the high school gym that was hosting his latest show until the very last autograph was signed.

HANK SNOW: STILL MOVIN’ ON

“I Don’t Hurt Any More”

Once again the kind of wonderfully straightforward and unembarrassed emotion that seems almost anomalous in our ironic world, delivered in Snow’s distinctive style. (Listen to Elvis’ right-on imitation on The Million Dollar Quartet session.) It comes with the usual bonus of Hank’s beautifully articulated acoustic solo – and dig the cornstalks!

**note: the video that was originally selected has disappeared from YouTube, along with the cornstalks. Above is similar take from a couple of years later


“I’m Movin’ On”

This is it. The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll (more or less, one of many – on the country side). Elvis recorded it on Elvis Country, as a tribute to the star with whom he first went out on tour in early 1955. It appears to have been filmed prior to its even being recorded by Hank in March 1950.

DEFORD BAILEY: PAN AMERICAN BLUES

“Pan American Blues”

Here’s DeFord Bailey, back on the Grand Ole Opry stage after an absence of many years. One of the earliest stars of the Opry (his original version of this song actually kicked off the first broadcast to officially use the “Opry” name in 1927), he was treated like a mascot and dropped in 1941, ostensibly because he wouldn’t “learn new songs.” But DeFord could play all day, on harmonica, banjo, and guitar – he took his inspiration, he said, from his solitary childhood out in the country, where he would listen to the birds and the trains going by and imitate all the sounds around him. When I met him, through James Talley and social worker David Morton, his great champion over the years (it was largely through David‘s efforts that he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005), he was living in a public housing project on Edgehill Avenue in Nashville, where today a plaque proclaims his one-time residence.


RUFUS THOMAS: THE WORLD’S OLDEST TEENAGER

“Walking the Dog”

How can you beat this (well, Rufus anyway)?  Rufus was the self-proclaimed “World’s Oldest Teenager” when I met him in the mid-1970s, he was still the World’s Oldest Teenager when he died at 84 in 2001. He inspired the Sweet Soul Music Festival in Porretta, Italy, where in the 1990s, little kids called out “Rufalone,” as they ran after him in the streets. Rufus, as Jerry Wexler might say, was “a stone gas.” Or, to put it another way: Rufus vincit omnia.

BOBBY BLAND: LITTLE BOY BLUE

Bobby and B.B. King: Medley

Don’t miss the great Soul Train intro by Don Cornelius.

You can’t miss the graciousness and affection that both men display. The first time I saw them both was at a Battle of the Blues in 1966 at Louie’s Showcase Lounge, a lively but little room despite its name, in Boston’s Roxbury section. The spirit was not all that much different from the one exhibited here, except that it was a battle, with no duets contemplated or joined, and Bobby’s squall vanquishing B.B.’s falsetto, at least for that night. (When Bobby ended with “Stormy Monday” and fell to his knees at the lyric cue, the women could not be held back from storming the tiny stage.) The easy trade-offs here are no less enthralling, the vocal mastery no less assured – and dig the jackets, too!

T-Bone Walker: “Don’t Throw Your Love On Me So Strong”

T-Bone was Bobby’s main man, as he declares in the chapter. And not just because T-Bone originated “Stormy Monday” either. For the whole sound. He was B.B.’s main man, too – hell, he was everybody’s main man. Check out the way he holds his guitar, like a keyboard around his neck, and note the familiar chord progressions, too. And while you’re at it, check out B.B. and T-Bone together in the next clip, with BB’s jazzy, T-Boneish intro, not to mention “the great Lloyd Glenn,” as B.B. properly introduces him, on piano.

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