IN THE COUNTRY OF COUNTRY:
People And Places In American Music
by Nicholas Dawidoff

(Pantheon, 317 pages)

Listen to Ralph Stanley talking about his granddaughter: "The other day when I walked in the door, she…said, ‘Papaw, if you ever die, I want to lie right down with you.’ Stuff like that, makes you feel good and bad, don’t it?"

It’s moments like this – eerie and beautiful in precisely equal measure – that are the real strength of Nicholas Dawidoff’s new book, In The Country Of Country: People And Places In American Music. In a series of often revealing character sketches, Dawidoff gets down the words, and the voices, of 20 country music legends – men and women whose contributions to the genre have been, in most cases, incalculable, but who have rarely been treated so respectfully in the popular press. Whether he’s speaking with songwriter Harlan Howard, pickers such as Earl Scruggs and Doc Watson, or great singers from Kitty Wells to Iris DeMent, Dawidoff clearly admires his subjects, and the way he so regularly just steps back and lets them talk is what makes this book essential to anyone who cares about country music.

Like an exclusively country version of Peter Guralnick’s great Feel Like Going Home, Dawidoff (author of The Catcher Was A Spy) is more interested in letting us see and hear his subjects than in commenting on them, and he seems to have nearly as strong a capacity for getting people to talk openly with him as Guralnick does. In his travels from the Sand Mountains of Alabama to the streets of Bakersfield, Dawidoff captures many wonderful moments: an indomitable Bill Monroe talking to his friends ("I want you all to keep pulling for me and I’ll keep pulling for you"); Kitty Wells analyzing her groundbreaking smash "It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" ("It was kinda the womenfolk getting back at the menfolk"); Doc Watson recounting how his father built him his first instrument ("You boys skin [that cat], and I’ll make you a banjo"); West Coast star Rose Maddox explaining why her family gave her away as a child ("They couldn’t afford to feed me"). Perhaps the book’s most moving moment is when Charlie Louvin explains how much he misses his late brother Ira: "It’s been 30 years…and still, if I’m playing a Louvin Brothers song, when I get to the harmony part, I move off to one side of the mike. It’s a habit I can’t break."

Moments like this, as Ralph Stanley says, make us "feel good and bad" simultaneously, and Dawidoff understands that such moments are what country music is all about. Like everyone else who was born in the second half of this century, Dawidoff grew up in a generally urban, rock ’n’ roll world; still, he took to country music fairly early. When he was 11, an uncle sent him a record of the Carter Family singing "There’s a dark and troubled side of life/There’s a bright and sunny side too," he writes, and after that he was hooked. His book is at its strongest when it’s successfully balancing those two sides of life: bad and good, desperation and joy, Saturday night and Sunday morning.

But Dawidoff is still a child of the rock era, so it’s not surprising that the book’s few weaknesses primarily come when he attempts to evaluate country music with a rock aesthetic. Sometimes, this just means he makes silly pronouncements. His "[Johnny] Cash was the first punk rocker," for example, is indefensible no matter on which side of the rock/country divide one stands. His description of Cash’s daughter Rosanne as a "country-punk singer" is downright bizarre. And his concluding argument that rocker Bruce Springsteen and bands such as Golden Smog are "more obvious heirs" to the Hanks Snow and Williams, respectively, than many contemporary country acts is something of a stretch in terms of lyrical vision, and an even bigger one musically.

Mainly, though, the problem is one of emphasis. For most of the book, Dawidoff seems far more interested in the pain and trial of Saturday night than in the peace of Sunday morning – which misses the point. The catalogues of Cash, DeMent, Stanley, Monroe, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and most of the rest of the artists here are about both pain and peace, equally. The Stanleys’ "A Vision Of Mother" shines poignant light on Merle Haggard’s "Mama Tried". And vice versa.

Dawidoff’s occasional bias toward the darker side of this equation means, for one thing, that he is sometimes too taken in by naive notions of "authenticity." In his prologue, he spends a couple of pages arguing that one reason classic country beats the contemporary kind is that the lives of the legends he writes about "really have been hard" – a pretty picture, no doubt, but a fairly unsophisticated one as well. Dawidoff’s emphasis also means he tends to privilege the sad or scary over the joyous. He dislikes the American Recordings version of Cash’s "Mean Eyed Cat", for example, because Cash "has added, alas, a happy ending" – as if happy endings are somehow less true than sad ones. Perhaps this is why his essay on George Jones is so much shorter than most of the rest in the book. In the final years of his life, Jones seems to have genuinely found peace. And what could possibly be interesting about that?

There are occasional errors here ("The Blizzard" features a lame horse, not a dog), and once every few chapters, Dawidoff’s prose tries too hard to be clever: Steve Earle "has kept both his hair and his rap sheet scruffy"; Harlan Howard "prefers to forgo socks, but flashes his broad, boyish grin often, as if in compensation." But all of this is nitpicking. The voices and the stories are the things that truly matter here, and Dawidoff captures them wonderfully. And, when once bitter rivals Bill Monroe and Earl Scruggs sit side by side at a picnic, friends again; or when Iris DeMent weeps tears of loss and joy from remembering her father and his people; or when George Jones – preparing to mow his lawn instead of downing a bottle – admits that he’s "really enjoying life for the first time in 63 years," the balance even begins to be set right. At its very best, Dawidoff’s book makes us feel good and bad, just like country music.

– DAVID CANTWELL

WILLIE NELSON
Yesterday’s Wine
Justice

Back at the end of the ’50s, about when I was being conceived or born or something, Willie Nelson sold the rights to a song called "Family Bible" for $50. That was his first break in country music; a singer named Claude Gray made "Family Bible" a top-10 hit, and then he got cuts by Ray Price and Patsy Cline and Faron Young. When Nelson finally recorded the song himself, for RCA in 1971, it seemed like his run had about run out.

Nelson revisited "Family Bible" for Yesterday’s Wine, the first concept album in country music. Which would explain why RCA was reportedly able to sell something less than 10,000 copies of the thing; Columbia had somewhat better luck with Red Headed Stranger in 1975.

"You do know why you’re here?" a deep voice, perhaps Waylon Jennings, asks in the spoken intro to Yesterday’s Wine.

"Yes. There’s great confusion on earth," Willie answers. "The power that is has concluded the following: Perfect man has visited earth already, and his voice was heard. The voice of imperfect man must now be made manifest, and I have been selected as the most likely candidate."

What follows is a brief (remember when LPs ran 30 minutes, and we were satisfied?) suite of gentle, deeply meditative songs which go some distance to explaining the spiritual quest Nelson undertook in Austin a few years later. The title track, as well as "Me And Paul", will be familiar, but most of this material has been unavailable for years.

In hindsight, it seems curious that Music Row was so perplexed by the notion of an album that sought to be more than a collection of would-be greatest hits. Or maybe it was just that Willie was the one trying. In any event, Yesterday’s Wine is a graceful, simple, peaceful kind of record, and a gem. Doubtless Willie would have liked time to correct some of the rough spots, but that’s how they used to run sessions, and it’s the songs that matter anyhow.

– GRANT ALDEN

SCUD MOUNTAIN BOYS
The Early Year
Sub Pop (2-CD set)

Brought to wider attention last year with their Sub Pop debut, Massachusetts, the Scud Mountain Boys had in fact already issued not one, but two, albums on Chunk Records – one of which, Pine Box, was a vinyl-only release. Both came out in 1995; thus the singular "Year" in the title of this reissue, which combines both records on a two-disc set. (The sequencing and, in a couple cases, the actual contents of the two albums have been slightly rearranged, but that’s likely to bother only the few folks who got hold of the original records.)

While Massachusetts was hardly an overproduced jump to the big leagues, The Early Year reveals how the Scuds’ slow-and-quiet minimalism has developed since their inauspicious beginnings around lap steel player Bruce Tull’s kitchen table four years ago. Pine Box is particularly hushed and deliberate, casting a spell over the room like a warm glow from the dying embers of a cold winter night’s fire in the hearth. While the immediate attention might go to the band’s remarkable reworkings of three late ’60s/early ’70s pop hits – "Wichita Lineman", "Gypsies, Tramps And Thieves", and "Please Mr. Please" – a couple of the band’s own tunes are ultimately more memorable – most notably the intriguingly titled "Peter Graves’ Anatomy", with its haunting refrain, "Have mercy on my soul." Beyond the songs, the sheer tone of Tull’s heartbreakingly muted steel guitar and Joe Pernice’s wistful, weary vocals make the album a four-in-the-morning minor masterpiece.

Dance The Night Away picks up the pace a bit on a couple tunes, "(She Took His) Picture" and "Helen", both of which are driven along by the drumming of Keith Levreault (a latter-day member of the Blood Oranges). Alternate versions of a couple tunes from Pine Box, "Freight Of Fire" and "Silo", are included here, though not in appreciably different forms. The nicest touch is a cover of "Where’s The Playground Susie?", a lesser-known Glen Campbell hit from the Jimmy Webb catalog than the more obvious "Wichita Lineman" included on Pine Box, and rendered with a reverent grace that underscores just how effectively the Scuds can bring out the essence of a beautiful melody.

– PETER BLACKSTOCK