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Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music, by Dana Jennings
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The years from about 1950 to 1970 were the golden age of twang. Country music’s giants all strode the earth in those years: Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, George Jones and Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. And many of the standards that still define country were recorded then: “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Mama Tried,” “Stand by Your Man,” and “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”
In Sing Me Back Home, Dana Jennings pushes past the iconic voices and images to get at what classic country music truly means to us today. Yes, country tells the story of rural America in the twentieth century—but the obsessions of classic country were obsessions of America as a whole: drinking and cheating, class and the yearning for home, God and death.
Jennings, who grew up in a town that had more cows than people when he was born, knows all of this firsthand. His people lived their lives by country music. His grandmothers were honky-tonk angels, his uncles men of constant sorrow, and his father a romping, stomping hell-raiser who lived for the music of Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the other rockabilly hellions.
Sing Me Back Home is about a vanished world in which the Depression never ended and the sixties never arrived. Jennings uses classic country songs to explain the lives of his people, and shows us how their lives are also ours—only twangier.
- Sales Rank: #575125 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Faber n Faber
- Published on: 2008-05-27
- Released on: 2008-05-27
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.58" h x .93" w x 5.88" l, .87 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 272 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The perfect country song, according to the late songwriter Steve Goodman, always had references to mama, being drunk, cheating, going to prison and hell-bent driving. Taking a page from Goodman's songbook, Jennings, a New York Times editor, brilliantly captures the essence of country music in this hard-driving tale that is part memoir and part music history. With the wild-eyed, hard-edged energy of Hank Williams and Jerry Reed, Jennings tells of his upbringing in the hardscrabble hollers of New Hampshire. He recalls characters from his family to illustrate the themes of what he believes is the golden age of country music: 1950–1970. Grammy Jennings, "like Patsy Cline, knows what it is to go walkin' after midnight searching for her man, to fall to pieces, to be crazy-you don't go chasing your oldest son with a butcher knife if you ain't crazy." With the lonesome strains of the steel guitar and tales of hunger and poverty, reckless driving, cheating and drinking, country singers Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and Merle Haggard-no longer heard on the radio-sang not only to Jennings and his family but the millions of folks just like them struggling to face "The Cold Hard Facts of Life" (Porter Wagoner) in a postwar world. (May)
Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Dana Jennings, a native of New Hampshire, is an editor with The New York Times. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley
Dana Jennings was born in the fall of 1957 to 17-year-old parents who had married only eight days earlier. "The first thing they bought of any consequence was a gray and white Sylvania record player" on which they listened to songs from "a squat glistering stack of 45 rpm records" and the two long-playing albums they owned: "Rock and Rollin' with Fats Domino" and "Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar." These albums "became my nursery rhymes," Jennings writes. To this day "the behind-the-beat rhythm and blues of Fats Domino and his Crescent City brethren still thrill me, but it was Johnny Cash who marked me for life. My Gothic hick childhood began with that record; Cash's music steeled me for a dirt-poor world of tar-paper shacks, backwoods Grendels (my relations), and freight-train seduction."
If you're thinking this took place in Tennessee or Mississippi, think again. Jennings was born in rural New Hampshire and grew up in Kingston, a town of fewer than 1,000 residents. The local accent was Yankee cracker, but it was cracker all the same, and the music people listened to was played and sung by the likes of Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Jimmie Rodgers, Roy Acuff, Ferlin Husky, Loretta Lynn, Lefty Frizzell, the Carter Family, Bob Wills, Merle Haggard and the greatest of them all, Hank Williams. "The myth," Jennings says, "is that country music is purely a white, rural, and Southern art," whereas the reality is that "country musicians come from all over," from California (Merle Haggard) to Nova Scotia (Hank Snow) and just about all stops in between. Country music of what Jennings accurately calls the "golden age of twang" isn't about Dixie, though there's plenty of Dixie in it. It's about country:
"Country music made between about 1950 and 1970 is a secret history of rural, working class Americans in the twentieth century -- a secret history in plain sight. . . . Country music knows that the dark heart of the American Century beat in oil-field roadhouses in Texas and in dim-lit Detroit bars where country boys in exile gathered after another shift at Ford or GM. Bobby Bare might've pleaded in 'Detroit City' that he wanted to go home. But we all knew he wouldn't, that he couldn't. Country profoundly understands what it's like to be trapped in a culture of alienation: by poverty, by a [lousy] job, by lust, by booze. . . . If you truly want to understand the whole United States of America in the twentieth century, you need to understand country music and the working people who lived their lives by it."
That's absolutely true, and Sing Me Back Home makes a powerful argument for it. Though I have serious reservations about Jennings's prose -- more on that later -- his inquiry into the great underlying themes of country music is astute and deeply informed. He takes country music seriously but never gets pompous or pretentious about it; he appreciates its humor and raunchiness as much as he values its commentary on the life of "the permanent poor white underclass -- both those who had stayed in the country and those who had strayed to the city." He doesn't draw a parallel between the history of country music and the history of jazz, but one needn't be a musicologist to understand that both genres reached their zeniths relatively early in their development -- jazz between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, country during the period outlined by Jennings -- and gradually lost much of their creative spark and originality as they achieved maturity. The founding fathers of the two genres, Louis Armstrong and Jimmie Rodgers, actually made a recording together in 1930 ("Blue Yodel #9"), the symbolic importance of which cannot be exaggerated: black and white together, at the dawn of American music.
The genres took different paths: Jazz went abstruse and elitist while country went slick and pop, but both lost track of their roots. With the exception of the singer Iris DeMent, Jennings doesn't find much to praise in country today: "What's marketed as country music today is actually country-style music or, to be postmodern, country music about country music." Basically this is true, though it too glibly dismisses the likes of Marty Stuart, Jerry Douglas, Ricky Scruggs and the incomparable Alison Krauss, who are trying to locate country in an altered landscape while remaining true to its soul. But its glory years fell roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1970s, between Jimmie Rodgers and Willie Nelson.
"Country music for decades was poor-people music, made by poor people and bought by poor people," Jennings writes. "It sprang from the heart and the gut, and, like R&B and soul, it was a music of exile, meant to make being banished to the margins, if not a matter of pride, then at least more tolerable." Those are the opening sentences of a chapter called "Hungry Eyes," taking the title of one of Haggard's most beloved songs as a guide to country's long connection to Americans who were going hungry, scrambling to keep their heads above water and not always succeeding. "Of all the great country singers of the 1950s and '60s," Jennings writes, "Haggard articulated rural blue-collar life best, explaining to his listeners what their lives meant and making them understand that those lives counted." Run your eyes over just about any list of Haggard's songs, and you'll see the entire country canon in miniature: "Misery & Gin," "Workin' Man Blues," "The Bottle Let Me Down," "Ramblin' Fever," "Mama Tried," "The Roots of My Raising," "Sing Me Back Home," "Always Wanting You."
It's all there: love, hunger, work, the road, booze, family, faith, infidelity, prison, loneliness, nostalgia. Chapter by chapter, Jennings explores every one of these themes, always with specific songs as points of reference. A few chapter headings from the table of contents tell the story: "Crazy," "There Stands the Glass," "Folsom Prison Blues," "King of the Road," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Lovesick Blues." If you love country music, those are the stations of the cross, song titles that immediately conjure up not merely the songs themselves but other songs of similar import. In "There Stands the Glass," for example, Jennings cites not merely the Webb Pierce classic -- the "national anthem of barroom tunes" -- he also rounds up "What's Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)," "Honky Tonk Man," "White Lightning," "Chug-A-Lug" and the Loretta Lynn classic "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin' (with Lovin' on Your Mind)," which within a single lyric manages to incorporate drink, sex, love, marriage and domestic abuse, written by a woman who "knew what it was like to be left home crying and lonely with the kids while her husband went off carousing, knew what it was like to be a glorified sperm depository."
All of these are matters with which Jennings has personal acquaintance. In his "particular chicken-scratched swatch of New Hampshire, postwar prosperity was a rumor." He "was born into a ramshackle husk of a house that had no indoor plumbing except for cold running water that froze in the pipes come winter -- and the occasional hot running rat." His family "lived in 'the other America,' busted, hurting, silent." His "was a family of mangy foxes, a sly, shifty, and shiftless lot, who, when faced with authority, licked its shiny boots. We had adulterers, drunks, and glue sniffers (ah, Testors!); wife beaters, husband beaters, and child abusers; pyros, nymphos, and card cheats; smugglers and folks who were always sticking their cold, bony hands where they didn't belong."
Incredibly, Jennings made it out of Kingston. He got himself to the University of New Hampshire, then into writing and journalism; he's published several novels and is an editor at the New York Times. The examples of his prose quoted herein make plain that he writes lucidly, but there are times -- too many of them, for my taste -- when he thumbs his nose at "the prissy conventions of grammar" and flexes his hardscrabble bona fides. One such passage, for example, is sandwiched between two perfectly conventional paragraphs. "Weren't nobody happy when Ma got pregnant with me in 1957," it begins, "what with her being barely seventeen and all and the father being my old man, who wasn't nobody's idea of a young go getter. Me? I can't complain -- I got borned, didn't I?" Et cetera. Obviously Jennings chose to go bumpkin as a way of emphasizing his deep and lasting intimacy with the music about which he writes, but for me it doesn't work. It sounds contrived and artificial. A North Carolina newspaper editor of many years past liked to call such prose "shucks and nubbins," and it seems as fake now as it did then, all the more so when the reader is fully aware that the writer is perfectly capable of using the king's English.
This is Jennings's choice and he's entitled to it, but I wish he'd resisted the temptation. Sing Me Back Home is, at its best, a very good book and a useful addition to the rather sparse literature of country music, but its lapses into mannered yokelisms diminish it considerably.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
i was hugely disappointed
By J. C Clark
While there are many things about this book I did not like, including its fundamental lack of any coherent world view, its inability to decide whether the fear of nuclear war did or did not impact these people--half the time he says they don't know and don't care about the outside world, half the time he's blaming their fatalism on their imminent immolation, its condescending jibes at religion, and its endless and trite pokes at governments that cannot articulate why we are fighting wars (I think, Mr. Jennings you may not like the justifications, but they have not been missing...) one thing endlessly annoyed me. At least 100 times in this book he says that these people, who fornicate, drink, fight, argue, cheat on their spouses, child-abuse, steal, avoid responsibility, and engage in every other vice certain to keep them poor and unhappy, are not responsible for their behavior. The century, or the Depression, or the government, or the recent wars, or their poverty, or their ignorance, or whatever is the favored argument of the blame-someone-else crowd, caused their despair. His own life disproves this, as he was poor, ignorant, nearly illegitimate, and yet somehow escaped.
Nope. Sorry, these people created a sordid and ugly world and embraced it with both arms. All along I waited to read about one person who said "You know, we don't have to live like this." I closed the book without finding that person. How he escaped this hole might have made an interesting story, but this disjointed narrative of squalid and stupid people who cannot even begin to imagine why their lives are such a mess left me sad. If these are the fans of country music, then I understand why I am not.
So, if you are on the left, and feel that circumstances make character and if you're a criminal or a wife-beater it's not your fault, you will probably like this book. If you believe that people control their lives and make decisions about how they live, then I don't think you will.
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Growing Up Among the Poor and Pissed Off
By Sam Sattler
OK, I admit it. When it comes to real country music, and those whom I believe truly appreciate it as the art form that it is, I am prejudiced. Never in a million years would I believe that some guy from New Hampshire, a writer and editor for the New York Times, of all the newspapers in the word, for crying out loud, would know much about the real thing; no way would someone with that background actually understand the music and those who created it. Well, that was before I read Sing Me Back Home, by Dana Jennings, who is exactly the guy I just described.
I want to apologize, Mr. Jennings, and I salute you, sir.
Sing Me Back Home is not a straight forward history of country music. Books like those serve their purpose, certainly, and there are many worthy ones out there already that take that approach. Jennings, on the other hand, turns the history of country music into something very personal: a way to share his own family story.
As most country music historians (and knowledgeable fans) agree, the years from the late forties to the very end of the sixties mark the period of classic country music. The music reached its peak during those years and has faced a steady, downhill slide since 1970 with the exception of a small (and poorly rewarded) group of pickers and singers that refuses to let classic country music completely disappear. But, overall, country music has probably never been in a sorrier state than it is in today. According to Jenkins, in fact, "It can be entertaining, but the difference between today's country and the summits of the 1950s and `60s is the difference between the lightning and the lighting bug."
As Jennings puts it, "country music was made by poor people for poor people." At its best, country music reflected, and maybe even justified, the lives endured by the rural poor who lived all around the United States, not just those from the South or the mountains and coal-producing regions of the Southeast. It is the history of working people, those who made livings with their hands, often at the sacrifice of their health or even their lives, during those two decades. Nothing for them came easy and, when they finally made it to Saturday night, they became walking, talking country songs themselves. They lived the cheating songs and the drinking songs; they spent time in prison, went hungry in the bad times, hit the road out of desperation or despair, had love affairs end badly, and repented on Sunday mornings with the full knowledge that they would backslide again come the very next Saturday night.
But what makes Sing Me Back Home so memorable is the way that Dana Jennings readily fits a member of his own family to every kind of classic country song there is. He lived it - and he remembers it because it made him the man that he is today despite the fact that he sits behind a desk at the New York Times. Song by song, the reader meets members of Jennings' family who could easily have been the inspirations for those same songs because, not only did these folks love and surround themselves with country music, they lived the lifestyle at its heart.
For those of us of a certain age, and of a certain upbringing, this book is like preaching to the choir. We already knew this deep down in our souls. But having someone as frank, and just as importantly, as articulate, as Dana Jennings come along to tell the real story of country music's golden age and how its listeners related to those songs, is a real bonus.
Sing Me Back Home fits longtime country music fans like an old glove. But the book is also a perfect primer for those newer fans who wonder about the country music legends that are barely more than names to them today. In fact, the discography at the end of the book is worth its whole $24 dollar cover price. Those willing to spend the money and time required to surround themselves with the albums and box sets listed by Jennings in that discography will learn more about the history of America's working class than they could ever learn from any textbook.
Despite what David Allan Coe says to the contrary, I do not believe in the perfect country music song. But there just might be a perfect country music book. If so, this is it.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Hollers and heartaches
By PennyAuntie
For anyone who thinks country music begins and ends with Kenny Chesney, here's your reality check. Part autobiography, part music appreciation course, the author gives the reader a lean, mean lesson in what country music -- in its Golden Age -- was all about. Far more than just twangy songs about drinking and cheating, the country music of those times and artists tied the music to the poorest, the marginalized, the most helpless of Americans. The prose is eloquent and evocative, yet sparse as a meal in the Depression. Also funny, biting, and wryly witty at times. The author reminds us, too, that country music didn't stem solely from, nor was it intended solely for the people of the rural south. Instead, artists like Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Faron Young, the Louvin Brothers, Connie Smith, et al, were all people who came up from hardscrabble lives & times, and their music resonated with people everywhere who suffered from deprivation, whether the listeners lived in Kingston, New Hampshire, or Stollings, West Virginia. The music of our youth evokes the people, the pain, the loves, the losses, and the emotions of our youth. Like the author, I had turned away from country music during my youth, and when I returned to it later in life I found that there isn't any (almost none, anyway) country music anymore. No more fiddle, no more steel, no more twang. Honesty? Fuhgeddaboudit!
This book reminded me in so many ways of the music I love, but more than that, it brought back the people I loved most and who are no longer with me. Yeah, this book was a trip down memory lane for me, but it also felt like validation for the appreciation I've put into this kind of music. And it's a great tool for beginners who want to learn what the Golden Age of country music really sounded like, and where to begin listening.
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