Country Roads

The days are long gone when “country music” meant a twangy song about heartbreak playing on a jukebox somewhere in middle America. In December, during that all-important shopping week before Christmas, the biggest-selling CD in the nation was Garth Brooks’ “Sevens,” and two other country performers also landed in the nation’s top 10. Coinciding with that, President Clinton also nominated William J. Ivey, head of the Country Music Foundation, to chair the National Endowment for the Arts. His choice certified country music’s cultural, as well as commercial, cachet.

But if a spate of recent books is any judge, there is little joy in Nashville these days, and it has to do with country music’s identity. Johnny Cash, a country icon if there ever was one, writes in “Cash” that he feels “alienated” from what passes for country music today. Jimmy Bowen, who claims the lion’s share of the credit for having transformed country music from a $50-million to a $1-billion-a-year industry, complains in “Rough Mix” that he can’t stand the stuff either: “The music today suffers from a disturbing conformity.”

Joining this chorus of concern is Laurence Leamer who, in “Three Chords and the Truth,” writes that “the top executives, almost to a person, admitted privately that they tuned out country radio, driven away by the mediocrity and the derivativeness of so much of the music that they themselves had produced.”

Part of the malaise stems from the expanding popularity of country music over the last 10 years, especially the popularity of Brooks. Bowen calls Brooks the “800-pound hillbilly gorilla” and with good reason: Brooks muscled Bowen out of the presidency of Liberty Records. Having sold more units than any other American recording artist in history--more than Elvis, more than Michael Jackson--and surpassed everyone but the Beatles in total sales, Brooks has set standards of commercial success that country music cannot possibly sustain. “As good as Garth has been for country music,” observes a record executive in Dan Daley’s “Nashville’s Unwritten Rules,” “he opened a Pandora’s box.”

The stupendous success of a country performer who owes more to James Taylor and KISS than to Cash and Merle Haggard (worse is yet to come: Kevin Sharp, a singer whose debut CD went platinum, recently told New Country magazine that his idol is Barry Manilow!) has amplified Nashville’s perennial anxiety about straying too far from its roots. After all, crossing over to the pop mainstream might cross out Nashville altogether. Certainly anyone who treasures country music for what has traditionally distinguished it from pop can find little to cheer in contemporary country’s parade of hats, hunks and, increasingly, on the distaff side, exposed navels.

“Is there anything behind the symbols of modern ‘country,’ ” Cash asks, “or are the symbols themselves the whole story? Are the hats, the boots, the pickup trucks and the honky-tonking poses all that’s left of a disintegrating culture? Back in Arkansas, a way of life produced a certain kind of music. Does a certain kind of music now produce a way of life? Maybe that’s OK. I don’t know.”

Unfortunately, Cash’s reluctance to pursue this question is typical of his book, whose slackness may be due partly to ill health (Cash suffers from a Parkinson’s-like condition) but also to the fact that he wrote an autobiography, “Man in Black,” 28 years ago and not a whole heck of a lot has happened to him since. That book, with its wide margins and teensy paragraphs, lacked literary sophistication but offered powerful personal testimony to the ravages of drug addiction and the redemption of religion. It’s all there: how Cash was saved by Jesus Christ and June Carter, his second wife; how he told Carl Perkins, who died last month, that “Blue Suede Shoes” might make a good title for a rock ‘n’ roll song; how his TV series and trips to the Holy Land fared.

*

Unable to compete with that dramatic narrative, “Cash” is reduced to anecdotes. My favorite is about the country singer Faron Young, with whom Cash was touring when Johnny popped his first Benzedrine in 1957. After Young’s suicide a few years ago, a gust of wind blew his ashes over friends gathered to sprinkle them in Cash’s garden. “There they were with Faron in their faces, Faron on their coats, Faron in their hair. Later . . . I found that I had Faron on my windshield, too. I turned the wipers on. There he went, back and forth, back and forth, until he was all gone.”

Cash, after Columbia Records dropped him, auditioned unsuccessfully at MCA-Nashville for Bowen, who describes Cash in “Rough Mix” as looking in the mid-’60s like “Abe Lincoln on pills.” Until his ouster in 1995, Bowen epitomized the new Nashville that put Cash out to pasture.

When Bowen arrived at MCA-Nashville, he was determined to “make the music sound better, more modern and competitive with pop” by eliminating what he calls its “honk factor.” At his first recording session with singer Mel Tillis, Bowen called the engineer “a dumb-ass hillbilly” and put 15 microphones on one drum kit. It was sweet revenge for the time, 19 years earlier, when the Grand Ole Opry, which frowned on percussion, forced the drummer for Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids (Bowen played bass and sang) to perform behind a screen on a single snare.

“Party Doll” was the Rhythm Orchids’ only hit, but what a hit: sheer rockabilly ebullience. Bowen’s next big break occurred when he was hired by Frank Sinatra’s Reprise label, where he revived the Rat Pack’s recording careers, starting with Dean Martin and “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.”

In Nashville, as in L.A., Bowen seldom discovered a star. He admits in “Rough Mix” that the many performers he declined to sign at the outset of their careers included two with whom he would later become closely associated: Reba McEntire (“too country”) and Brooks (who “wasn’t where Nashville was heading”). Bowen had a tin ear but a golden touch. His forte was for finding the right material for artists who weren’t as big as they should have been (Tillis, George Strait) or had been (Sinatra, Haggard) and then spending a fortune on making and promoting their records.

In addition to making more hit records, Bowen chortles that he “probably made more enemies than anyone in Nashville history.” He recognizes that the worst of these was his own spit and image. Brooks, he writes, “embodied my vision for Nashville when I arrived” and “had a gift for working TV, radio . . . whatever it took, to sell records.” In Brooks, a marketing major at Oklahoma State, Bowen finally met his match and his comeuppance. The soft-spoken yet intense Brooks didn’t bowl over Bowen when he auditioned in 1988. Six years later, however, Bowen was buckling under the weight and demands of the “hillbilly gorilla” on his back: “Music was never meant to be an assembly-line product sold like lighting fixtures. Now, the business was driving the music.”

“Three Chords and the Truth” describes Bowen as a pot-smoking “Mephistopheles in baggy pants and golf shoes.” Unlike the roguish Bowen who views everyone with evenhanded irreverence, Leamer, author of “The Kennedy Women” and several other books (none about country music) divides the world into heroes and villains. He notes that fans who will do anything to get near their favorite country stars are known in Nashville as “gherms.” Leamer is a bit of a gherm himself, gushing about stars who granted him access (Vince Gill, Patty Loveless) and revealing a bitchy streak when discussing those who didn’t (McEntire, Wynonna Judd). Leamer dishing is more palatable than Leamer fawning, in this instance literally, over Emmylou Harris, who invited him on a European tour: “A deer, so lithe, and gentle, and sensitive, with that nervous alertness, like a fawn hearing a footfall in a forest glen.”

Leamer’s fandom is so fervent (that alliteration is catching) that he takes everything personally, which blinds him to broader, less personal trends, and his personality profiles often seem inadvertently to parody country music at its most bathetic and banal. At its best, country music is not the simple “truth” Leamer cherishes to sentimental excess; it’s three chords and complex.

When it comes to broad trends, “Nashville’s Unwritten Rules” is dead-on. While Leamer makes light of the dance remix of “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” that made the careers of Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn, Dan Daley, a producer, songwriter and journalist, explains in detail who remixed the song and why and how it related to the rise of country dance clubs. Daley rightly recognizes that the accessibility of sophisticated yet affordable recording technology and the proliferation of independent record labels may change Nashville as they have already transformed rock and rap. Regrettably, his prose is as pedestrian as Leamer’s is purple. His behind-the-scene interviews with producers, publishers, songwriters and session musicians are extremely informative but ineptly organized, blurring together and lacking the glitzy star appeal of Leamer’s profiles.

Daley’s passing reference to “the myth of country music’s heritage”--its undefiled origins in the true-blue (and lily white) bedrock of Appalachian experience--is the subject of Richard A. Petersen’s “Creating Country Music,” which provides the historical perspective that the other books sorely miss. If country music ain’t what it used to be, ‘twas ever thus. Petersen describes how the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers and other early country recording artists quickly exhausted their traditional repertoires and were pressured to come up with “new old-sounding songs” to satisfy the nostalgia of a rapidly urbanizing audience. A decade later, Roy Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys “were not built to be a 1920s string band, but rather, with the sensibilities of the late 1930s, to seem like what by then had become a ‘traditional’ string band.” Plus ca change . . . : A few weeks ago Wade Hayes, a young country singer, told Billboard, “It’s getting tougher and tougher to find traditional songs.”

*

From its infancy, country music was consciously contrived. Petersen illustrates this with marvelous photographs. In their first publicity shot, the Fruit Jar Drinkers wore three-piece suits and ties; in their second, the Opry performers donned bib overalls. Rodgers’ changing headgear (bowler, Stetson, engineer’s cap) reflects his plastic sense of self-presentation.

There is no single time or tradition in which country is rooted. While Leamer frets about the future of the music now that Michael Jackson “echoes down the most distant holler in Kentucky from an $8 ghetto blaster,” Petersen points out that no “mountain fastness was too isolated in 1931, or a century earlier for that matter, to regularly exchange musical ideas with other sources.” Moreover, Petersen argues that the desire for a pure musical wellspring is ideologically and often racially driven. Car czar Henry Ford promoted country fiddling and square-dancing because he abhorred black jazz. Sometimes the racism is unconscious, as when Cash credits his mother-in-law, Maybelle Carter, with having been more influential in purely musical terms than Bob Dylan or John Lennon because of the guitar style she created--a style, Petersen writes, she was taught by an African American.

Is it only since the advent of Brooks that business has driven country music? Bowen might be interested in Petersen’s account of how Polk Brockman, an Atlanta furniture store owner, exploited the music’s commercial possibilities by coordinating radio, recording, touring and publishing in the 1920s.

Petersen is a sociologist and sometimes writes like one, inserting subheads like “The Barn Dance as an Opportune Work-Site for Youth and Women” and jaw-breaking jargon like “institutional isomorphism.” Yet his academicism doesn’t drain the life out of country music, and he’s not out to debunk it. Instead, he restores to the music a sense of fun and diversity and possibility that more naive fans (and performers) miss. Like Buck Owens, Petersen knows there is no greater adventure or challenge than to “act naturally.”