It's a little-known fact, but Willie Nelson's first wife, Martha, once tied him to a chair with skipping ropes and beat him unconscious with a broom handle. The experience soured Willie a little on Martha, for he subsequently left her for Shirley, but his faith in the sacrament of marriage appeared unshaken since, in due course, Shirley became his second wife.
I bring up the subject of Willie's beating to show that a woman can not only hurt a man emotionally but physically as well, if he's not too careful. But I also refer to Willie because he is a truly wonderful country singer and I have, I confess, been listening to a lot of country music lately. It comes from being single again. Actually, it comes from being not entirely willingly single again, which lends country music an added piquancy.
Self-pity and remorse
Country music is one of the few popular music forms that deals almost entirely with matters of the heart, and is therefore a kind of one-stop-shop for anyone consumed by self-pity, remorse and a burning desire to buy a pick-up truck. Thus, my stock of country music has increased considerably in the past few months. Titles like My Tears Have Washed "I Love You" From the Blackboard of My Heart, Am I That Easy to Forget?, The Wino and I Know, My Arms Stay Open All Night and even, God help us, That Ain't My Truck In Her Drive now appear to be remarkably profound, though I have never owned a truck in my life and, even if I had, her parents probably wouldn't have let me park it in the drive to begin with.
It's because of my growing dependency on country music that I now know about Willie and the broom. I also know that Merle Haggard - (If You're Trying to Break My Heart) You Don't Have Far to Go - spent two-and-a-half years in jail for trying to rob a restaurant while drunk. It was while in San Quentin that Merle saw Johnny Cash perform live - a performance that almost incited a riot - and determined that country music could provide an outlet for his pain.
But Johnny, despite amassing a sizeable repertoire of prison songs, actually spent only about three days in jail in total, while he spent three years in the Air Security Service, where he worked as a cryptanalyst intercepting Soviet Morse Code transmissions. It was Johnny who first passed on the word that Stalin had died. After he left the service and began following his country star in earnest, Johnny became a pretty difficult customer. He once shared an apartment with Waylon Jennings, when Waylon's marriage was breaking up, and spent his time searching for Waylon's pills and repeatedly throwing his Bowie knife at the wall.
Drinking seriously
But the saddest and greatest of them all was Hank "There's A Tear in My Beer" Williams, who experienced emotional pain beyond the comprehension of most. Hank was a drinker in a business where people took drinking pretty seriously, and he can't have been easy to live with. On the other hand, his wife Audrey wasn't easy to live with either, but he still managed to marry her twice. Audrey was acquisitive and intolerant, and it's fair to say that she had a mean streak in her: she had an abortion and only told Hank about it afterwards. He wrote Cold, Cold Heart about the experience. It seemed that the more Hank suffered, the better he wrote. In one day alone, shortly after marrying his second wife, Billie, he recorded Your Cheatin' Heart, The Lonesomest Day of My Life and Take These Chains From My Heart. In country terms, that's like Beethoven popping in and running off the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies while waiting for the kettle to boil. Immediately after the session, Hank got so drunk that he couldn't go on his honeymoon.
The point is that the best country music has been written by people who suffered, and suffered deeply. If it speaks to you, it does so because there is an underlying truth to it. Unfortunately, a great deal of country music is also maudlin, desperately contrived, cheaply sentimental and performed by Garth Brooks, the Anti-Hank. Many people still find it appealing, though it's like trading in a debased currency, or listening when a whore saying that she loves you.
I have to be honest here and confess that I find vast tracts of the country music landscape unappealing. Listening to songs like Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life, Shamrocks Don't Grow in California or Flushed from the Bath- room of Your Heart - the latter two proof that even Johnny Cash could stink out a room when he chose - in an effort to overcome rejection is kind of sad. (In much the same way, I recently found myself, one Saturday night, sitting in my dressing gown on the sofa eating fig rolls. This, too, was kind of sad but, since I recognised that it was sad, that made it ironic and therefore okay to do.)
In fact, while I would defend Willie, Johnny and Hank to the grave, the most interesting country music is being made by comparatively young musicians almost unknown to the mainstream country audience. These artists tend to be lumped under the title "alternative country" (which doesn't mean songs in which your truck starts, your wife comes back and your dog gets resurrected) and are currently producing some of the finest work in any sphere of popular music. The ghosts of Gram Parsons and Gene Clark drift around Lambchop's Jack's Tulips and Thriller, Lullaby for the Working Class's haunting Blanket Warm, The Pernice Brother's lovely Overcome by Happiness and the music of dozens more.
Rejected
With this in mind, and with "rejected" written all over me like a faulty toaster, I recently took myself to Whelan's in Dublin, which was hosting two leading lights of the alt.country world, the Willard Grant Conspiracy and the Handsome Family. It was one of those nights when only country music would do and, as the Handsome Family introduced song after song with the words "Here's a song about death", or "Here's another song about death" or - my particular favourite - "Here's a song about a man who gets an infected foot. He dies" - my heart lifted. "This is why people OD on pills," they sang, "Or jump from the Golden Gate Bridge/ Anything to feel weightless again." It was wonderfully depressing. I looked around at the lovelorn and lonely, the sad nightmongers to whom this stuff actually spoke, and I thought: "These are my people. . ."