November 11, 2013: Green Grass of Home
The Ryman Auditorium, home of the Grand Ole Opry from 1943 to 1974.
The Country Music Awards were last week. Boy, what a hoot. The hosts, Carrie Underwood and Brad Paisley, came out, and they pretended to fight each other, like brother and sister (they weren't actually angry). They had some jokes. Then, Brad tried to enroll in Obamacare on-stage. That didn't go so well. The computer started smoking and spinning. That's how much trouble they had signing up for healthcare.
The CMA Awards are a nice thing, I told myself, morosely watching in the darkness of my carriage house (the only electrified part of my estate). The CMA Awards are a nice thing, designed to make nice people feel nice. It is candy that melts in your mouth so quickly, you don't even need to bite. It recalls very little of the music that marked my introduction to the country sound. (It was the spring of '68, and I was attempting to gain the trust and business of a leading open-pit mine concern, but that is a story for another time). So it was no surprise that from the outset, any darkness bordering on the edges of Bridgestone Arena was dealt with nicely.
In August, Tom Petty got in trouble for calling modern country music "bad rock with fiddle," which besides being accurate, incensed those syrupy mainstream A&R men who recently transmogrified Hootie into a country musician. That can be dealt with easily enough—the CMA hosts made a joke out of it—but there are some things that can't be glossed out. No hook or layer, no cornpone gags and straight-tooth grins, can really hide the falsity: this music—when it's good, and true—is pain that can't be otherwise expressed.
Don't believe me? Fine then, I thought, watching Taylor Swift—feted on-stage as if she had discovered the AIDS vaccine in her purse—suck the saccharine out of the trough. Nashville needs their pop ingenues, too. Mindy McCready had been one. Until the bloom faded. In the interceding years, she had been beaten and nearly killed by an abusive ex, buffeted by the sundry humiliations and the convulsive pains of drug abuse. She shot herself last February.
Some more people came on and sang some more lies. When a heart gets bigger, this is not always the stuff of a love song. Poor Randy Travis, a fine country singer with a fine voice, has been hospitalized for months, suffering from the effects of a stroke and viral cardiomyopathy. The enlarged and damaged heart that is symptomatic of the second condition is usually the result of alcoholism, a disease that has wracked Travis for years, consigning him to a series of tabloid punchlines. He may never sing again.
There doesn't seem much good in things, at the bitter root of them. Whatever romance there is in this music seems to be in either losing at love or dying in drink. Yet a funny thing happened, as I was starting to drift off in front of the TV. That chucklehead Paisley came on stage, a little more serious, to offer his condolences to the widow of George Jones. I practically hissed, hearing as great and glorious a personage as Jones invoked by this muppet, but, he was at least sincere. And he said something that struck me, thanking Mrs. Jones: that without this woman, we would have lost the Possum much sooner.
Well, I had to sit up in my anchor chair a bit, as George Strait and Alan Jackson launched into a decent rendition of "He Stopped Loving Her Today." I find I tend to think of what I don't have, rather than what I do. In George Jones's case, I had my favorite country singer about three decades longer than he had any business living.
Whatever plague killed Keith Whitley or Gram Parsons didn't kill him, even though it, by all rights, should have. We can't even be sure why. That's a truly nice thing. Someone should give out awards for it.
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