October 28, 2005
The Greatness of Hank Williams—As Explored in a New Biography Posted by Allen Barra at 10:10 AM EST Hank Williams was the last echo of the barbaric yawp from Walt Whitman’s America. In just five short years, from 1948 to his death in the backseat of a car on the way to a concert on January 1, 1953, he recorded 66 songs, most of them his own compositions, many of which can still be heard on radio stations almost anywhere in the world. A Nashville songwriter named Harlan Howard summed them up in a nutshell: “Three chords and the truth.” Every American and just about everyone who knows something about America recognizes at least a refrain from “Cold, Cold Heart,” “I Can’t Help It if I’m Still in Love With You,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” “Why Don’t You Love Me (Like You Used to Do)?,” “Jambalaya,” “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and perhaps a score of other songs, whether in versions by Williams himself or Elvis Presley, Nat King Cole, the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Tony Bennett, James Brown, Linda Ronstadt, the Bee Gees, and even Lawrence Welk. What other songwriter been covered by Nat King Cole, the Grateful Dead, and Lawrence Welk? Primarily due to legal squabbles within the Williams family that kept letters and papers out of the hands of potential biographers, and partly because his personal history was so unrelentingly bleak, Williams’s life and work has received surprisingly little serious attention. His own home state of Alabama, which could never quite decide if it regarded him as a suitable native son, did not erect a statue of him until 1991, and not until 1993 were his lyrics taken seriously enough to be published between covers. Not until 1995 did he receive a definitive biography, Hank Williams, by the music historian Colin Escott, who also co-produced the comprehensive set of Williams’s recordings, The Complete Hank Williams. And not until Paul Hemphill’s new Lovesick Blues – The Life of Hank Williams (Viking, $23.95) has Williams been the subject of a book as exhilarating as his music. Hemphill, the Birmingham-born journalist whose 1970 The Nashville Sound was many a college student’s first guide to country music, has now given us in Lovesick Blues perhaps the first book that could be read with equal pleasure by both Hank Williams and his current generation of fans. Like his subject, Hemphill keeps the story lean and simple. Hiram “Hank” Williams, a logger’s son, grew up in tiny West Mount Olive, Alabama, in a log cabin in back of a country store. Once the family was settled, the father, Lonnie, split, and Hank didn’t see him for another ten years. Little Hank roamed the town, listening to music at both white and black churches. “Rather than relying on secondary sources,” Hemphill writes, “—commercial radio, tape recordings, songwriting lessons—he had gone straight to the roots” of his music. His first direct influence was a black professional musician named Rufus Payne, known by the locals as “Tee-Tot.” Payne gave Hank an informal course in nearly half a century of Southern music—country blues, gospel, and medicine show tunes. He taught him something else, too: poor folks wanted to see a performer who looked better than they did. When he became a professional, Hank would emulate his teacher, always performing in a hat, coat and tie. Thin, pale, and suffering from the boyhood ravages of spina bifida, the teenage Williams became an alcoholic. He dropped out of school and got his education in a circuit of clubs that, as Hemphill puts it, “had a particular edge to them; which is to say you could get killed in there.” It was the only work he would ever know, and when he showed up he was good at it. When he didn’t he risked the wrath of small-time mobsters like Jack Ruby (yes, that Jack Ruby). His voice, lyrics, and onstage charisma soon won him a huge following, but his erratic behavior and reputation were anathema to the establishment represented by the Grand Ole Opry. His idol, Roy Acuff, told him, “You got a million-dollar voice, son, but a ten-cent brain.” Perhaps, but as one of his band members put it, “For a man like that, to make that kind of impression on mankind, he had to be a genius. Education might’ve ruined him.” He had an amazing natural poetic gift, honed by a partnership with a Nashville producer named Fred Rose, and together they came up with lyrics that would make a fin-de-siècle French poet weep: “The silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky,
And as I’m wondering where you are, I’m so lonesome I could cry.” He possessed an innate sense of what his audience wanted because, as G. K. Chesterton said of Dickens, he wanted the same things they wanted. Though Williams was the first country songwriter whose work was recorded by mainstream popular singers, he resisted the trend toward greater sophistication; when one of his musicians asked if a recording sounded “too country,” he answered, “It’s never too country.” Hank Williams was the greatest star of the heroic era of country music in the years following the World War II, when the songs were “written and performed by Southern boys and girls not a day’s bus ride from the cotton fields or Appalachian hollows whence they had come. . . . To people in cities like Chicago and New York, especially the more sophisticated songwriters on Tin Pan Alley, country music was for losers. But for people like my father, it was the latest news from home.” Who could have guessed that more than half a century later, in cities like Chicago and New York and London and Tokyo and Moscow, that news would still seem so current?
October 25, 2005
Rosa Parks Posted by Audrey Peterson at 01:00 PM EST A few days ago my mother had a brief conversation with a woman at the Post Exchange at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. It was one of those bits of passing small talk you have with strangers while standing in line to check out. The woman had the misconception that Rosa Parks was no longer living. My mother, who is as informed about American history as about that of her own native Germany, quickly told her that Rosa Parks was indeed alive, and was downright huffy that any American citizen wouldn’t know that. Mom told me this story yesterday evening, her voice filled with the same bewildered dismay that must have been present when she schooled the stranger in the PX. She does not watch very much television, so she could not have known that Rosa Parks had just died, or was dying perhaps even as we spoke. For my own part, I always try to avoid the news after 5 p.m. I figure that if there’s anything more intense and catastrophic than what’s already happening, somebody will make it their business to tell me. So I didn’t find out until this morning. It was like a soft punch to the heart, hearing the news. As most Americans know, Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, for not giving up a her seat to a white man on a crowded, segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She had to submit to being fingerprinted and having mug shots taken. You may have seen them. There’s no smugness to them, unlike some I’ve seen lately. She is dignified and calm in appearance. She was being arrested for doing the right thing. I think I would have been too afraid to try anything like what Mrs. Parks did back then; I believe I am too much of a coward to do anything like that even today, and even for the right reasons. Rosa Parks was 42 years old, one year younger than I am, no impulsive young woman. She was a seamstress and housewife, but she was not some meek little lady who just decided one day that she had had enough. She had known the score for a long time. Her husband, Raymond Parks, a barber, had been active in the National Committee to Defend the Scottsboro Boys, eight black youths unjustly convicted of raping two white women. She had been turned away twice when she tried to register to vote, finally succeeding in 1945. She was an adviser to the NAACP youth council, and the secretary to her local NAACP. She attended a school-integration workshop at the Highlander Folk School (now the Highlander Research and Education Center) in Monteagle, Tennessee. The school was known for training civil rights activists. She even had had a tussle with the same bus driver, James Blake, in 1943, 12 years before the incident that would spark a full-on war for civil rights. Blake had gone apoplectic because Mrs. Parks had refused to pay her fare at the front door and then get off of to enter through the back, as was the custom in Montgomery at the time. She was no more or less afflicted by that vicious brand of openly practiced race prejudice than other blacks and minorities were in the South (and for that matter, in some other parts of the United States too). She almost didn’t get on the bus when she saw Blake was driving it. But this time she had had enough. And in many ways she was prepared for the fight that would come. And it came. The NAACP had been looking for a case like hers to test in court. Members first thought that 15-year-old Claudette Colvin, who had been arrested on the same charge eight months earlier, would be a good subject, but the girl got pregnant, and her mother and the NAACP decided she couldn’t get on the stand (with good reason, because she would likely have been pilloried by the prosecution). Another woman, Mary Louise Smith, was arrested, but it was decided she couldn’t withstand media scrutiny. Mrs. Parks knew about both women, because as secretary of the Montgomery NAACP she had attended the meetings where these decisions were made. A white lawyer named Clifford Durr, who along with his wife Virginia is among the bravest people in civil rights history for reasons I may blog about someday, bailed Mrs. Parks out. Her case went to trial. She was convicted of disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance. A young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., then led a boycott of the Montgomery buses that crippled the city. Less than a year later, in November 1956, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation on transportation in any city was unconstitutional. According to the historian and author Douglas Brinkley, who wrote a crisp and concise biography of Rosa Parks, James Blake, the bus driver, remained unrepentant. Brinkley interviewed him for the book, and Blake used all kinds of foul language when Mrs. Parks’s name was mentioned. He died of a heart attack in 2002, at the age of 89. His story presents an argument for why we should continue to prosecute people who got away with violating the civil rights of others way back when, no matter how old and weak they are. They’re not too weak to keep spewing their bile and hatred. My one consolation is that Mrs. Parks outlived him. Mrs. Parks moved in 1957 to Detroit, where she stayed active in the civil rights movement, and served on the staff of U.S. Representative John Conyers (D., Mich.) from 1965 until 1988. In 1987 she founded the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development, an organization that provides scholarships and guidance for young blacks. Her death was a punch to the heart for me, because she had the kind of integrity and unimpeachable character, the kind of courage and backbone, you almost never see in public figures today. As long as she was alive I could point to her as someone who had the right stuff. But at 92 she lived as long as she could. Rather than mourning her, though, perhaps in her honor I will straighten my back and try to gain just a little of her courage myself.
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