Black with dried blood: Nick Tosches' Country book

"We got both kinds of music", goes the old joke, "country and western", and that's certainly true of Nick Tosches' book, Country: Living Legends And Dying Metaphors In America's Biggest Music (1977). Yeah, man, this book has certainly got both kinds of music, and plenty more too. Yee-haw. I ain't - it's fair to say - no big country music fan, but I happily saddled up and galloped through Tosches' book because earlier this year I'd thoroughly enjoyed his excellent book on Jerry Lee Lewis's rollercoaster life. Why? Because Tosches is a really entertaining writer and one who appears to have a genuine understanding of his subjects (we're not talking a gun-for-hire writer churning out middle-market stuff for the HMV books section). Tosches' thing is a brisk economy of style, dark humour, tart judgments, a deep sense of history, and whole bucket-loads of discographical detail - eg a page-long sentence listing dozens of records from a given period, or the reproduction of a page from a record company's sales catalogue, complete with order code references. Or he might chuck in some heady diversions into super-wide-angle history ("Cut to Athens, fourth century B.C.", begins one paragraph). Overall, Tosches' book sets out to show what a "crazy bastard sort of thing country music is", and I reckon he definitely succeeds in this. 

Murder, mayhem and dense detail: Tosches' book

Anyway, here a few of the things in Country which caught my eye:

*Bastardy, in the sense of uncertain parentage, is very much true in the case of country music. Medieval English ballads, Scottish and Irish fiddle music from the seventeenth century, late-nineteenth-century "minstrel" jazz, honky-tonk, the blues: all this and more is part of the weird and wonderful parentage of country music in Tosches' retelling. When you get right down to it, hybridisation is surely the key nature of all music, so it's obviously going to be true of country, an especially capacious (vague?) term in the first place. 

*Given country music's long and complicated genesis, Tosches is unsurprisingly wary on the question of the supposed "first" country record. Evidently, there's fairly broad acceptance that this was Eck Robertson & Henry C Gilliland's Sallie Goodwin, from June 1922. But even if this is correct, says Tosches, it would only be accurate to say it was the first country song by "authentic country artists", as there'd been numerous earlier ones by pop artists of various kinds.   

*Just one of countless examples of country music's mixed nature is mentioned in the form of a Hank Williams song from 1949: Lovesick Blues. This was a huge hit, the biggest country record of the year, and with his rendition at the Grand Ole Opry in June that year Williams "became myth, the archetypal country singer". Yet the song was written, says Tosches, "by a Jew from Russia [Irving Mills, born Isadore Minsky]" and "midwived by a redneck jazz singer who would have been thrown off the Opry [Rex Griffin]".

*The use of violins in proto-country music long predated the use of guitars, and it wasn't until the late-nineteenth century, explains Tosches, that guitars became more common than violins among rural musicians in the USA. The reason was apparently two-fold: guitars were easier to make and maintain than violins, and guitars also didn't have the awkward association with sinfulness that came with fiddles. 

*By the late-1930s, the steel guitar had replaced the fiddle as "the signature instrument of country music", though many country musicians would later return to what Tosches calls the "plainer" sound of a standard guitar accompaniment. Among others, Tosches mentions Jimmie Rodgers' use of steel guitar on his records, an especially notable example given how Rodgers "made black music accessible to white audiences" (Tosches' words). Meanwhile, in his brief account of Rodgers' important part in the development of country music, Tosches mentions a 1931 record called Jimmie Rodgers' Puzzle Record, which rather amazingly played one of three separate songs depending where on the record the stylus was placed. A couple of millimetres separated Everyone Does It In Hawaii, Blue Yodel and Train Whistle Blues. Evidently, these multi-grooved records dated back to 1920. 

*Again on steel guitars, Tosches explains how by the late-1940s and early-1950s pedal steel guitar had become the dominant sound in country music, while, by contrast, blues musicians stuck with the slide and bottleneck style. Subsequently, pedal steel country was made hugely popular by Webb Pierce (check out his Back Street Affair, a cornball triumph which still sounds good today), and Tosches also mentions the truly prolific session work of Speedy West, a pedal steel musician who apparently played on more than 6,000 separate recordings with 177 singers (some pop, not country) in a five-year period in the early fifties. Tosches likes to regularly throw in such mind-boggling statistics.  

*Up until June 1949, country music had apparently always been described by Billboard magazine as "hillbilly" music. Thereafter it became "country and western". Meanwhile, some country music was beginning to sound like rock-and-roll, with "hillbilly boogie" emerging in the 1940s (Tosches mentions Johnny Barfield, the Delmore Brothers, Arthur Smith and others). Key records were apparently Freddie Slack & Ella Mae Morse's The House Of Blue Lights (hear the black singer Morse using the word "homie" on this btw), Red Foley's Tennessee Saturday Night and the rhythm to Hank Williams' Kaw-Liga (evidently informing some of the emerging ideas at Sun Records). And Tosches mentions how the West Coast "okie" group the Maddox Brothers & Rose were also beginning to incorporate yelps, screams and howls, soon to become the "watermarks of rockabilly".  

*Tosches has a few fascinating pages on how small independent US record companies were a key part of the history of country music (and blues and rock-and-roll). Tracing the "indies" back to 1922 and the Los Angeles-based "all-colored" label, Sunshine, Tosches points out that independent labels would sometimes take a punt on stuff the majors wouldn't touch (it was "an avant-garde of economic necessity"). Hank Williams' first records were issued by a tiny New York company called Sterling, while even the Beatles' first US records came out on a small label (Vee Jay). 

*Along with Nik Cohn, who Tosches sometimes resembles as a writer (though he's much more research-heavy than Cohn), Tosches disparages Bob Dylan, dismissing him as an "utterer of hermetic ironies". Hmm, that's Dylan dealt with. To me, this seems extreme and overdone. In context, Tosches disses Dylan while exalting Elvis ("I think Elvis Presley will never be solved"), which might make some kind of sense if you're restricting yourself to a discussion of mega-celebrity and the broad-brush history of pop and rock-and-roll. But it surely doesn't if you're open to thinking about how Dylan's wild poetics fed into the sixties counterculture or countless artists' work ever since. Whatever. Meanwhile, speaking of Elvis, Tosches has a typically smart line on Colonel Parker's cynical comment that Elvis's death wouldn't change anything and that his records would continue to sell. And lo, "sales rose on the third day" after Elvis's death, says Tosches. Tosches' worldliness in full effect there. 

I could go on, bullet point after bullet point. Yodelling. You want to know how yodelling fits into the history of country music? Fine, read pages 110-114 of Country (the Secker & Warburg 1991 edition). Or whether real cowboys made country records? Pages 114-117 will have you covered (incidentally, Tosches calls the 1930s Hollywood version of the yodelling cowboy "one of the mightiest pop hallucinations of all time"). So yes, as you'll have gathered, Tosches' book is positively packed out with stuff like this. Potted histories of entire musical genres are woven into a wider story about country music, while fascinating sub-stories keep appearing along the way. You get the sense that Tosches was having to work hard to rein some of this in - how tempting it must have been to tell us more about Hawaiian music's influence on country, or how the pieties of the church skewed (at least some) country music toward the plodding religiosity of Johnny Cash ("Johnny Cash and his God are a particularly tedious act", says Tosches). Unsurprisingly given he would write his Jerry Lee Lewis book after Country, Tosches does linger a little longer on the R&R wildman himself (wildness is very much what Tosches relates to). The personification of "redneck rock-and-roll", "homo agrestis americanus ultimus", one of JLL's qualities was that he "balanced things out" when it came to Elvis Presley, allowing Presley to seem wholesome and clean-cut by comparison. And speaking of bad boys, Tosches speculates that Sun's Sam Phillips may have signed Lewis because Lewis's piano playing reminded him of Ike Turner's, who'd played on the Phillips-produced Jackie Brenston sessions in 1951, including the legendary Rocket 88. Phillips snapped up Lewis, says Tosches, because he was "in the market for a new punk prodigy". And in the end, I reckon it's this - Tosches' ability to understand wildmen like Lewis and sharkish operators like Colonel Parker and Sam Phillips - that makes his book on the seemingly staid world of country & western music the suprisingly wild ride it is (less a gentle trot into the sun-bathed distance, more the bareback bronc madness of an out-of-control rodeo). Jerry Lee and Elvis were both steeped in country music but their early music fused this with the frantic energy of rockabilly, a fiery new music, says Tosches, with a spirit "that bordered on mania". Rockabilly - hillbilly rock-and-roll - is, I guess, about as far removed from the tiresome stuff warbled out by "classic" 1970s country musicians  - the John Denvers, Glenn Campbells, Dolly Partons, Waylon Jennings, Billie Jo Spears, Kris Kristoffersons, Charley Prides and Merle Haggards (etc ad nauseam), all the C&W musicians who dominated daytime radio back when I was growing up. This was (and is) horribly dull music. To my mind, it was so dull that no-one below the age of about 40 could possibly have liked it (I hated it). I'm sure Radio 2 still plays this stuff to this day but, as Tosches' excellent book shows, it's the richer, wilder, weirder side of country that surely deserves to be aired and listened to. Or at least the forgotten music of pioneer country artists from the 1920s, 30s and 40s. In the preface to the 1984 reissue of his book, Tosches reckons he bemused his original editors by almost completely ignoring the contemporary country stars who were part of the mid-70s country boom as he was writing the book. Wanting to "explore the darker areas of country music's history, not its current popularity", Tosches went his own way. On sex and sexuality, for instance, the "valley of the shadow of Dolly Parton's cleavage was bypassed", while murky goings-on from the late-1800s were discussed instead (eg the origins of that classic tale of sex and muderous revenge, Frankie And Johnny). So it's more or less typical that Tosches ends his book with a grim and apparently obscure two-page story of a "country star" shot in the face who, when found dead the next morning by the cleaning woman, has "a paper sack over his head, stuck fast and black with dried blood". This mysterious mini-chapter, called "Northeast Mississippi, 1953" (the year of Hank Williams' death at the age of 29), is possibly an allusion to a known incident, but I couldn't discern what that might be. Instead, I'm minded to think it's a macabre symbolic finale that Tosches chooses to tack onto his serious-minded, thoroughly un-romantic history of country music, a music awash not just with schmaltz and fake emotion, but with criminality, cruelty, outlaws and sudden death. Think Badlands, not the Dukes Of Hazzard. Yep, Country concludes with a squalid murder and dried black blood rather than the rhinestone suits and gleaming smiles of 70s C&W. Ride 'em, cowboy.

PS: a mysterious note

It wasn't until I finally got around to actually reading Tosches' book that I realised my secondhand copy contained this handwritten note. Hmm, what's it all about? It's apparently some beach bum musician's account of playing a gig ("a bit sparce" [sic]), being ogled (so he says) at his show by a "beautiful girl", and then having a Sunday rest day "getting stoned", not seeing a whale and generally being very laidback. All in all a sort of ideal 1990s slacker vibe. Perhaps the guy was ploughing through Tosches' book as he honed his Neil Young or Gram Parsons tribute act? Or maybe he was doing a more Frank Fairfield or Sam Amidon-type murder ballads thing? Who knows? With a music as potentially powerful as country, the possibilities are endless ...