Alaska Employment Law

Sing Me Back Home to New Hampshire

Only rarely do I read a book that I wish I had written (suggesting, I must admit, that I am not really competent to write on more than one or two subjects), but just that sort of thing happened when I was about halfway through Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music, by Dan Jennings. Mr. Jennings, an editor for the New York Times, grew up in a dirt-poor part of New Hampshire.  Now, people don’t usually associate New Hampshire with country music, but then again - and this is a point Mr. Jennings makes - there isn’t any real country music anymore.  And while no one would mistake it for Tennessee, parts of New Hampshire (a favorite state to and in which I regularly travel)  still qualify as down, and pretty much out.

The music that spoke so much to Jennings - as well as to a younger version of me, listening from Massachusetts in the dark of night, on my little Motorola transistor, to the voice of Hank Williams beamed over the AM airwaves all the way from WWVA in Wheeling or WOWO in Fort Wayne - is the country music that had fully emerged by the post-war 1940s and lasted into the mid- and late 1960s. It was Hank himself, it was honky tonk, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Lefty Frizzell, Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Johnny Paycheck, Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce (”There Stands the Glass”), and on, and on. This is music, says Jennings, for people “living for overtime up the mill and [a] weekend case of Schlitz.” It’s often dark, it’s often comic, and it belies the simplicity of its forms.  Poverty, prison, violence, alcohol, sex, death or love are at the heart of the great country songs in this period. There is nothing false about the music.

Jennings recounts in particular how much Cash gave voice to feelings Jennings couldn’t otherwise understand, in his 1957 debut LP Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar, which offered the indelible “Cry Cry Cry,” “I Walk the Line,” and “Folsom Prison Blues.” To Jennings, the spare, unadorned “I Walk the Line” is not exactly a love song, but a song about longing, confusion, and fear, and he’s right. “I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die,” Cash intones, without the smallest trace of irony, from Folsom Prison.  “No matter how I struggle and strive/I’ll never get out of this world alive,” sang Williams, the father of modern country music, in a tune he no doubt intended to be humorous, released in 1952 just before his shocking death, age 29. That’s what country music was about. Both a personal memoir and a tribute, Sing Me Back Home is evocative, funny, bitter, sad, and true.

Bob Feller Meets SABR

With Mr. Jennings’ book somewhere in my mind, I drove to Cleveland for the Annual Convention of the Society for American Baseball Research, or SABR, a non-profit organization for baseball geeks that focuses on the history of the game at a micro level and on the development of statistics and other factual information that enable baseball geeks to analyze and understand the game better.  SABR members are nuts about the sport. (You can join for $60 at http://www.sabr.org/.)

The keynote speaker at the opening ceremony was Bob Feller, who pitched for the Cleveland Indians from 1936 (age 17!) to 1956 and won 266 games, missing three years for military service in WW2. Feller threw three no-hitters, including one on opening day (1940), and twelve 1-hitters. He held the no-hitter and single game and single season strikeout records that were later tied or broken by the likes of Sandy Koufax, Tom Seaver, Nolan Ryan, and Randy Johnson. At 89, he is the second oldest living player in the Baseball Hall of Fame (former Red Sox Bobby Doerr is currently the oldest).

Feller grew up on a farm in Iowa, and he still seems like a farm boy from Iowa, with big hands that would look okay on the handle of a plow. He reminisced, fairly randomly, about his time in baseball, and mentioned that in the iconic Nat Fein photo of Babe Ruth in his very last appearance at Yankee Stadium, June 1948, Babe is leaning on a bat, using it almost like a cane. Card-carrying SABR members know that bat was Bob Feller’s bat, grabbed by Ruth from the Cleveland dugout to steady himself. Feller eventually had to buy it (for $95,000!) from a collector, but the last bat touched by Babe Ruth is now in Feller’s little museum in Van Meter, Iowa.

After his speech, Feller patiently autographed pretty much everything put in front of him, so I got his autograph on a picture of him as a young man signing a contract with the Indians. I noted that my dad had been a farm boy, from Missouri, and had also fought in WW2. To my surprise, Feller seemed interested, and we traded a few words on the use of B-24s as radar and recon planes in the Pacific Theatre. Feller inquired about my dad’s health, and I had to point out that it was unchanged since 1993, when he passed away.  I liked the man.

Over the next couple of days I attended half a dozen SABR seminars on, among other things, (1) the genesis of cricket and how playing cricket on a field that was too small contributed to the development of baseball, (2) the consequences of using maple bats instead of ash bats, (3) a history of baseball played in the Philippines in the early 20^th century, when one of the teams consisted of African-American servicemen in the U.S. armed forces, (4) how many home runs Babe Ruth might have hit had he used steroids (842, if you’re following along), and (5) the reasons for the profound decline in the number of inside-the-park home runs. I also met Bill Nowlin, the founder of Rounder Records, an important folk label based in Massachusetts, who has written or edited roughly a dozen books about the Red Sox.

Sing Me Back Home via Cleveland, West Lebanon and eBay

When I got tired of baseball, I walked over to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Lake Erie. Having a Hall of Fame is completely antithetical to my conception of rock and roll, but the Hall does have a lot of cool stuff, and this time I noticed Paul Simenon’s smashed bass guitar from the cover photo on the Clash’s London Calling, and the actual piano that Jerry Lee Lewis used at Sun Recording Studios to bang out “Great Balls of Fire,” surely one of the very most inspired moments rock and roll has ever seen. It was a black upright.  I forget the make.

As in all museums, as you exit this Hall of Fame you must go through the gift store. I bought my daughter a tie-dyed t-shirt that says, “If this music is too loud, you’re too old,” and then headed for the music bins, hoping to find a good comprehensive collection of the kind of country music Dan Jennings liked so much.  No luck.  But I did find Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar, so I bought it and played it, a lot, on the drive back to Boston.  I thought of Dan Jennings.  I thought of my old transistor radio.

A week later I found myself in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, and in a little music store I picked up Social Distortion’s Greatest Hits, because I wanted to listen to that band’s speedball cover version of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.”  Mike Ness and the rotating group of sidemen he calls Social Distortion are a fabulous band, sort of raw roots-punk.  “Story of My Life,” “Ball and Chain,” “Sick Boy,” “Bad Luck,” and “I Was Wrong” are all great songs played with intensity, dominated by rhythm guitar and steady drumming and Mr. Ness’s gravelly, permanently rueful rants.  Social D gets pegged as California punk, but that’s not really right.  In his own way, Mike Ness is country too, and he feels the connection between country and punk, as shown by his two solo albums from 1999 - Cheating at Solitaire, which contains mostly originals done in a rockabilly style, and, more significantly, Under the Influences, which is full of old-time country songs, with fiddles, pedal steel, and autoharp, and, sure, some of Ness’s buzz saw guitar.  As a reviewer wrote, “It’s pretty bad when it takes a punk rocker to make a great country album.  But that’s exactly what happened and thank God it did.”  If you want to try Social D, or SxDx as the cool kids call them, try Mommy’s Little Monster, Social Distortion, Somewhere Between Heaven and Hell, and Sex, Love and Rock’N’Roll.  If I could just pick one, I would pick Social Distortion.

I didn’t give up my search for the real country music. On eBay I found an out-of-print 4CD set called Columbia Country Classics, and I have been happily playing Johnny Horton’s “Honky Tonk Man” (1956) and the original version of Gene Autry’s “You Are My Sunshine” (1941).  I am pretty sure this collection also has Tammy Wynette and David Houston singing “My Elusive Dreams” (1967).  I hope so.