Wrongs What I Do Best: Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture

Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music And Contemporary Culture

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Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Wrong's What I Do Best: This is the first study of "hard" country music as well as the first comprehensive application of contemporary cultural theory to country music. Barbara Ching begins by defining the features that make certain country songs and artists "hard. With chapters on Hank Williams Sr. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Mar 07, East Bay J rated it did not like it Shelves: Okay, so, my best guess on this book is that Barbara Ching had to write a thesis paper.

She came up with all sorts of ways to discuss and explain this crazy hard country music. Her professor loved it! This Okay, so, my best guess on this book is that Barbara Ching had to write a thesis paper. This book needs to see print! In fact, what this pointless, overly long and longwinded essay needed was to be graded and left in a drawer or on a hard drive for all eternity.

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Wrong's What I Do Best - Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (Hardcover)

Wrong's what I do best: English View all editions and formats Summary: This is the first study of "hard" country music as well as the first comprehensive application of contemporary cultural theory to country music. Barbara Ching begins by defining the features that make certain country songs and artists "hard. L With chapters on Hank Williams Sr. Allow this favorite library to be seen by others Keep this favorite library private.

Find a copy in the library Finding libraries that hold this item Ching, Barbara, Wrong's what I do best. Document, Internet resource Document Type: Barbara Ching Find more information about: This title argues that hard country music deliberately focuses on its low position in the American cultural hierarchy, comically singing of failures to live up to American standards of affluence, while mainstream country music focuses on nostalgia, romance, and patriotism of regular folk, buying into the standards of "higher" culture. Publisher Synopsis "A professor of English University of Memphis and obvious country music fanatic, Ching offers a study of the basis and social implications of 'hard country.

User-contributed reviews Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Similar Items Related Subjects: Linked Data More info about Linked Data. Learning the hard way. Contemporary hard country and the incurable unease of class distinction. The burlesque abjection of the white male. Hank Williams and the legacy of hard country stardom. Born in , and originally named Shelton, Hank III bears an eerie resemblance to his gaunt grandfather. I never got any help from anybody up top, like Dad or nothing.

Each living Hank recorded his part separately, a fact that the photographs in the album would seem to deny: In his autobiography, he names the fear that the tradition would continue as one of the factors leading to his suicide attempt: Although it can easily be heard as his farewell to public life, especially since he imagines his enshrinement in the Country Music Hall of Fame, he also makes the tantalizing offer of more music, bragging that he still has songs by Hank Sr.

I found this basic concept and all I did was change the lyrics and the melody a little bit. I just left it the same and sold it to them over and over again. In contrast, many Nashville stars of that era were guided by a handful of Nashville producers, singing what they were told to sing, accompanied by the same musicians who played for the last singer to rent the studio and who would stay for the next one. Rather than structuring his touring schedule around weekly Opry appearances, he specialized in pleasing crowds at all sorts of unlikely cosmopolitan venues: In order to advertise his international appeal, he often released live albums from these locations.

His song sources were equally varied. Without ever crossing out of hard country, he distinguished himself by drawing and crossing several boundary lines. Just as interesting, though, is the contrast with the rock hits of the day. Then came Frankie Avalon and the Italian crooners. People started switching over [to country]. Buck Owens recorded standard country fare, while Corky Jones released a few rockabilly numbers. But on his Capitol recordings, he claims, he was ready for incongruity and integrity: Critics at the time, they thought my guitars were.

In , however, when Owens began recording, his music did not sound like a locomotive coming through the front room.

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These early recordings, with their subdued percussion, unobtrusive guitar work, and languid steel guitar playing, sound like typical s country. The themes, too, are typical. Overcome with remorse, he wishes he were dead. Both versions contrast popular success with the critical cachet of being pictured on the cover of a respected industry magazine. This complaint, no matter how jocular, indicates how far from the country music establishment Owens felt and how little it hurt him. In the same song, he bragged about his numerous Nudie suits and the high fees that he earned: Accusing Nashville of keeping him down and out only added drama to his abject rags-to-riches story.

At the same time, the very notion of drawing an easily discernible line provokes Owens to derisive laughter as he recounts a story from his early days in the music business: Reminds me of Fuzzy Owen. Fuzzy would say, well you go to the starting line. It makes them think of outhouses. It is music born of this country. His distinctive sound has been well analyzed by others; how this sound created distinctive meanings, though, has seldom been discussed.

His visual image reinforces that sense. On many album covers, he and his band, clad in glittering Nudie suits, greet the fans with broad grins. Unlike fellow dust-bowl migrants Merle Haggard and Woody Guthrie, Owens shows little interest in commemorating hard times. Likewise, he avoided typically hard country themes. Whereas most hard country stars mine their own hard times for material, Owens makes a point of playacting. This Modesto-based family had been performing since and recording since The last line, which informs listeners that the number of Philadelphia lawyers has gone down by one, comes across as a punch line.

They tackled everything and made it their own. Owens had more direct exposure to Tommy Collins than he had to the Maddoxes: In contrast, Collins would naively address songs to an aggressive, experienced woman. But as Owens developed his own musical style and message, listeners could also hear a thrilling form of denial. While his characters optimistically dodge rustic contamination, they rarely catch the women of their dreams. Haggard occasionally dramatizes such abandonment with more detail and a note of righteous selfpity: Even then, he hopes the woman who left him will deign to break his heart again.

The singer claimed to be playing the part of a sad and lonely man, a role he believed would lead to stardom. And Owens sings happier songs still. Once she returns, he shamelessly promises to cling to her like a vine. At this point, Owens began hitting the scandal sheets and talk shows with Hank Williams—like displays of loneliness and instability. He then took out a full-page newspaper advertisement begging her forgiveness and swore to reporters that he would do whatever it took to win her back.

She, however, claimed that there were other women in his life. After a few more rounds of well-publicized reconciliation and abandonment, the marriage dissolved. Owens later explained to Dwight Yoakam that drinking caused the whole mess: And when I sobered up, I got it annulled. The exhilarating music vanquished the humiliating implications of the lyrics, somehow shifting the balance of power to where mainstream culture said it should be: And these men, unlike Hank Williams and his ilk, managed somehow to keep their cool in spite of the pain they endured.

I always used that song to close with. By placing these two songs between the applause that elicits an encore and the applause that indicates the end of a successful show, Owens could realize the dreams they expressed: In these two closing songs, on the other hand, the man leaves home, following Lady Limelight into the city. That woman not only wanted him, she rejected many others.

By , Owens had disappeared from the radio and record stores; all that was left was Hee Haw. He claims to have known all along that the overfamiliarity created by a weekly television appearance would hurt his record sales, but he also says he would do it all over. After years of doing it the hard way, Hee Haw put him on easy street. When Dwight Yoakam suggested to him that being invited to join the show also represented a new pinnacle of success, Owens agreed: It was before Hee Haw. And of course, all we did on Hee Haw, we just guaranteed it was true what they thought.

At some level, though, even this opprobrium can be seen as a hardship Owens shouldered in order to have some say about what it meant to be country, for he quickly reminded Yoakam that not only was a network television show a rarity for a country star,45 it was also as ephemeral as the happy love affairs he sang about. It was network for about a year and a half. The show immediately went into syndication, and over episodes were produced through ; the Nashville Network still broadcasts reruns. Owens left the show in Thus, on television, Owens glowed the hard way or no way, just as he did on records.

Those records of his in the mid-sixties were incredible—the zenith of American hillbilly music. As anyone who pays the slightest attention to popular culture knows, California is the capital of cool, and it has been since the movie industry cast the state in this trendsetting role early in the twentieth century.

In fact, he sees this range as central to country stardom: Contributors to his Fan Club Yearbook provide remarkable testimony of his power to gladden them. James Hubbard in When I played your records, it was always so my neighbors without record players could hear too. That, the singer explains, is what makes his chosen honky-tonk so soothing to his lonely soul. Let me hear it.

It was Haggard who kept this city and its dust-bowl background in the public ear. The steady clanging of heavy machinery that accompanies this track stresses the connection between this grinding gig, hard labor, and honky-tonk party time. In the fade-out, this working man mentions playing in the Blackboard and the Lucky Spot, now-legendary honky-tonks where Owens, Haggard, and a host of unknowns got their start. Dwight Yoakam and Buck Owens, ca. To avoid this particular stoning, the Tulsan probably should have headed West like his Okie predecessors.

The line, now, is right where he can oversee it. His album This Time explored this theme in several songs. Instead, their freely displayed broken hearts and unrealized dreams turn them into fools. The music, softer and more enervated than Owens ever used, says no.

Yet the family, particularly the good woman at its center, makes all the struggle worthwhile. The tone quickly shifts in the next two songs, however. The title song reaches the end of that road: The seventh and eighth cuts stress the anomie of California drifting and dreaming. To get his name in lights, the singer has to cross the Floyd County line, and, like the ghostly Hank Williams Sr.

Yoakam thus makes a point of transgression. In addition to unearthing his country roots with cover songs, he also uses them to connect country with other genres. It is in this respect that he is most like Owens: The honky-tonk revivals hit the country airwaves, but others draw and cross all sorts of lines: I come from that time when music just exploded on AM radio. To achieve that degree of creative license, Yoakam, like the Okies before him, had to head West.

Although he was signed to Warner-Reprise in , he does his actual recording at Capitol Studios: To combine drummers and mountain people, though, you have to get the people out of the mountains. Instead, he begs God for another day of safety underground as he thanks Him for his children and few earthly possessions.

A Kentucky coal miner for forty years and my Grandpa. The music that accompanies this story provides a good example of that respite: In this song, a vaguely sketched and ultimately short-lived love affair lured a man from his rural home, but in other songs migration follows a familiar socioeconomic impulse.

In fact, Yoakam says that he called the album Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc. Everett, 13 87 Like Owens, Yoakam wants to draw the lines he crosses. Owens, though, draws it at the experience of failure.

Unlike Owens, Yoakam insists that this possibility remain visible. He wears his jeans tight and torn, and, with his back to the audience, he wiggles suggestively during live performances. His early publicity even tried to construct him as an arbiter of taste. He thought his image might be enhanced by the four-seater Avanti: The front cover of Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc.

The back cover balances tradition and contemporary sophistication even more explicitly: His later album art puts the emphasis almost entirely on the contemporary. While women of questionable virtue surround him, Yoakam guards his paradoxically hip innocence. Yoakam will never tell. Yoakam, however, insists that his background is the very stuff of country music: You hear that in country music. The drinking songs, in particular, get funnier with each album.

Wrong's What I Do Best: Hard Country Music And Contemporary Culture by Barbara Ching

Similarly, his videos often balance defeat with hammy slapstick. His drinking and urban angst compositions can easily be heard as homage, particularly when they are surrounded by covers of classics. Is your love life all messed up, Dwight? In response, Yoakam must belabor the obvious: Certainly, the songs on Gone implicitly raise hard questions about human connections and priorities that go beyond the familiar measures of success and failure.

The twangy title song vaguely sketches a broken romance but the allegro chorus easily lends itself to a comment on mortality: Muted guitars and a startling organ solo reinforce the contemplative tone of the lyrics. That humiliation includes walking the line that Yoakam and Owens have refused to toe but have perhaps never completely crossed, either: Like Owens, the Outlaws armed themselves with Telecasters and a rock beat, and then insisted on the right to produce their own music.

However, this rebellion would have been far less newsworthy if the rebels had acknowledged their similarity to Owens.

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For a short while, Waylon and Willie were stars of such magnitude that, like Cher and Elvis, they had no need for last names. Although they both gathered a vast audience, the differing fates of Waylon and Willie, the two biggest stars of the Outlaw movement, demonstrate once more the essential yet metaphorical rustication of hard country. The cover of their Wanted! While their battles with record companies lacked silver-screen drama, their success did seem to validate the American worship of wild and woolly entrepreneurship.

Gaillard, in his perceptive report- Dying hard Fig. The cover of Wanted! Nevertheless, they were widely perceived as having eschewed the cheating and drinking laments so prevalent in country music. On his liner notes to Wanted! The Outlaws did sing about liberation and good times, but these pleasures were more often fueled by drugs and alcohol than optimism. Such songs allowed these supposedly tough loners to stand by their female fans without becoming emotionally solid and economically sound breadwinners.

While commentators now almost ritually explain the movement as little more than a marketing ploy,14 it marketed to the mainstream what had never been marketed before or since: Although they have outlived Williams, their hard country stardom has not. In , he released Stardust, a collection of pop standards. Shortly thereafter, he signed several Hollywood motion picture deals.

As a result, his star continued to gain magnitude while the death knells for the Outlaw movement rang. In , Hank Williams Jr. The Outlaws provides an interesting commentary on the fate of these two artists who brought hard country its greatest audience. The song epitomizes the fate of the hard country star. In fact, Waylon has wandered down just such a hard road. Willie, on the other hand, sang his part and hit the road—and for him, the road is a highway. He has found his way to the fast track that takes him right out of hard country. Jones has had a remarkably long career, with hits on the chart in every decade since the s.

References to him abound in country songs, and he has lent his voice to many singers by joining them for a line or two in their songs, or by recording duets with them. On other occasions, performers make a point of singing about Jones or imitating him. He has also recorded numerous duets with numerous partners. Importantly, Jones occupies a pivotal position in the transmission of the hard way, allying himself with Hank Williams and anointing members of the new generation who ally themselves with him. Whereas country-music-loving presidents advocate frugality, hard work, and moderation, Jones—at least until recently— stands for bankruptcy, extravagance, and addiction.

The tabloids have made this personal turmoil public, and thus his songs of woe sound like chapters in his autobiography. He suffered through failed marriages, alcoholism,.

Wrong's What I Do Best - Hard Country Music and Contemporary Culture (Electronic book text)

Ever the lonesome loser, never the rugged individualist, Jones expresses most clearly his commitment to the hard way in his frequent songs about dream houses decaying into nightmares. When Jones sings these tales of woe, they seem to be the story of his life, and when he tells us the story of his life, he insists on his attachment to this particular aspect of the modern American dream. Although he often pleads lost memory and lost documents to explain vast gaps in his autobiography, I Lived to Tell It All, he can remember a great deal about his real estate transactions.

During the height of his cocaine addiction he recalls buying seven houses in Florence, Alabama. A lot of folks would be surprised to learn that I enjoy interior decorating. I can walk into a shell with a roof and tell you what it would look like after six months of work. Then I can walk through a furniture store and tell you just what would go with what and in what room. The back cover of I Lived to Tell It All , the compact disc named after his autobiography, even shows him wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and a big smile as he perches on top of a John Deere riding mower.

Yet unlike Williams, he rarely offers religious solace; although Jones has recorded a few religious songs and a gospel album, none of his signature songs has religious themes. In the next verse, he imagines bankruptcy and unemployment will follow since he lost his last two dollars at the horse races and his boss is threatening to lay him off. After a crying spell, he concludes the swelling third verse by threatening suicide; he says he feels like giving up and dying. Instead, the song makes sense through the reiteration of familiar elements: Then, he cries as his illusions crumble.

The home, the private space where identity is nurtured, and the house, which makes a public statement about who we are, sings of failure. To further embody such failure, Jones commissioned a Nudie suit decorated with tear-stained faces peeking through windows. In this house, both the woman and the man have a story, but neither one has a happy ending.

The most worthless objects that surround him have more value than he does. The roses, after all, had a good year, and he even wishes he were the lipstick-stained cigarette and coffee cup that his wife at least touched. He, too, disintegrates before our eyes as he drunkenly hallucinates a conversation with Fred Flintstone and Elvis. Typically, the song lists the many objects adorned with yellow paper: The realization of what he has lost leads to yet another burst of tears.

The singer suddenly sees years of lonely decay ahead for him and his house. In turn, he seeks both comfort and complicity with his audience. Of course, not all of these songs are completely straight-faced. Being in on the joke adds to our complicity. While Jones bemoans his fate, Jackson is seeking his destiny. Whatever the autobiographical aura may be and in albums like Who I Am Jackson gestures toward creating it and however traditional he sounds, the glamorous Jackson relates to his audience as a superstar rather than as an inhabitant of hard country.

Part of her plea for mercy suggests that he not listen to Haggard and Jones since she believes they aid and abet his mischief. More recently, he also needed to reach the audience that those stars had built for themselves. What hard country star could admit to having laurels or a front porch to rest on? Before his singing debut, his management force-feeds him Strait and Jones.

With the whole world gone country, what special connection can a hard country artist make with his audience? Country, in this song, remains a refuge for losers, and although country gives these losers hope, it also turns them into opportunists: Some of them, though, may turn out to be. Jackson himself may never become the superstar he plays. This page intentionally left blank Notes Introduction 1. Among postmodern theorists, see Jim Collins, Uncommon Cultures: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism Bloomington: Duke University Press, Waylon Jennings with Lenny Kaye, Waylon: An Autobiography New York: Warner Books, , Loretta Lynn explains her songwriting procedure similarly: Peter Guralnick, Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians Boston: Godine, , Simon Frith, Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music Cambridge: Harvard University Press, , University of North Carolina Press, Cited in Frye Gaillard, Watermelon Wine: Peterson, Creating Country Music: University of Chicago Press, , — Authenticity, Commercialization, and Country Music Nashville: University of Texas Press, , John Grissim, Country Music: Paperback Library, , Paul Hemphill, The Nashville Sound: Simon and Schuster, , 49— Harvard University Press, , 8—9, for a more general discussion of this tendency.

Nicholas Dawidoff, In the Country of Country: Pantheon, , Scholars Press, , Storey Books, , Laurence Leamer, Three Chords and the Truth: Bruce Feiler, Dreaming Out Loud: Avon, , 7. Routledge, , A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Harvard University Press, For yet another discussion, see Tex Sample, White Soul: Abingdon Press, , especially part one.

See also Richard A. Peterson and Roger M. A journal title provides the handiest example: The Journal of Urban and Cultural Studies, founded in Cornell University Press, , 5. Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture New York: The term comes from Stallybrass and White, 3. See Fear of Falling: More recently, Juliet B. Schor, The Overspent American: It should be noted that after complaints from Oklahomans, Freixenet stopped using the advertisement. Williams never released this song although he did make a demonstration version of it, an indication that he was planning to record it.

Bud Schaetzle, 30 min. Country Music in America, ed. Billboard, , Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy, ed. Ching and Creed New York: Routledge, , 1— The Possum, the Hag, and the Rhinestone Cowboy 1. Publication of the Johnny Paycheck International Fan Club , merits quotation at some length as an example: There is hardly anything most of us look forward to more, than our paycheck. Most also wish our paycheck came more often. But on abjection alone, see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans.

Columbia University Press, Ressentiment and the Abject Hero Princeton: Princeton University Press, , for a discussion of the cultural manifestations of abjection. See John Jump, Burlesque London: Seuil, , for general discussions of the burlesque. According to Robert C. Allen, in Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture Chapel Hill: Peter Stearns, American Cool: New York University Press, , 1.

Loren Baritz, The Good Life: Knopf, , Guralnick stresses the common roots of country music and the blues. Uncle Dave Macon to Johnny Rodriguez, ed. Malone and Judith McCulloh Urbana: University of Illinois Press, , Charley Pride with Jim Henderson, Pride: Morrow, , He was a handsome man but with little of the overt sexuality projected by many of the younger black singers, and he avoided any references to civil rights or political topics.

Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, Finding Her Voice: Crown, , provide a thorough historical overview of women in country music. In practice, women nearly always responded to men rather than the other way around. See Colin Escott, Liner notes for. And the Answer Is! Daniel Cooper, Lefty Frizzell: Little, Brown, , Also see Tosches, Country, 26— Pat Alger, Larry B. Basic Books, , — Random House, , Billy Sherrill, liner notes to George Jones Anniversary: Bob Allen, George Jones: Lefty Frizzell and Sanger D.

The lyrics note that the drunk causes himself misery at the same time that he embarrasses his family. The conclusion turns the title into a paradox that sums up the dialogue of abjection: Lyrical Themes in Country Music, ed. McLaurin and Richard A. Haggard relates some of his marijuana-induced antics in his autobiography. My Story New York: Simon and Schuster, Rogers, The Country Music Message: University of Arkansas Press, , Likewise, he objected to sitting on a bale of hay for an appearance on Hee Haw Grissim, On the other hand, he told Di Salvatore that his disagreement with the Sullivan show was not about singing Rodgers and Hammerstein but rather about the effeminate dance number he was expected to do while he sang Larry King provides a sympathetic explanation for the muddle: Michael Bane, The Outlaws: Revolution in Country Music New York: Doubleday, , The hard act to follow 1.

In an attempt to demythify Williams, his most recent biographer adopts a studiedly neutral title: The Complete Lyrics New York: For example, Roger M. Williams, in Sing a Sad Song: The Life of Hank Williams, 2nd ed. Few people doubt that his greatest laments.

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