Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music

Dana Jennings tells what Country Music means to him and the people he grew up with in New Hampshire. New Hampshire? Is that the Dana Jennings who is an editor at The New York Times, was interviewed on NPR about his ongoing battle with cancer, and who writes novels under the name of Dana Andrew Jennings? Yes, it is, but in Sing Me Back Home he gets in touch with his inner hillbilly, expressing himself in poetic prose that still sounds like a good ole boy, albeit one with a very large vocabulary. It is part memoir, part sociology thesis, part Country Music appreciation course. Jennings makes an excellent case that Country Music from 1940 to 1970 was at its peak, and has gone downhill since then. I tend to agree with him, but think that great Country Music is still being created, but not the commercial, watered down, saccharine sounds coming out of Nashville and winning the Country Music Association awards, made for people with weak viscera or none at all. He also contends that the rural areas of New Hampshire and other parts of the US of A where people are poor, not just the South, are just as much a part of the Red Neck Diaspora as 'Bama, Texas, and Oklahoma. And what about Bakersfield? It is only 100 miles from Hollywood, yet it's the birthplace of Merle Haggard and The Bakersfield Sound. In the course of telling the story of Country Music, his own story gradually emerges: He got good grades and went to college, so he didn't quite fit in, but in spite of his ability to appreciate Coltrane and Cabernet, he would really rather crack a cold one, kick back in the dark, and listen to Hag. As Jeff Foxworthy might say, "If your house has wheels, and your car don't, Dana Jennings, you just might be a Redneck." June 4, 2008, 8:54 am New York Times Website Living With Music: A Playlist by Dana Jennings On Wednesdays, this blog is the delivery vehicle for "Living With Music," a playlist of songs from a writer or some other kind of book-world personage. This week: Dana Jennings, an editor at the Escapes section of the New York Times, and the author of "Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music." 10 Out of 20 from Dana Jennings's June 2008 Playlist: 1. I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, Hank Williams. The Complete Hank Williams 2. It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels, Kitty Wells. The best of Kitty Wells: Millenium Collection 4. Home of the Blues, Johnny Cash. The Essential Johnny Cash 1955-1983 5. There Stands the Glass, Webb Pierce. Honky Tonk Songs: 22 Country Hits 6. Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young, Faron Young. The Classic Years 1952-62 7. Mom and Dad's Waltz, Lefty Frizzell. Life's Like Poetry 8. Honky Tonk Man, Johnny Horton. Johnny Horton - 1956-1960 14. She's Got You, Patsy Cline. The Patsy Cline Story 15. Hungry Eyes, Merle Haggard. Down Every Road 18. Pardon Me, I've Got Someone to Kill, Johnny Paycheck. The Lost Masters: Collection

This is a wonderful joyride through personal memoir courtesy of the souped-up hot rod of the history of country music. The writing is not elegant: it's raw as moonshine, honest as the love of a good dog, and full of the sort of knowledge only a true enthusiast can have. Jennings is the sort of storyteller that pulled people from one house to another once, the kind that keeps everyone leaning forward, sitting only on the front edge of chair, couch, stool, or upturned apple box. This is a single sitting book, one of those that goes from 0-80 in a paragraph, and then doesn't slow down, even for curves--especially for curves. Highly recommended.

Like the author, I was a yankee (New Jersey in my case, NH in his) who grew up in a poor white family whose main musical preference was country. I am older than the author, and his 1960's experiences were my '50's memories. My family was maybe a bit less broke, a bit more functional despite the presence of a lot of drinking. But Hank Williams and Slim Whitman and Eddy Arnold and the Sons of the Pioneers and Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and Jimmy Wakely and Red Foley and Tex Ritter were on our turntable all the time. Auto mechanics directly, and auto racing indirectly, and fishing and hunting and target shooting were the big recreational events of my youth. My folks had schooling that stopped at fourth grade for my orphaned dad and sixth grade for my ma. There were sporadic tragedies involving guns and cars and divorces and diseases and feuds in my extended clan. Dana Jennings has written about this kind of childhood, punctuated by what is now called "classic country music" and I identified with almost all of what he went through and what he thinks about it. Like him, I escaped into journalism. Despite our similar backgrounds, I could not have written nearly as well about my family as he wrote about his own. I think he did a grand job in this effort.

OK, I admit it. When it comes to real country music, and those whom I believe truly appreciate it as the art form that it is, I am prejudiced. Never in a million years would I believe that some guy from New Hampshire, a writer and editor for the New York Times, of all the newspapers in the word, for crying out loud, would know much about the real thing; no way would someone with that background actually understand the music and those who created it. Well, that was before I read Sing Me Back Home, by Dana Jennings, who is exactly the guy I just described. I want to apologize, Mr. Jennings, and I salute you, sir. Sing Me Back Home is not a straight forward history of country music. Books like those serve their purpose, certainly, and there are many worthy ones out there already that take that approach. Jennings, on the other hand, turns the history of country music into something very personal: a way to share his own family story. As most country music historians (and knowledgeable fans) agree, the years from the late forties to the very end of the sixties mark the period of classic country music. The music reached its peak during those years and has faced a steady, downhill slide since 1970 with the exception of a small (and poorly rewarded) group of pickers and singers that refuses to let classic country music completely disappear. But, overall, country music has probably never been in a sorrier state than it is in today. According to Jenkins, in fact, "It can be entertaining, but the difference between today's country and the summits of the 1950s and `60s is the difference between the lightning and the lighting bug." As Jennings puts it, "country music was made by poor people for poor people." At its best, country music reflected, and maybe even justified, the lives endured by the rural poor who lived all around the United States, not just those from the South or the mountains and coal-producing regions of the Southeast. It is the history of working people, those who made livings with their hands, often at the sacrifice of their health or even their lives, during those two decades. Nothing for them came easy and, when they finally made it to Saturday night, they became walking, talking country songs themselves. They lived the cheating songs and the drinking songs; they spent time in prison, went hungry in the bad times, hit the road out of desperation or despair, had love affairs end badly, and repented on Sunday mornings with the full knowledge that they would backslide again come the very next Saturday night. But what makes Sing Me Back Home so memorable is the way that Dana Jennings readily fits a member of his own family to every kind of classic country song there is. He lived it - and he remembers it because it made him the man that he is today despite the fact that he sits behind a desk at the New York Times. Song by song, the reader meets members of Jennings' family who could easily have been the inspirations for

For anyone who thinks country music begins and ends with Kenny Chesney, here's your reality check. Part autobiography, part music appreciation course, the author gives the reader a lean, mean lesson in what country music -- in its Golden Age -- was all about. Far more than just twangy songs about drinking and cheating, the country music of those times and artists tied the music to the poorest, the marginalized, the most helpless of Americans. The prose is eloquent and evocative, yet sparse as a meal in the Depression. Also funny, biting, and wryly witty at times. The author reminds us, too, that country music didn't stem solely from, nor was it intended solely for the people of the rural south. Instead, artists like Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Faron Young, the Louvin Brothers, Connie Smith, et al, were all people who came up from hardscrabble lives & times, and their music resonated with people everywhere who suffered from deprivation, whether the listeners lived in Kingston, New Hampshire, or Stollings, West Virginia. The music of our youth evokes the people, the pain, the loves, the losses, and the emotions of our youth. Like the author, I had turned away from country music during my youth, and when I returned to it later in life I found that there isn't any (almost none, anyway) country music anymore. No more fiddle, no more steel, no more twang. Honesty? Fuhgeddaboudit! This book reminded me in so many ways of the music I love, but more than that, it brought back the people I loved most and who are no longer with me. Yeah, this book was a trip down memory lane for me, but it also felt like validation for the appreciation I've put into this kind of music. And it's a great tool for beginners who want to learn what the Golden Age of country music really sounded like, and where to begin listening.