Mermaid Avenue VH1 Storytellers Clinch Mountain Country Sharps & Flats is a Salon reviews section sponsored by Borders.com A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow Jerry Seinfeld is the devil Without reservations By Mary Elizabeth Williams A conversation with "Smoke Signals'" Sherman Alexie Y E S T E R D A Y Armageddon Reviewed by Charles Taylor This summer's other meteor movie is so dumb and unimaginative, it would even embarrass NASA (07/01/98) Road warrior By David Bowman The path to Lucinda Williams' "Car Wheels" was paved with good intentions (07/01/98) R E C E N T_. M U S I C American Squirm By Sarah Vowell Fishers of men: Two offbeat TV talk shows reinvent the celebrity interview (06/29/98) The A-Team By Jonathan Curiel A tour of Africa's biggest pop stars becomes the biggest musical bargain in America (6/24/98) Sharps & Flats Reviews of new CDs by Billy Bragg and Wilco, Neil Finn, Spinanes, Ellis Marsalis, Robert Pollard and Genesis (6/24/98) Confessions of a box-set sucker By Eric Alterman A music collector thanks Rhino for repackaging his awful adolescence (6/22/98) Sharps and Flats Reviews of new CDs from Brian Wilson, Grant Lee Buffalo, Rod Stewart, John Fogerty and more (06/17/98) BROWSE THE MUSIC ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

E V E R Y T H I N G   O L D   I S  young again _____New music from the veterans of _____Old Country is roping in rock audiences. BY BILL C. MALONE | New Country Music, we are told, has become the music of suburbia, reflecting the interests and dreams of an audience that has become increasingly rootless, regionless and classless. Its singers summon few memories of that working-class culture that once surrounded country music. With Garth Brooks, Shania Twain and other young entertainers dominating the playlists of Top 40 country radio stations, the veterans of Old Country have found themselves shut out of the most important venues of exposure and forced to find refuge elsewhere. A few have retreated to Branson, Mo., or other tourist havens; a lonely contingent still sing their hits of yesteryear from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry each Saturday night. Yet there are a handful of performers -- among them Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson and Ralph Stanley -- who have found enthusiastic audiences among young listeners typically much more comfortable with MTV than with the Nashville Network. There's no precise set of explanations for the bonding that links rock-bred fans and the wizened veterans of country music. But many young fans seek, and think they find, in older styles of country music an authenticity not heard in other realms of contemporary American music: the affirmation that the music is somehow an honest reflection of the singer's life. Almost 60 years ago, Woody Guthrie demonstrated how a man with enormous talent and a keen understanding of American cultural symbols could fashion himself into an icon of working-class artistic sensibility. Almost immediately after his arrival in New York City in January 1940, an adoring assemblage of young fans, imitators and promoters including Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger embraced Guthrie and the myth that lay around him, believing that a new Joe Hill had arrived. In this Okie poet they thought they had found a flesh-and-blood proletarian who wrote and sang protest ballads. And Woody was ready and willing to play the role that his New York fans expected. He was a highly gifted writer and singer, but neither a country bumpkin nor a working stiff (as a matter of fact, there's little evidence that he ever worked at anything for very long). Armed with an arsenal of folk songs and sayings from his southwestern youth, and made keenly aware of the enduring appeal of homespun philosophy by the success of fellow Oklahoman Will Rogers, Woody built a public persona that continues to attract successive generations of singers and fans. The vision of rugged simplicity and humanitarian sensitivity that Guthrie conveyed has repeatedly aroused young musicians from Jack Elliott in the '50s and Bob Dylan in the '60s to Bruce Springsteen and Steve Earle today. Billy Bragg and Wilco's "Mermaid Avenue," a collection of recently discovered Guthrie lyrics set to music provided by Bragg, introduces Woody to a new and potentially larger audience than he has ever had, but it also links him more closely to the culture of rock 'n' roll. Political radicalism does appear in a few songs, such as "Christ for President," but social commentary is subordinate to the introspective and personal musings heard in songs like "Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key" (a recollection of Guthrie's Oklahoma childhood), or in such reveries as "California Stars" and "Hesitating Beauty." Powered by Bragg's rocking tunes, Woody emerges buoyant, but far adrift from his hillbilly origins. Like Guthrie, whose music reflected a rock-ribbed honesty and unadorned simplicity, Johnny Cash understood the role that illusion played in the shaping of his career. During a brief spoken exchange with Willie Nelson in their recent CD collaboration, "VH1 Story Tellers," the two great entertainers poke gentle fun at the reputations that have followed their careers. When only coffee, water and hot chocolate were provided in the recording studio, Nelson wryly opined that their image as rebels would be spoiled, to which Cash responded: "Well, we'll just have to keep wearing black." A peculiar blend of self-effacing humor and humility, vanity and contrived artlessness have endeared Johnny Cash to successive generations of listeners since his 1955 commercial debut on the Sun label. No country singer has shown more clearly the marks of a rough working-class past, and none has been so successful in reaching across stylistic and generational lines. Through his participation in the urban folk revival after 1964, his well-publicized friendship with Bob Dylan and his practice of casting himself as "the man in black," Cash has built enduring bridges to young fans outside the country music community while consciously creating an aura of drama and mystery. He somehow fashioned a reputation as a battler for social justice while simultaneously holding conservative positions and winning the allegiance of evangelist Billy Graham. And consciously or unconsciously, he conveyed a hint of repressed violence, and maybe even the experience of a prison past, while remaining the most pacific of people. It may come as a surprise to some of those who hear this CD that "Don't Take Your Guns to Town" came not from some intimate experience with violence, but from Cash's fascination with Marshall Matt Dillon's fast draw on "Gunsmoke" -- or that "Folsom Prison Blues" was inspired, not by a stretch spent in that notorious institution, but by a movie that Cash had seen. Willie Nelson is much less forthcoming on "VH1 Story Tellers" concerning the origins of his songs. Like his stage concerts, Willie is all business, and he lets the songs speak for themselves. Consequently, we receive only a few brief recollections, such as the reference to his job as a Bible salesman in Fort Worth, and the disclosure that three of his blockbuster hits -- "Crazy," "Funny How Time Slips Away" and "Night Life" -- were written in Houston in the same short span of time in 1959. Although Willie's unadorned and uncluttered performing style is key to understanding his wide appeal, it nevertheless should not obscure the enduring persona he has ingeniously created. Already renowned as a songwriter and "singer's singer," Nelson's solo career did not blossom until he moved in 1972 to Austin, Texas, where a "progressive" community of country musicians was already taking shape. Surrounded there by talented young singers -- among them Marcia Ball and Jerry Jeff Walker, who grew up on rock music but who were now mixing those sounds with country and folk styles and performing for an audience of proud Texans who wanted their music to be both hip and regional -- Willie consciously molded himself into the countercultural hero. The smoothly shaved, neatly clipped and semi-obscure Nashville songwriter emerged as the bearded and pony-tailed mythic red-headed stranger whose picnics became country music's own versions of Woodstock. While Nelson and Cash made their forays into the welcoming arenas of alternative music, Bob Dylan ventured into the field of traditional rural music, singing a duet with Ralph Stanley on the latter's "Clinch Mountain Country," and describing it as "the highlight of my career." The venerable Stanley, however, who has assumed the mantle of bluegrass music's patriarch since the death of Bill Monroe, has seldom made explicit overtures to America's youth audience. Since entering professional music in 1946 with his brother Carter, Ralph Stanley has fashioned a sound that evokes a rural culture much older than the bluegrass genre of which he is ostensibly a part. After Carter's death in 1966, Ralph's haunting voice became even more sepulchral, and his style and repertoire have increasingly reflected the harmonies and songs of the Old Regular Baptist Church. He introduced to bluegrass music the fashion of a cappella gospel singing, a style that has become so obligatory that virtually all bluegrass bands seem compelled to perform at least one unaccompanied number. Ironically, as Stanley embraced the old, he won the increased allegiance of the young. In his performances on "Clinch Mountain Country," Stanley is joined by the not-so-young Bob Dylan, George Jones and a host of younger musicians who pay tribute to the legendary singer and the tradition that he represents. Performances by such well-known musicians as Ricky Skaggs, Junior Brown, Alison Krauss, Vince Gill, Patty Loveless, Dwight Yoakam, Marty Stuart and Joe Diffie -- all of whom have served apprenticeships in bluegrass music -- remind us of the powerful role that genre played in the making of Nashville's modern country music roster. These musicians, in their successful romancing of American youth, remind us of how we like our music served up under the veil of illusion. We forget that country musicians have been working people whose lives hold little romance or excitement, and that they have most often performed for audiences whose horizons are as narrowly circumscribed as their own. Consequently, musicians don the garb of singing cowboys, or assume the roles of footloose ramblers or some other type of rebel. But if we look beyond the romantic poses, and past the stage uniforms of the counterculture, we will find a more profound explanation for the appeal that these musicians exert. Cash and Nelson exhibit a remarkable catholicity in their selection of songs, but they still sing and play them as they did in 1955; Ralph Stanley's lonesome, pinch-throated style of singing reaches even farther back than that. The durability of these performance styles, and the sense that they are rooted in and shaped by traditions of poverty and struggle, do more to explain the appeal of their performers than any romantic pose or well-crafted persona; they represent a grounded way of life in an insecure world. If suburban Americans are indeed becoming rootless, regionless and classless, these veterans of Old Country music can help to restore a sense of place and identity. SALON | July 2, 1998 Bill C. Malone is the author of several books on country music, including "Country Music U.S.A." (University of Texas) and "Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers: Southern Culture and the Roots of Country Music" (University of Georgia). - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A L B U M_.I N F O R M A T I O N BILLY BRAGG AND WILCO "MERMAID AVENUE" | ELEKTRA WILLIE NELSON AND JOHNNY CASH "VH1 STORYTELLERS" | AMERICAN/COLUMBIA RALPH STANLEY "CLINCH MOUNTAIN COUNTRY" | REBEL RECORDS - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - R E L A T E D_.S A L O N_.S T O R I E S Paint it black A prayer for his holy hipness, Johnny Cash By David Bowman Dec. 5, 1997 Brain clock An amateur Dylanologist takes on the bard's long-awaited "Time Out of Mind." By David Bowman Sept. 19, 1997