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I chose to do a series of drawings portraying 10 country western singers who were decisive in defining the genre in the 1970s. I chose this period because I think it represents country music at its most pure, having defined itself away from hillbilly music and bluegrass, but before the glamour age of the 1980s began to influence it and before the music began to become a type of cliche of itself.
While thinking about the project, I could not stop focusing on the people behind it, that is, the songwriters and/or singers who lived the lives they wrote about. Their songs are about noble issues of love or lost love, hope or lost hope, attempts and failed attempts, but these issues are brought to the very human level of the bar room, the divorce court, the alimony settlement, the jail cell, pregnancy, the engagement ring store. I am drawn to these figures as unglamorous heroes, who in effect glamorized the unsensational issues and problems of every man and woman. And this aspect of directness, simplicity, yet nevertheless veneration is what I’d like the drawings to communicate.
The lyrics of that age are witty, humorous, and tragic all at once, as in George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s (themselves married and divorced twice to each other) “Two Story House,” about a couple who dreams of success, which to them is symbolized by a house with two stories, or, two floors. Their dream comes true and they get the house but start to grow apart, until George sings to Tammy “Now you’ve got your story and I’ve got mine.” There is Loretta Lynn’s “Pregnant Again,” where she complains about not enough money to feed the growing family and worried about being pregnant again, only to end the song in a completely kitsch but softly sung, “I hope it’s a boy…”
So my thoughts revolved around the singers and the songs and the personalness of it all. It seemed impossible to take in the music without taking in the people who lived and performed it.
Each of the 10 drawings is accompanied with my vocal version to one of the featured artist's songs on a signed unique CD
My Stories -
Johnny Cash
Well what else can you say about Johnny Cash? Except that he was a pretty amazing guy. The love story between him and June is always real uplifting. “A Boy Named Sue” is the first Johnny Cash song I remember from my childhood. I heard it for the first time in New Jersey, in the back of our family station wagon while we were driving to the beach. I had to ask my father what the song was about because I couldn’t understand how a father would give his son a girl’s name.
I always thought it was so funny.
Much later I heard it again on the radio and understood the hitch about the father and his reasons for doing that.
Johnny Cash talks the song. I found this unnatural to do and while plucking on the guitar somehow started to hear an actual melody coming through. So I decided to sing it rather that talk it.
Loretta Lynn
Loretta Lynn was a real bare-foot mountain girl born to a poor miner. It was a big family living in a small one room wooden shack. Her parents would sell a sow to buy the kids new shoes. She started learning to play guitar from a mail order catalog, and then she started writing her own songs. In 1976 she wrote “Coal Miner’s Daughter” which was a tribute to her young life and her parents.
At thirteen she married “Doo” (with the permission of her parents). They stayed together for their entire lives and he managed her career. They had a devoted, loving but turbulent marriage and produced 5 children. Their relationship provided the material for her songs.
I saw her live in Georgia. She was 75 and still wearing sequined gowns and her huge wig. And she was great. She performed the concert shortly after Doo died.
When she mentioned him she started to cry and was joined by her children and grandchildren who were backstage.
I think she’s one of the first true, strong woman’s voices. She didn’t sing about her man leaving her and her suffering. She threatened the women he cheated on her with, with songs like “Fist City.” Or she’d warn him in songs like “Don’t Come Home Drinkin’ with Lovin’ on your Mind.”
The one here, “One’s on the Way” recounts how, while all the other famous ladies were leading glamorous lives, she was at home constantly getting pregnant.
For me Loretta Lynn epitomizes what I love about the country music scene of the 60s, 70s, and early 80s. Before glamour rock and pop came into it and before it and everything else became so commercialized. She and the others never seemed to leave their very normal people status. Their songs seem like they were written for a friend, or at least for someone who you can talk with candidly about the most personal things that are going on in your life, but things that go on in everyone’s lives. In her work, you can also find great examples of the witty, humorous lyrics style so typical of country music.
George Jones
Another real important icon of country music with a voice to die for.
He has so many songs to choose from that selecting one was difficult, because I sort of love them all. He sang a lot of duets with his equally famous wife Tammy Wynette. They were married and divorced to each other about 4 times or something. And their songs are all about the experience of breaking up and cheating, drinking, and so forth. They have a great duet called “Have You Ever?” And it’s amazing. In the song, they ask each other on the eve of breaking up if they “had ever…” (cheated) and of course they did and admit it to each other in this real elbow swaying back and forth, crazily upbeat song. He even asks if she’s told her mother, if he’s as old as him, and so on.
But the great thing is that in the duet, they finish off each other’s sentences. Like they know each other so well, are so in tune that they know exactly what the other will say, know exactly about the mother, what cocktail they might like, and so on. And you can’t help but thinking that they shouldn’t be breaking up.
We chose a rocky upbeat song “The Race Is On”, a real George Jones classic. It compares losing a love to a horse race. Where “Heartaches” is the name of a horse who wins a race, meaning the rider has lost everything. The lingo is real race talk too, and uses words like Pride and Tears as horses names in a race presented by a sportscaster.
Willy Nelson
Willy Nelson was mostly famous for simply writing so many songs and having lots of friends. He wrote songs for almost anybody and everybody. He also started playing music with a mail order catalog when he was very young. He once owed the IRS something like 16 million dollars in back taxes, and to avoid prison he wrote a record called “The IRS Tapes. Who Will Buy My Memories” where all of the profits had to go to the IRS. Also, friend’s bought up all of his stuff, everything almost, and then just gave it back to him. He sued his accountant though.
His performance style is always real laid back, almost emotionally distant. Like you never see his face screwing up when he goes for a high note; he always seems like he’s done this 100 times before and knows every in and out of the piece. But he’s a beloved man, now an old, cool guy with long braids, who is a passionate member of a pro-marijuana organization. I saw him live with other oldies last summer in Georgia, and you can’t believe how these guys in their 70s are still hammering away at the guitar.
I liked “Bloody Mary Morning” because of the lyrics and the melody, but he performs it totally different, real upbeat and often with lots of guys on stage. His performance makes me think of a large Mexican band.
But I thought the lyrics sounded so hung-over. Someone's leaving LA, breaking up with their girlfriend/boyfriend, smoked too much last night, can’t deal with the big city parties and glamour, totally disappointed and rejected, early morning flight and all. So we changed the tone to sound more exhausted and burned out than rowdy.
Hank Williams Jr.
I deliberately chose do cover Hank Williams Jr. rather than his legendary father Hank Williams, simply because I love his voice and relate to his music much more. But his story is great too. He was born to one of the absolute, most important, influential country singers ever: Hank Williams. His father died when Hank Jr. was about 3 or so. Hank picked up the guitar and found he wasn’t that bad either, and started playing and writing his songs. Most of his stuff is real macho, but he wrote wonderful songs about this relationship to a massively famous father he never new. One is about how everyone knew his father but him, which ends with something like “the thing that I most regret is that I can’t remember him singing me to bed.” A theme that arises several times in his work.
It is said that his mother (Hank Williams’ widow) pushed him too hard to be a singer and to cover his father’s songs and basically fill his boots.
He was a really good-looking, sweet boy-faced young man when he began making a name for himself, and looked like a better-looking version of his father. He went climbing a mountain in Montana once and fell terribly, smashing his face almost completely. It was repaired with early plastic surgery techniques. It took 9 operations and 2 years for him to recover, yet his face remained disfigured. That’s why you never see him without his big sunglasses or his thick beard. But I always wonder if it helped him rid himself of his father’s shadow a bit.
The song we did, “A Country Boy Can Survive” is a song I really like. It’s a real redneck macho song about guys making their own whisky and shooting dear, and hating the city (a theme that comes up a lot in country western music). But I heard a desperate aspect here, of a guy trying to uphold, even romanticize a lifestyle that doesn’t really exist anymore. Like, who would yell “I can survive!” if they didn’t think their survival was being put to the test.
Dolly Parton
Well, Dolly Parton. Now she’s also a real icon. She even makes fun of her extensive plastic surgeries when on stage. Also a real old timer and has been around forever.
She started out as a sidekick for Porter Wagoner (a great country name). When she left to go on her own he sued her because he realized she was sort of all he had. “Jolene” is a song I have loved forever. And it was the first one we did. When we started out, we just played it again and again until we actually got bored of its repetitiveness. Then we cracked it. We slowed it down a lot. I also couldn’t really do the poor me aspect of it. I imaged I had a pistol behind my back when trying to talk Jolene out of taking my man, going back and forth between pleading and warning, and knowing that if she says one wrong thing, BANG! I’ll let her have it.
Having the male voice as the harmony was important because I thought if the guy’s between two women, he must also be having a hard time of it too.
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