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Laura Bruce
Goodbye is Half the Words You Know
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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 clich? 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.
The 10 drawings are accompanied by a CD where I sing 10 songs, each by one of the portrayed singers.
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