Heart land

Baring the roots of country music

by Ted Drozdowski

IN THE COUNTRY OF COUNTRY: PEOPLE AND PLACES IN AMERICAN MUSIC By Nicholas Dawidoff. Pantheon Books, 371 pages, $25.

Bill Monroe was a hard-ass. A.P. Carter was a flake. Patsy Cline was despised in her hometown. And Charlie Louvin, who survived his alcohol-consumed brother Ira, is a bitter old man.

Hell, nobody's perfect. That's what used to be great about country music -- the kind of deep country that Nicholas Dawidoff romances within In the Country of Country. It was made for and from our imperfect world, with songs about colossal fuck-ups in relationships with lovers, booze, strangers, business partners, and God. Those tales were written in often imperfect English, and played with a rough-edged style out of the poor white settlements of the South. Up through the late '60s, when California boys like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens became the patron saints, that character survived in raw-boned picking or old-time fiddle sawing, or lyrics about hard times and simple folk in rural settings.

Turn on country radio today and it seems like everybody's baby takes the morning train, works from 9 to 5, and then . . . Well, you get the picture. Popular country has lost its soul and buried its roots under decades of slick arrangements and production, and singers and writers whose craft is generic, formula.

Dawidoff has applied the shovel of journalistic instinct to a mountain of bullshit, uncovering the music's roots and humanity through portraits of some of its elemental artists. He begins with the earliest country hitmaker, Jimmie Rodgers. In Rodgers's hometown Meridian, Mississippi, he finds people who had friends and relatives who'd known the Singing Brakeman. Dawidoff's visit yields a sketch of a genial outcast shunned for drinking, gambling, and womanizing. More important, we get an understanding of the sociopolitics of the agriculture and trade economy, religious fundamentalism, racial climate, and territory mentality that produced Rodgers.

Dawidoff's encounters with the living are most affecting. He recounts the lonely life of an old songwriter -- and re-creates Nashville's golden '50s and '60s -- through the eyes of the great Harlan Howard ("Heartaches by the Number," "Pick Me Up on Your Way Down"). He stands shoulder to shoulder with mournful Ralph Stanley in the Stanley family cemetery. He attends one of the last birthday parties for Monroe, a hard genius who had a hard raising. Only Emmylou Harris reveals nothing. And Iris DeMent is merely a bit player in Dawidoff's incomplete contemplation on Merle Haggard (Hag doesn't cooperate).

The book concludes with a portrait of Lubbock's Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Joe Ely, and an epilogue in which Dawidoff explains his belief that rock's "No Depression" bands have restoked the boiler of real country. But by then he's accomplished something more vivid than a historical overview. He's brushed aside the gossamer of modernity and the marketplace to show us the music's heart.