{"id":124195,"date":"2018-04-18T13:00:04","date_gmt":"2018-04-18T17:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=124195"},"modified":"2018-04-18T11:25:54","modified_gmt":"2018-04-18T15:25:54","slug":"its-strange-the-way-the-lord-does-move","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/04\/18\/its-strange-the-way-the-lord-does-move\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Strange the Way the Lord Does Move"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The other night, up late again listening to old records, I came across a song by the country singer Lefty Frizzell that, so far as I know, I had never heard before. It was the title that got my attention: \u201cThere\u2019s No Food in This House.\u201d I imagined Lefty, in his most vexed falsetto, leveling the words at a cheating lover who, in a final act of defiance, blows the week\u2019s grocery money on a trip to the salon. He had other songs to this effect: \u201cYou\u2019re Humbuggin\u2019 Me,\u201d \u201cAlways Late (With Your Kisses),\u201d \u201cRun \u2019Em Off,\u201d \u201cYou Want Everything But Me.\u201d Merle Haggard called Lefty \u201cthe most unique thing to ever happen to country music.\u201d He was, among other things, a kind of hillbilly Falstaff, Nashville\u2019s great minstrel of aggrieved accusations.<\/p>\n

Lefty was a leading figure in the country movement called honky-tonk, which adapted the genre\u2014previously the province of barn dances, bandstands, and festivals\u2014to the beer hall. Rock \u2019n\u2019 roll was an influence. Hollywood was too. Lefty\u2019s publicity photos for Columbia Records in the early fifties channel black-and-white film stills. In a classic shot from 1951, he wears a fringed western shirt and a bandanna scarf, looking like Edward G. Robinson doing his best Davy Crockett.<\/p>\n

Honky-tonk music could, at times, be scandalous. Heavy drinking and infidelity were recurring themes. Webb Pierce, one of Lefty\u2019s contemporaries, had big hits with \u201cThere Stands the Glass\u201d and \u201cBack Street Affair,\u201d the former an ode to the cathartic powers of whiskey, the latter a sentimental defense of sleeping around that led Kitty Wells, the queen of country music, to answer with a song of her own. \u201cYou didn\u2019t count the cost,\u201d she sang in \u201cPaying for That Back Street Affair.\u201d \u201cYou gambled and I lost \/ Now I must pay with hours of deep despair.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

To the pairing of bottle and bedroom, Lefty added a third member, the empty pocket. In his first chart-topping single, 1951\u2019s \u201cIf You\u2019ve Got the Money (I\u2019ve Got the Time),\u201d he played a carousing cheapskate angling to paint the town (\u201cwe\u2019ll have fun, oh boy, oh boy\u201d) on his sugar mama\u2019s dime. In his last chart-topping single, 1964\u2019s \u201cSaginaw, Michigan,\u201d he tells the story of a poor Midwestern fisherman who, in a bid to win the blessing of his true love\u2019s father, travels to Alaska to pan for gold. The dig comes to nothing, but the fisherman is unwilling to concede defeat, and so he mails a letter back to Saginaw claiming he\u2019s made \u201cthe biggest strike in Klondike history.\u201d The father believes the lie, offers his daughter\u2019s hand and, having convinced his son-in-law to sell his Alaska claim, sets out to collect. \u201cThe greedy fool,\u201d Lefty sings in the smarting final verse, \u201cis looking for the gold I never found.\u201d The new couple, meanwhile, becomes \u201cthe happiest man and wife\u201d in the Midwest.<\/p>\n

A rags-to-riches fantasy, \u201cSaginaw\u201d doesn\u2019t seem, on first listen, to fit with Lefty\u2019s songbook, an otherwise singular catalogue of pique and letdown. But the song is up to more than it announces. I don\u2019t think Lefty buys the message he\u2019s peddling for a second. The specious letter on which the narrative turns might just be an analogue for the song itself, only the intended recipient isn\u2019t a father looking to protect his daughter from life in the poorhouse but a listener looking to popular music for blessed assurance. It\u2019s as if Lefty is saying, I\u2019ll play you the mush you want to hear, but don\u2019t blame me if in the end your golden dreams about romance and riches come to sawdust.<\/p>\n

Lefty used vocals to complicate lyrics rather than letting lyrics instruct how he sang. A comparison to Hank Williams, the dean of honky-tonk singers, is apropos. Hank tapped his thin, tremulous voice to reify the emotional register of his songs. In \u201cI\u2019m So Lonesome I Could Cry\u201d he sounds just so. In \u201c(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle,\u201d he taffy pulls the word lonesome<\/em> into a lolling five-syllable yodel that somehow channels both a train and the hills across which its whistle blows. What Hank was after was candor. \u201cYou ask,\u201d he once told a reporter, \u201cwhat makes our kind of music successful. I\u2019ll tell you. It can be explained in just one word: sincerity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lefty, on the other hand, called sincerity into question. His subject wasn\u2019t candor so much as its projection. The dynamic found expression in his name. Born William Orville Frizzell, Lefty picked up the moniker, so the story goes, boxing southpaw in south Arkansas, where his father worked in oil. On stage, though, Lefty wasn\u2019t a lefty at all. He played a flattop Gibson guitar with his right hand. The name attested to his craftiness as a performer, a characteristic that found a corollary in his singing style. His thick voice, an organ board of concomitant pitches, stayed a touch punch-drunk with itself. Lubricated, slightly esophageal, he sang like a man knowingly going through the motions.<\/p>\n

In his love songs, the results could be comical. Covered by Hank Snow or Jim Reeves, \u201cI Love You a Thousand Ways,\u201d another early hit, could pass for a litany of sweet nothings. But Lefty, who wrote the song for his wife after getting caught fooling around, coos affirmations\u2014\u201cI\u2019ll be true,\u201d \u201cDarling, you\u2019re the only one,\u201d \u201cI\u2019ll love you every day\u201d\u2014with a voracity that evinces suspicion.<\/p>\n

The same quality of connivance that kept Lefty\u2019s love songs from curdling and lent the ones about heartache their fortifying self-awareness is also present in \u201cThere\u2019s No Food in This House,\u201d though the subject matter couldn\u2019t be more different. For starters, there is no incredulous husband involved. Rather, the song, which appeared on the same album as \u201cSaginaw, Michigan,\u201d is rendered from the perspective of a child. \u201cSister says she\u2019s hungry,\u201d the song begins. \u201cBrother says he\u2019s hungry too \/ if daddy don\u2019t get a job real soon \/ I don\u2019t know what we\u2019re gonna do.\u201d The boy\u2019s age isn\u2019t given, but we gather he\u2019s too young to work, too young for school. Despite his youth, or perhaps because of it, he is undistracted. He knows his family is in trouble, that his father has been laid off, that the store has cut off their credit line, that the cupboards, never that full to begin with, are empty.<\/p>\n

Times have been hard, the boy says, for \u201ctwo months and a day.\u201d The precision of the count stresses the severity of the dilemma as well as its merciless lag. A couple of months isn\u2019t all that long in the grand scheme of things, but you know right away what he\u2019s getting at\u2014two months and a day might as well be forever.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe aim of every artist,\u201d Faulkner<\/a> said, \u201cis to arrest motion, which is life.\u201d What moves the song is the boy\u2019s worried appraisal: of his parents\u2019 reactions, the way his father seems to have given up hope, the way his mother is in denial. His older brother and sister are starving; as he discloses in the one-line chorus, \u201cthere\u2019s no food in this house.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Lefty\u2019s handling, the chorus becomes a question masquerading as statement of fact. The narrator isn\u2019t confused about why the family can\u2019t afford groceries. That, he knows, has to do with his father\u2019s layoff. We suspect that even if the father\u2019s fortunes were to turn tomorrow, if he were to find a way to cobble together enough odd jobs to restock the shelves, the boy wouldn\u2019t be satisfied, not anymore.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s as if he\u2019s started to wonder why unemployment and hunger should exist in the first place, as if he\u2019s begun to suspect that the human condition is one of want instead of comfort and that the ache in his belly points to a hole in the heart of things. In the final verse, when help does finally arrive in the form of a meal offered by\u00a0neighbors from the local church, he is grateful yet wary. \u201cIt\u2019s strange,\u201d he says, \u201cthe way the Lord does move.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the decade after he recorded \u201cThere\u2019s No Food in This House,\u201d Lefty\u2019s health and career declined. He neglected his voice, succumbed to alcoholism, and fought with his record label, which cut him loose in 1972. He died from a stroke three years later, at the age of forty-seven.<\/p>\n

For all their setbacks, Lefty\u2019s final years yielded beautiful songs. In \u201cI Never Go Around Mirrors,\u201d he rattles off the types of characters he can\u2019t stomach (unshaven men, men with wine on their breath) only to reveal, in one of the most chilling turns in country music, that the character he has in mind is Lefty Frizzell. Delivered in little more than a whisper, the song refuses his old honky-tonk shtick. Lefty collapses the knowing remove that marked his early work and embraces sincerity to devastating effect.<\/p>\n

Unlike \u201cI Never Go Around Mirrors,\u201d \u201cThere\u2019s No Food in This House\u201d isn\u2019t autobiographical. We have no reason to believe that Lefty was once the kid in the song. Still, it\u2019s not hard to imagine the kid growing up to become a man like Lefty: curious, undeluded, discontented in and out of love, never forgetting his hunger, never forfeiting his grievance but wringing from each a genuine music that goes on moving because it is life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Drew Bratcher is a writer from Nashville.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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