![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/07\/vern-gosdin-portrait-billboard-1548.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
My buddy Nick swears that \u201cChiseled in Stone\u201d by Vern Gosdin is the saddest country song ever written. \u201cYou ran crying to the bedroom,\u201d it begins:<\/p>\n
I ran off to the bar
\nAnother piece of Heaven gone to Hell
\nThe words we spoke in anger just tore my world apart
\nAnd I sat there feeling sorry for myself<\/p><\/blockquote>\nIt\u2019s a hell of start. Seldom has romantic strife been evoked so concisely. What words did they speak in anger? None, we suspect, that lovers haven\u2019t always said. The point, I think, is that these lovers never dreamed they\u2019d be the ones saying them. Nobody sets out to be miserable in love.<\/p>\n
After a modest run as a singer and guitar player in California folk-country bands, Gosdin retired in the early seventies only to rally as a solo act later in the decade. Beginning in his mid-forties, he sent one song after another\u2014\u201cI\u2019m Still Crazy,\u201d \u201cIs It Raining at Your House?,\u201d \u201cThis Ain\u2019t My First Rodeo\u201d\u2014into the top 10. \u201cChiseled in Stone,\u201d which won the\u201989 CMA award for best song, helped him mount one of the greatest comebacks in country music. He was Music City\u2019s patron saint of late bloomers.<\/p>\n
Gosdin looked like a Burt. He had Bacharach eyes, Reynolds sideburns and mustache, Lancaster air. His pliant, world-worn voice took cues from George Jones, whose vocal performances of sentimental lyrics dredged out of wretchedness a pitiful joy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cChiseled in Stone\u201d harkens back to Jones’ signature hit, \u201cHe Stopped Loving Her Today.\u201d In that song, Jones tells the story of a man who makes good on his promise to love the woman who broke his heart until the day he dies. Apart from Jones\u2019 singular voice, which is its own steel guitar, what sets \u201cHe Stopped Loving Her\u201d apart is the song\u2019s narrative conceit. See, the story in question is recounted by one of the man\u2019s friends. \u201cYou know,\u201d he says in the final verse, as if pulling the listener aside and sharing a piece of privileged information, \u201cshe came to see him one last time,\u201d<\/p>\n
And we all wondered if she would
\nAnd it kept runnin\u2019 through my mind,
\n\u201cThis time he\u2019s over her for good\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe device enfolds the listener in the human drama. The move sort of turns the song into a simulacrum of country music. What country does best, \u201cHe Stopped Loving Her\u201d suggests, is what this song is doing right now, namely converting a private and particular sadness into a shared and singable experience, one that provides no succor but the sad music of itself.<\/p>\n
\u201cChiseled in Stone,\u201d despite its grief-stricken tone, has something far more redemptive in mind. The contrition at the end of the first verse\u2014\u201cI sat there feeling sorry for myself\u201d\u2014injects a measure of expectancy, even hope, into the heartache invoked by the opening lines. The narrator was boiling when he fled the house, but now he\u2019s cooled off. What, we wonder, has changed his mind? The second verse picks up the story. \u201cThen,\u201d Gosdin sings,<\/p>\n
that old man sat down beside me and looked me in the eye,
\nAnd he said, \u201cSon, I know what you’re going through\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThere\u2019s been an intervention. An old man, a widower, has heard the narrator venting to the barkeep, and has inserted himself into the conversation. His empathic overtures, gentle at first blush, amount to a jab before a left hook. \u201cYou don’t know about sadness till you\u2019ve faced life half alone,\u201d the old man continues, before delivering the line that gives the song its title: \u201cYou don\u2019t know about lonely till it\u2019s chiseled in stone.\u201d<\/p>\n
In response to the old man\u2019s riff, the narrator has beaten a path back to his house, which, as it turns out, is where we\u2019ve been all along, listening as he relays the fortuitous encounter to his partner. En route he has picked up a peace offering. \u201cSo,\u201d he tells his lover, \u201cI brought these pretty flowers hoping you would understand sometimes a man is such a fool,\u201d<\/p>\n
Those golden words of wisdom
\nFrom the heart of that old man
\nShowed me I ain’t nothin’ without you<\/p><\/blockquote>\nI don\u2019t know about saddest country song ever, but I think \u201cFlowers\u201d by Billy Yates could give \u201cChiseled in Stone\u201d a run for the saddest song featuring a bouquet. The two songs, at least to my ear, are in conversation. It\u2019s as if Yates, who performed \u201cChiseled in Stone\u201d at Gosdin\u2019s \u201909 Grand Ole Opry tribute concert, suspected Gosdin\u2019s ballad had anguish to spare.<\/p>\n
\u201cFlowers\u201d never bagged any industry awards. It was released in\u201997, just as the neo-traditionalist movement ushered in by artists such as Gosdin and carried forward by Alan Jackson and Patty Loveless was ceding territory to the pop sensibilities of Tim McGraw and Shania Twain.<\/p>\n
\u201cFlowers\u201d peaked at #36 on the Billboard country chart and then faded from country radio all together. Yates, who worked as a barber on Music Row before landing his first record deal, found greater success as a songwriter. Among others, he co-wrote \u201cChoices,\u201d the stunning recantation of honkytonk living for which George Jones won his final Grammy, in \u201999.<\/p>\n
Like \u201cChoices\u201d and \u201cChiseled in Stone,\u201d \u201cFlowers\u201d is relayed from the perspective of a brokenhearted man. Here, however, Yates withholds the details of what his character has done, beginning instead with a litany of what he hasn\u2019t. \u201cI should’ve took you dancin\u2019,\u201d the song opens, \u201ca little candlelight romancin\u2019, with roses.\u201d Offset by that comma, by a heavy pause in Yates\u2019 delivery, the roses are key. They hang over the rest of the song even though they don\u2019t appear again until the final line.<\/p>\n
In the following verses, the reasons for the narrator\u2019s romantic negligence come into view. \u201cBut I was high up on a barstool,\u201d the song goes on, \u201cI was such a blind fool, now I know it.\u201d He was \u201chigh up\u201d back then, but he\u2019s humbler now.<\/p>\n
You won\u2019t believe how much I\u2019ve changed since you left
\nIt took losin\u2019 you, for me to find myself<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe changes are manifold. In the following verses, we learn the narrator has kicked the bottle and secured a steady job. He\u2019s bought \u201ca brand-new suit\u201d to wear to church on Sundays. To hear him tell it, he\u2019s a brand-new man. Our suspense grows\u2014we wonder whether a partner walking out would in fact bring about a change of such magnitude; we wonder if he\u2019s stretching the truth.<\/p>\n
Where the song goes next you just don\u2019t see coming. \u201cI went by the junk-yard,\u201d the narrator tells us. His car is there and yet the sight of the wreckage doesn\u2019t bring back memories of a crash but rather of the scene that preceded it. \u201cI still see you on your knees,\u201d he says<\/p>\n
Beggin\u2019 me not to drive
\nBut I took away the keys
\nAnd made you climb inside<\/p><\/blockquote>\nWhat starts as a hackneyed meditation on heartache, one that seems like yet another rearranging of the tropes used in a thousand country songs, has been transfigured into a solitary graveside service. \u201cOh, I’d take your place,\u201d the narrator concludes,<\/p>\n
in this field of stone
\nIf I only had the power
\nLook what it took
\nFor me to finally bring you flowers<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThere\u2019s a touch of gallows humor to that phrase \u201clook what it took,\u201d as if the man\u2019s failure to buy flowers while his partner was living had been a running joke between them, as if all of the other changes wrought by her death pale in comparison to this one gesture, which is heartfelt and carefully calibrated, if, in the end, fruitless. Flowers, after all, don\u2019t mean a thing to the dead.<\/p>\n
The differing trajectories of \u201cChiseled in Stone\u201d and \u201cFlowers\u201d\u2014one regarded as a classic, the other hardly regarded at all\u2014could be used to make the case, common among enthusiasts of traditional country music, that somewhere in the nineties the genre lost its way.<\/p>\n
Country music, the line goes, stopped sounding sad and lonesome. It lost touch with its broken heart, started looking and sounding like the suburbs. Red wine replaced cheap whiskey. The night club drove out the corner bar. \u201cThe love of money and the search for worldwide fame slowly killed tradition,\u201d George Strait and Alan Jackson sang in \u201999 in \u201cMurder on Music Row,\u201d \u201cand for that someone should hang.\u201d<\/p>\n
To be sure, there is some truth to this cynical characterization of the mainstreaming of country music. It\u2019s telling that in the months before and after Yates released \u201cFlowers,\u201d Garth Brooks charted two number #1 songs, \u201cLong-Neck Bottle\u201d and \u201cTwo Pi\u00f1a Coladas,\u201d a pair of boozy, breezy up-tempo anthems that sound something like the foil to Yates\u2019 marvelous, if undoubtedly maudlin, tearjerker.<\/p>\n
And yet for all their top-40 catchiness, the essential subject matter of Brooks\u2019 songs\u2014drinking, heartbreak, self-loathing\u2014is undeviating. Perhaps the difference between Brooks and Yates, between nineties country and what came before, has to do, at least in part, with attitude. Instead of remorse, Brooks\u2019 songs are fueled by a kind of giddy delusion, an approach that isn\u2019t without precedent in the annals of classic country.<\/p>\n
In Golden Age staples such as \u201cDang Me\u201d and \u201cIn the Summer,\u201d Roger Miller yowled about romantic frustration with an impromptu jauntiness that combined Jimmie Rodgers\u2019s blue yodeling with Cab Calloway\u2019s scat. Indeed Miller makes you wonder whether there ever was such a thing as traditional country music when country music, to hear him sing it, is so evidently a blender of musical styles.<\/p>\n
What I mean to say is that in country music, as in every genre, sad songs take many forms. And if, on the one end, there\u2019s the grandiose, nearly baroque sorrow of Gosdin or Yates and on the other the insouciance of Brooks or Miller, might there also be a place for the kind of entrenched sadness, situated just a hair shy of ambivalence, that finds expression in a song like Miranda Lambert\u2019s \u201cDead Flowers,\u201d a 21st<\/sup>-century addition to the heartbreak canon?<\/p>\n
Lambert\u2019s records cover the emotional spectrum. Few singers do indignation and regret with more panache. With her whipsaw range, she is, more than any living country singer, the heir of George Jones. In \u201cDead Flowers,\u201d however, rage and sorrow take a back seat to ennui. \u201cI feel like the flowers in this vase,\u201d Lambert deadpans over a forlornly propulsive electric guitar:<\/p>\n
He just brought them home one day
\n\u201cAin’t they beautiful,\u201d he said
\nThey been here in the kitchen and the water\u2019s turnin\u2019 gray
\nThey\u2019re sittin\u2019 in the vase but now they\u2019re dead<\/p><\/blockquote>\nSad songs take many forms and the saddest songs are the ones about flowers.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Drew Bratcher was born in Nashville. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa. He lives in Chicagoland. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My buddy Nick swears that \u201cChiseled in Stone\u201d by Vern Gosdin is the saddest country song ever written. \u201cYou ran crying to the bedroom,\u201d it begins: I ran off to the bar Another piece of Heaven gone to Hell The words we spoke in anger just tore my world apart And I sat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":439,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[34872,34822,34820,19216,4367,23171,34873,9388,34870,34874,34871,34821],"class_list":["post-127890","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-alan-jackson","tag-billy-yates","tag-chiseled-in-stone","tag-country-music","tag-flowers","tag-garth-brooks","tag-george-strait","tag-grand-ole-opry","tag-miranda-lambert","tag-patty-loveless","tag-roger-miller","tag-vern-gosdin"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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