{"id":132519,"date":"2019-01-08T10:00:21","date_gmt":"2019-01-08T15:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=132519"},"modified":"2019-01-08T11:06:48","modified_gmt":"2019-01-08T16:06:48","slug":"on-randy-traviss-distinctive-whine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/08\/on-randy-traviss-distinctive-whine\/","title":{"rendered":"On Randy Travis\u2019s Distinctive Whine"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Randy Travis.<\/p><\/div>\n

The first song I ever loved was \u201cOn the Other Hand,\u201d by Randy Travis. It was the first single from Travis\u2019s debut album, Storms of Life<\/em>\u2014and it was the third single, too. The song fizzled when Travis first released it in the summer of 1985, so he rereleased it the following spring, figuring it might fare better after \u201c1982,\u201d the album\u2019s second single, entered the top ten.<\/p>\n

This time, \u201cOn the Other Hand\u201d went to number one on the charts. It was on country radio all the time, and because we listened to country radio all the time, I learned the song, as I\u2019d learned countless others, through osmosis. We lived in Davidson County, in the hills due north of Nashville, a place where country music was less a form of entertainment than an atmospheric feature, as ubiquitous as clouds and often as nebulous.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the Other Hand\u201d was different from the other country music I heard at the time. Travis\u2019s deep nasal whine, a mix of range and grog and woebegone, blew through the blur. His voice seemed to summon Hank Williams by way of a bullfrog. He was, among other things, an irresistible parody. I stood in front of the fireplace in the living room. I pinched my nostrils. \u201cOn one hand, I count the reasons I could stay with you,\u201d I started, pausing to release my nose-hold and inhale again before continuing, \u201cand hold you close to me, all night long.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The song finds Travis weighing the pros and cons of continuing an affair. In the pros column is the pleasure his mistress provides. \u201cAnd on that hand,\u201d Travis sings, \u201cI see no reason why it\u2019s wrong.\u201d \u201cBut on the other hand,\u201d he continues, \u201cthere\u2019s a golden band.\u201d If, in the end, Travis is leaning toward calling off the fling, the song is hardly a defense of fidelity. Travis\u2019s divided heart is still with his lover, whom he credits with reviving his joie de vivre. \u201cI\u2019ve got to hand it to you girl,\u201d he tells her in the final verse, \u201cyou\u2019re something else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Storms of Life<\/em> went on to sell more than three million copies and win the 1986 Academy of Country Music Award for Album of the Year. It has about it a kind of creaky coherence. The songs are about cheating, leaving, and crisis. The album begins with \u201cOn the Other Hand\u201d and ends with \u201cThere\u2019ll Always Be a Honky Tonk Somewhere\u201d\u2014the messy bedroom leads inevitably to the barstool, with trips along the way to memory lane (\u201cDigging Up Bones,\u201d \u201c1982\u201d), the confessional (\u201cReasons I Cheat\u201d), the railroad crossing (\u201cSend My Body\u201d), and the therapist (\u201cMessin\u2019 With My Mind\u201d).<\/p>\n

Thematically, the songs don\u2019t buck tradition so much as begrudgingly capitulate to it. In \u201cNo Place Like Home,\u201d the single released after \u201cOn the Other Hand,\u201d the wholesome truth of the titular clich\u00e9 dawns on the narrator with the force of revelation\u2014but only after his wife has sent him packing. In the end, the song isn\u2019t about home; it\u2019s about the nostalgia that swirls in the wake of wrecking it.<\/p>\n

The gulf between my interest and Travis\u2019s intentions must have given my parents a rise. They marveled at how I knew every word. And I did know every word\u2014or at least knew how to sing them, if not quite what they were saying. What little I could gather, which may have been only a vague notion of friction between the sexes, felt odd and slightly frightening.<\/p>\n

Indeed, country songs were not unlike horror films. Both derived power from the ridiculous. Both dealt in extremes, in worst-case scenarios. Both played out, in large part, under cover of dark. There were differences, of course. Instead of monsters, country songs featured carousers. Instead of curses, the toughest of luck. Still, the one seemed as outr\u00e9 as the other. In childhood, masked murderers and unpaid bills are comparably remote.<\/p>\n

There was a sense, however, in which the lyrics were beside the point, for in the end, as in the beginning, what I loved first and foremost about Randy Travis was his voice. It was the whine that resonated, that wavering, wind-burred bellow, the sadness and the apathy of it, the pathetic beauty. I wondered how in the world he\u2019d gotten away with making such a noise.<\/p>\n

Of all the wisdom my parents imparted\u2014to say sir<\/em>, to say ma\u2019am<\/em>, to hold doors for the people behind you, to shake with a firm hand, and so on\u2014the bit they were most emphatic about was whining. Nobody, they said, respected a whiner. It was wrong for the living to want to die, and that\u2019s what whining communicated: I\u2019d rather be dead.<\/p>\n

Tied to the warning about whining was a second rule: thou shalt not mope. Whining had to do with talk. Moping had to with posture, with physical crestfallenness, lethargy exaggerated for effect. Put them together and you\u2019d get a loser sulking about with a moan on his lips, which, to hear my parents tell it, was a terrible look. And yet there was Travis, moping and whining without apology, singing on the radio in a tone of voice for which I would have been upbraided and sent off to my room.<\/p>\n

Travis\u2019s whine, truth be told, didn\u2019t sound all that sorry to me. I thought it had integrity. It was possessed of the languor of late summer. It felt of a piece with the North Nashville landscape. In a place where the Ford Broncos and tobacco barns had seen better days, where wasps and poison ivy reigned tyrannically, where trees sagged under the weight of bug-gored fruit and tick-eared beagle hounds panted in the hot shade, how else, I wondered, should singing sound?<\/p>\n

His was foothill music\u2014not the soaring anthems of mountain tops, not the sober hymns of the horizontal plains, but a tremulous waver between the two, between the lower tiers of heaven and the higher rungs of hell, between delight and dejection, among apathy, agony, and force of will. There was loss in it\u2014not the pain of loss, per se, but the shame that comes from knowing you were right to have lost and that if things stayed the same, you were probably going to keep on losing.<\/p>\n

Travis was twenty-seven when Storms of Life<\/em> came out. As a teenager in North Carolina, he\u2019d dropped out of high school and done a bid in county jail for car theft. Singing was an escape that reified the need to. His world-sick timbre was the bruised fruit of nonchalance chastened by disgrace. Travis\u2019s whine was audible and yet it retained an urgent, under-the-breath intimacy. It was as if a hostile hand was pressed up hard against that hole in the heart where feeling comes from. Even muffled, though, Travis\u2019s sound was trenchant, cutting. It was the outermost echo of a buried cry.<\/p>\n

That \u201cOn the Other Hand\u201d sounded fresh, newfangled even, in the mideighties highlighted just how gassy Nashville country had become. Critics tagged Travis a neotraditionalist. But there was nothing neo<\/em> about him. He sounded less like a fusion of contemporary and classic country than the rearrival of a sound that had never not been around. The final song on Storms of Life<\/em>, \u201cThere\u2019ll Always Be a Honky Tonk Somewhere,\u201d opens around the album like a crowded room, at once turning the collection into an homage to honky-tonk music and an essay about the indispensability, in a weary world, of the whine.<\/p>\n

Even as Travis became one of Nashville\u2019s most reliable song-dogs, charting single after hit single and selling millions of records, he kept whining, perhaps nowhere more feelingly than on the 1990 single \u201cHe Walked On Water.\u201d Over a harmonica and the spare plucking of an acoustic guitar, Travis relays pithy anecdotes about, of all people, his great-grandfather. The man is ancient. He has one foot in the present and one in another century. \u201cHe said he\u2019d been a cowboy,\u201d Travis sings:<\/p>\n

When he was a young\u2019un
\nAnd he could handle a rope
\nAnd he was good with a gun<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The man\u2019s age, know-how, and eccentricity (\u201cHe wore,\u201d Travis sings, \u201cstarched white shirts buttoned at the neck\u201d) had cast a spell over the young Travis. In at least two ways, the great-grandfather is like a god. One: the span of his years is unfathomable. Two: the love he engenders borders on worship, hence the one-line chorus\u2014\u201cI thought that he walked on water.\u201d<\/p>\n

I knew right away what Travis was getting at. Once or twice a year, my own great-grandfather on my mother\u2019s father\u2019s side would drive down from West Virginia to visit us. His name was Enos, a name lifted from the first chapters of the book of Genesis, and he seemed to be as old as Genesis, as mysterious. He was a mountain man. He had worked as a coal miner. His right hand had been shattered in an accident, and one of the fingers had reset at a ninety-degree angle. When you shook it, the cocked finger pressed into you palm, a sensation that simultaneously bridged and ossified the distance between you.<\/p>\n

He spent the days shooting squirrels in the woods around the house. If not \u201cgood with a gun,\u201d as Travis\u2019s great-grandfather is in the song, he was loose with the trigger. We\u2019d hear bullets ripping through trees and ricocheting off the barn. At dusk, he\u2019d walk over the hill and empty his field bag beneath the shade tree by the porch. \u201cI looked at him and he looked at me,\u201d he told me once, holding a squirrel up by the tail, \u201cand if I hadn\u2019t pulled the trigger first, he\u2019d be the one sitting here gutting me.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was struck, in particular, by the bridge in \u201cHe Walked On Water\u201d:<\/p>\n

And he was ninety years old in \u201963
\nAnd I loved him
\nAnd he loved me
\nAnd Lord I cried the day he died
\n\u2019Cause I thought
\nThat he walked on water<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The lines decried something that, up until I heard them, I had not known that I knew: namely, that my great-grandfather would not live forever and that this was true for everyone I loved. \u201cI thought,\u201d Travis sings. The verb is in the past tense. He doesn\u2019t think such thoughts anymore.<\/p>\n

John Berger wrote that storytellers are secretaries who take their orders from Death. \u201cThe file,\u201d Berger writes, \u201cis full of sheets of uniformly black paper but they have eyes for reading them and from this file they construct a story for the living.\u201d \u201cHe Walked On Water,\u201d like much of Travis\u2019s music, was made, I think, within the umbra of mortality. It wasn\u2019t I-want-to-die music, it was we\u2019re-all-going-to-die music. It was the soundtrack to a story for the living that also kept the dead alive.<\/p>\n

Travis was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2016. At the time, his reputation was recovering from a series of public mistakes and private misfortunes. He\u2019d been arrested for drunk driving outside of a Texas church. The booking photograph had made the rounds. In Johnny Cash\u2019s famous El Paso mugshot, taken after he was apprehended for smuggling pills across the Mexican border, he looks like Johnny Cash, nonplussed, righteously ambivalent. Travis, by comparison, looks disturbing. His eye is black, his nose is swollen. There is blood between his eyes, which do not greet so much as assault the camera with rage. Shortly after the arrest, a video surfaced of Travis stumbling naked into a convenience store, drunkenly demanding cigarettes. Unlike Cash, whose music was inextricable from his person, Travis had not been a persona so much as a voice delivering songs. Now the singer was eclipsing the music. Country\u2019s lethargic prophet had become a lightning rod.<\/p>\n

Travis had suffered a stroke in 2013. There had been talk that he might never speak, let alone sing, again. But at the hall-of-fame ceremony, Travis took the microphone. Phalanxed by his wife and the singer Garth Brooks, who had removed his black cowboy hat in tribute, Travis made it through the first stanza of \u201cAmazing Grace.\u201d His voice was weak and inchoate. That he managed to get any words out at all was something of a triumph and yet from somewhere deep inside the flickering shadow of the sound he used to make, you could hear it\u2014the whine had survived.<\/p>\n

And on the one hand, it said, \u201cI\u2019ll keep going but I don\u2019t have to like it.\u201d And on the other, \u201cI\u2019ll sing the sorrow if the sorrow is all I have to sing.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Drew Bratcher was born in Nashville. He received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. He lives in Chicagoland. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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