{"id":151573,"date":"2021-03-25T09:00:15","date_gmt":"2021-03-25T13:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=151573"},"modified":"2021-03-24T18:18:47","modified_gmt":"2021-03-24T22:18:47","slug":"a-taxonomy-of-country-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2021\/03\/25\/a-taxonomy-of-country-boys\/","title":{"rendered":"A Taxonomy of Country Boys"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Cartoon by Homer Davenport from The Country Boy<\/em>, 1910. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

To be or not to be a country boy? To my ear, this has always been one of the animating questions in country music. In \u201cThank God I\u2019m a Country Boy\u201d (1974), John Denver, for instance, revels in the persona. From the picture he sketches, it\u2019s not hard to see why. Country boys, Denver says, have all they need: a warm bed, good work, regular meals, fiddle music. The life of a country boy, he sings, \u201cain\u2019t nothing but a funny, funny riddle,\u201d and who doesn\u2019t like a good laugh?<\/p>\n

For Hank Williams Jr., however, this country boy business isn\u2019t something to joke about. In \u201cA Country Boy Can Survive\u201d (1981), he says the rivers are drying up and the stock market is anybody\u2019s guess and the world, as a general rule, is going to hell and if you knew what was good for you, you\u2019d be a country boy, too, because in the end only country boys\u2014the ones \u201craised on shotguns,\u201d the ones who know \u201chow to skin a buck\u201d and \u201cplow a field all day long\u201d\u2014will make it out alive.<\/p>\n

Loretta Lynn could do without Hank Jr.\u2019s heated rhetoric, but as she sings in \u201cYou\u2019re Lookin\u2019 at Country\u201d (1971), \u201cthis country girl would walk a country mile \/ to find her a good ole slow-talking country boy.\u201d Then, so as to underline her preference, she repeats, \u201cI said a country boy.\u201d Not just any country boy will do. Drawl aside, Loretta makes plain she wants a workhorse with a worn shovel who, in exchange for a tour around the farm, will \u201cshow me a wedding band.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s doubtful Lynn\u2019s narrator would have gone for the type Johnny Cash sings about on his first album, Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar!<\/em>\u2014not that Cash\u2019s country boy would care. He has \u201cno ills,\u201d \u201cno bills,\u201d \u201cno shoes,\u201d \u201cno blues.\u201d A country boy\u2019s greatest privilege, Cash\u2019s \u201cCountry Boy\u201d (1957) suggests, is his ignorance of the finer things. In part, he\u2019s happy with his \u201cshaggy dog,\u201d fried fish, and \u201cmorning dew\u201d because he hasn\u2019t been exposed to much besides.<\/p>\n

Having little, Cash says, country boys have \u201ca lot to lose.\u201d Cash, who by this stage in his life had traded Arkansas fields for a Memphis recording studio, spends a lot of time wishing he could get back to being a country boy, but his hot-and-blue guitar says otherwise. The truth is you couldn\u2019t go back if you wanted to, but would you go back even if you could? <\/p>\n

It\u2019s when country boys leave the country, or are made aware of other ways of living, that problems arise. They either get nostalgic (Cash) or defensive (Hank Jr.), or they come down, in the case of Glen Campbell\u2019s \u201cCountry Boy (You Got Your Feet in L.A.)\u201d (1975), with a bad case of impostor syndrome.<\/p>\n

In the first song on his album Rhinestone Cowboy<\/em>, Campbell sings about a country boy who has hit the big time:<\/p>\n

You get a house in the hills
\nYou\u2019re paying everyone\u2019s bills
\nAnd they tell you that
\nYou\u2019re gonna go far
\nBut in the back of my mind
\nI hear it time after time,
\nIs that who you really are?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Having lived for so long on so much less\u2014\u201cI can remember the time,\u201d he sings, \u201cwhen I sang my songs for free\u201d\u2014this country boy can\u2019t enjoy his change of fortune. His modest beginnings are both a grace and a liability. On the one hand, they keep him from getting carried away. On the other, they prevent him from being fully present. To do so, he fears, would be a self-betrayal. In the end, he realizes that he\u2019s going to have to choose. A country boy in Hollywood won\u2019t stay so for long.<\/p>\n

What about a country boy in finance? In the video for Ricky Skaggs\u2019s 1985 hit \u201cCountry Boy,\u201d the bluegrass legend Bill Monroe accuses Skaggs of losing his bearings. The scene takes place in a Manhattan office building, where Skaggs sits behind a big desk in a business suit. Buzzed in by Skaggs\u2019s secretary, Monroe looks around. \u201cI heard it was bad, boy, but I didn\u2019t know you\u2019d sink to this,\u201d he says, at which point Skaggs whips out his guitar and tries to prove him wrong.<\/p>\n

Monroe\u2019s disapproving presence turns Skaggs\u2019s foot stomper into a pr\u00e9cis on Nashville\u2019s shifting sensibilities in the eighties. Skaggs had come up under Monroe\u2019s tutelage. He first played mandolin with Monroe\u2019s band when he was six years old. In his teens and twenties he had toured with the Stanley Brothers and the Country Gentlemen, more bluegrass royalty. With his high-lonesome voice and confident grasp of the bluegrass canon, Skaggs had often been regarded as the future of the genre, which is to say a faithful steward of its past. Now he was making mainstream country. Had he sold out?<\/p>\n

You can take the boy out of the country but not the country out of the boy\u2014that\u2019s what Skaggs contends. Despite ills and bills and all the rest of it, not to mention a streak of No. 1 records, a country boy is a country boy once and for all. He might work in a bank instead of a coal mine and live in a walk-up instead of a cabin in the woods, but deep down, he\u2019s still a \u201ccotton picker,\u201d still a \u201chog caller chewing cud on the stile.\u201d Monroe isn\u2019t convinced. He shakes his head in disgust. \u201cI\u2019m just a country boy,\u201d Skaggs counters, over and over, \u201ccountry boy at heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cJust a country boy.\u201d For Skaggs, the words are a pledge of allegiance. For Don Williams, however, they\u2019re a convenient excuse. In \u201cI\u2019m Just a Country Boy,\u201d a song first recorded by Harry Belafonte and which Williams took to No. 1 on the country charts in 1977, the meagerness wrapped up in the word \u201cjust\u201d has real-world consequences.<\/p>\n

Williams\u2019s country boy won\u2019t be marrying the woman he loves because he can\u2019t afford her. He can\u2019t afford much of anything. He might have, as the chorus says, \u201csilver in the stars\u201d and \u201cgold in the morning sun,\u201d but they don\u2019t take sunshine at the jeweler\u2019s. And yet the \u201cjustness\u201d of being a country boy resigns him to his letdown. The song is less a dirge than a shoulder shrug. \u201cI\u2019m just a country boy,\u201d Williams sings, as if to say, What did you expect?<\/p>\n

Even so, resignation has its own complexity. That\u2019s the theme of another Williams song, the somber \u201cGood Ole Boys Like Me\u201d (1979), which might as well be called \u201cI\u2019m Still Just a Country Boy.\u201d In that song, which was written by Bob McDill, the narrator looks back on a childhood full of sensually overwhelming contradictions and tries to reckon with his place in the world. In a chapter about Nashville from his travelogue A Turn in the South<\/em>, V.\u2009S. Naipaul describes McDill\u2019s achievement as a kind of magic composed of \u201cthe calling up and recognition of impulses that on the surface were simple, but which, put together with music, made rich with a chorus, seemed to catch undefined places in the heart and memory.\u201d<\/p>\n

The narrator of \u201cGood Ole Boys Like Me\u201d recalls his gin-drunk father reading him the Bible at bedtime, lecturing him \u201cabout honor and things I should know,\u201d then staggering \u201ca little as he went out the door.\u201d In the chorus, he declares his allegiance to Hank and Tennessee Williams, one a honky-tonk hero who forever exploded the boundaries of country music, the other a playwriting shake-scene who left Mississippi for New York and European cities and never stopped writing about displaced country people.<\/p>\n

The country boy remembers falling asleep to the sounds of John R., a Nashville DJ who played rhythm and blues, and to the words of Thomas Wolfe \u201cwhispering in my head.\u201d Wolfe\u2019s two most famous novels, the autobiographical Look Homeward, Angel<\/em> and the equally autobiographical You Can\u2019t Go Home Again<\/em>, tell the story of a country boy\u2019s struggle to leave and return to the South. Don Williams\u2019s country boy has taken Wolfe\u2019s cue.<\/p>\n

Unsettled by the death of a friend from substance abuse and, we might infer, by the fear of becoming a sentimental drunk like his old man, the country boy has \u201chit the road,\u201d and in more ways than one. He admits, in the final verse, that he has purposefully moderated his Southern accent to sound like \u201cthe man on the six o\u2019clock news.\u201d Maybe he\u2019s not a country boy at all. Maybe he never was one to begin with. \u201cI was smarter than most,\u201d he says, \u201cand I could choose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, that he can recall these experiences and artifacts with such precision reveals how inured of them he remains. So much so that in the end, his statement about freedom of choice has been allayed by a kind of fatalism. \u201cI guess,\u201d he concludes, \u201cwe\u2019re all gonna be what we\u2019re gonna be \/ so what do you do with good ole boys like me?\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure how to take that question. Which way is it aimed? Is the \u201cyou\u201d a world that no longer has much use for country boys? Or is the \u201cyou\u201d the country boys who couldn\u2019t care less about their own relevance and so regard this narrator with suspicion? Don Williams\u2019s country boy is some combination of Skaggs\u2019s and Hank Jr.\u2019s varieties. He\u2019s survived, all right, but in spite of his upbringing, not because of it, and what would it mean if in the end it turned out he wasn\u2019t a country boy, not even at heart?<\/p>\n

\u201cGood Ole Boys Like Me\u201d has always reminded me of a painting by Marc Chagall called I and the Village<\/em>, a framed poster of which hung on a wall in my Tennessee elementary school. Chagall completed I and the Village<\/em> when he was in his midtwenties. He had traveled from Belarus to Paris and back. The painting, a spectacular of rapt disorientation, describes the churn.<\/p>\n

In it, scenes from Vitsyebsk, the town where Chagall grew up, wheel around a polychromatic dreamscape. The characters are earthy, low down, and yet the picture radiates a kind of weightlessness. A man with a green face and white eyes holds a little tree of life. There\u2019s a woman milking a goat on a cow\u2019s cheek.<\/em> In the background, a woman in blue skirts stands on her head, a kind of yin to the yang of a peasant shouldering a scythe.<\/p>\n

I and the Village<\/em> projects a cockeyed vision of village life. Later, Chagall would write in his memoir, My Life<\/em>, that the flying figures and transmogrifying vistas that characterized his early breakthroughs had come in response to a desire, expressed in desperate prayers while walking the streets of Paris, to \u201csee a new world.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the third or fourth grade, I would not have had the vocabulary to articulate such thoughts, but I think I sensed, as I walked by I and the Village<\/em> en route to class or hovered in front of it while waiting in line to go to the gym or restroom, something of Chagall\u2019s fraught relationship with his roots.<\/p>\n

There was adoration in the Chagall, and there was also revulsion, nearness and distance, the red and the green. The artist loved this place and these people even though, as I suspected, he wasn\u2019t one of them. His village wasn\u2019t Vitsyebsk; his village was the canvas. Likewise, Don Williams\u2019s \u201cgood ole boy,\u201d out of place in the country and the city alike, finds comfort, if nowhere else, in the country song, which for all of its parochialism never comes off as provincial.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s telling, if not surprising, that the chorus of \u201cGood Ole Boys Like Me\u201d commends, out of all the country singers in the canon, Hank Williams Sr., Hank Jr.\u2019s dad. Ol\u2019 Hank, to my knowledge, didn\u2019t write any songs called \u201cCountry Boy.\u201d What he did write, unforgettably, was \u201cRamblin\u2019 Man\u201d (1953), a minor-key manifesto, delivered in a brazen blue yodel, about the allure of the open road, a place he calls in another song \u201cthe lost highway.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is a rambling man? A country boy gone rogue. As much as he sees the good in a simple, even simplistic way of life, a rambling man values his freedom more. He\u2019s a flight risk. In love and work, he\u2019s liable to unlatch at any moment, not caring who he works up or lets down in the process. Ashley Monroe, a country singer who has taken up the rambler mantle, describes the calculus in her song \u201cI\u2019m Good at Leavin\u2019\u2009\u201d (2015):<\/p>\n

A couple times I said I do
\nA couple times I said we\u2019re through
\nI never really seem to get what I was needing
\nI\u2019m good at packing up my car
\nI\u2019m good at honky-tonks and bars<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Waylon Jennings, in his 1974 cover of Ray Pennington\u2019s Hank-inspired \u201cI\u2019m a Ramblin\u2019 Man,\u201d puts it more bluntly: \u201cYou\u2019d better move away\u2009\/\u2009You\u2019re standin\u2019 too close to the flame.\u201d<\/p>\n

More than a personal liability, though, Hank\u2019s rambling man is also something of a jongleur. Hank recorded \u201cRamblin\u2019 Man\u201d under the auspices of his alter ego, Luke the Drifter. The songs Hank recorded as Luke tend to deliver morality tales. Luke is a kind of itinerant preacher, a wandering prophet whose home church seems to consist solely of Hank Williams, whose own songs, reflective of his life, were often about carousing, heavy drinking, and existential despair.<\/p>\n

Instead of Dr. Jekyll to the country boy\u2019s Mr. Hyde, Hank\u2019s rambling man is a wiser, more bruised iteration of himself. He seems older than Hank, at once more frightening and more reasonable, cut off from society and yet drawing from a deeper source. He hasn\u2019t abdicated responsibility so much as secured the necessary distance to appraise experience and report back. Rambling, in this sense, is the process by which a country boy becomes a man.<\/p>\n

\u201cRamblin\u2019 Man\u201d was never released as a single. The song was the B side to \u201cTake These Chains from My Heart,\u201d a honky-tonk ballad that went to No. 1 following Hank\u2019s death, at age twenty-nine, on New Year\u2019s Day 1953. Hank\u2019s passing translated \u201cRamblin\u2019 Man\u201d into a last will and testament. \u201cAnd when I\u2019m gone,\u201d he sings,<\/p>\n

And at my grave you stand
\nJust say God\u2019s called home
\nYour ramblin\u2019 man<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like John Denver, Ol\u2019 Hank invokes the Almighty. \u201cLet me travel this land,\u201d he prays,<\/p>\n

From the mountains to the sea
\n\u2019Cause that\u2019s the life I believe
\nHe meant for me<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One thanks his stars he\u2019s a country boy. The other thanks his he isn\u2019t only that. The question, in other words, is not whether or not to be a country boy. The question is, What kind of country boy are you going to be?<\/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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