uTopianTurtleTop

love


A few months ago I re-read "The Nashville Scene: Bright Lights and Country Music" by Paul Hemphill. Hemphill grew up in the south; his father was a truckdriver; Hemphill was a reporter. His 1969 book is a reporter's book, surveying the country music scene from a Kitty Wells recording session at Owen Bradley's barn; to small-town DJs going over hill and dale to host dances; to down-on-their-luck songwriters hanging out in bars, waiting for their break; to hanging out with Chet Atkins (one of Nashville's few liberals, Hemphill notes, with a touch of wistfulness); to hanging out with mountain people who build their own fiddles and play tunes their parents taught them; to covering tapings of TV shows by Johnny & June and by Glen Campbell; to hanging out with fans who've saved their money for months and driven for hours to get to the Grand Ole Opry; to interviewing Tex Ritter who's bemused that his son, a college student at Berkeley, has given him "Soul on Ice" by Eldridge Cleaver (I've tried but failed to determine whether it was future "3's Company"-man John who was the Berkeley student); to getting the Opry's one African American star (a harmonica player whose name I've forgotten) to open up about how poorly the Opry treated him. All throughout the book, Hemphill gets a ton of detail in -- social detail, everyday life detail, telltale details denoting social status. And -- he says it himself, and his writing shows it every page -- these are his people, and he loves them. And -- it saddens him, their political viciousness -- most of them supported George Wallace's segragationist candidacy in 1968. He loves enough to criticize.

I recommend the book to anybody interested in the American South in the late '60s, or anybody interested in country music, or to any music writer.