Country Music Blog: Eddy Arnold

I wrote this entry in my journal last week: May 8, 2008 - "Eddy Arnold died this morning. I saw it on the breaking news. I immediately thought of my mother. I know how much he reminded her of grandpa."

Though she never met Eddy Arnold or knew him on a personal level, my mom could tell what kind of man he was by watching him on television as a little girl and listening to him on the radio. "He was smooth," she told me, "a real gentleman." It seems she wasn't off the mark. At Arnold's funeral, his pastor described him as "a first-class entertainer and a first-class gentleman." Vince Gill said he was a man who "taught you how to be kind and how to be a gentleman."

Read more...

Gretchen Wilson sets a better example with her life than with her songs. Beginning with "Redneck Woman," many of her songs seem to suggest that you can be happy and emotionally fulfilled by embracing the squalor, ignorance and low expectations into which you were born. Fortunately, she's never followed her own lyrical counsel. She dreamed big, worked hard and became a superstar. Now she's taken time out to earn the high school diploma she had to forfeit back in tougher times. That's a monumental act of courage and good sense -- and it's the kind of value she should be extolling in her songs rather than the dead-end charms of Skoal rings and Jack Daniel's.

Read more...

In the hours after Eddy Arnold's death early Thursday morning, country music stars and everyday working class people from Nashville have been sharing their stories of the Country Music Hall of Fame member. And if there's one underlying theme, it's the kindness and decency he showed to everyone he had contact with long after he had anything to prove or anyone to impress.

He was a superstar long before anyone ever coined the expression, but he didn't act like a superstar and you certainly wouldn't pick him out of a crowd as being a multi-millionaire. Up until a few months ago, he could be seen most weekdays having lunch at a modest meat-and-three restaurant south of downtown Nashville. Read more...

I don’t know if it was Johnny Ray, Elvis Presley or some overheated divine stomping the floorboards of a rural church who first decided a singer could deliver his lyrics more effectively by throwing his whole body into the act. Whoever it was, I wish he’d kept it to himself. Fifty years or so after the unfortunate birth of rock ‘n’ roll, it still annoys the hell out of me when singers shimmy, strut and prance about the stage instead of letting me focus on the content of their songs, which, presumably, is why they put those utterances on record. Should I ever be in the mood for extravagant motions set to music (a yearning from which I have so far been spared), I’ll watch a DVD of Riverdance.

Although concert contortions have long since taken root in country music, the greatest and most durable acts -- stylists like Eddy Arnold, Ray Price, Marty Robbins, George Jones, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Conway Twitty, Vince Gill, George Strait, Alison Krauss and Alan Jackson have all managed to enthrall millions by the sheer expressiveness of their voices. They didn’t and don’t require a half acre of stairs, ramps, runways and risers to convey strong and sometimes complex emotions. The same goes for opera stars who can bring onlookers to tears without heaving their considerable tonnage hither and yon.

Being a champion of free expression, I have absolutely no desire to impose my preference for immobility on others, even if I could. If some tone-deaf, nuance-starved wailer wants to drape himself in live ferrets and swing from the rafters by his eyelids, he can rest assured that I’ll go to the wall to defend his right to make a galloping ass of himself. But such gymnastics eclipse the subtle art of delivering a lyric. Worse still, they goad the audience into joining in the mindless revelry. There’s no uglier sight than that. Tell you what, why don’t I trade you my ticket for your CD? That way I can at least find out what the songs are about.

I was foraging through Arthur Schlesinger's Journals, 1952-2000 the other day when I came upon an entry in which the late historian and presidential adviser declared that he "detest[ed] country music and rock-and-roll." Well, that's a bit too pat, don't you think? Over the years, a lot of people have told me they hated country music. But what they really meant, I discovered when I pressed them for specifics, was that they disliked the very few samples of country music they had heard and assumed that those samples represented the whole format. In other words, they stereotyped.It's easy to imagine that the urbane, gregarious, fashionable and politically liberal Schlesinger might have disdained the twangy, faux down-home gibberish and conservative viewpoints that mark some country music. But that's like biting into one or two sour apples and concluding you hate all fruit. Eddy Arnold's "You Don't Know Me," which he co-wrote with Cindy Walker, is surely as elegant as any love song that ever graced the Broadway stage. Alan Jackson's "Where Were You (When The World Stopped Turning)" provides as much food for thought about humanity under pressure as any of Schlesinger's celebrated op-ed essays.

As a prose stylist himself, Schlesinger would almost certainly have been impressed by the narrative power and cinematic imagery of Tom T. Hall's "Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine" and the carefully crafted dark interiors of Bob McDill's "Good Ole Boys Like Me" (via Don Williams' impeccable interpretation).

While Schlesinger might have recoiled instinctively from the traditional country sounds of "It's Not Love (But It's Not Bad)" -- the Merle Haggard hit from Hank Cochran and Glenn Martin -- he was enough of a ladies' man to savor and smile knowingly at its message. And I have no doubt that he would have been moved by Patsy Cline's smoky rendering of Don Gibson's "Sweet Dreams." How could any male heart resist it?

Country music is such a richly varied art form that you can bring almost any of its critics to heel by insisting that they cite the particular roots of their distaste and then pointing out how narrow their view is. There's no greater sport than shoving ill-informed criticism down people's throats.

It wasn't too long ago that country performers routinely incorporated a title with their name, the idea being that such an addition gave them a little extra boost in stature and individuality. Thus, Roy Acuff was the King of Country Music, Kitty Wells the Queen and Tammy Wynette the First Lady. The practice went a long way back. Jimmie Rodgers billed himself as the Singing Brakeman (and later bore the title of Father of Country Music). Grand Ole Opry patriarch Uncle Dave Macon was known as the Dixie Dewdrop. Eddy Arnold gained fame as the Tennessee Plowboy (but gradually eased away from that designation as he sought a broader, more urbane audience). Tennessee Ernie Ford styled himself as the Old Pea Picker, and Ernest Tubb labored as the Texas Troubadour. Patti Page was the Singing Rage.

Sometimes these titles were conferred on performers by their admirers and sometimes by their paid promoters. But whatever its origin, the value of a title lay in whether or not it stuck and eventually became synonymous with the performer's name.

Before there was a Gary LeVox, Vern Gosdin was the Voice. Roy Rogers was King of the Cowboys, Bill Monroe the Father of Bluegrass, Hank Snow the Singing Ranger, Johnny Cash the Man in Black and Tom T. Hall the Storyteller. Generously proportioned Kenny Price of Hee Haw went to his grave as the Round Mound of Sound. Ranger Doug Green of Riders in the Sky continues to call himself (albeit puckishly) the Idol of American Youth.

So here's what I'd like to know: What do you think would be fitting honorifics for the likes of Garth Brooks, Vince Gill, Alan Jackson, Reba McEntire, Martina McBride, Kenny Chesney, Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill (separately or in tandem), Josh Turner, Carrie Underwood, Brad Paisley, Miranda Lambert or any other act of your choosing? Here's your chance to influence country music history. The floor is yours.

Too many “singer-songwriters” are making records these days. Their singing may be OK, but too often their songwriting sucks. I wouldn’t care if I didn’t have to suffer through their dopey, derivative, meterless, awkwardly rhymed and wafer-thin lyrics. But I do. And it’s infuriating when you consider all the great songs out there that never get cut because the singer doesn’t own a piece of them.

Country music has had a wealth of first-rate singer-composers: Jimmie Rodgers, A. P. Carter, Hank Williams, the Louvin Brothers, Marty Robbins, Don Gibson, Carter Stanley, Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, Mel Tillis, Bill Anderson, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Tom T. Hall, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, Roger Miller, Dottie West, Eddie Rabbitt, Earl Thomas Conley, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Rodney Crowell, Alan Jackson and perhaps a dozen others whose omission from this list will haunt me as soon as I post this blog. Even these lyrical wizards didn’t limit themselves to their own songs. Superb songwriters though they are, Larry Gatlin and Clint Black gradually dimmed their appeal by refusing to open their records to other songwriters. The more of their own material they did, the more it sounded the same.

A lot of music critics hold singer-songwriters in particularly high regard, contending that such exalted creatures are more believable, interesting and authentic than mere mouthers of other people’s words. Bullspit! What counts is the emotion conveyed in a performance, not lyrical authorship. Could Irving Berlin, who wrote the song, capture hearts with “White Christmas” the way Bing Crosby did? Does it lessen their emotional impact because Eddy Arnold, Ray Price, Glen Campbell, Jim Reeves, George Strait, Reba McEntire, Charley Pride, Don Williams, Ronnie Milsap, Randy Travis and Tim McGraw, for example, wrote few or none of their biggest hits?

Being a singer-songwriter is as much about money as it is about art. Any singer who can land a record contract can be sure of a lucrative music publishing deal as well. That’s because the publisher knows the singer can then be induced to record his own songs. When a singer does this and his songs are played on radio and sold on albums, he will be paid performance fees for the former and mechanical fees for the latter, in addition to album royalties. These economic realities are big incentives for the singer to become a songwriter, whether he can write or not. I guess it all comes down to this: Do writing-impaired artists want to make a living or a build a career? Weak songs won’t sustain them for the long haul. But they will torment me for the moment.

When my computer goes down, I can still turn in a fairly full day of work; but take away my Whitburn and I might as well be dozing on the beach. After all, who knows when I’ll need to find out the title of Eddy Arnold’s first No. 1 (“What Is Life Without Love,” 1947) or Buck Owens’ last one (“Streets Of Bakersfield,” 1988)? By Whitburn, I refer to that indispensable volume of record research, the latest incarnation of which is called Joel Whitburn’s Top Country Songs: 1944-2005.

I must stress that I have absolutely no personal stake in this product. I have never met Mr. Whitburn, have no financial interest in his company and have never received nor requested a free or discounted copy of his books. Even so, he thrills me with his Olympian sweep of our music. To begin with, he provides for each artist a thumbnail bio that includes the full name, date and place of birth (and, where applicable, death) and a list of CMA Awards and Grammys. There are also pictures of the top 200 artists. Then for each song, he cites the date it first charted, its peak position and the number of weeks it stayed there, the overall number of weeks on the chart, the record label and record number, the songwriter(s) and, in more recent entries, the title of the album the song came from.

The songs are further indexed by title, and there is a final section of lists for such career achievements as most chart hits, most No. 1 hits and most consecutive No. 1 hits. It is an astounding store of useful information and deliciously trivial snack facts. As one might expect in such a monumental undertaking, there are occasional errors. For example, in Brooks & Dunn’s entry, Whitburn cites Ronnie Dunn as a co-writer of “It’s Getting Better All the Time,” when it should be Ronnie Bowman. But that is a mere flyspeck on the Taj Mahal.

When I come across a song in Whitburn that interests me but whose words and melody I don’t know, I listen to a sample on Amazon.com or Tower.com. From that sample, I type the key phrases in a Google search for the complete lyrics. By such devices, one can sound awfully smart awfully fast. Isn’t that what American education is all about?