CMT Blog: Flatt & Scruggs

Dierks Bentley's new album, Up on the Ridge, comes out a week from today, on June 8. I got an advance copy a couple weeks ago and I have to say that before I even slid that CD into the player, I knew I was going to love it. That's because with every CD I get, I immerse myself in the liner notes 100 percent. I read every lyric to every song, then all the stuff at the end. That's usually just a few paragraphs of gratitude, and Bentley definitely gets around to all those thanks, but first he shares his epiphany about finding what he calls "the musical foundation" he'd been hoping to find when he moved to Nashville 15 years ago.

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When I wake up on the floor of a cheap motel room with Charles snoring in the bed above me, I can't help but think about all the things that the first and second generations of bluegrass pickers went through to keep this music alive. Curly Seckler, of Flatt & Scruggs fame, says they assumed the first three rows of a corn field were open season for hungry musicians, traveling the roads without much cash. Thomas Haglund, the Swedish fiddler, says that money was so tight when he played with Jimmy Martin, his first job upon arriving at any festival was to search the grounds for a bass player for the night. When Flatt & Scruggs were doing their 4 a.m. live radio broadcasts, they didn't want to wake up early and try to sing, so they'd just stay up all night until show time.

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How odd to see in a recent ad for Foreigner's Nashville concert that the show is being sponsored by the AARP. I had to laugh out loud - rock's dinosaurs are finally getting their appropriate sponsorship. No more trying to be young and hip. Foreigner gave up and accepted the inevitable.

These days it seems as if there has always been corporate sponsorship of music tours. But, relatively speaking, it really hasn't been that long ago when there was no rock major corporate sponsorship at all. Country barn dances such as the Grand Ole Opry always had fairly low-budget stage corporate backers such as Prince Albert tobacco. Martha White Flour backed Flatt & Scruggs on tour. The magic elixir Hadacol sponsored an entire national caravan tour starring Bob Hope and Hank Williams as the headliners. Camel cigarettes sponsored the Camel Caravan of country stars during World War II, touring military bases and hospitals.

But in rock, the first sponsored tour came in 1981, when Jovan Perfume backed the Rolling Stones. There was a huge hue and cry from the rock community, which felt that the Stones had sold out the ideals of the rock revolution. The Stones reply was that they were doing it just to keep ticket prices down, for the people, man. We all know how that turned out.

But you know who the first modern-day big corporate sponsor was? Junior Johnson persuaded the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company to sponsor his team's car on the NASCAR circuit in 1971. The price? Under $100,000.

I am not a man who plucks the subject of cleavage out of thin air, but neither do I shrink from cleavage when it is thrust upon me. So it is with serious purpose that I turn to the topographical features of Rhonda Vincent. In the liner photos for her new album, Good Thing Going, the effervescent bluegrass star once again exhibits some intriguing studies in light and shadow. One picture shows her lying on her back in the grass, pensively gazing at the sky while clasping the neck of her mandolin just to the side of her precipitously plunging neckline. Looking closely at the photo (and choking back sounds generally associated with the last stages of waterboarding), I concluded this was not a candid shot, not something that could be dismissed as the accidental slip of a strap or failure of a button. No, it was a deliberate display of the goods. And bravo for her. The peek-a-boo theme has been common to her album and publicity art since at least as far back as her One Step Ahead CD of 2003. On that cover, she strides across a street wearing a top that bares both cleavage and navel. I count this the most important advance in bluegrass music since Bill Monroe hired Flatt and Scruggs.

As one who is pure of heart, I barely took notice of Vincent’s stylistic swashbuckling until it came up at the 2003 International Country Music Conference. There, on a panel called “Country Music and Gender,” banjo player and magazine columnist Murphy Henry grouched about Vincent’s recent epidermal revelations and then flatly declared, “You don’t show cleavage in bluegrass!” That outraged me. How dare she, I thought, put such a rack on the rack? I was on the verge of withering her with a spirited defense of cleavage as an instrument of free expression, but then it occurred to me that someone might think my motivation was more carnal than Constitutional. So I cravenly kept my mouth shut. It is a shame I will carry with me the rest of my life. Forgive me, Rhonda, and keep up the good works.

My personal highlight of today is easy – I sat next to Sam Bush at the IBMA nominations announcement this morning. (IBMA is the bluegrass equivalent of the CMAs.) Sam Bush is only one of the greatest mandolin players ever. He’s hosting the awards show on Oct. 4, so he was on hand to talk about how much fun it’s going to be. The last time I saw him play was at Bonnaroo, when Dierks Bentley brought him out for a rousing rendition of “Same Old Moon.” I couldn’t get that song out of my head for days.

Right now I have “If You Don’t Love Your Neighbor, Then You Don’t Love God” bouncing around in my mind. That’s because the songwriter Carl Story was announced as one of two new inductees into the Bluegrass Hall of Fame. (It’s officially changed its name from Bluegrass Hall of Honor, starting this year.) One of the most pivotal bass players in bluegrass history, Howard Watts, a.k.a. Cedric Rainwater, is this year’s other inductee. He played with Bill Monroe & His Bluegrass Boys (in what many people refer to as ‘the classic lineup’), as well as Flatt & Scruggs, Jimmy Martin, the Osborne Brothers and even Kitty Wells.

One of the most promising bands in bluegrass, the Infamous Stringdusters, kicked off the easygoing morning with a few songs. I remember seeing these guys at Station Inn when they were billed as Wheelhouse, under a slightly different configuration. They’re definitely talented but I know I’d be sweating bullets with several of the top bluegrass musicians in the world sitting in the crowd, including fellow nominees Del McCoury, Doyle Lawson, Tim O’Brien, Dale Ann Bradley, Jim Van Cleve and Andy Leftwich. I’m happy to report that the Stringdusters did a terrific job. Meanwhile, I was just trying to play it cool, because did I mention I was sitting next to Sam Bush?

If I never hear another country song about how impervious the singer is to education, experience and ambition ... well, we know that’s not going to happen. Country artists and songwriters have always pandered to backwardness, to the notion that it’s treason against your family and class to aspire to better circumstances than you were born into. It’s no wonder that people so freely make fun of our music. We ask for it. We’ve done everything short of attaching tags to our ears that say, “We’re poor, uneducated, worked to death and damn proud to stay that way.”

The granddaddy of such lyrical self-effacements is Flatt & Scruggs’ “Don’t Get Above Your Raising” in which the singer takes his girl to task because “she just ain’t what she used to be.” His advice: “Don’t get above your raising / Stay down to earth with me.” In other words, don’t evolve or adapt. Eric Church’s “Guys Like Me” presents as the feminine ideal a disheveled shift worker who uses snuff, drinks too much and spends his Saturdays working on his truck. That may seem cool when you’re 20 but it’s pathetic if you’re 40.

“Guys Like Me” is, of course, just the male variation of “Redneck Woman,” an equally self-sabotaging ditty. The sad fact is that today’s defiant young redneck woman is likely to become tomorrow’s defeated old redneck woman. The song doesn’t tell you that. Terri Clark’s “Dirty Girl” plows the same barren field, suggesting there’s something irresistible about the earthy type whose imagination is compressed between her wrenches and her pearls. That’s a pretty narrow slice of existence.

How about “I Wanna Be A Hillbilly,” the rube proclamation that graces Billy Currington’s current album? Here’s a sample: “City folks got worries / a country boy’s got none / All I wanna be is the daddy of a farmer’s son / Subdivisions are silly / I wanna be a hillbilly.” Even allowing for a certain amount of humor and poetic overstatement, this is a dismal, shortsighted vision for an increasingly complex world.

Besides offering bad role models, there’s also something cynical and dishonest about these songs. Many of the singers and songwriters who repeatedly warm over this thin thematic gruel are college grads who live in grand homes, vacation abroad and send their kids to private schools. I guess it’s more comfortable to glorify simple-minded hard living than it is to endure it.