Latter Day Outlaw Country Songs
They are great, but there's a difference...And other ramblings, as I begin to lose the plot here
(In a previous post, I wrote about how certain country music artists were representative of a large White underclass that has since disappeared. Please read that first; this is definitely part two.)
In some ways Billy Joe Shaver was the last of his breed — a guy born into a hardscrabble existence who had to personally claw his way out via the military and his inborn gift for poetry.
When he sang words like:
On a rainy, windy morning that's the day that I was born on
In that old sharecroppers one room country shack
They say my mammy left me same day that she had me
Said, she hit the road and never once looked back
and
I got all my country learning, millin' and a churning
Pickin' cotton, rasin' hell, and bailin' hay
and many more, they came across as believable, because one look at the man was all you needed to know that they were true. If the creased face didn’t tell you, or the worn-out denim shirt, then the absence of those fingers certainly did. He was the real deal. When he sang about poverty and hard times and bar fights and dancin’ holes in his shoes, he was singing from personal experience. It seems it was impossible for him not to; the only times he didn’t, he would sing meditations on faith and mortality as he saw them, as in “Live Forever.”
He was real in a way that even Waylon and Willie were not. Neither of those guys came from shattered families, and Willie even enrolled at Baylor for a spell. They had aspirations; Billy Joe operated on desperation.
And so there was a difference in the outlaw / poverty songs he wrote — and those that Haggard and Loretta and Dolly wrote, and that Paycheck wrote or performed — and those of almost everybody else younger than them. They could embody those words because they were those words.
As I wrote in the last post, after three wars and generations of the GI Bill, the once-vast White underclass had all but disappeared by the 1970s. I’ve seen it personally in Houston, my hometown. Giant neighborhoods like Aldine and cities like Pasadena, once exclusively White and mostly poor, are now overwhelmingly Hispanic. The same goes for areas of town closer in, like the Near Northside, much of the East End, South Park, and Kashmere Gardens, birthplace of Johnny Bush, but for generations since a fertile breeding ground for funk and jazz musicians and rappers.
Concentrated White poverty is impossible to find any closer to Houston than places like Bacliff, just across the Galveston County line, and way, way up north in the Piney Woods beyond Intercontinental. Even lower middle-class to middle-class Whites are hard to find in Houston proper now that Sharpstown and Alief are incredibly diverse neighborhoods home to every race and color of face. By and large, the Whites who once lived there — many of them KIKKers back in the day — decamped to places like Katy and Cypress, which are also rapidly diversifying, and they were beaten to the punch by Pearland and almost all of suburban Fort Bend County by a decade or more.
Those country fans that have remained in Houston have prospered and now form the core audience for artists like Robert Earl Keen (himself a product of the Sharpstown diaspora), Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, et. al. At least 15 years or so ago, in affluent White enclaves like Memorial, it was fashionable for White kids to be fans of Texas country artists like Pat Green and Cory Morrow, dudes with a very tame outlaw streak but much more vociferous about not being from Nashville than anything else.
To take on the spawn of Green and Morrow first — the Texas music of today is less a lamentation of hard times or declarations of badassery than it is a celebration of all things Texas. Most of it seems composed by a committee of chamber of commerce types based in the Hill Country — endless songs about tubing on Texas rivers, drinking Texas beers, beautiful Texas women in Daisy Dukes cut off right here in Texas, driving down Texas dirt roads in Texas Edition trucks, while listening to Texas artists singing to you about….all of the above Texas Texas yee-haw things.
When these artists do lapse into a sad song, it’s usually of the “I’m drinking myself into a stupor because you left me (with Texas beers and liquors, of course)” variety but utterly lacking in the pathos of those sung by George Jones, who actually would drink himself into stupors over, well, lots of things. And while it’s not fair to compare just about anybody to the Possum singing-wise, well, take it from a drunk: the lyrics of these modern-day drunkards’ blues don’t rise to those of Jones, such as “if drinking don’t kill me her memory will” or Bob Wills’ “I know that my life’s been a failure, while watchin’ the bubbles in my beer” or the chilling all-time great alcoholic’s lament “There Stands the Glass” or Tom T. Hall’s novelistic “Pay No Attention to Alice.”
In short, you don’t believe these youngsters when they claim they are wallowing in the gutter because there are generally four more songs on the same album celebrating booze as a wonder drug.
James Thurber nailed these songwriters in his cartoon series “The Masculine Approach.” This method was included along side other angles of attack including “The candy-and-flowers campaign,” the “strong, silent system,” and the “you’ll’-never-see-me-again tactics.”
“Power of Positive Drinkin’.” “Red Solo Cup.” “Ten Rounds with Jose Cuervo.” “Count the Beers.” “Bottoms Up.” “Drunk on a Plane.” And so on and on and on….
Which is all a bit of a detour…Anyway, some of the songwriters of today, those loosely based in the outlaw or alt-country tradition, do take on songs about criminals and such, but here is the thing: they almost never try to convince you that they, the singer, are the outlaw they are singing about.
This is a sea change from the days of Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues,” Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home,” Paycheck’s “The Only Hell My Mama Ever Raised,” or any number of David Allen Coe songs. In the cases of the latter three, all of those singers had or would do hard time; Cash seemed believable as a man who had, but in fact had not.
Contrast that to latter-day songwriters. Steve Earle’s songs of outlaws are almost always set in the past (“Tom Ames’ Prayer” “Devil’s Right Hand”) or cast in a plainly-stated persona or both: “My name’s Billy Austin and I’m 29 years old…” or “My name’s John Lee Pettimore, same as my daddy and his daddy before.”
Robert Earl Keen sings about Sonny and Sherry — he doesn’t try to pretend to be Sonny. Charlie Robison’s “Desperate Times” — underrated even if it’s an obvious attempt at a fusion of “The Road Goes on Forever” and “Copperhead Road” — likewise finds him describing the actions of characters who are not Charlie Robison, and in that case, are characters he might well have known: a burned-out, debt-stressed veteran-turned cop and his bank teller girlfriend, not Flannery O’Connor-style Misfits.
Maybe you believe Lyle Lovett would go on a killing spree at his ex’s wedding. I kinda choose not to? But this song is something of an outlier, but he comes across much less of a badass than a terrifying creep.
Anyway, that’s all kind of where we are, at least with my dated understanding of country music. It’s less about meaningful current events than it is about hedonism and a certain nostalgia, four-minute sagas of the deeds brave and foul of our ancestors.
Way way open to discussion in the comments; I feel I’ve kind of hit a wall here, but that there is plenty more to discuss on the other side….
Co-witing was once in the minority. Did Willie, Billy Joe, Dolly, Loretta, Merle or Waylon or George co-write? No, nor did David Allan Coe nor Steve Earle. Today? Well, Lady A (formerly Lady Antebellum) are releasing a new 7 song album. 19 writers are credited for that septet of songs., some that took five writers to craft. POV dilution to the max. Closest Nashville has come lately to an "outlaw" song is "Beer Never Broke My Heart". And now, they tell me, country songs are "all about t he bounce", the words don't matter as long as the song has good thumps. Four artists -- Morgan Wallen, Luke Combs, Chris Stapleton and Carrie Underwood are selling substantially while the rest are awash in a sea of mediocrity.
I agree, I am a TX Country and Red Dirt fan and that’s where I would put the Pat Greens, Cory Morrows, Randy Rogers etc. You would be very hard pressed to label any of that as Outlaw. I’m not really sure there is such a thing right now. I like the previous commenter’s term, Hardscrabbler, and current singers are expanding away from TX (except for maybe Ryan Bingham and Paul Cauthen?) like artists Arlo McKinley (Ohio) and Benjamin Tod/Lost Dog Street Band (Kentucky). Some of these have spent some time living in cars and jail cells. Almost all battle addiction of some kind.