I can remember the first time I had anything at stake in popular music. As a ten year old English schoolboy in the days leading up to the British Invasion, I had to decide whether I was a Beatles or a Rolling Stones fan. The Beatles had shot to fame in 1962, with the Stones coming up the following year. Ironically, one of the Stones’ first hits was the Lennon-McCartney tune “I Wanna Be Your Man”1, but it was given a typically primal treatment by Jagger and Co., and the record all but epitomizes their sound. It was very different from the Beatles’ joyful pop, and you were supposed to go with one or the other. I found it hard to choose. I’d like to say the dithering was a measure of the breadth of my musical appreciation, but it had to do with the uniquely childish concerns of boys contemplating manhood; while the Stones’ gritty musical delinquency could make the Beatles seem vapid, the Beatles’ irresistible musicality and daft charm could just as well make the Stones bad boy posturing seem silly. This was the essence of the dispute between the two camps, prosecuted with coarse schoolboy venom. I eventually went with the Beatles; given the same choice, I still do2. With that settled, I soon decided I was really a Kinks fan; their fantastic 1964 breakthrough “You Really Got Me”3, was so direct it almost outStoned the Stones, but their famously literate pop lyrics soon captured our attention and their songs have seemed to shadow my own extended development: the quiet pride of 1967’s Waterloo Sunset4 deeply moving to a young Londoner; the fluid gender of 1970’s “Lola”5 reflecting a young man’s search for sexual identity; 1982’s “Come Dancing”6 offering a wistful welcome to the middle years.
In 1963, the issue had been simple; the Beatles or the Stones? We were all thrown in at the deep end. This wasn’t, or course, my first involvement with music. Like everyone everywhere, I had grown up surrounded by it. But before the opening “Oh yeah, I” of “I Want to Hold Your Hand”7, the greatest hook in pop history, yanked me into tribal musical consciousness, I had simply accepted and enjoyed the sounds of music. What had caught my ear and exercised my throat wasn’t any kind of youth music, but the hodge-podge of traditional and popular pieces to which we were all then exposed, most of them learned and sung at school. First and foremost, there were hymns and carols; “O Worship the King”8, “He Who Would Valiant Be”9, “Jerusalem”10, “The First Noël, Silent Night”11 – to a child, the most beautiful song in the world. This Anglican daily bread was leavened with English folk songs – Widecombe Fair, Green Grow the Rushes O and the bowdlerized version of The Maid of Amsterdam – and gentrified ‘Negro Spirituals’ like “Down By the Riverside” and “Go Tell It On the Mountain”.
We sang these songs at home too, where there were other delights. On family car journeys, I would add my plummy suburban treble to Music Hall standards like “My Old Man”12 and “Oh How He Lied”. There were also popular songs that had become children’s favourites. An uncle had a record of Last Train to San Fernando by Johnny Duncan and the Bluegrass Boys13 I could sing. I loved Bing Crosby’s “Swinging On a Star”14, with its delicious infantile surrealism and apparently effortless rhyming, and his intoxicating invitation to be “Busy Doing Nothing”15.
(The Beatles – Stones question is rather precisely mirrored in a Bing Sheet music for Last Train To San Fernando Crosby – Frank Sinatra question, and I have always preferred Crosby’s gentle voice and genial public persona to Sinatra’s Rat Pack cool; his partnership with Bob Hope in the Road movies, also childhood favourites, may have something to do with it.) I loved Gene Autry’s “(I’ve Got Spurs that) Jingle, Jangle, Jingle”16. I was delighted by the convoluted understatement of the last line of the chorus: “And that song ain’t so very far from wrong”. I also fell in love with the voice, and stirring paternal presence, of Paul Robeson, although my attempts at singing “Ol’ Man River”17 were only a child’s impersonation of the bass register.
I didn’t pay much attention to what was American and what was British. I’m sure I noticed – with Gene Autry you could hardly miss it – but I didn’t make anything of it. This held for the rock and roll that filtered through; to a child, there wasn’t much difference between Elvis Presley and Cliff Richard, Buddy Holly and Tommy Steele. 1963 was different. Oblivious to the significance of American influence, the Beatles and the Stones seemed thoroughly, wonderfully British. The British Invasion, beginning in 1964, was registered, even by a schoolboy, as a huge national victory, American hearts falling to our boys’ pop chops and cocky wit.
At the same time, I was aware of distinctly American music. Bob Dylan was leading the American folk revolution, his earnest songs and hip delivery making British folk seem merely whimsical; not surprising when you’ve grown up singing Barbara Allen. In 1963, “Blowin’ in the Wind”18 established him as a singular visionary whose poetic and apparently prophetic gifts allowed him to voice the longings of the first global generation. But, for me, the most visceral seduction was by another profoundly American musician; I must have heard Ray Charles’ “Making Believe” b/w “Busted”19 on the radio, and I bought it. It was one of my first personal record purchases and I just couldn’t stop playing it. These were pretty sombre themes for a ten year old but, even as a boy, when I listened to those gospel-soaked R & B vocals which never fail to showcase his profound command of rhythm, melody, lyric, timing and timbre, I could tell there was something about the way Ray Charles could sing that created sublime music, and that if you wanted to sing this well, you had to be, or you had to pretend to be, American.
It’s a simplification, of course, but I think those four giants from 1963 – the Beatles and the Stones, Bob Dylan and Ray Charles – represent the point of departure from which have I navigated the endlessly swirling transatlantic currents of popular music. I would come to understand the American sources that had inspired Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, and detect the English folk music genealogy in the desperate immediacy of Dylan and Woody Guthrie. Ray Charles, so American, would always seem to have been born of another world entirely, coming to us directly from Heaven. It was hard to do anything more than listen with the music of Ray Charles and the Beatles; their ability to make a whole, magical sound was as intimidating as it was thrilling. Bob Dylan’s music would come to have more personal influence as I entered my teens. His leftie brainpower and grumbling vocals were catnip to suburban adolescents like me but, just as important, his simple instrumentation made his music seem playable. It was this, more than anything else, that suggested he could guide us all to our own authentic musical expression. The desire for authenticity his American music engendered would eventually have me and my friends fixated on country blues; Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson. It was American folk and blues, rather than rock or R & B, that made us pick up guitars in our teens. Having occasionally toyed with a friend’s guitar, and having bought a tenor banjo from another who’d inherited it, I eventually bought a second hand classical guitar for £20 from a junk shop. It had been cheap when new and badly repaired. I banged on a set of steel strings which lifted the bridge and made the action almost unplayable, and I was in business.
I don’t think I knew anyone with an electric guitar or bass, a keyboard or a set of drums, but acoustic guitars were everywhere. All the music we listened to was screened for acoustic playability: Buddy Holly and Simon and Garfunkel, yes; James Brown and Stevie Wonder, no; James Taylor and Pentangle, yes, obviously, but dauntingly tricky. The desire for music that spoke to us was reflected in the resilient popularity of dearly departed Eddie Cochran. We would strum acoustic versions of his rebel teen anthems, their American framing seemingly necessary for the expression of our alienation; we wouldn’t have felt his Summertime Blues20 if he’d been singing about the English seaside.
I bought an electric guitar when I was about twenty; a Shaftesbury copy of the massive Gibson Barney Kessel semi-acoustic for £35 in another junk shop. Reversing the problem I had created with my acoustic, the neck on the Shaftesbury started off twisted and bowed so the strings were always buzzing, and I could never fix it. I loved them both. From then on, I was much more serious about music; playing with friends, working on demos for a couple of local songwriters, and writing my own songs. Introspective singer-songwriters were all the rage; all I needed was to knock out a few chords, inflate my limited life- experiences with some singer-songwriter ‘honesty’, and I’d be making music.
Like everyone I played with, I was always finding myself stranded in mid-Atlantic; we were proud of the relentless invention of British music, and the clear-eyed virility of the American performers we covered was refracted through ourOld World jitters. Yet I sang even my own songs in a half-baked American accent. It seemed only right. The archly British vocal inflections of British traditional and progressive folk performers of the 1960s and ’70s seemed more stilted than the ubiquitous Americanization of British pop and rock singing. It was a wonderful thrill to hear Steve Harley of Cockney Rebel singing in a London accent in the early ’70s, a gesture taken up at the end of the decade by the British punk rockers and the boys from Squeeze. California native Billie Joe Armstrong, mimicking his Britpunk ancestors for Green Day in the ’90s , would be almost more endearing21.
I came to like a pretty wide range of music; I have heard something in just about every style that came along. Two escaped me. After the inspiring first flush of loud rock – Cream and Jimi Hendrix – I couldn’t get anything out of it. My friends went crazy for Led Zeppelin, but they left me cold, and I couldn’t find the life in their metal progeny. I also found little to like in what we always called Country and Western. I loved country inflected rock like The Byrds, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the Eagles, even Emmylou Harris. The presence of Graham Nash, a deeply Americanized Englishman, in C S N Y was a source of strange pride; their music was original, ambitious and, sealing the deal, acoustically playable. I also had that soft spot for Don Williams’ voice that mirrors the soft spot in Don it comes from, as well as a brief infatuation with the mysteries of Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman”22; it’s such a great song that I hardly noticed the Nashville Sound syrup. But I thought of Country and Western in general as Jim Reeves, which seemed little more than Easy Listening; as inauthentic as American folk and blues were real. I didn’t know about Ray Charles’ influential genre-bending 1962 albums Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music23 and Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music Volume 224, the latter the source of my beloved “Making Believe”. I hadn’t taken “Making Believe” to be a country song; I wouldn’t have liked Kitty Wells’ wonderful original if I’d heard it25. I don’t think any of us understood Dolly Parton at all. We couldn’t see past the Dollyness; couldn’t hear the deep musical roots, or even the beautiful voice, it’s hard won cheer earthy and ethereal at the same time. I’m ashamed to say it didn’t occur to me she was a songwriter.
By the time I moved to Canada in 1991, I was pursuing a career in academic criminology and playing much less music. I left a Yamaha FG180 acoustic guitar, a Framus Thinline semi-acoustic bass and a Roland Jazz Chorus 60 combo amp with various friends in England. The Shaftesbury had fallen to pieces. Soon after I arrived, I purchased a wonderful Cromwell archtop guitar for $400, just to have something to play. Cromwell’s were a cheap line made by Gibson, the archtops between 1936 and 1939. They’re not worth very much; mine was probably a fair price, and certainly not a steal. To me, it’s the bargain of the century. I haven’t tried to keep it original. I replaced the machine heads with Schallers I had fitted to the Shaftesbury, and which were languishing in England. I don’t use a pick these days, so I took off the scratch plate; I’m not using much of the archtop’s big rhythm sound, but it is a great sounding guitar. I have added quite a few guitars to my stockpile since.
I quickly began to realize how completely wrong I had been about country music. Living in North America, even the northern bit of it, I heard country music ever Rose Lee and Joe Maphis day. In the evenings, I sometimes improvised acoustic lead lines to country songs I heard on TV, their simple structures allowing gentle invention to produce satisfying results, and nourishing relaxation. I went through a phase of listening almost exclusively to women singers. I had started to find the capacity of women’s voices to simultaneously soothe and entice immensely gratifying. I have the same reaction to many kinds of women singers; soul, pop, folk, gospel, but there’s no doubt country music is blessed with an especially rich supply of great women singers. The two things came together and I began to feel very at home with women singing country. I embraced traditional and contemporary pop country, bluegrass and old time music, gritty rural folk and debonair Western swing. I came to a much deeper appreciation of the immense power of dynamic musical traditions in American music; not influences to be acquired and juggled, as I had always viewed them, but whole ways of doing music absorbed from childhood, often from kin. British pop inventiveness began to seem trivial by comparison; a crisis of faith I am yet to resolve.
Slowly I found myself feeling the music of performers that, in my first Canadian dalliance, had seemed ‘just too country’; Tammy Wynette and Pam Tillis, Merle Haggard and Ricky Skaggs, and, of course, Dolly Parton. I felt a final barrier break when I heard what all the fuss was about with George Jones’ singing. I started to play and sing country songs to myself, and to friends and family – Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today”26 and “She Thinks I Still Care”27 ; Joe and Rose Lee Maphis’ “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke”28 – initially with a degree of ironic distance and even morbid fascination, but these disguises soon disappearing to reveal musical appreciation and emotional connection.
I had written a few songs since coming to Canada; nothing serious or sustained, just indulging the flirtatious muse when she turned my head. But after years of listening, I eventually found myself writing my own country songs, the first, I Remember It All, a simple country waltz that tells an archetypal sad story of commitment and betrayal. Since then, I have written much more frequently, almost all in traditional country music forms. Music so grounded in its traditions, and which I approached from such a distance, seems to have taken root.
(1) Decca F-11764, 1963. Words and music: Lennon-McCartney, Sony/ATV music Publishing LLC.
(2) If Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot’s The Beatles Vs. The Rolling Stones: Sound Opinions on the Great Rock N’ Roll Rivalry (Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2010) and John McMillan’s Beatles Vs. Stones (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013) are anything to go by, it is still a live question.
(3) Pye 7N.15673, 1964. Words and music: Ray Davies, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC.
(4) Pye 7N.17321, 1967. Words and music: Ray Davies, Warner/Chappell MusicInc, ABKCO Music Inc.
(5) Pye 7N.17961, 1970. Words and music: Ray Davies, Dan Haugesen & Tony Lindby, EMI Publishing, Warner/Chappell Music Inc.
(6) Arista ARI 8301, 1982. Words and Music: Ray Davies, Sony/ATV Music Publishing Ltd.
(7) Parlaphone R 5084, 1963. Words and Music: Lennon-McCartney, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC.
(8) Words: Robert Grant; music: Johann Michael Haydn,
(9) Words: John Bunyan; revised: Percy Dearmer.
(10) Words: William Blake; music: Sir Hubert Parry, originally J. Curwen & Co.,1916
(11) Words: Joseph Mohr, trans. John Freeman Young; music: Franz Xaver Gruber.
(12) Words and music: Fred W. Leigh & Charles Collins
(13) Columbia 45 DB 3959, 1957. Words and music: Carlton Joseph Gumbs; revised: Randolph Padmore & Sylvester DeVere.
(14) Decca 18597, 1944. Words: Johnny Burke; music: Jimmy Van Heusen, Chappell & Co. Ltd.
(15) With William Bendix and Cedric Hardwicke. From soundtrack of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Paramount Pictures,1949. Words: Johnny Burke; music: Jimmy Van Heusen, Melrose Music Corp., 1948.
(16) Available on The Essential Gene Autry, Sony BMG Entertainment, 2005. Words and music: Frank Henry Loesser & Joseph J. Lilley, Paramount Music Corp, 1942.
(17) With Paul Whiteman and His Concert Orchestra. Columbia Records C55, 1941. Words: Oscar Hammerstein II; music: Jerome Kern, T.B. Harms, Cimino Publications, 1927.
(18) Columbia 4-42856, 1963. Words and music: Bob Dylan, Special Rider Music, originally Warner Brothers Inc.
(19) In the UK, HMV POP 1221, 1963. Making Believe: words and music: Jimmy Work, Sony/ATV Acuff Rose Music. Busted: words and music: Harlan Howard, Sony-ATV Tree Publishing.
(20) Liberty 55144, 1958. Words and music: Eddie Cochran & Jerry Capehart, EMI Music Publishing, Warner/Chappell Music.
(21) His recent album Foreverly with Norah Jones (Reprise Records 2 540939, 2013) beautifully evokes The Everly Brothers. His stint as Don Everly may not be Billie Joe being Billie Joe, but he sounds much more natural than in his exhilarating work with Green Day
(22) In tdhe UK: Ember Records EMB S 261, 1968. Words and music: Jimmy Webb, Universal Music Publishing Group.
(23) ABC-Paramount ABCS 410, 1962.
(24) ABC-Paramount ABCS 435, 1962.
(25) Decca 29419, 1955.
(26) Epic 9-50867, 1980. Words and music: Bobby Braddock & Curly Putman, Sony/ATV Music Publishing.
(27) United Artists UA 424, 1961. Words and music: Dickey Lee Lipscomb & Steve Duffy, EMI Music Publishing.
(28) Available on Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (And Good Old Country Music), CMH Records CMH 6224, 1979. Words and music, Rose Lee Maphis, Joe Maphis & Max Fidler, Comet Music Corp.
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