AMERICANALAND

MUSIC IN AMERICAN LIFE

A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.

Where Country & Western
Met Rock ’n’ Roll

JOHN MILWARD
Portraits by Margie Greve
© 2021 by the Board of Trustees
of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936455

isbn 978-0-252-04391-8 (cloth)
isbn 978-0-252-05281-1 (e-book)
 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations   vii

Introduction: Americanaland  1
Chapter 1 Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?   7
Chapter 2 The Lost Highway   20
Chapter 3 Sunrise  32
Chapter 4 Blowin’ in the Wind   54
Chapter 5 Turn! Turn! Turn!   73
Chapter 6 White Line Fever   89
Chapter 7 Something in the Air   1oo
Chapter 8 Sweetheart of the Rodeo   113
Chapter 9 American Tune   126
Chapter 10 Troubadours  137
Chapter 11 Grievous Angels   154
 Chapter 12 The Red-Headed Icon   168
Chapter 13 Punks, God, and Urbane Cowboys   180
Chapter 14 Hard-Core Troubadours   194
Chapter 15 The “Birth” of Americana   210
Chapter 16 Across the Great Divide   228
Chapter 17 Yesterday and Today   240
Last Call  253

Notes  257
Bibliography  281
Index  289
 ILLUSTRATIONS

Jimmie Rodgers  3
The Carter Family   9
Hank Williams  24
Elvis Presley  33
Carl Perkins  38
Johnny Cash  40
Chuck Berry  42
Jerry Lee Lewis   48
Ray Charles  64
Bob Dylan  69
The Beatles  75
The Byrds  81
Merle Haggard  91
Joni Mitchell  102
Gram Parsons  116
The Band  131
Neil Young  139
Jerry Garcia  146
Townes Van Zandt   162
Willie Nelson  172
Buddy Miller  191
Dolly Parton  203
Steve Earle  206
Emmylou Harris  222
Jason Isbell  233
Jeff Tweedy   244
Patsy Cline  254
AMERICANALAND
 INTRODUCTION
Americanaland

Americana is a genre of music that presumes to include country & western,

rock ’n’ roll, folk, blues, soul, and bluegrass (among other things). Americana
is hard to define, but easier to recognize. In the 1990s bands such as Wilco
and the Jayhawks and such singer-songwriters as Steve Earle and Lucinda
Williams combined elements of rock and country and were said to be playing
“alt-country.” That’s when Jon Grimson, a record promoter, and Rob Bleet-
stein of the Gavin Report radio tip sheet created a chart to monitor airplay
for such records.
“I originally wanted to call it the ‘Crucial Country’ chart,” said Bleetstein,
“but [Bill] Gavin thought it was too big a slight on mainstream country.” Then
Grimson came up with “Americana.” “That one stuck with me after I thought
about what it meant musically,” said Bleetstein, “which was really nothing, so
it was our chance to define it as something.” The Americana chart only lasted
a few years, but the term stuck around. The genre is now more than twenty
years old, with its own trade organization (the Americana Music Association
was founded in 1999) and Grammy Award category (since 2009).
This is how the Americana Music Association defines Americana: “Con-
temporary music that incorporates elements of various American roots music
2 Introduction

styles, including country, roots-rock, folk, bluegrass, R&B, and blues, resulting
in a distinctive roots-oriented sound that lives in a world apart from the pure
forms of the genres upon which it may draw. While acoustic instruments are
often present and vital, Americana also uses a full electric band.” Both broad
and vague, the term became a useful handle for roots-oriented musicians.
“I’ve been bleeding outside the lines for some time,” said Emmylou Harris,
who was a country star before she became the queen of Americana. “I like
to think I have my own category by now.” In recent years, Harris has won
Grammy Awards for both Americana and Contemporary Folk.
But Americana was happening long before it had a name. Think of string
bands, blues singers, folk musicians, and jazz players passing songs and in-
strumental techniques from one generation to the next. The modern history
begins with the 1927 recordings of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family.
Then Hank Williams twisted a yodel into 1949’s “Lovesick Blues,” and Elvis
Presley paired an Arthur Crudup blues (“That’s All Right”) with a Bill Monroe
bluegrass song (“Blue Moon of Kentucky”) for his 1954 debut. Ten years later,
the Beatles cut country songs by Buck Owens and Carl Perkins and brought
those influences into their own tunes. The Byrds, inspired by Bob Dylan and
the Beatles, pioneered folk rock and, a few years later, country rock. Dylan
turned heads when he went to Nashville to record 1966’s Blonde on Blonde (and
later, John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline) with the city’s best musicians.
Willie Nelson left Music City to become a Texas “outlaw” who appealed to fans
of both country and rock. Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt went from Texas
to Nashville and nurtured a songwriting circle that included Steve Earle and
Rodney Crowell. All this inspired recent generations of musicians to make
music at the corner of country and rock. That’s Americana.
Elvis, to choose one, was far too popular to be considered Americana,
which in the contemporary music scene is a niche genre in an era in which
rock ’n’ roll is itself a minority taste. Chris Stapleton got his start writing hits
for mainstream acts such as Kenny Chesney and sang and played guitar with
the Steeldrivers, a bluegrass band. Stapleton’s 2015 solo debut, Traveller, has
the musical characteristics of Americana, but when it sold more than three
million copies, he became a country star. Similarly, Kasey Musgraves found
commercial and Grammy success despite being too pop for country and too
modish for Americana. Both artists make music that is likely to appeal to
fans of Americana but already play to a broader audience. Conversely, Stur-
gill Simpson and Mumford and Sons are mainstream acts that got started
JIMMIE RODGERS
4 Introduction

in Americana. Plenty of others stuck around. “You don’t get limos and Lear
jets,” says roots rocker Dave Alvin of a career in the more intimate world of
Americana, “but you can have a long career. That’s not a bad trade-off.”
In September of 2017 I went to Nashville for Americanafest, an annual
event that attracts thousands of fans, musicians, and industry professionals.
Promoted by the Americana Music Association, the multi-day affair features
daytime panels about various aspects of the music and business, promotional
parties for press and record-business insiders, and long nights watching per-
formers play at clubs all over town. The centerpiece of the event is the Honors
and Awards ceremony held at the so-called Mother Church of country music,
Ryman Auditorium, and recorded for later broadcast on Austin City Limits.
Jim Lauderdale, wearing an embroidered Nudie-inspired suit, was the
night’s emcee. Lauderdale is Americana to the core. He’s written hits for coun-
try stars such as George Strait, collaborated with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert
Hunter, and released more than thirty albums in a variety of styles, including
a pair of bluegrass albums recorded with Ralph Stanley. The house band was
to be led by guitarist Buddy Miller, who is Lauderdale’s partner in The Buddy
and Jim Show on SiriusXM. But because Miller was under the weather, guitar-
ist Larry Campbell stepped up to lead the ensemble. Campbell had played
with the Buddy Miller Band in 1980 in New York, where they ran in the same
pre-Americana, urban-country circle as did Lauderdale. Now they’re all elder
statesmen of the genre.
The show opened with Old Crow Medicine Show emerging from the au-
dience while playing “Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35” from their live album
celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of a landmark Americana album, Dylan’s
Blonde on Blonde. John Prine, another songwriter who’s helped shape the genre,
performed his wry country song “In Spite of Ourselves” with the night’s win-
ner of the Trailblazer award, Iris DeMent. Drive-By Truckers showed why
some call Americana “country music for Democrats” by performing a song
about racially motivated shootings, “What It Means,” but lost the Band of the
Year award to Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superlatives, who play country
music with the intensity of a rock ’n’ roll band. Jason Isbell, among the most
successful of Americana artists, performed “If We Were Vampires” with his
wife Amanda Shires, a singer-songwriter and violinist who won the Best New
Artist award. All of these artists live within the pages of Americanaland.
Old World rock stars were also on the program, with Ireland’s Van Mor-
rison given a Lifetime Achievement award, and the U.K.’s Graham Nash given
 Introduction 5

the Spirit of Americana/Free Speech in Music award. Nash sang “So Sad,”
an Everly Brothers song, with the Milk Carton Kids, a duo that evokes the
tradition of singing siblings. These famous musicians have also been honored
at the UK Americana Awards, and Australia holds its own Americana Music
Honours. These events draw Americana fans and performers looking to court
them. At the end of the Americana Awards show, the players gathered to pay
tribute to country singer Don Williams, who had just died, with a communal
sing-along of his “Tulsa Time.”
The real business of Americanafest takes place at twenty clubs all over
town, with different musicians taking the stage hourly. Fans with a plan cir-
culate between venues until the wee hours. My Thursday evening began at
the Downtown Presbyterian Church, where singer-songwriter-producer Joe
Henry was followed by Shelby Lynne and Allison Moorer, solo singers and
sisters who’d just released their first collaborative effort, Not Dark Yet. An
hour (and a little barbecue) later, I saw Lynne on stage at City Winery singing
with the late swamp rocker Tony Joe White. Then it was off to the Cannery
Ballroom to catch the end of a set by the Lumineers and to see if Buddy Miller
would make his scheduled appearance. Emmylou Harris announced that
because Buddy was still feeling ill, the War and Treaty, a gospel duo whom
he’d been producing at his home studio, would take his slot. Closing a long
day’s night were the Drive-By Truckers.
Friday’s entertainment began at the 3rd & Lindsey with Jim Lauderdale’s
band playing honky-tonk tunes and Larry Campbell and his wife Teresa
Williams performing songs from their latest album, Contraband Love (plus a
virtuosic cover of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan”). Back at City Winery, I caught
Brandy Clark, a singer-songwriter whose sharp set of songs about folks on the
edge of respectability made her my favorite new discovery. Energy flagging, I
lingered for the start of a midnight set by an Americana star from Australia,
Kasey Chambers, and was jolted awake by her songs, powerful voice, and
wicked sense of humor. (It turns out that Buddy and Julie Miller added vocals
and guitar to her 1998 debut, The Captain.)
Promoting musicians is the job of the Americana Music Association (also
check nodepression.com for news of contemporary acts). Americanaland is con-
cerned with the long history of connections between country & western (and
bluegrass) and rock ’n’ roll (including folk music and singer-songwriters). This
approach is similar to Merriam-Webster’s more precise definition of Americana
as “a genre of American music having roots in early folk and country music.”
6 Introduction

I’ve been spare in my coverage of blues music within Americana, and not
simply because I wrote a book about the more pertinent interactive history
of the blues and rock called Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock ’n’ Roll (and
Rock Saved the Blues). The blues is in the groundwater of American music and
informs everything from jazz and folk to country and rock. “Where I come
from in Mississippi,” said Marty Stuart, “the blues is underlying everything.
Whether you are playing country or gospel or bluegrass, blues is just part of
the atmosphere there.” Or, as John Lennon from Liverpool said, “The blues is
a chair, not a design for a chair, or a better chair . . . it is the first chair.”
Our story starts in Bristol, Tennessee, and travels to Alabama, Memphis,
Nashville, Greenwich Village, London, Los Angeles, Texas, and points in be-
tween. I spent decades as a rock critic for big-city newspapers and magazines
and my beat included such “country” artists as Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle,
Buddy and Julie Miller, and Shawn Colvin. Middle age found me increas-
ingly drawn to the roots of rock and to the best in vintage blues and country.
These days, I sing in a Hudson Valley band whose set list includes songs by
the musicians featured in this book, from Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams
to Merle Haggard and George Jones. Tucked into my LP collection are vintage
copies of seminal Americana albums: Dylan’s trilogy of Nashville albums, The
Band and Music from Big Pink, The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the Flying
Burrito Brothers’ Gilded Palace of Sin, the Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead,
and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken. The artists who
populate these pages are as close as your streaming service, and as you read
this story and listen to that fine, fine music, you just might hear the whistle
of a train. Next stop, Americanaland.
 WILL YOU MISS ME WHEN I’M GONE?

This wasn’t at all like home. No hearth, no front porch, just a wooden platform
in a vacant building in Bristol, a mountain town on the border of Tennessee
and Virginia. A recording machine powered by carefully calibrated weights,
like a cuckoo clock, was nearby. Sara Carter studied the carbon microphone
while Maybelle Carter quietly fingered the strings of her husband’s Stella
guitar. Then, like back home in Poor Valley, they began to sing “Bury Me
Under the Weeping Willow,” with Sara taking the lead and Maybelle adding
an alto harmony. A long moment later, as if jolted awake by a dream coming
true, A. P. Carter added his bass vocal. “When we made the record and they
played it back to us,” said Maybelle, “I thought, ‘Well, it can’t be!’ You know
. . . it just seemed so unreal, that you stand there and sing and then turn
around and [they] play it back to you.” The next day A. P. was absent, and
the women recorded what would become the Carter Family’s first hit, “Single
Girl, Married Girl.”
Ralph Peer spent twelve days in the summer of 1927 recording regional
musicians in Bristol, Tennessee; the sessions have been called the big bang of
country music because they introduced two seminal acts, the Carter Family
and Jimmie Rodgers. The recording and distribution of homespun American
8 Chapter 1

music was not new, but the Bristol sessions confirmed that commercial re-
cords would soon supplant an oral tradition that had passed songs from one
musician (and generation) to the next. Peer already had a history of recording
roots music; his stint at Okeh Records produced historic examples of recorded
blues (Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” in 1920) and “hillbilly” music (Fiddlin’
John Carson’s “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” in 1923). When Peer
moved from Okeh to the Victor Talking Machine Company (soon to become
RCA Victor), he negotiated a unique contract in which he took no salary but
retained the publishing rights of the songs he recorded. That meant he’d earn
a royalty on each record sold. In three particularly lucrative months in 1928,
Peer received $250,000.
The Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers had some things in common—for
one, both acts helped turn the guitar into a lead instrument—but were also
quite different. “[The Carter Family’s] style was something they created out
of older styles,” said musician and folklorist Mike Seeger, “with the tear be-
tween A. P.’s way-back sounds, and Maybelle’s guitar pulling them forward.
But with Jimmie [Rodgers], he was reaching toward being a creator, trying to
get something that would grab people’s attention—and that’s pop.”
The Carters’ repertoire was drawn from and inspired by the folk songs
brought to America from the British Isles (among other places). Maybelle and
A. P. draped Sara’s lead voice with church-based harmonies, and the Carter
Family’s rich vocal sound stood out in an era dominated by string bands. Jim-
mie Rodgers was a folkie bluesman with a shape-shifting persona suitable for
songs that could be randy or pious, silly or sad. Generations of folk musicians
grew up singing the songs of the Carter Family. Rodgers’s personable voice
and guitar informed a long line of troubadours, including Woody Guthrie,
Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan. “It’s arguable,” said Steve Earle,
a contemporary embodiment of that tradition, “that we just wouldn’t have this
consistent, lasting genre of music based on one guy singing and accompanying
himself on a guitar. . . . I think [Jimmie Rodgers] invented the job.”
The Carter Family and Rodgers took different paths to Bristol. The Carters
were borne of the passions of Alvin Pleasant Carter, known as A. P., who played
the fiddle and collected folk songs as he traveled around Appalachia selling
fruit trees. When A. P. married Sara Dougherty in 1915, he found both a mate
and a musical partner who played guitar and autoharp and who sang with
a voice of uncommon splendor. They were joined by Sara’s cousin Maybelle
Addington, who created a unique guitar style (the so-called Carter scratch)
THE CARTER FAMILY
10 Chapter 1

by using her thumb to pick a melody on the bass strings while her fingertips
created rhythms on the upper strings. “We’d get together and, you know, flump
around [on our instruments], and sing,” said Sara. “Maybe go to a neighbor’s
home once in a while. . . . It was just our natural way of playing—we don’t
know any music, we just played by ear.” The Carters couldn’t read music, but
they sure knew songs.
At an early performance by the Carter Family, Maybelle met A. P.’s brother
Ezra, whom everybody called Eck. “I’d gone to Sara and A. P.’s to do a show at
a schoolhouse,” said Maybelle. “A. P.’s brother was . . . going with the school-
teacher there at the school. Well, he was supposed to take her home, but he
didn’t.” When Bristol beckoned, A. P. borrowed his brother’s Essex sedan after
agreeing to weed Eck’s corn patch; Maybelle was eight months pregnant.
Jimmie Rodgers was born in 1897 in Meridian, Mississippi, the son of a
railroad worker. His mother died when he was a child, and he ran away twice
in hopes of becoming an entertainer; at fourteen, he began to learn about the
blues and playing guitar while working as a water boy for a black railroad crew.
Rodgers became a brakeman on the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad,
but his health began to fail, and he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. At the
age of twenty-eight Rodgers decided to sing for a living or die trying; one early
gig found him touring with a medicine show and singing in blackface.
In Asheville, North Carolina, Rodgers recruited the Tenneva Ramblers to
perform with him as the Jimmie Rodgers Entertainers. The group arrived in
Bristol on August 3, 1927, but Peer recognized that Rodgers was a bright star
in a mediocre string band and recorded him solo. Peer left Bristol with six
tunes by the Carter Family and a pair by Rodgers (“The Soldier’s Sweetheart”
and “Sleep, Baby, Sleep”) and paid the artists fifty dollars per song against a
2½-cent royalty. He encouraged them to create original material that could
be copyrighted by Peer’s Southern Music Company, a move that would bring
him revenue not only from their releases but more money when other artists
recorded the songs. In order to maximize his influence, Peer also managed
the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers.
The Carters went home to Poor Valley, nestled beneath Clinch Mountain,
and presumed that little would change; but the success of “Single Girl, Mar-
ried Girl” prompted Peer to schedule another session in early 1928, this time
in Camden, New Jersey. Rodgers, whose first release went nowhere, was more
proactive, checking into a Manhattan hotel room in November 1927 and in-
forming Peer that he was ready to record more tunes. They cut a twelve-bar
 Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? 11

blues called “T for Texas” that featured a catchy yodel that prompted Peer to
retitle the song “Blue Yodel.”
Rodgers’s background earned him the nickname “the Singing Brakeman,”
but it was the bluesy yodel that became his commercial hook. “Blue Yodel”
was a monster hit, and subsequent songs bore titles like “Blue Yodel No. 4
(California Blues)” and “Blue Yodel No. 8 (Mule Skinner Blues).” Rodgers’s
yodel was not unlike the sob that operatic tenor (and Victor recording artist)
Enrico Caruso created by changing registers during his recording of “Vesti la
Giubba” from the opera Pagliacci. A more likely source was Riley Puckett, a
blind singer and guitarist who played with Gid Tanner and the Skillet Lickers
and who recorded “Sleep, Baby, Sleep,” a yodel-laden tune that Rodgers had
cut in Bristol.
Rodgers’s intimate vocals anchored his records in a manner that, like hits
by Bing Crosby, influenced generations of popular singers. As befits an icon,
he appealed to almost everyone, including innumerable country singers and
such bluesmen as B. B. King and Chester “Howlin’ Wolf” Burnett, who turned
Rodgers’s yodel into a howl. Robert Johnson sang the songs of Jimmie Rodg-
ers alongside his own. “If you believe that rock ’n’ roll brings about a nexus
of black music and white music,” said Steve Earle, “then Jimmie Rodgers is
one of the people who made that happen.”
Rodgers was a prolific songwriter, both by himself (“Waiting for a Train”
and almost all of his thirteen Blue Yodels) and in collaboration with others.
By contrast, A. P. Carter didn’t write songs so much as recognize a good one
when he heard it. Returning home from his travels with tunes and stray lyrics,
A. P. would work over the words and (with the help of Sara and Maybelle)
craft melodies that could be copyrighted as new songs. The Carter Family’s
“I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes” is a telling example of the porous
nature of American roots music in the first half of the twentieth century.
Maybelle and A. P. are said to have modeled the tune after “The Prisoner’s
Song,” a 1925 release by Vernon Delhart. The Carter Family’s recording was
a major hit in 1929; Roy Acuff heard a gospel group put different lyrics to the
same melody and used those words for the 1936 song that launched his career,
“The Great Speckled Bird.” Sixteen years later Hank Thompson cut “The Wild
Side of Life,” in which the same tune carried new, broken-hearted lyrics about
a man spotting his ex-wife in a honky-tonk. “The Wild Side of Life” stayed at
the top of the country charts for fifteen weeks. Then songwriter J. D. Miller
used the same melody to create an “answer song” that became the #1 hit that
12 Chapter 1

introduced the world to Kitty Wells, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk
Angels.”

   
Peer’s output at Victor also included tracks by black musicians (known as
“race records”) by such southern blues musicians as Tommy Johnson, Furry
Lewis, and Sleepy John Estes. He also recorded such seminal ensembles as
Will Shade’s Memphis Jug Band and Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers. Bluesmen
like Son House and Skip James recorded for Paramount Records in 1931 but
remained virtually unknown until they became rediscovered stars of the blues
revival of the 1960s. That group also included Mississippi John Hurt, a guitarist
and singer who recorded for Okeh Records in 1929 and whose repertoire of
blues and folk tunes was not unlike those of Rodgers and the Carter Family.
Roots music was also of interest to folklorists who recorded music not for
profit but to document regional styles before they disappeared. In 1933 John
Lomax, an author and musicologist, made field recordings for the Library
of Congress with his son Alan. The pair discovered and recorded Huddie
Ledbetter at the Louisiana State Prison in Angola. Ledbetter, who’d already
served time for murder, was in prison for stabbing a white man. Released two
years later, he would soon come to be known as the folk singer Lead Belly.
Alan would subsequently establish his own relationship with the Library of
Congress and in 1941 would record McKinley Morganfield, already known as
Muddy Waters, at Stovall Plantation.
Singing into Lomax’s microphone, Waters performed “Country Blues,”
which was his version of Robert Johnson’s “Walking Blues,” which was John-
son’s rewrite of Son House’s “My Black Mama.” A. P. Carter could relate to the
way Delta blues musicians created new songs using familiar guitar licks and
lyrical fragments. And Sara Carter would understand how Waters felt when
Lomax played back the recording to him. “Man, you don’t know how I felt
that Saturday afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice,”
said Waters. “Later on he sent me two copies of the pressing and a check for
twenty bucks, and I carried that record up to the corner and put it on the
jukebox. Just played it and played it and said, ‘I can do it, I can do it.’” By the
late 1940s, Waters would be in Chicago reshaping his delta music into a whole
new style of big-city blues.
Jimmie Rodgers couldn’t wait around to become famous; living with tuber-
culosis, he already knew his days were numbered when he traveled to Bristol. If
 Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? 13

Peer personified the modern record man, Rodgers was like a pop star. Record-
ing 111 songs in just five years, Rodgers was an avid self-promoter, quick to sign
autographs and talk up deejays and reporters while he was on concert tours. He
sat for numerous photo shoots in a variety of outfits and snappy hats, filmed a
promotional movie short for Columbia Pictures called The Singing Brakeman,
recorded with superstar colleagues such as the Carter Family and jazzman
Louis Armstrong, and toured with showbiz cowboy and humorist Will Rogers
to benefit the Red Cross. In a word, Rodgers was the Bono of his time.
But time was short for one of the biggest stars of his day. In May 1933 Rodg-
ers traveled to New York for what would be his last recording session. A cot
was brought to the studio so that he could lie down between takes. In four
sessions held over the course of a week, Rodgers recorded eleven songs; the
words of the last one, “Years Ago,” spoke to being sad to leave Mississippi. The
next day, Rodgers and his private nurse took a trip to Coney Island; feeling
distress, he returned to the Taft Hotel, where five years earlier he had stayed
while hustling a second chance with Ralph Peer. Rodgers died late that night.
The body was brought back to Mississippi by rail, and as the night train pulled
into Meridian, the mournful cry of the locomotive’s whistle welcomed the
brakeman home.

   
Jimmie Rodgers inspired a school of emulators. Gene Autry spent the late
1920s releasing virtual copies of Rodgers’s “Blue Yodels” and was quick to cut
a tribute song, “The Death of Jimmie Rodgers.” Autry soon found his own
mellifluous style and became Hollywood’s premiere singing cowboy. Ernest
Tubb was another fan; Carrie Rodgers gave Tubb one of her late husband’s
guitars and helped him obtain a contract with RCA. Like Autry, Tubb didn’t
click until he established his own sound, in his case with 1940’s “Walking the
Floor Over You.” Future country stars like Lefty Frizzell and Johnny Cash grew
up idolizing Rodgers. The first tune Doc Watson learned to play on guitar
was the Carter Family’s “When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland,” but he started
using a flat pick after listening to Jimmie Rodgers.
Others didn’t imitate Rodgers so much as interpret his songs in new ways.
Bill Monroe and his brother Charlie recorded in the 1930s as the Monroe
Brothers. When that group broke up, Bill formed the Blue Grass Boys. Mon-
roe, who played mandolin, had learned the syncopations of blues and jazz
from a black guitarist named Arnold Schultz; these rhythmic touches became
14 Chapter 1

his special sauce. Monroe’s group used fast tempos and high-pitched vocal
harmonies to create a lively string-band style that came to be called blue-
grass. Monroe became known as the “Father of Bluegrass” with the mid-1940s
lineup that included guitarist Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, who used a unique
three-fingered technique to pick his banjo. But in 1939, when Monroe and the
Blue Grass Boys successfully auditioned for the Grand Ole Opry program in
Nashville, they played Jimmie Rodgers’s “Mule Skinner Blues.” “Charlie and
I had a country beat,” said Monroe, “but the beat in my music—bluegrass
music—started when I ran across ‘Mule Skinner Blues’ and started playing
that. We don’t do it the way Jimmie sang it. It’s speeded up, and we moved it
up to fit the fiddle, and we have that straight time with it—driving time.”
On the day in 1940 when Monroe recorded “Mule Skinner Blues,” the Blue
Grass Boys also cut “I Wonder If You Feel the Way I Do” by Bob Wills and
His Texas Playboys, who in 1938 counted fourteen members including three
fiddles, two saxophones, a trumpet, and a drummer. The band did big business
in the Southwest and kept the dance floor hopping with its big-band style of
country music. Wills recognized that a Jimmie Rodgers tune could kill with a
big beat, rhythmically bowed fiddles, jazzy improvisations on the pedal steel,
and smoothly swinging vocals (delivered most famously by Tommy Duncan).
Willie Nelson, a Texas teenager who played music in a combo with his sister
Bobbi and her husband Bud Fletcher, staged a Bob Wills concert not far from
his childhood home in Abbott. Nelson figures that about five hundred people
came to the show; the gate receipts barely covered the band’s guarantee and
left nothing for the young promoter, whose group was the opening act. “He
hit the bandstand at eight and didn’t leave it for hours,” said Nelson of Wills.
“He would play continually, there was no time wasted between songs. . . . His
band watched him all the time, and he only had to nod or point the bow of
his fiddle to cue band members to play a solo. He was the greatest dance hall
bandleader ever.”
Wills ruled a Southwest music scene full of talent. The Maddox Brothers
and Rose, a popular swing band that called its version of the Rodgers song
“New Muleskinner Blues,” traveled the rodeo circuit to play the local bars.
“Right across the street from us would always be Woody Guthrie,” said Rose
Maddox. “I was a kid. He looked tall and skinny.” Guthrie, the enduring arche-
type of the socially conscious folk singer, took up music as a teenager and led
a life of wanderlust that included three wives and eight children. During the
late 1930s he performed on KFVD, a radio station in Los Angeles, and debuted
 Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? 15

songs that would appear on his 1940 RCA release, Dust Bowl Ballads. He also
wrote a column called “Woody Sez” for a Communist newspaper, People’s
World, a sideline that ultimately cost the “fellow traveler” his radio job.
At the request of Alan Lomax, Guthrie traveled to New York to perform at
“A ‘Grapes of Wrath’ Evening for the Benefit of the John Steinbeck Committee
for Agricultural Workers.” Lomax subsequently recorded hours of Guthrie’s
conversation and songs for the Library of Congress. “The first hint of his
real importance didn’t come from him or me,” said his third wife, Marjorie
Guthrie. “It was Alan Lomax who said to me, ‘Don’t throw anything away.
Save everything.’ And I looked at him to say, ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Woody is
going to be very important.’”
At the benefit, Guthrie met a folk singer who worked for Lomax: Pete
Seeger. “I learned a lot about songwriting from Woody,” said Seeger, a Harvard
dropout who was the son of composer and musicologist Charles Seeger. “I
learned something that was awful important. And that was: don’t be so all-fired
concerned about being original. You hear an old song you like but you want
to change it a little, there’s no crime in that.” This explains why Guthrie bor-
rowed the melody of the Carter Family’s “John Hardy Was a Desperate Man”
for his own “Tom Joad” and used the tune of the Carters’ “When the World’s
on Fire” for “This Land Is Your Land,” his wry response to Irving Berlin’s “God
Bless America.” Guthrie had less success teaching Seeger how to hop a freight
train. “Woody said, ‘Wait on the outskirts of town,’” said Seeger, “‘and when
the train is picking up speed, and it’s still not going too fast, you can grab a
hold of it and swing on.’ Getting off the first time I didn’t know how to do it
and I fell down and skinned my knees and elbow and broke my banjo.”
In the early 1940s Seeger and Guthrie performed on Lomax’s radio program
Back Where I Came From alongside Josh White, Burl Ives, and Lead Belly. The
pair also belonged to the Almanac Singers, a coterie of leftist musicians who
lived together at 130 West 10th Street in New York’s Greenwich Village. To
make the rent on the three-story “Almanac House,” the singers anticipated
the arrival of Village folk clubs by passing the hat at hootenannies held in
the basement.

   
The legacy of the Carter Family was in its deep repertoire. Peer continued
to record the Carters into the 1930s, introducing such songs as “Keep on the
Sunny Side,” “Wildwood Flower,” “Lonesome Valley,” “Worried Man Blues,”
16 Chapter 1

and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” These songs provided fundamental les-
sons for folk musicians from Guthrie and Seeger to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.
“The first time I heard [“Gold Watch and Chain”],” said Emmylou Harris, “I
thought about my grandparents and cried . . . I found the music very haunt-
ing.” Listen to a singer-songwriter like Gillian Welch, and you’re hearing the
distant echo of the Carter Family.
To find these songs, A. P. traveled widely. Brownie McGhee, a guitarist
who would form a blues duo with harmonica player Sonny Terry, recalled
the excitement when A. P. rolled into Kingsport, Tennessee, driving the red
Chevrolet that he’d bought with record royalties. He met black musicians (and
learned their songs) with the help of an African American guitarist named
Lesley Riddle. “I was his tape recorder,” said Riddle, who took about fifteen
trips with A. P. “He’d take me with him and he’d get someone to sing him
the whole song. Then I would get it, then I’d learn it to Sara and Maybelle.”
Along the way, Maybelle absorbed Riddle’s instrumental techniques. “You
don’t have to give Maybelle any lessons,” he said. “You let her see you play
something, she’ll get it.”
Her husband’s travels left Sara alone for long periods of time, and she had
an affair with his cousin, Coy Bays, fifteen years her junior. Poor Valley was
scandalized, and the Bayses relocated to New Mexico, where Coy’s mother
intercepted letters from a forlorn Sara. She and A. P. divorced, and while she
became an increasingly reluctant performer, hard times conspired to keep
the Carter Family together. When record sales plummeted during the Great
Depression, radio became vital to the careers of the Carters and other roots
musicians. The big action was on the shows with national network affiliates
such as National Barn Dance on WLS in Chicago and the Grand Ole Opry on
WSM in Nashville. But there was another route to a wide audience, and in
1938 the Carter Family began performing on XERA, a powerful border radio
station located near Del Rio, Texas. The venture was bankrolled by Doctor
John Romulus Brinkley, who’d made his fortune promoting an operation that
sought to cure male impotence by grafting goat glands onto a man’s testicles.
“Good Neighbor Get-Together” was the name of the Carter Family’s show,
and its theme song was “Keep on the Sunny Side.” The Carters recorded two
shows per day for six months of the year. Compared with the weekly barn
dance shows, with live audiences adding visceral big-city excitement, the
Carters’ daytime program was far more intimate. One J. R. Cash, listening
from his boyhood home in Dyess, Arkansas, could hardly imagine that one
 Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? 17

day he’d marry Maybelle’s daughter, June, who was already part of the act.
One day in February 1939 Sara dedicated “I’m Thinking Tonight of My Blue
Eyes” to “Coy Bays in California.” “For the pleasures we both seen together,”
she sang, “I am sure, love, I’ll never forget.” Coy heard the broadcast and trav-
eled to Texas, where he and Sara were married. Though the original Carter
Family would continue performing for another four years, including a stint
at WBT, a fifty-thousand-watt radio station in Charlotte, North Carolina, the
familial circle was broken beyond repair.
Sara left the music business and lived a quiet life with Coy in northern
California. Returning to Poor Valley, A. P. ran a grocery store that was a com-
munity center as much as a business. He later worked at a fire tower on the
top of Clinch Mountain that looked over the countryside that had given him
so many songs. Maybelle began performing with her three daughters (Helen,
Anita, and June) as The Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle. Driving long
distances between small-time shows, they’d rehearse in the car, and on the
radio they’d occasionally hear an old Carter Family song that increasingly
sounded like something from a distant past.
The postwar years were a tumultuous time in popular music, with big
bands supplanted by solo singing stars such as Frank Sinatra and small com-
bos led by, for example, Louis Jordan and Nat King Cole. One can imagine
Elvis Presley from Tupelo, Mississippi, noticing how much hits by hillbilly
acts like Red Foley (“Tennessee Saturday Night”) and Tennessee Ernie Ford
(“Shot-Gun Boogie”) had in common with race records by Roy Brown (“Good
Rockin’ Tonight”) and Joe Liggins (“Pink Champagne”).
The music trade magazine Billboard struggled to classify roots music made
by white and black musicians. For a time in the 1940s, both hillbilly and race
records were listed as “American Folk Records.” Recordings were subsequently
segregated into “Race Records” and “Hillbilly Records.” Finally, in June 1949,
Billboard created two charts that encompassed the roots of Americana: “Coun-
try & Western” and “Rhythm & Blues.” Industry insiders had another term for
the kind of pre-rock ’n’ roll records that appealed to white people: “cat music.”
If such sounds made Maybelle and her daughters feel old fashioned, they
could certainly relate to Merle Travis, a popular yet deeply traditional Ap-
palachian artist who in 1947 released an influential recording called Folk Songs
of the Hills. Travis had had such popular hits as “Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! That
Cigarette,” but this collection put a spotlight on the guitar playing that had
made him a superstar among musicians. His style came to be called “Travis
18 Chapter 1

picking,” a syncopated form of fingerpicking in which alternating bass notes

are struck by the thumb while melodies are played with the index finger.
Travis picking is essentially the flipside of the Carter scratch, and it was in
part derived from the playing of Arnold Shultz, the same African American
musician who’d influenced Bill Monroe.
When the Carters had a radio program at WNOX in Knoxville, they met
Chester “Chet” Atkins, a staff guitarist who’d perfected a version of Travis
picking that used three fingers to pick the melody atop the bass notes. May-
belle was quick to appreciate the instrumentalist whom some considered too
jazzy for country music, and he was soon traveling with an act now dubbed
“The Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle and Chet Atkins and His Famous
Guitar.” “Maybelle was kind of like a second mama to me,” said Atkins. “We
never had a cross word. She was just a gentle soul.” Atkins was at home in a
family of women. “I’d lay my head in one of ’em’s lap and try to go to sleep,”
he said. “It wasn’t all bad, I tell you.”
By the time America had suffered through the Great Depression and
World War II, the big bang in Bristol was ancient history. Country & west-
ern music now lived at the Grand Ole Opry and in beer-soaked honky-tonks,
and Hank Williams was starting to write the songs that would make him
country’s singular star. At the same time, Muddy Waters was electrifying the
blues in Chicago, Pete Seeger and the Weavers were bringing a repertoire
of folk songs to urban nightclubs, and R&B musicians were recording tunes
that appealed to a young and occasionally white audience. Even the formats
were changing, with thick 78 rpm records replaced by 45 rpm singles and
33⅓ rpm long-playing albums.
There was little to nothing in record stores by Rodgers or the Carter Fam-
ily, a particular hardship for Jim Evans and his quest to collect all 111 songs
of Jimmie Rodgers. Evans created a fan club and obliged other collectors by
reproducing increasingly rare Rodgers songs on blank discs. The label that
owned the recordings, RCA, warned Evans that his “bootlegs” were illegal
and soon released Yodelingly Yours—Jimmie Rodgers: A Memorial Album to a
Great Entertainer, Volume One (1949). In the early 1950s RCA reissued twenty-
four Rodgers songs to relatively slim sales; then, in 1955, Webb Pierce’s cover
of “In the Jailhouse Now” spent twenty-one weeks at the top of the country
charts and confirmed that Rodgers had become an enduring legend.
In 1952 the past met the present in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American
Folk Music, an eccentrically curated ramble through what critic Greil Marcus
 Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? 19

called “the old, weird America.” Smith had become obsessed with collecting
rural music while living a bohemian life as a visual artist and experimental
filmmaker. He made history by creating a unique portrait of American music
using eighty-four songs from his collection of ten thousand 78s. It is significant
that he drew no distinctions between black musicians who recorded race re-
cords and country pickers who played hillbilly music. The Anthology included
songs by Blind Lemon Jefferson, Clarence Ashley, Blind Willie Johnson, and
Dock Boggs, as well as four by the Carter Family (including “Single Girl, Mar-
ried Girl”). Smith included no songs by Jimmie Rodgers, perhaps because he
considered them too popular to be included in a collection of the old and the
obscure.
The Anthology was marketed as three sets of two LPs labeled “Ballads,”
“Social Music,” and “Songs.” Moses Asch of Folkways Records had sent letters
of inquiry to the labels that had released these mostly forgotten songs but
received no replies, so technically the Anthology was a bootleg recording that
became the Holy Grail to musicians drawn to the roots of Americana. (The
package wasn’t entirely licensed until the Smithsonian released it on compact
disc in 1997.) “We knew every word of every song on it,” said Dave Van Ronk,
a central figure in the Greenwich Village folk music scene, “including the
ones we hated.” The Anthology also reintroduced performers lost to history,
with musicians such as Furry Lewis, Mississippi John Hurt, and Sleepy John
Estes finding an unexpected third act playing at urban coffeehouses, college
campuses, and folk festivals.
“I’m glad to say that my dreams came true,” said Smith, accepting a special
Grammy Award for the Anthology in 1991. “I saw America changed through
music.” And in the 1950s the changes would come fast, with country music
intermingling with blues and R&B to create what would become the next
big bang. You can hear a hint of rock ’n’ roll in the biggest country hit of 1950,
Hank Snow’s “I’m Moving On,” a powerful boogie that stayed at #1 for twenty-
one weeks and was later recorded by the Rolling Stones. Snow loved the
man from Meridian so much that he named his son Jimmie Rodgers Snow.
Meanwhile, after a couple of rejections due to the presence of a suspiciously
sophisticated guitarist, the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle and Chet
Atkins and His Famous Guitar joined the Grand Ole Opry. “I owe everything
to the Carters,” said Atkins, who would soon be regarded as Nashville’s pre-
eminent guitarist. “I don’t know what the hell would have happened to me
if I hadn’t run into ’em.”
THE LOST HIGHWAY

Hank Williams was the greatest country artist in history. He put the poetry
into hillbilly music and influenced innumerable country, rock, and Americana
songwriters. His sad story also anticipated the tragic tales of such artists as
Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt. Don Helms played the steel guitar
for Williams, using a metal bar to carve instrumental figures within Hank’s
heartbreak tunes. Helms learned to go high when Hank’s voice went low
and to drop down when Hank went up. When Helms’s group, the Alabama
Rhythm Boys, first met its new boss in 1943, Hank took them to a pawnshop.
“Hank said, ‘Jake, have you got any more of those blackjacks back there?’”
recalled Helms, whose group was renamed the Drifting Cowboys. “‘Give me
five of them.’ And he passed these clubs out to us guys and said, ‘Boys, if you’re
gonna play with me you’re gonna need these.” Hank spoke from experience;
he’d already saved his skin by breaking a Gibson guitar over the head of a
rowdy tough at Thigpen’s Log Cabin.
The sound of classic country was born in the rural honky-tonks that prom-
ised dim lights, thick smoke, and loud, loud music. “When you paid and got
in,” said Helms of visiting a roadhouse in a so-called dry country, “you’d pick
 The Lost Highway 21

a table, slap your bottle on it, and throw your [switchblade] in the floor. The
thing was still vibrating when they brought you a bucket of ice and some
glasses.” Chicken wire was sometimes strung across the stage to protect the
musicians from flying bottles.
Hiram Williams was born in the backwoods of Alabama in 1923. A defor-
mity in his spinal column (spina bifida) was left untreated and pained him
all his life. His father, Alonzo Williams, had lost his mother to suicide at the
age of six. While serving in the army in World War I, he either fell off a truck
or was hit with a wine bottle during a fight over a woman. Whatever the case,
a brain aneurysm landed him in a Veterans Administration hospital; Hank
and his sister Irene grew up in the care of their mother Lillian, who would
forever occupy a central role in her son’s life.
Lillian ran a boarding house in Georgiana where Hank took to the streets
to shine shoes and sell newspapers. It was there that he met Rufus Payne, a
black musician known as “Tee-Tot” (derived in jest from “teetotaler”) because
he carried a flask filled with whiskey and tea. Though Tee-Tot worked as a
janitor and deliveryman, he considered himself a troubadour; he sang blues
and gospel and sometimes used the neck of a bottle to fret the strings of his
guitar. Williams pestered Tee-Tot for guitar lessons and absorbed the way he
sang the blues atop a good, steady beat. In 1951 he told the Montgomery Advisor,
“All the training I ever had was from him.”
When Lillian moved the family to Montgomery, Hank busked outside the
studios of WSFA. The station soon gave him his own fifteen-minute radio
show, which earned him $15 per week and helped him get gigs at local honky-
tonks, where Lillian was on hand to handle the business. Liquor was already a
problem for the young talent. Backstage at a concert, Williams met Roy Acuff,
of whom he’d said, “It’s Roy Acuff and then God!” Said Roy to Hank: “You’ve
got a million-dollar voice, son, but a ten-cent brain.”
In 1944 Hank moved to Mobile, took a job on the docks, and courted a
married woman named Audrey Mae Sheppard. Lillian saw Audrey as com-
peting for Hank’s allegiance, but the women were actually on the same page,
because Audrey preferred a hillbilly singer to a working stiff. Audrey, whose
husband was a soldier on the European front, pushed Hank to make her part
of the act in spite of the fact that she could scarcely hold a note. Meanwhile,
Lillian worked her maternal magic. “I booked Hank solid for sixty days,” she
said. “Then the third week he had been ‘out of the music business,’ I went to
22 Chapter 2

Mobile and put him back in it. When Hank saw the datebook for those shows,
he gave me the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen and said, ‘Thank God, Mother.
You have made me the happiest boy in the world.’”
Hank and Audrey (after a quick divorce) were married at the end of 1944
by a justice of the peace at his gas station in Andalusia. Hank now had two
women whispering in his ear. He’d found his professional footing with his
WSFA show and a busy schedule of live gigs making him the hottest country
act in southern Alabama. But local success was for losers, and Audrey pushed
Hank toward Nashville and a crucial association that would focus his song-
writing and turn him into a recording star.
Fred Rose was everything Hank wasn’t. He’d been a professional pianist and
songwriter for decades, performing on the radio in Chicago and writing more
than a dozen songs for America’s favorite singing cowboy, Gene Autry. Rose
also liked to drink, and the bottle let him down until he became a Christian
Scientist and embraced sobriety. Settling in Nashville, he played piano at
WSM and was bankrolled by Roy Acuff to launch Acuff-Rose, country music’s
first major publishing company. Rose signed Williams to a publishing contract
with the encouragement of singer Molly O’Day, who recorded four of his
tunes. Rose soon gave Williams a chance to sing his own songs; Billboard said
that his first single, “Calling You,” showed that he had “real spiritual qualities
in his pipes.” But Hank truly hit stride with “Honky Tonkin’,” a bouncy track
without drums that rode on the “crack” backbeat created by the interplay of
the bass fiddle and the muted strings of an electric guitar. Ten years later a
similar “boom-chicka-boom” rhythm would become the signature sound of
Johnny Cash.
Williams and Rose made a perfect pair, with the musically savvy publisher
lending a sympathetic ear to the work of an inspired original. Rose would sug-
gest a chord change here or excise a whiskey reference there but recognized
that Hank’s appeal rested on simple melodies and everyday language. Unlike
many behind-the-scenes players, Rose didn’t take undue advantage. He only
shared songwriting credit when he significantly contributed to a song, as on
“Kaw-Liga,” where he switched up the chord progression and came up with
the lyrical conceit of a romance between a couple of wooden Indians.
Williams flourished with Rose’s encouragement and was soon producing
such enduring hits as “Move It On Over” and “I Saw the Light,” a spiritual
tune inspired by the early morning sight of an airport beacon as the Drifting
Cowboys drove home from a gig. “When a hillbilly sings a crazy song,” said
 The Lost Highway 23

Williams, “he feels crazy. When he sings, ‘I Laid My Mother Away,’ he sees her
a-laying right there in the coffin. He sings more sincere than most entertainers
because the hillbilly was raised rougher than most entertainers. . . . You got
to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly.”
Hank’s stark and reedy voice was as unaffected as his lyrics. He put a yo-
del into some of his songs, but he was no Jimmie Rodgers. “Characteristic of
Williams,” said Henry Pleasant, who wrote about the art of singing, “is the
rapid yodeling alternation of falsetto and normal voice within the phrase or
even within the time span of a single note, the effect being that of a birdlike
warble, its function at once ornamental and expressive.” “Lovesick Blues” is
a brilliant example of this technique. It also said something about the differ-
ence between Williams and Rose. The song came from a mid-1920s Broadway
musical that flopped (O-oo Ernest) and bore lyrics by Irving Mills, who also
put words to Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That
Swing).” Emmett Miller, a blackface vaudevillian who sang (and yodeled) in
a bluesy style that influenced Jimmie Rodgers, cut the song in 1925. Williams
sang “Lovesick Blues” to a rapturous response from audiences, but when he
played the structurally unorthodox tune for Rose, he declared it a stinker.
“I’ll tell you one damn thing,” said Williams. “You might not like the song,
but when I walk off the stage and throw my hat back on the stage and the hat
encores, that’s pretty hot.”
“Lovesick Blues” turned out to be the biggest country hit of 1948, selling
two million copies and spending sixteen weeks at #1, but with his reputation
as an unreliable drunk, Williams was still shunned by the conservative and
hugely influential Grand Ole Opry program. The Opry debuted on Nashville’s
WSM in 1925 and was dominated by fiddlers and string bands until Roy Acuff
became its marquee star with his sentimental, tear-stained vocals. In 1941 the
program found a permanent home in the Ryman Auditorium, an austere
tabernacle used by Evangelical preachers that was built in 1892 by Thomas
Ryman as penance for the fortune he’d made running saloons and riverboat
casinos. Because the Opry’s syndicated Saturday night broadcast reached a
coast-to-coast audience and had an additional network affiliation with NBC,
appearing on the program was considered the key to a successful career.
Aiming to win a spot on the Opry, Williams relocated to Shreveport, Lou-
isiana, and performed on the KWKH show that booked talented up-and-
comers, the Louisiana Hayride. Six years later, Elvis Presley would appear on
the Hayride to sing his first single for Sun Records, “That’s All Right.” Merle
HANK WILLIAMS
 The Lost Highway 25

Kilgore was fourteen years old when he carried Hank’s guitar on the night of
his Hayride debut. (Years later, Kilgore would write “Ring of Fire” with June
Carter Cash; the song became one of Johnny Cash’s biggest hits. Kilgore also
managed the musical career of Hank Williams Jr.)
“Hank had the same look in his eyes that Elvis had,” said Kilgore. “That ‘I
know something you don’t know’ look. Hank was cocky. That first night [Au-
gust 7, 1948, with Hank fifth on the bill], the Bailesses were on before him and
he said, ‘How did they do?’ I said, ‘Real good. I hate that you have to follow
’em.’ He said, ‘I’ll eat ’em alive.’” Between the success of “Lovesick Blues” and
the excitement Williams was generating on Louisiana Hayride, the Opry gave
in within a year. To seal the deal, Fred Rose pledged that Hank would stay
sober (which didn’t happen) and gave two Opry principals part of the writer’s
share of his song “Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy,” which soon became a #1 hit.
Williams finally made his Opry debut on June 18, 1949.
Williams was introduced as “the lovesick boy,” and the string bean of a
singer (six foot one, 150 pounds) was all elbows and angles as he strode onto
the celebrated stage wearing a fringed cowboy suit, a broad white hat, and
shiny boots. Nobody recognized him, but the bubbly steel guitar lick that
introduced “Lovesick Blues” lit the fuse, and when Hank began to sing—“I
got a feelin’ called the blues”—the place exploded, with flashbulbs popping
and women swooning at the feral sound of his yodel and the way he swung
his hips behind his flat top guitar. Legend has Hank called back for no fewer
than six encores, but the details are irrelevant, for by the time Williams re-
turned later in the program to sing “Move It On Over,” he’d become not just
a hillbilly star but a giant of American roots music.
Williams’s career went into orbit, with concert appearances alongside other
stars organized by the Opry and a daily radio show (often pre-recorded) on
WSM. He wrote whenever he could. “One Sunday morning we left Nashville
to go to Birmingham to do a matinee and a night,” said Helms, “and he said,
‘Hand me that tablet up there.’ And he wrote down, ‘Hey, good lookin’, what
you got cookin’, and before we got to Birmingham it was finished.” Hank would
bring songs and fragments to Rose in anticipation of recording sessions, and
he created an alter ego (Luke the Drifter) for sentimental songs and spiritual
recitations that sold nowhere near his usual numbers.
The songs of Hank Williams are distinguished by the pared-down poetry
of his lyrics; the vast majority of the words he used consist of single syllables,
26 Chapter 2

with a smaller number containing two, and once in a blue moon, three syl-
lables. Consider the lyrics of “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” which Williams
initially earmarked for Luke the Drifter. Fred Rose thought otherwise, and
an American standard was born. Savor this single couplet: “The silence of a
falling star / Lights up a purple sky.” Songwriters study the artful concision
of Williams’s best song. “Hank’s recorded songs were the archetype rules of
poetic songwriting,” said Bob Dylan. “Even in words—all the syllables are
divided up so they make perfect mathematical sense. You can learn a lot about
the structure of songwriting by listening to his records.”
Harlan Howard, a songwriter whose copyrights include “Heartaches by the
Number” and “I Fall to Pieces,” examines the first verse of Williams’s “Cold,
Cold Heart” with the acumen of a poetry professor. He notes that the eight
lines of the first verse are held together with fifteen r phonemes, six of them
in its first two lines: “I try so hard my dear to say / that you’re my every dream.”
“Nobody notices this,” said Howard. “That’s the idea, but once those words are
put together this way, they won’t come apart. One follows the other as day the
night.” How did Williams, whose reading rarely went beyond comic books,
achieve such verbal acuity? Willie Nelson’s theory is that Williams wasn’t a
“songwriter” as much as a “song-singer” who sang his works-in-progress until
they sounded just right.
Hank Williams emerged at a time when hillbilly hits were being covered
for the pop market. Bing Crosby enjoyed wartime success with a Jimmie Da-
vis song, “You Are My Sunshine,” but the floodgates really opened when
Jerry Wexler, a reporter at Billboard, encouraged Patti Page to record “Ten-
nessee Waltz,” which ended up selling nearly five million copies. Wexler
subsequently steered Mitch Miller, the A&R director of Columbia Records,
to the Hank Williams song “Cold, Cold Heart.” “I was sort of a tune pimp,”
said Wexler, who would soon become a principal at Atlantic Records, one of
the major independent record labels of the 1950s.
“When I heard the song,” said Miller of “Cold, Cold Heart,” “I thought
it was made to order for Tony [Bennett]. I thought the last four lines were
particularly poetic, and so I played Hank Williams’s record for Tony, with
the scratchy fiddle and everything, and Tony said, ‘Don’t make me do cowboy
songs!’” After Bennett’s rendition of the “cowboy song” hit the top of the pop
charts, Miller was granted first dibs on new Acuff-Rose songs once they’d had
their run on the country & western chart. Miller (and Hank) soon struck gold
 The Lost Highway 27

when Frankie Laine and Jo Stafford recorded a duet of “Hey, Good Lookin’”
and Rosemary Clooney cut “Half as Much.”
Miller, a classically trained musician who famously passed on the chance
to sign Elvis Presley, had a genuine appreciation for Williams. “He had a way
of reaching your guts and your head at the same time,” said Miller. “No mat-
ter who you were, a country person or a sophisticate, the language hit home.
Nobody I know could use basic English so effectively.” Tony Bennett never
understood the appeal of “Cold, Cold Heart,” but Williams got a kick out of
seeing his song at the top of the Billboard pop charts and carried a copy of the
page in case he wanted to show off.
The spoils of success bought matching Cadillacs for Hank and Audrey and
the remodeling of their home outside Nashville, but their marriage was full of
friction, with endless arguments about his drinking and her spendthrift ways.
When Hank indulged in sexual liaisons on the road, Audrey retaliated with
affairs of her own. And if the band was hauling Williams back to Nashville at
the end of a particularly brutal bender, they knew to bring him, not home, but
to a suburban sanatorium. “Oh no, I ain’t going there,” cried Williams when
he awoke to find himself being hustled into a small stone cottage equipped
with cot, a toilet, and barred windows. “It’s that damn hut!”
Williams found unlikely solace with the Carter Sisters and Mother May-
belle. Anita Carter shed a tear in the wings of the Opry the night Hank de-
buted a song inspired by Audrey, “Cold, Cold Heart.” He asked the teenager
out on a date and ended up taking the whole family out to dinner. Hank took
to calling Maybelle “Mama,” and when visiting her and Eck at their home,
would crumble freshly baked corn bread into a glass of milk. When both
Williams and the Carters were in New York to appear on the Kate Smith Show,
Hank and Anita duetted on his “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You.”
To celebrate Anita’s nineteenth birthday he took her to see Peggy Lee at the
Copacabana; when Lee sang one of Williams’s songs, Hank asked Anita to
dance. “I was embarrassed to death,” she said. “His knees were coming up
even with his ears. He was dancing like a Texas oilman. People just stopped
and stared, until Peggy Lee announced who he was.”
The hillbilly star also stuck out in Hollywood. Williams was signed to a
movie contract with MGM, the studio associated with his record label, but
cameras never rolled. Ralph Gleason, who would later help launch Rolling
Stone, wrote a profile of Williams for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1952, and
28 Chapter 2

his prose suggested the cultural divide the singer had experienced in Hol-
lywood. During the interview Hank threw back a handful of pills and talked
about his first instrument (“When I was about eight years old, I got my first
git-tar. A second-hand $3.50 git-tar my mother bought me”) and of meeting
Tee-Tot (“I was shinin’ shoes and sellin’ newspapers and followin’ this ole
Nigrah around to get him to teach me to play the git-tar”).
That evening, Gleason saw a show twenty miles outside of Oakland, Cali-
fornia. “When you got to San Pablo,” he wrote, “it looked like every place else
only a little raunchier.” Gleason didn’t like the band, but Williams sang all
the hits. “And he had that thing,” he noted. “He made them scream when he
sang. . . . There were lots of those blondes you see at C&W affairs, the kind
of hair that mother never had and nature never grew and the tight skirts that
won’t quit and the guys looking barbershop neat but still with a touch of dust
on them.” That was Hank’s crowd, not the swells at the Copacabana.
Williams ruled the honky-tonk but was also competing with a new country
star, Lefty Frizzell, who was having hits with a softer singing style that put a
little pop into his country shuffle. Frizzell’s biography reads like a melodra-
matic country song, with an impoverished Texas boyhood brightened by sing-
ing Jimmie Rodgers songs on a $2 guitar. Married at sixteen, Frizzell became
a local star in Roswell, New Mexico; he had a daily radio show and played
the Cactus Garden until he and three others were arrested for the statutory
rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. Frizzell spent six months in prison, and left
having written one of his biggest hits, “I Love You a Thousand Ways.”
Hard drinking, womanizing, and bad business bedeviled Frizzell’s career.
Jim Beck, the talent scout who first recorded Frizzell, added his name as the
co-writer of his first hit song, “If You’ve Got the Money (I’ve Got the Time).”
When Frizzell was signed to Columbia Records by Don Law, who’d recorded
the influential bluesman Robert Johnson, Beck and Art Satherly had him sign
a contract that gave them each one third of the financial pie. Not even a slew
of hit records could ameliorate that bad deal. Still, by the end of 1951 he had
posted three #1 records (“I Love You a Thousand Ways,” “I Want to Be with
You Always,” and “Always Late with Your Kisses”) compared with a pair for
Williams (“Cold, Cold Heart” and “Hey, Good Lookin’”). “No one could handle
a song like Lefty,” said Merle Haggard. “He would hold on to each word until
he finally decided to drop it and pick up the next one. Most of us learned to
sing listening to him.”
 The Lost Highway 29

Williams and Frizzell toured together in 1951. Their relationship was ini-
tially tepid, but Hank later conceded, “It’s good to have a little competition.
Makes me realize I gotta work harder than ever.” In truth, Frizzell’s songs were
trifles compared to those of Williams, though Hank could never sing in the
mellifluous style that made Lefty famous. Their double bill made for honky-
tonk heaven, but the place to be would have been the late-night jam sessions
where the liquor flowed and the legends traded Jimmie Rodgers songs.
Heavy drinking took a toll on both Williams and Frizzell, whose hits dried
up by the mid-1950s. Frizzell scored one more classic, “Saginaw, Michigan”
(1964), but at the time of his death in 1975 at the age of forty-seven he was an
influential yet largely forgotten figure. Williams took a more direct highway
to hell, and when Audrey filed for divorce on January 10, 1952, he went into a
dramatic, heart-breaking free fall. Discharged from the Opry for missing gigs
and general misbehavior, Williams broke up his band and, following major
back surgery, moved into an apartment with Ray Price, a young singer from
Texas with whom he’d written the song “Weary Blues from Waitin’.” Williams
hosted endless parties that attracted every freeloader in Nashville. He’d sit
amid the hubbub, drink himself into incoherence, and scribble out lyrics on
a tablet. Price used the Drifting Cowboys for his own gigs.
The divorce from Audrey was contentious and threatened Hank’s pride,
cash flow, and relationship with his son Hank Jr., who was born just days
before his father made his debut at the Opry. In Hank Williams: The Show
He Never Gave, a film by David Acomba, actor and folk singer Sneezy Waters
re-creates a roadhouse performance during which Hank describes his mar-
riage to Audrey as a three-act musical. Act 1 consisted of a couple of giddy
love songs, “Hey, Good Lookin’” and “Rooty-Tooty,” while Act 2 contained the
more cautionary “Half as Much” and “Your Cheating Heart.” The story ended
with “Alone and Forsaken.”
One day, on his way to visit the Carters, Williams thought he saw June and
Audrey in a car and tried to run the vehicle off the road. Maybelle rebuffed
Williams when he tried to explain, saying, “Don’t call me ‘Mama.’” A few
months later June Carter drove Audrey to the home she retained after the
divorce. Hank was waiting in the driveway. As an angry Williams brandished a
pistol, June ran interference while Audrey ran into the house. A scuffle ensued,
the gun discharged, and June dropped to the ground. Williams jumped into
his car and fled. The bullet had missed June by inches, and she spurned his
30 Chapter 2

attempt to apologize. “I realized he was crazy,” said June. “We knew he was
going to die, and he was going to die soon.”
Hank’s first concert after his back surgery was in Richmond, Virginia. Des-
perate for a drink, he mixed tomato juice with rubbing alcohol and became
violently ill. Price opened the show and had to add songs in order to give his
friend time to get sober. “I introduced him,” said Price, “warning the audience
that he’s recently undergone some serious surgery, trying to prepare them. So,
what does Hank do? He walks straight to the microphone and immediately
says, ‘Y’all don’t believe him, do you? Don’t think I’ve had an operation.’ And
then he starts to take his clothes off, ready to show the sellout crowd his scar
and God-knows what else.” The headline in the next day’s Richmond Times-
Dispatch was “Hank Williams Hillbilly Show Is Different: Star Makes Impres-
sion of Unexpected Kind.” The next night, Williams dedicated “Mind Your
Own Business” to the writer of the review.
Recording sessions could be tortured, but Williams still came up with
great material. One Friday in June 1952, he recorded both “Settin’ the Woods
on Fire,” a tune that anticipated the rhythms of rockabilly, and “Jambalaya
(On the Bayou),” a song that proved to be among his most popular and that
also became a #2 pop hit for Jo Stafford. (In order to write the lyrics of “Jam-
balaya,” Williams consulted a page listing Cajun foods spelled out phoneti-
cally.) Chet Atkins, who was on the session, recalled the third song of the day.
“We recorded ‘I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive,” said Atkins, “and after
each take, he’d sit down in a chair. I remember thinking, ‘Hoss, you’re not just
jivin’,’ because he was so weak that all he could do was just sing a few lines,
and then just fall in the chair.”
Williams had a charlatan doctor on retainer to supply him with amphet-
amines, Seconal, chloral hydrate, and morphine. Audrey was gone, but Wil-
liams did not lack for women, getting one pregnant and pursuing a young
knockout he’d met in Shreveport. The plan was for Hank to marry Billie
Jean Jones during a concert at the Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans,
but fearful that Audrey would disrupt the ceremony, the lovebirds traveled
to the countryside, where a justice of the peace declared them man and wife.
Back in New Orleans, the show went on with a wedding “rehearsal” at the
matinee and another nuptial at the evening concert. A honeymoon trip to
Cuba was scuttled after Hank got too drunk on champagne to make the trip.
In the first eight weeks of his marriage to Billie Jean, he was admitted to the
North Louisiana Sanitarium three times.
 The Lost Highway 31

In the end, there was nothing left for Hank Williams but to climb into his
blue Cadillac convertible. On December 30, 1952, he loaded his guitar and
songbooks into the car. Charles Carr, a college student, was paid $400 to drive
Hank from Montgomery to gigs in Charleston, West Virginia, and Canton,
Ohio. Williams rode shotgun and sang a couple of tunes, including Red Foley’s
“Midnight.” The travelers stopped for the night in Birmingham and took two
hotel rooms. Three women soon materialized, and Hank asked one where she
was from. “Heaven,” she replied. “Well, in that case,” said Williams, “you’re
the very reason I’m going to hell.”
The next morning, Williams bought a bottle of booze and hit the road,
stopping for a meal in Chattanooga, where he played Tony Bennett’s “Cold,
Cold Heart” on the jukebox and left the waitress a $50 tip. Snow began to fall;
already running late, he booked air passage to Charleston, but after takeoff the
storm forced the plane to return. The New Year’s Eve show in Charleston was
cancelled and the Cadillac left Knoxville at 10:30 p.m. for Canton, stopping
around midnight to gas up in Bristol, Tennessee, where Jimmie Rodgers and
the Carter Family had made history. Williams stretched out on the back seat,
covered himself with a blanket, and folded his hands over his chest. Hours
later, Carr reached into the back seat to rearrange the blanket and touched a
cold, cold hand.
Hank Williams put the heartbreak into American roots music and died
on a dark highway while “I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive” was high
on the charts. Later that day, in Canton, a spotlight shone on a microphone
at center stage while, behind the curtain, Don Helms’s steel guitar led the
band in “I Saw the Light.” Then it was on with the show. Lillian secured the
now-famous Cadillac, which Hank Jr. later drove when he was in high school.
Audrey was in litigation for years over her late husband’s estate. The “death
car” ultimately became the centerpiece of the Hank Williams Museum in
Montgomery, where his funeral was held on the first Sunday of 1953. Three
thousand people were in the auditorium and thousands more filed past a silver
coffin, where Hank lay in a Nudie suit; his ankles had been broken so that he
could be buried in his boots. Helms played the steel guitar while Ernest Tubb,
Roy Acuff, and Hank Snow sang their goodbyes. Williams was interred in a
hillside plot that later welcomed Audrey. “Your Cheating Heart” was released
after his death and spent six weeks at the top of the country charts. And the
moon went behind the clouds to hide its face and cry.
SUNRISE

On December 4, 1956, Carl Perkins was at Sun Studio at 706 Union Avenue
in Memphis searching for a song to follow the hit of a lifetime, “Blue Suede
Shoes.” To beef up Carl’s trio Sam Phillips hired his latest discovery, Jerry
Lee Lewis, who had yet to release a record, to play the studio’s spinet piano.
Nothing clicked until Perkins cast “Matchbox” (a version of Blind Lemon Jef-
ferson’s “Match Box Blues”) in the new style people were calling rockabilly.
Then history walked through the door in the form of Elvis Presley.
Presley was Sun’s biggest star until Phillips sold his contract to RCA. Elvis
was now the King, with hits such as “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Hound Dog,”
and Love Me Tender already in movie theaters. But Sun was where he’d crossed
country & western with rhythm & blues to create rock ’n’ roll. Phillips sum-
moned Sun’s hottest new act, Johnny Cash, to the studio and alerted the
Memphis Press-Scimitar to the gathering of what would become known as the
Million Dollar Quartet. Jack “Cowboy” Clement didn’t have to be told to roll
tape. Elvis was soon at the piano surrounded by Cash and Jerry Lee with Carl
hunched over an acoustic guitar. Elvis’s latest flame sat atop the piano. The
southern singers jammed on gospel tunes, country songs, and Chuck Berry’s
“Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.”
ELVIS PRESLEY
34 Chapter 3

“It was like everything I had worked to achieve in that one little room,” said
Sam Phillips of the gathering of four men who’d helped create rock ’n’ roll. “It
was a time when black and white were fusing musically,” said Carl Perkins,
speaking of his own musical education. “There was a little circle in West Ten-
nessee, where we combined the blues influence coming up from Mississippi,
and the bluegrass from out of Kentucky, but I don’t think none of us ever quite
knew what it was. It didn’t have a name; we called it feel-good music”—which
is to say, not exactly blues or country but the roots of rock ’n’ roll.
Sam Phillips grew up poor on a farm in Florence, Alabama, and worked
in radio before (and after) going into the record business. In the early 1950s
his Memphis Recording Services recorded early sides by such influential
blues artists as B. B. King and Howlin’ Wolf, as well as one of the very first
rock ’n’ roll records, “Rocket 88,” by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats. This
was an ensemble from Clarksdale, Mississippi, led by its piano player, Ike
Turner (the group was actually known as Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm). A
significant wrinkle in the recording of “Rocket 88,” a jump blues written about
an Oldsmobile, was that guitarist Willie Kizart played through a damaged
amplifier whose speaker cone was held in place by wads of newspaper. The
result was the kind of fuzzy tone that electric guitarists would later obtain
using distortion pedals. The musicians were surprised when Phillips didn’t
object to the oddball sound, but capturing something unique, even if it was
by accident, was a key to his aesthetic.
Because Phillips had yet to launch his own record label, Chess Records
released “Rocket 88,” and it became one of 1951’s biggest rhythm & blues hits.
Ike Turner also played piano when Phillips recorded B. B. King’s breakthrough
hit, “Three O’Clock Blues.” King promoted his music career by working as
a singing deejay on Memphis’s WDIA, the first radio station in the nation
programmed for an African American audience. The call-and-response pat-
tern between King’s voice and his lead guitar on “Three O’Clock Blues,” a
technique pioneered by T-Bone Walker (best known for writing and recording
“Stormy Monday Blues”), came to define the sound of urban blues and, later,
the blues-rock of British guitarists like Eric Clapton and Peter Green.
But Phillips was even more enamored with another blues singer who’d
moved from the Mississippi Delta to Memphis. “When I heard Howlin’ Wolf,”
noted Phillips, “I said, ‘This is for me. This is where the soul of man never
dies.’” It didn’t take long for Phillips to get Wolf in the studio. “He would sit
there with these feet planted wide apart,” said Phillips, “playing nothing but
 Sunrise 35

the French harp, and I tell you, the greatest thing you could see to this day
would be Chester Burnett doing one of those sessions in my studio.” No one
who’s heard “Moanin’ at Midnight” or “How Many More Years,” both recorded
at Sun, would question the word of Sam Phillips.
Elvis Presley was the first member of the Million Dollar Quartet to reach
Memphis. He was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Gladys and Vernon Presley;
his identical twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley, was stillborn. Vernon, who
worked odd jobs, once spent eight months in prison for altering a check is-
sued by his landlord and sometime employer. “We were broke, man, broke,
and we left Tupelo overnight,” said Presley. “We just headed for Memphis.
Things had to be better.” The thirteen-year-old carried the $12.95 guitar he’d
received when his parents couldn’t afford to buy him a bicycle.
The Presleys moved into Lauderdale Courts, a public housing complex, and
Elvis picked up guitar tips from a neighbor, Jesse Lee Denson. He studied his
hillbilly favorites (Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, and Jimmie Rodgers), soaked up
race records on WDIA, and went to hear both black and white gospel quartets.
“I also dug the real low-down Mississippi singers,” said Presley, “mostly Big
Bill Broonzy and Big Boy Crudup, although they would scold me at home
for listening to them. ‘Sinful music,’ the townsfolk in Memphis said it was.
Which never bothered me, I guess.”
The enigma of Elvis Presley is how a shy kid mocked by his classmates for
being a mama’s boy became such a musical provocateur. There were visual
clues in the sideburns he grew as a teenager, the way he styled his hair with
Vaseline and rose oil, and the flashy clothes he bought at Lansky Bros., a Beale
Street store that catered to the black community. He first showed up at Sun
Studio in August 1953 to make a recording as a gift for his mother, but this
was a young man who clearly wanted to be noticed and who likely knew all
about Sam Phillips.
Presley certainly made an impression on Marion Keisker, who ran a sec-
ond tape while Presley recorded “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your
Heartaches Begin.” “The reason I taped Elvis was this,” said Keisker: “Over
and over I remember Sam saying, ‘If I could find a white man who had the
Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.’ This is what
I heard in Elvis, this . . . what I guess they now call ‘soul,’ this Negro sound.
So I taped it. I wanted Sam to know.”
Phillips took the bait and recruited guitarist Scotty Moore to rehearse with
the young singer. They tried a variety of country and pop tunes along with
36 Chapter 3

string bassist Bill Black, and Moore reported to Phillips that he wasn’t particu-
larly impressed. Phillips nonetheless brought them into the studio, where the
session foundered until, according to Moore, “Elvis picked up his guitar and
started banging on it and singing ‘That’s All Right, Mama,’ jumpin’ around
the studio, just acting the fool.” Phillips liked what he heard and worked the
trio until they had a master take of a blues song written by Arthur “Big Boy”
Crudup.
Attempts to record the flip side went nowhere until, once again, serendip-
ity saved the day. “Bill jumped up,” said Moore, “started clowning with his
bass and singing ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ in falsetto, mimicking Bill Monroe
[the bluegrass pioneer who’d written the song]. And Elvis started banging on
his guitar. And the rhythm thing jelled again.” In both cases, the musicians
succeeded by acting the fool, which is to say that in order to cut records that
drew on both the black and white music of the South, Elvis, Scotty, and Bill
had to get out of their own skins.
“‘That’s All Right’ is in the R&B idiom of negro field jazz, ‘Blue Moon of
Kentucky’ more in the country field,” wrote Bob Johnson in the Memphis
Press-Scimitar, “but there is a curious blending of the two different musics in
both.” The record became a regional hit, and subsequent singles from Sun
struck a similar balance by pairing R&B numbers with pop or country tunes;
Presley’s next release was “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” a 1947 hit for Roy Brown,
and “I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’ Shine,” a pop hit for Patti Page that had
also been recorded by one of Presley’s favorite singers, Dean Martin. Live gigs
ensued, and Moore said that Presley would get so nervous that his legs would
shake. When his gyrations prompted girls to scream, he realized that he was
onto something good.
Presley’s life changed overnight, with recording sessions at Sun sandwiched
between live appearances. In 1955 he was on a package tour that included the
Louvin Brothers, Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, and headliner Hank
Snow, whose Machiavellian manager, Colonel Tom Parker, was already mov-
ing in on the new star. He called Maybelle “Mama,” and she would replace
the buttons that popped off during his performances. “We worked many a
show with safety pins in our skirts,” said Helen, explaining that her mom
would repurpose buttons from her daughters’ clothing to help Elvis avoid a
wardrobe malfunction.
Presley had a crush on Anita Carter, who was married, and once feigned a
heart attack to get her attention. “The thing is,” he said, “I don’t know anybody
 Sunrise 37

else like you and your sisters. Would you look for someone for me that’s like
you all?” Anita replied that she couldn’t be the one to find his true love. “Well,”
said Elvis, “I guess I’m going to have to find one on my own and raise her to
suit myself.”

   
Elvis Presley’s Sun singles galvanized musicians throughout the South. “He
was the first boy I heard on record playing the songs the way I always done,”
said Carl Perkins, who was born to poor sharecroppers near predominantly
black Tiptonville, Tennessee. Perkins picked cotton after school and on long,
hot summer days. A weekly pleasure was listening to the Grand Ole Opry. After
he struggled with a homemade cigar-box instrument his father bought him a
battered Gene Autry guitar, and John Westbrook, a black field worker whom
he called Uncle John, taught him to play the blues. “Get down close to it,”
said Westbrook. “You can feel it travel down the strings, come through your
head and down to your soul where you live. You can feel it. Let it vib-a-rate.”
In addition to country heroes like Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family,
Perkins was drawn to the blues of Big Bill Broonzy and T-Bone Walker and
to the bluegrass of Bill Monroe. By the age of fourteen Perkins was playing
local gigs at the Cotton Boll and the Sand Ditch with his brother Jay (younger
brother Clay soon joined them on bass). When he heard Presley’s recording
of “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” a song already in the trio’s repertoire, Perkins
went to Memphis to get an audition with Sam Phillips, who reluctantly agreed.
“We were set up and picking before he could get back to the control room,”
said Perkins; liking what he heard, Phillips told him to come back with some
new songs.
Perkins found regional success with a country ballad, “Turn Around,” that
sounded a lot like a Hank Williams song. He also went on tour with Presley,
who took him to Lansky’s to jazz up his wardrobe. “When I’d jump around
they’d scream some,” said Perkins, “but they were gettin’ ready for him. It
was like TNT, man, it just exploded. All of a sudden the world was wrapped
up in rock.” While on tour with Sun’s newest act, Johnny Cash, Perkins was
inspired to write his greatest hit. Cash told him about a fastidious man in the
army who’d get ornery if anybody stepped on his shoes; Perkins saw kids in
the audience doing the same fool thing. He wrote the lyrics of “Blue Suede
Shoes” on a brown paper bag, added a nursery-rhyme introduction—“Well, it’s
one for the money!”—and cut the record in three takes. “Blue Suede Shoes,”
CARL PERKINS
 Sunrise 39

along with Presley’s early sides, essentially defined rockabilly, which writer
Nick Tosches called “hillbilly rock-and-roll. It was not a usurpation of black
music by whites because its soul, its pneuma, was white, full of redneck ethos.”
“Blue Suede Shoes” was the first Sun record to sell a million copies; it hit
the top of the country charts, #2 on the pop charts, and #3 on the rhythm &
blues charts. “When the song was popular,” said Perkins, who took to wearing
its signature footwear, “somebody would always come up with a camera and
want a picture of them stepping on the shoe.” The song’s success caused the
Perkins family to lose its $32-a-month public housing apartment.
The Perkins Brothers Band was booked to appear on the Perry Como Show.
That was high cotton for a kid who had actually picked cotton. After a March
21, 1956, show in Norfolk, Virginia, the brothers piled into their new Lincoln
for the overnight drive to New York. Before sunrise, near Dover, Delaware,
the car crashed into the back of a pickup, killing the truck driver and flip-
ping the Lincoln into a watery ditch. Perkins suffered a severe concussion,
three broken vertebrae in his neck, and a broken collarbone. His brother Jay
fractured his neck and sustained extensive internal injuries, dying two years
later. Perkins ultimately did the Perry Como Show, but it was too late; his mo-
ment had passed. Elvis had by then enjoyed his own 1956 hit with “Blue Suede
Shoes” and sang it on television no fewer than one, two, three times.

   
The fourth of seven children, J. R. Cash was three when his family moved to
Dyess, Arkansas, as participants in a New Deal program that let poor families
earn ownership of a twenty-acre plot by working the land. Cash was picking
cotton by the age of five, and the family sang together in the field and at church
and would always tune in to the Grand Ole Opry. His mother taught him the
rudiments of guitar and sent him to a voice teacher who was stunned when
the indifferent student sang a song of his own choosing, Hank Williams’s
“Lovesick Blues.” The instructor told him to not let anyone mess with the
way he sang. In 1944 his older brother Jack died when a saw-blade accident all
but split him in half. Cash was haunted by Jack’s death for the rest of his life.
John Cash (he was required to change his legal name from “J. R.”) enlisted
in the Air Force in 1950 and served as a radio operator in Germany, where he
played guitar in a combo that performed songs by the usual suspects (Rodgers,
the Carters, and Hank Snow). Back in the United States, he married Vivian
Liberto, the girlfriend he’d left behind (after dating for three weeks). The
JOHNNY CASH
 Sunrise 41

newlyweds moved to Memphis, where Cash sold appliances door-to-door and

liked to end his day by paying a visit to Gus Cannon, who once led Cannon’s
Jug Stompers, a Memphis combo popular in the late 1920s and 1930s. Cash
would sing along with Cannon, whose “Walk Right In” would become a #1
hit for the Rooftop Singers in 1963.
Cash also played music with guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall
Grant. He pitched himself to Sam Phillips as a gospel singer but piqued his
interest with an original song he’d written in Germany, “Hey Porter.” Phillips
encouraged Cash’s combo (plus drummer J. M. Van Eaton) to pump up the
tempo. (Phillips also suggested that Cash call himself “Johnny.”) This was
the same advice he gave to Cash when the singer wanted to record “Folsom
Prison Blues” as a recitation instead of the up-beat cry against confinement
that became one of Cash’s greatest hits. In order to amplify the percussive
sound of his strum, Cash looped a piece of paper through the strings of his
guitar. The song, with its famously nihilistic lyric (“I shot a man in Reno just
to watch him die”) hit the top of the country charts, and its boom-chicka-boom
rhythm became Cash’s signature sound. (Gordon Jenkins, a songwriter and
arranger, successfully sued Cash over the song’s similarity to his own “Crescent
City Blues”; curiously, Jenkins didn’t act until the song became a hit for the
second time on Cash’s 1968 album Live at Folsom Prison.)
Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two toured hard and were quick to learn
of the rigors and rewards of the road. Women were easy to meet, and amphet-
amines would keep a musician awake until another pill put him to sleep. Cash
and Perkins talked about how to handle these temptations. “I walk the line,”
said Cash; Perkins said that that was a good title for a song. When Cash cast
the lyric as a spiritual ballad, Phillips once more encouraged him to pick up
the pulse. The song was a hit, but all the same, Cash cheated on his wife and
was soon addicted to bennies.

   
Sun Records wasn’t the only place where rock ’n’ roll was born. In Chicago,
Chess Records, the label that released the Howlin’ Wolf tracks cut by Sam
Phillips, spiced up its roster of blues artists with two seminal rockers, Chuck
Berry and Bo Diddley. Berry, who grew up in St. Louis listening to blues
and country music, pitched himself to Leonard Chess at the suggestion of
Muddy Waters. Chess liked a country-tinged tune called “Ida Red,” which
Berry had adapted from a 1938 song by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys,
CHUCK BERRY
 Sunrise 43

but wanted a snappier title. The song became “Maybellene” and was cut
at Berry’s first recording session in May 1955 along with “Wee Wee Hours,”
“Thirty Days,” and “You Can’t Catch Me.” During those few hours, Berry, like
Elvis at Sun, found rock ’n’ roll on the corner of country and R&B. A criti-
cal difference is that Berry was also a gifted songwriter who would quickly
create one of the greatest catalogs in all of rock ’n’ roll. Bo Diddley, whose
given name was Ellas McDaniel, also wrote enduring hits including “I’m a
Man,” “Mona,” and “Who Do You Love?” McDaniel’s secret ingredient was
the “Bo Diddley beat,” his take on the clave rhythm common to African
(and Caribbean) music.
Buddy Holly (born Charles Hardin Holley) grew up in west Texas playing
country music but was quick to follow Elvis into rock ’n’ roll. Opening for
Presley shows in Lubbock won Holly a recording contract with Decca; in Janu-
ary 1956 he went into a Nashville studio with Owen Bradley, who dismissed
Holly’s band in favor of studio pros. When two singles went nowhere, Decca
dropped his contact. Holly’s next stop was Clovis, New Mexico, where pro-
ducer Norman Petty had recorded “Party Doll,” a rock ’n’ roll hit for fellow
Texan Buddy Knox. Holly and his band cut a demo of “That’ll Be the Day” (a
tune from the Nashville sessions) with Holly accentuating the punchy rhythm
with his electric guitar. Brunswick Records liked the demo so much that it was
released as a single, and in the fall of 1957 it hit #1 in both the United States
and the United Kingdom. Holly’s next release, “Peggy Sue,” reached #3 on
the pop charts and was a #2 R&B hit (the flip side was a soft-pop evergreen,
“Everyday”). Over the course of the next year Holly recorded a heap of hits
including “Oh, Boy!,” “It’s So Easy,” “Not Fade Away,” and “Maybe Baby.”
Buddy Holly and the Crickets codified the classic rock band format of lead
and rhythm guitars, bass, and drums, and his influence was profound. British
singer and guitarist Richard Thompson cites the “singability” of his songs.
“I can remember every word of every Buddy Holly song, perhaps more than
any other writer,” said Thompson. “Just making all that flow and the words
blending into each, it’s just beautiful.” Bob Dylan spoke of Holly when he
won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. “Buddy played the music that I loved,”
said Dylan in his Nobel Lecture, “the music I grew up on: country western,
rock ’n’ roll, and rhythm and blues. Three separate strands of music that
he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote
songs—songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he
sang great—sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype.”
44 Chapter 3

In the late 1950s, two archetypes climbed aboard a tour bus to headline
a rock ’n’ roll package tour. Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, both writing hit
songs at a feverish pace, were feeling lucky, and they walked to the back of
the bus to shoot craps.

   
The country establishment in Nashville hated rock ’n’ roll. Like many Ameri-
can parents, it considered the music to be both crude and juvenile. But what
really hurt was that rock had left country music in the dust, commercially
speaking, with Nashville particularly galled that hits by Elvis Presley and Carl
Perkins were simultaneously topping the country, pop, and R&B charts. “It
has already been suggested that country artists with r&b-styled material, or
r&b-styled delivery, be excluded from the best-selling country charts,” wrote
Paul Ackerman in Billboard. “They will be dropped when the kid with the 89
cents feels it time for a change.”
The antipathy toward rock ’n’ roll was due, at least in part, to the music’s
clear link to the blues and R&B created by black America. What’s more, the
sexy panache of the young rockers made country artists seem a little old hat.
“Most of the record-buying public regarded us as hillbillies,” said George
Jones, whose career got rolling in 1956. “Even in Nashville there were folks who
looked down on those of us on Sixteenth Avenue South, where we recorded
three-chord songs that were played on tiny AM stations scattered mostly in
the rural South.”
Not every country artist suffered at the hands of rock ’n’ roll. Ray Price,
who’d shared a Nashville apartment with Hank Williams, topped the charts
for twenty weeks in 1956 with “Crazy Arms.” Price had had a musical epiphany
while recording the tune that knocked Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” off the
top of the country charts. “We were having trouble getting a good, clean bass
sound,” said Price. “So instead of going with the standard 2/4 beat, I said, ‘Let’s
try a 4/4 bass and a shuffle rhythm, and it cut. It cut straight through.” The
rhythm, which became known as the “Ray Price Shuffle,” favored a walking
bass line and western-swing fiddles reminiscent of Bob Wills. Roger Miller
played drums with Price’s band, the Cherokee Cowboys, and wrote their 1958
hit “Invitation to the Blues.” In the 1960s Miller found great success with witty,
original songs such as “Dang Me” and “King of the Road.” Willie Nelson be-
came a Cherokee Cowboy after Price recorded one of his early evergreens,
“Night Life.” “I took Willie out on the road as my bass player,” said Price,
 Sunrise 45

“and after a few gigs, he said, ‘I bet you didn’t know I’d never played the bass
before.’ I said, ‘I knew the first night.’”
Price had another hit in 1956, “You Done Me Wrong,” which he wrote with
another Texan, George Jones. Jones got his Gene Autry guitar when he was
nine, played honky-tonks as a teenager, and met Hank Williams at a Beau-
mont radio station. Jones recorded his first single, “No Money in This Deal,”
for Starday, the small label that had hit pay dirt with Lefty Frizzell. “I wanted
to sound like Hank Williams, but I phrased like Lefty,” said Jones. “I made
five syllables out of one.” Jones found his own voice on “Why, Baby, Why,”
which won him a spot on the Grand Ole Opry. “A country singer making it to
the Opry in 1956,” said Jones, “was like an athlete making it to the Olympics.”
Still, Jones wasn’t making enough money to carry his own band, so he trav-
eled from town to town to quickly rehearse (if he was lucky) with a group of
local musicians. Along the way, his vocals evolved into artistry. “It makes you
sad,” said Jones, “because you’re singin’ all these sad words, about how a man
can do a woman and a woman can do a man, until you’re just like the people
in the song, and you’re living it and their problems become your problems,
until you’re lost in the songs and it just takes everything out of you.” That’s
one reason why Jones typically took a bottle into the recording studio.
Elsewhere on the country charts, the Louvin Brothers continued a tradi-
tion of singing siblings that went back to the Blue Sky Boys and the Delmore
Brothers. The Louvins grew up on a tiny cotton farm in southern Appalachia,
singing songs their mother taught them from the Sacred Harp hymnal and
avoiding their violent father. They sang gospel before recording their first
secular song (“The Getting Acquainted Waltz”) with Chet Atkins. The brothers
would soon record songs that continue to be performed by Americana artists
including “If I Could Only Win Your Love,” “When I Start Dreaming,” and
“You’re Running Wild.”
Ira, a head taller than Charlie, played mandolin alongside his brother’s
guitar; they harmonized with familial ease. “We knew when to switch when
something came along that was too high for me,” said Charlie. “In one line
of a song we’d sometimes change parts twice.” Though their vocals were
harmonious, Ira’s heavy drinking caused friction. Headlining a 1955 tour with
Elvis Presley, who was already a hard act to follow, a cantankerous Ira called
the rocker’s music low-rent garbage. The Louvins faded when a pair of their
fans, the Everly Brothers, produced close-harmony songs that spoke to teen-
age concerns.
46 Chapter 3

Ike Everly was a coal miner from Kentucky who learned finger-style guitar
from Kennedy Jones, who’d picked up the technique from Arnold Schultz, the
same black guitarist who had tutored Bill Monroe; Jones had also influenced
the playing of Merle Travis. Ike and his wife Margaret moved with their two
sons, Phil and Don, to Shenandoah, Iowa, where the parents hosted a radio
show that soon featured “Little Donnie and Baby Boy Phil.” In 1955 the family
moved to Nashville, where Chet Atkins helped Phil and Don get a deal with
Columbia Records, which dropped them after one flop single. Atkins then
steered them to Wesley Rose of Acuff-Rose Publishing, the firm where Rose’s
recently deceased father Fred had famously mentored Hank Williams.
Rose signed the siblings to a publishing deal, got them a contract with
Cadence Records, and crucially, introduced them to a pair of songwriters,
Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who played them “Bye Bye Love,” a song that
had already been rejected by thirty artists. The Everly Brothers cut the tune
(Atkins played guitar) and then went on a tent-show tour of Louisiana and
Mississippi with Bill Monroe. “Driving back to Nashville,” said Phil, “when
we got within radio distance, they had this pop station on in the car—and it
was playing our record. That was, like, big juju.” “Bye Bye Love” topped the
country charts, hit #5 on the R&B list, and reached #2 on the pop chart. The
duo followed up with other multiformat hits by the Bryants, including “Wake
Up Little Susie,” “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” and “Love Hurts.” The country
duo, suddenly pop stars, were featured on a seventy-eight-city package tour
alongside Chuck Berry, the Drifters, and Buddy Holly and the Crickets.

   
Colonel Tom Parker courted both Elvis and Sam Phillips, who recognized
that Elvis needed a major label to make him a truly national star. Name your
price, said Parker; Phillips came up with a number that he thought would
never be met, $35,000. But RCA paid $40,000, the extra $5,000 going to cover
royalties owed to Elvis by Sun. Within weeks, Presley was in RCA’s Nashville
studio cutting “Heartbreak Hotel” with Chet Atkins in the band. Phillips used
his newfound cash to promote the Carl Perkins smash “Blue Suede Shoes.”
Meanwhile, in Ferriday, Louisiana, a boogie-woogie pianist named Jerry
Lee Lewis figured it was high time he auditioned for the man who’d discovered
Elvis. His father Elmo was a farmer who also produced 100-proof whiskey in a
fifty-gallon still, a lucrative sideline that had twice landed him in jail. During
his second incarceration, when Jerry Lee was three years old, a drunk driver
 Sunrise 47

ran over his older brother, Elmo Jr.; prison guards accompanied the father to
his son’s graveside funeral, where, with his hand in cuffs, he threw a flower
onto the child’s coffin.
Elmo Lewis, an amateur musician, recognized that young Jerry Lee showed
promise, and he took out a mortgage on the farm to buy a $250 Starck piano.
Lewis would pound the keys alongside his cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy
Swaggart and was soon playing music with his family at the Assembly of God,
where parishioners sometimes fell to the floor and spoke in tongues. Jerry Lee
called Jimmie Rodgers “a natural born blues singer” and Roy Acuff “the worst
singer [he] ever heard.” He was drawn to the Big House, a black honky-tonk
run by Will Haney that booked such traveling musicians as Charles Brown,
Fats Domino, and Ray Charles. Jerry Lee lurked near the door, and when he
had the chance, would sneak inside to hide under a table. “It’s where I got my
juice,” he said.
Jerry Lee married Dorothy Barton, the daughter of a traveling evangelist,
when he was sixteen and knew in an instant that he’d made a mistake. He
escaped to Southwestern Bible Institute in Waxahachie, Texas, and found late
night fun in Dallas. But what got him kicked out of school was his boogie-
woogie take on “My God Is Real” at a student talent show. Back in the honky-
tonks, Jerry Lee met Paul Whitehead, a fifty-year-old blind pianist who also
played trumpet and accordion. “Mr. Paul knew every song in the world,” said
Lewis. “And we played ’em all.” One night, he heard Whitehead perform the
song that would change his life, “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On.” That was
when Lewis asked Elmo to accompany him to Memphis to meet Sam Phillips.
To finance the trip, Elmo cleaned out the henhouse and sold four hundred
eggs.
At Sun Studio, Jerry Lee bragged that he could play piano the way Chet
Atkins played guitar. “We sat down at the little spinet piano,” said Jack Clem-
ent, who was minding the store while Phillips was out of town, “and sure
enough, he played somethin’ that sounded like Chet Atkins. ‘So what else do
you do?’ I said. ‘Well, I sing.’ So I got him to sing, but it was all country stuff.
. . . So I told him if he could come up with some rock ’n’ roll we could prob-
ably do somethin’.” Lewis’s cousin, J. W. Brown, angling to play bass in Jerry
Lee’s band, put him up in the home he shared with his wife and two children,
including his thirteen-year-old daughter Myra. “I did notice,” said Jerry Lee,
“that she wasn’t no kid.” Phillips called Lewis into the studio as soon as he
heard his audition take on Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms.”
JERRY LEE LEWIS
 Sunrise 49

The song, recut after thumbtacks were stuck into the hammers of the piano
to juice up the sound, was Lewis’s first chart record but not a big hit. His next
session focused on a Clement shuffle called “It’ll Be Me.” “I felt like we ought
to get off of it,” said Clement, “and one of ’em piped up and said, ‘Hey, Jerry,
why don’t you do that thing you did the other night?’ So all I did was walk
back into the control room and turn on the machine. We didn’t run it down
or nothin’.” Jerry Lee closed his eyes, imagined himself back at the Big House,
and knocked out “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” in a single take, pausing
in the middle of the tune to “wiggle it around just a little bit.”
Lewis’s aggressive boogie-woogie piano was far more explosive than the
affable piano rock of Fats Domino. A more pertinent comparison was to Little
Richard (Richard Wayne Penniman), who went nowhere as a rhythm & blues
singer until 1955, when Specialty Records sent him to New Orleans, where
the studio players took a swing at the dirty ditty that Richard sang between
takes of the planned material. With a “wop bob a loo bob a lop bam boom,”
Richard ripped into “Tutti Frutti,” the most riotously risqué rock ’n’ roll song
until the release of “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On.”

   
Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis went on a month-long tour of
Canada in a fleet of cars loaded with musicians and equipment. Cash topped
the bill. Lewis, known only (if at all) for his version of “Crazy Arms,” felt like
a failure. “He came off one night in Calgary moaning, ‘This business ain’t for
me, people don’t like me,’” said Perkins. “John and I told him, ‘Turn around
so they can see you, make a fuss.’ So the next night he carried on, stood up,
kicked the stool back and a new Jerry Lee Lewis was born. . . . Four nights later,
he was top of the bill.” By tour’s end, “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” was
selling like happy hour drinks; then radio stations began pulling the record
for being too sexually suggestive.
Judd Phillips, Sam’s brother, took Jerry Lee to New York to audition for
The Steve Allen Show, a tough sell given that the now-controversial record
had yet to break nationally. Allen tapped the top of the upright piano with a
pencil as Jerry Lee played his song, and he won the gig when he hammed it
up during the “shake it for me one time” lyric. Comedian Milton Berle was
backstage during rehearsal. After seeing how Lewis kicked away his piano
stool, Uncle Miltie suggested that Allen throw it back onto the stage. That’s
exactly what happened on July 28, 1957, an appearance that sent “Whole Lot
50 Chapter 3

of Shakin’ Going On” to the top of the country charts and into the top five of
the pop and R&B charts.
Six million copies later, Jerry Lee was Sun’s biggest star; Cash and Perkins
felt lost in the shuffle. Perkins’s records sold only modestly after “Blue Suede
Shoes,” and though Cash continued to thrive, he was frustrated that Phillips
wouldn’t let him record a gospel album. Both Cash and Perkins eventually
signed with Columbia Records, but only after Phillips stockpiled enough
material by Cash to keep releasing records into the 1960s.
After seeing Lewis on The Steve Allen Show, Otis Blackwell, a black New
York singer-songwriter and himself a pianist, sent him “Great Balls of Fire.”
Blackwell had struck gold when Presley had had hits with two of his songs,
“Don’t Be Cruel” and “All Shook Up” (he also wrote the jazz-blues standard
“Fever”). Blackwell, who never met Presley, had agreed to Colonel Parker’s con-
dition that the songwriter relinquish half of both his publishing and writer’s
royalties. The Colonel applied the same unorthodox 50–50 split to his own
management contract with Elvis.
“Great Balls of Fire,” with lyrics that would again make Bible-thumpers
call rock ’n’ roll the Devil’s playground, was huge in the United States (#1 on
the country chart, #2 for pop, and #3 for R&B) and also a hit in the United
Kingdom. The money came in sacks, and like Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Wil-
liams, Jerry Lee spent it like the day after tomorrow. Lewis bought his parents
a house and matching Cadillacs and drove Myra to high school in his own
fancy car. “One night,” said Lewis, “we parked out in front of the house. . . .
After we got through, she started crying, ‘Now I’ve done this,’ and it wasn’t
the first time, ‘you’ll never marry me, will you?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ And I lived up
to my bargain.” Neglecting to divorce his second wife, Jerry Lee wed Myra,
whose parents were enraged on discovering that their thirteen-year-old was
now married. Her father, J. W. Brown, whipped his daughter, and continued
to play bass with his new son-in-law.
Jerry Lee’s concerts were now played before big crowds, and he starred in
package tours with Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Buddy Holly. (Holly asked
Lewis for romantic advice when he was thinking of marrying his Manhattan
girlfriend, Maria Elena Santiago.) Before a concert at the Brooklyn Paramount
promoted by Allen Freed, Berry and Lewis argued about who should close the
show. Freed chose Berry. Lewis capped his typically riotous set with “Great
Balls of Fire,” except this time he reached into his jacket for a Coke bottle
filled with gasoline. Wild-eyed, shaking his curly locks, Lewis baptized his
 Sunrise 51

instrument, tossed a match into its belly, and pounded the ivories as flames
engulfed the piano. Walking off the stage, Lewis looked at Berry and said with
more mirth than malice, “Follow that, nigger.”
Sam Phillips encouraged his new star to leave Myra at home when he
toured the United Kingdom but Jerry Lee would have none of it, and he took
his extended family to witness his emergence as a truly international star.
The entourage was met at London’s Heathrow Airport, where Myra identi-
fied herself to a reporter as Jerry Lee’s wife. Lewis, thinking fast, said that
she was fifteen. Soon enough, reporters learned that it was the rocker’s third
marriage; a dispatch from Memphis also revealed the wed-while-already-
married angle. The salacious story hit the British tabloids like a match to
a petrol-soaked piano. A thirteen-year-old child bride! Bigamy! Great balls
of sinful fire! When the tour opened to a half-empty hall in North London,
boos were mixed with salacious catcalls. The tour, cancelled after two dates,
buckled under the weight of rock ’n’ roll’s first great scandal. The stink fol-
lowed Lewis back to the United States. Records were returned, and airplay
dried up. When he left for England, Jerry Lee was taking in $10,000 per night.
Now, he was lucky to get $250.

   
The Million Dollar Quartet grew up poor, loved Hank Williams, lost brothers,
and made music that mixed black and white. They went to church, found their
unique voices, and arrived at Sun Studio full of big dreams. Against all odds,
they all hit it big and became men of the world, which turned out to invite a
ton of trouble. Perkins drank too much, Cash gobbled down pills, Lewis was
scorched by scandal, and Elvis lived alone in a crowd of sycophants.
Lewis didn’t even know that he had broken any rules. His mother was
fifteen when she married his father, and country kin can be thick as thieves.
Roy Orbison, who had a rockabilly hit called “Ooby Dooby” during his brief
stay at Sun, stayed at Sam’s house with his fifteen-year-old girlfriend. Elvis
was asked about Jerry Lee before he left for army duty in Germany. “He’s a
great artist,” said Presley. “I’d rather not talk about his marriage, except that
if he really loves her, I guess it’s all right.” In Europe, Elvis fell in love with
fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu, the daughter of a U.S. Air Force officer.
The unorthodox courtship—Beaulieu followed Elvis back to Memphis and
attended Immaculate Conception High School—avoided tabloid scrutiny.
They married in Las Vegas when Priscilla turned twenty-one. “He hid her
52 Chapter 3

in his house,” said Lewis, “and then he acted like he wasn’t doin’ nothin’. . . .
When I got married to my thirteen-year-old cousin, I blew it out and told the
whole world.”
Parents and preachers already hated how black music had morphed into
rock ’n’ roll, but Jerry Lee’s downfall suggested that the art of hillbillies could
be equally sinful. Johnny Cash came off a little differently; he was married
with three young daughters. But he also had a roving eye. Cash met June
Carter in 1956 at the Grand Ole Opry. “Hello,” said the married man to the
married woman, “I’m Johnny Cash, and I’m going to marry you someday.”
In the meantime, another woman had caught his eye. “From the time I met
Johnny Cash,” said Billie Jean Horton, “I wanted him, but I was married to a
man that I loved and I had three kids and Johnny had three.”
Billie Jean had married Hank Williams in a concert arena in New Orleans
and after his death wed country singer Johnny Horton, who’d hit it big with
“North to Alaska.” Horton appeared at the Skyline Club in Austin (where
Hank had played his last gig). Driving home to Shreveport on November 5,
1960, Horton died when his car collided with a truck. Cash arrived to offer
solace, and before long, he and Billie Jean became lovers. “There was a little
bit of drugs before, I think,” said Billie Jean, “but when Johnny Horton died,
that put him over the top. I lived with Hank Williams, the king of the dope,
and I was afraid Johnny was going to destroy himself if he didn’t get off those
pills.” Cash, still married, asked for her hand; she hesitated, and then said no.
If the Bristol sessions were the big bang of country music, the arrival of rock
’n’ roll was the Manhattan Project of Americana. The fact that Elvis Presley,
Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, and Carl
Perkins took the same songs to the top of all three charts—country, pop, and
R&B—was nothing less than revolutionary. Never again would the genres’
borders be quite so porous. That mélange of styles is the essence of Americana
music, except unlike today, it was universally popular. In later years country
artists would occasionally cross over to the pop charts, and vice versa, but
such songs were always exceptions. But at this moment of creation, the genres
were fluid, an abstract painting of black and white, country and blues. Popular
music would never be the same.
Then the first generation of rockers hit the wall. Elvis went into the army
and came home to great celebrity but would never again seem so wild. Jerry
Lee was washed up, a lion in exile. Chuck Berry went to prison (after two
trials) for transporting a fourteen-year-old girl over state lines for “immoral
 Sunrise 53

purposes.” Little Richard released raucous rockers like “Slippin’ and Slidin’”
and “Lucille” but then gave up rock ’n’ roll to preach the Gospel. Buddy Holly
wanted to avoid a long winter ride in a tour bus with a broken heater, so he
chartered a plane to take him from Clear Lake, Iowa, to his next show in
Minnesota. The flight ended in a cornfield crash. The next morning, when
the wreckage was discovered in seven inches of snow, the pilot and his pas-
sengers were long dead. Holly’s horn-rimmed eyeglasses weren’t found until
the spring thaw. In his 1972 hit song “American Pie” Don McLean said this
was “the day the music died,” but that’s not true. It only changed.
Peter Guralnick would write a two-volume biography of Elvis Presley in
the 1990s (Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love), but twenty years earlier,
he speculated that “if Elvis Presley had simply disappeared after leaving the
little Sun studio for the last time, his status would be something like that of
a latter-day Robert Johnson: lost, vulnerable, eternally youthful, forever on
the edge, pure and timeless.” But Elvis didn’t disappear; Colonel Parker made
sure of that. Still, the blunt-force impact of mid-fifties rock ’n’ roll was history;
now the music scene was dominated by teen idols and the folk revival. Sam
Phillips drank with his friend Audrey Williams at the house she’d bought
with Hank and put his money into radio stations and a new hotel chain, the
Holiday Inn. His musical moment had passed. “Everything was all happening
one day,” said Jack Clement, “and then it’s not.”
BLOWIN’ IN THE WIND

Bobby Zimmerman pushed against the stage at the Duluth National Guard
Armory. Buddy Holly, twenty-two, was playing a Fender Stratocaster, and he
and the Crickets were dressed in black jackets, gray slacks, and ascots. Zim-
merman, a senior in high school, said that it was as if “there was a halo around
Buddy’s head.” Truth be told, these were not the real Crickets because Holly’s
band and producer Norman Petty had argued over songs, money, and Buddy’s
move to New York to live with his wife, Maria Elena Santiago, whom he had
met during a visit to the Manhattan office of Peer-South Publishing (yes, that
Ralph Peer). Holly’s new bass player was Waylon Jennings, a Texas deejay and
musician. Before joining the “Winter Dance Party,” Jennings visited Holly at
his Greenwich Village apartment just north of where the folkie musicians
hung out in Washington Square.
The January 31, 1959, concert also featured Ritchie Valens (“La Bamba”),
Dion and the Belmonts (“I Wonder Why”), and J. P. Richardson, a.k.a. the Big
Bopper, who was riding high with “Chantilly Lace” and who had just written
a future George Jones smash, “White Lightning.” But Bobby’s eyes were on
the man rocking the sunburst Strat as everybody jammed on Chuck Berry’s
“Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.” Two nights later, Holly, Valens, and Richardson
 Blowin’ in the Wind 55

died in the crash of a four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza. For Zimmerman it was

tragic, if not as twisted as the death of his first musical hero, Hank Williams.
Bobby was crazy about Elvis and the other early rock ’n’ rollers, especially
Little Richard. In his first high school band, the Golden Chords, he pounded
the piano and sang songs such as Richard’s “Jenny Jenny.” His second group
never had a name but added blues and R&B to his repertoire. “Late at night I
used to listen to Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, and Howlin’
Wolf blastin’ in from Shreveport,” he said. “Listened to all those songs, then
tried to figure them out.” The radio show was called No Name Jive, and Zim-
merman ordered records from one of its sponsors, Stan’s Rockin’ Record Shop.
Playing in another band, the Rock Boppers, Zimmerman took on his first
stage name, Elston Gunn (inspired by Elvis and televisions’s Peter Gunn).
Early in the summer of 1959, Gunn played a couple of gigs in Fargo, North
Dakota, with the Shadows, one of whom would soon become pop star Bobby
Vee (“Take Good Care of My Baby”). “We gave Bob Zimmerman a chance to
work with us,” said Vee, “and he played great—in the key of C.” By the fall,
when he enrolled in the University of Minnesota, he had another new name,
Bobby Dillon (after Gunsmoke’s Marshall Dillon). Eventually he’d decide that
Bob sounded stronger than Bobby and that Dillon looked cooler spelled with
a y. Bob Dylan had also traded his electric guitar for an acoustic Gibson and
a teenager’s rock ’n’ roll for a college kid’s folk music.
“I first met Bob in the Ten O’Clock Scholar,” said John Koerner. “Bob just
drifted in. He and I both played the same sort of guitar things.” Koerner and
Dylan traded tunes by Jimmie Rodgers and Lead Belly and soon afterward
Dylan’s latest favorite, Odetta. Paul Nelson, who began his career as a music
critic co-editing the Little Sandy Review, saw the pair perform in the University
of Minnesota neighborhood called Dinkytown. “In 1959,” he said, “Bob and
Koerner were playing the standard repertoire, adequate guitarists and singers,
but plenty of other kids were as good. Dylan seemed to learn so incredibly
fast. If you didn’t see him for two weeks, he made three years’ progress.”
College campuses helped nurture the folk revival. In the early 1950s, folk
music reached a mass audience through the Weavers, who played upscale
nightclubs and enjoyed major hits, including some that Pete Seeger had
first heard sung by Lead Belly (“Goodnight, Irene,” “The Midnight Special”).
But the group’s popularity plummeted when Seeger and fellow Weaver Lee
Hays were found to have associations with the Communist Party and were
called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Both
56 Chapter 4

refused to name names and the Weavers, already being monitored by the
FBI, lost lucrative concert gigs and were essentially banned from radio and
television.
But their influence lingered, and in 1955 the Weavers filled Carnegie
Hall for a reunion concert. At about that time, Seeger played a Califor-
nia concert and sold a copy of his self-published How to Play the 5-String
Banjo to David Guard, a student at Stanford University. Guard soon formed
a collegiate folk combo called the Kingston Trio. After a long run at San
Francisco’s Purple Onion, the Kingston Trio broke nationally with a nine-
teenth-century ballad, “Tom Dooley”; the 1957 hit inspired such other folk
groups as the Highwaymen, the New Christy Minstrels, and the Rooftop
Singers, who revived Gus Cannon’s “Walk Right In.” It was these largely
apolitical groups that inspired the 1960s television show Hootenanny.
In Chicago, Jim McGuinn jammed with another folk group, the Lime-
lighters, who were booked into the Gate of Horn. McGuinn made such an
impression that he was offered a spot in the band, which he joined a few
months later, after graduating high school. McGuinn would tour with the
Chad Mitchell Trio and Bobby Darin before becoming a founding member
of the Byrds. Other Byrds earned their wings in similar fashion, with Gene
Clark performing with the New Christy Minstrels, Chris Hillman playing in a
California bluegrass group called the Scottsville Squirrel Barkers, and David
Crosby, the son of a Hollywood cinematographer, singing in coffeehouses
with the Balladeers.
“There were little pockets of musicians,” said David Grisman of traditional
acoustic players in New York, Boston, Chicago, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles,
“and all these people were aware of each other.” Over the years they formed
bands, guested on each other’s recordings, and cultivated the acoustic foun-
dation of Americana. Few of these musicians became household names—
Grisman’s friend Jerry Garcia is a notable exception—but all contributed to
a vibrant musical scene. Club 47, the center of the Boston-Cambridge scene,
featured touring acts and local talents such as Eric Von Schmidt, a blues gui-
tarist and graphic artist, and Debbie Green, a talented folksinger. The musi-
cians saw themselves as continuing a tradition. “We’d go out and find these
ancient records,” said Tom Rush, “and the guitars sounded out of tune, and
you couldn’t understand the words. But it was more powerful than anything
you’d hear anywhere else.”
 Blowin’ in the Wind 57

Joan Baez, a student at Boston University, was the daughter of an astro-

physicist born in Mexico and a mother from Scotland. Baez was introduced
to folk music at a Pete Seeger concert and began performing in Boston after
absorbing Debbie Green’s repertoire. She became a breakout star when she
sang with Bob Gibson at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959. All told, it
took Baez just nine months to go from first playing Club 47 to recording her
debut album.
Albert Grossman, who managed Odetta and Bob Gibson and ran the Gate
of Horn in Chicago, booked Baez in hopes of becoming her manager. Baez
instead chose the more genteel Manny Greenfield, who steered her to Van-
guard, a label that specialized in folk and classical music, though she retained
Grossman to negotiate her contract. Around that time, Grossman was at his
Chicago club when Dave Van Ronk, on the advice of Odetta, arrived for an
impromptu afternoon audition after hitchhiking from New York. “‘Do you
know who works here?’” said Grossman after Van Ronk played a few songs to
an empty club. “Big Bill Broonzy works here. Josh White works here. Brownie
McGhee and Sonny Terry play here a lot. Now tell me, why should I hire you?”
A deflated Van Ronk returned to New York, where he would become a folk
star known as the Mayor of McDougal Street.
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, Bob Dylan was busy being born. “From
Odetta,” said Dylan, “I went to Harry Belafonte, the Kingston Trio, little by
little uncovering more as I went along. Finally, I was doing nothing but Carter
Family and Jesse Fuller songs. Then later, I got to Woody Guthrie, which
opened up a whole new world.” Dylan couldn’t help but notice the new folk
star whom some called the “barefoot Madonna.” “The sight of her made me
high,” said Dylan of Baez. “All that and then there was her voice. A voice that
drove out bad spirits.”
In January 1961 Dylan caught a ride to New York. It proved to be a brutal
winter, but Dylan had been raised in the windswept cold of the Iron Range,
and a big city shrouded in snow was a perfect stage for an ambitious young
folkie to create a new image to go with his made-up name.

   
Jerry Lee Lewis walked through commercial hellfire after marrying Myra
Brown. He continued to record for Sun, but nothing sold; his one modest hit
was a 1961 cover of Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say,” a roadhouse gospel song cut
58 Chapter 4

from the same suggestive cloth as Jerry Lee’s own hits. His life had become
an endless hustle of inconsequential gigs fueled by pills and booze. The one
blessing was his son, Steve Allen Lewis, born in 1959 and named after the
television host who’d given Jerry Lee a break.
Three years later, Lewis was on the road when Myra, now seventeen, found
Steve Allen facedown in the brackish water of a backyard swimming pool. A
distraught Lewis soon left for a tour of England. “They were screaming for
me this time,” said Lewis, who nonetheless was criticized in the tabloids for
touring so soon after burying his boy. A couple of years later Jerry Lee cut Live
at the Star-Club Hamburg, a raucous disc recorded at a venue that had hosted
a residency by the Beatles. A hit in Europe, the album never came out in the
United States, where the gigs were grim. “He started havin’ a lot of goons
around,” said his drummer, Tarp Tarrant. “They were buyin’ him dope. . . .
They were totin’ a lot of money for him, ’cause everything was always cash
with Jerry. Guns. Hell, man, we had guns galore.”
Alcohol broke up the Louvin Brothers (along with rock ’n’ roll in general
and the Everly Brothers in particular). “Satan is Real,” they sang, while Ira,
whose high-lonesome tenor echoes throughout Americanaland, hit the bottle.
One drunken fight with his third wife ended with gunfire. “If the son of a bitch
don’t die,” said Faye Cunningham, “I’ll shoot him again.” Ira’s beleaguered
younger brother finally went solo in 1963. A year later, a drunken driver killed
Ira and his fourth wife. “It’s been thirty years since we were separated,” said
Charles, “and still, if I’m playing a Louvin Brothers song, when I get to the
harmony part, I move off to one side of the mike. It’s a habit I can’t break.”
The Everly Brothers also began to fade after a dispute with Acuff-Rose left
them estranged from the writers of many of their hits, Felice and Boudleaux
Bryant. The brothers wrote their biggest single, 1960’s “Cathy’s Clown,” but
while their influence lingered, the hits soon stopped.
A struggling Carl Perkins played an early-sixties gig in a small Tennessee
club. As he slipped off his guitar at the end of a set, his fingers got caught in
the blades of an onstage fan; Perkins passed out while his fingers were cut to
ribbons. “That tunnel of light they talk about,” said Perkins. “That happened
to me. It just opened up in the most beautiful colors.” Perkins regained con-
sciousness to discover that his wife had begged the surgeon not to amputate
his disfigured fingers. His left pinky was dead, but months of squeezing a
rubber ball put the rockabilly back into his other fingers. The bourbon that
used to calm his nerves before a show now soothed deeper pain. In 1964 his
 Blowin’ in the Wind 59

old friend Johnny Cash asked Perkins to join his touring band, but it wasn’t
exactly like the old days. Perkins said that he and Cash would sit in the back
of a motor home and “get so drunk—me and my whiskey and he on his pills—
that we couldn’t see each other and we’d start crying. We’d sit there and talk
about our dead brothers and get to feeling sorry for ourselves.”
June Carter joined the Cash show in 1962 on a bill in Des Moines with Patsy
Cline and George Jones. The married Cash let it be known that the married
Carter was off-limits to the boys in the band. Family life remained a challenge
for Cash. “When I was six years old, it was like my daddy always came home,”
said Rosanne Cash. “But when I was eight, somebody else came home. He
was distracted and depressed and antsy.” One night in Carson City, Nevada,
police put a naked, unconscious Cash in a jail cell with a drunken lumberjack.
When his cellmate woke up spoiling for a fight, Cash sang a spiritual and then
“Folsom Prison Blues.” “Me and you are a couple of drunks,” said the pacified
prisoner, “but you sure sound like Johnny Cash.”
“I’d watched Hank Williams die,” said June Carter. “I was part of his life—
I’m Hank Jr.’s godmother—and I grieved. So I thought, ‘I can’t fall in love with
this man, but it’s just like a ring of fire.’” Their tortured relationship inspired
the lyrics she wrote for a song that was first recorded by her sister Anita and
then became Cash’s biggest hit of the early 1960s, “Ring of Fire.” Jack Clem-
ent, who’d recorded Cash at Sun, was enlisted to make sure the recording had
just the right rhythm; Cash requested the mariachi horns that he’d heard in
a dream.
Cash gave up the pretense of marriage in 1964 and rented a house in Nash-
ville that he shared with Waylon Jennings. “We were the original ‘Odd Cou-
ple,’” said Jennings, who’d recorded briefly for A&M Records before being
signed to RCA by Chet Atkins. “I was supposed to clean up, and John was the
one doing the cooking. . . . He’d be stirring biscuits and gravy dressed in one
of his thin black gabardine shirts, and the flour rising in clouds of white dust
all over him.” They hid their respective drug stashes in the air conditioner
(Jennings) and behind the television set (Cash).
June and Maybelle Carter lived nearby and would periodically clean the
men’s house and cook a real meal. Cash bonded with Maybelle and soon
added the entire Carter clan to his road show. Musicians active in the folk
revival had already rediscovered Maybelle, who’d been moonlighting as a
practical nurse to make ends meet. In 1963 she traveled to Los Angeles to play
the Ash Grove with the New Lost City Ramblers (she also joined them at the
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Newport Folk Festival). Meeting her at the airport, the Ramblers cringed
as her historic Gibson guitar dropped down the baggage chute in a plastic
case.
“I will never forget standing up there onstage at the Ash Grove,” said the
band’s John Cohen, “and watching Maybelle. The way she moved her hands
in simple little elegant, graceful gestures, making this incredible sound come
out of that Gibson. It reminded me of the way my grandmother used to cro-
chet—she used the same skilled, graceful movements, repeated over and
over.”

   
On New Year’s Day in 1958, Johnny Cash’s itinerary included a concert at
California’s San Quentin State Prison. Merle Haggard was in the audience
not because he was arrested after a drunken attempt to rob a tavern that he
thought was closed but because he then broke out of the local jail. It was
his final act of juvenile delinquency, and the Cash concert helped scare him
straight. “The next day down in the yard,” said Haggard, who was known to
play guitar, “the players . . . came to me, and they all wanted to learn that Lu-
ther Perkins lick [from ‘Folsom Prison Blues’]. It was like seeing Muhammad
Ali or something.” On his release Haggard got to work making music; during
a brief 1962 run playing bass for Buck Owens, Haggard suggested that he call
his band the “Buckaroos.”
Alvis Edgar Owens was one of four children born to Texas sharecroppers,
and as a young boy he took the name of the farm’s donkey, Buck. The family
struggled during the Depression, and in 1937, when Buck was eight, headed
west. They ended up outside Phoenix and worked at various dairy and fruit
farms. “I remember always saying to myself that when I get big,” said Buck,
whose childhood suppers could be cornbread and milk, “I’m not going to go
to bed hungry.”
By the age of sixteen Buck had dropped out of school and was perform-
ing in local honky-tonks, preferring to earn $5 for playing a smoky club than
for picking produce in the hot sun. While he was performing with Mac’s
Skillet Lickers, he met and married singer Bonnie Campbell. In 1951, with a
young son, the couple relocated to Bakersfield, California, where Buck played
with Bill Woods and the Orange Blossom Playboys. (The marriage didn’t last;
Bonnie later wed Bakersfield’s other major star, Merle Haggard.) Owens also
worked sessions in Los Angeles, playing on records by Tommy Collins, Faron
 Blowin’ in the Wind 61

Young, and Wanda Jackson. After a handful of small-label releases, he was

signed by Capitol Records.
Buck’s first success came in 1959 with a shuffle reminiscent of Ray Price
called “Second Fiddle”; his next single, “Under Your Spell Again,” reached
the top ten; the song also became a hit for Price. At about this time Owens met
Don Rich, a fiddle player who became integral to his music. “I’m driving and
singing,” said Owens, “and Don starts singing harmony with me. I say, ‘Hey!’
He sounded like me. . . . If you listen to all the cuts you’ll think he’s singing
melody and I’m singing harmony. You can’t tell.” Owens and Rich also used
twangy Telecaster guitars to knit an instrumental weave of similar richness.
“Don and I made a sort of synergy where one and one don’t make two,” said
Owens. “The two of us together made three.”
The hits kept on coming, including songs by Harlan Howard (“Above and
Beyond”) and others that Howard wrote with Owens (“Foolin’ Around,” “Un-
der the Influence of Love”). Owens aimed to create what he called “freight
train” songs: tunes with simple, memorable lyrics set atop beefy rhythms that
owed more than a little to rock ’n’ roll. Beginning with “Act Naturally” (1963)
Owens had more than twenty #1 country hits, and he was the first to admit
that he wasn’t reinventing the wheel.
“My songs are quite alike, like Chuck Berry,” said Owens, who admired
Berry’s songs and who’d recorded his own version of “Maybelline.” “Once in
awhile I’d throw in a left-field song. But basically, if you listen to ‘I Don’t Care’
and ‘My Heart Skips a Beat’ and ‘Tiger by the Tail,’ I just changed the song
and chord progression a little bit, and it sold to them over and over again.” It
was music built for the honky-tonk. “Buck was wild and rowdy,” said Loretta
Lynn. “The music was loud—too loud for me. He said, ‘You’ll never see nobody
leave if the music’s loud. If it’s soft, people’ll walk out.’ So after that I played
loud the way he did. When I got to the fourth or fifth song, if a fight didn’t
break out in Texas, I’d think I was doing something wrong.”
Buck Owens bought his own honky-tonk (the Crystal Palace), invested
in real estate and radio stations, and never went to bed hungry. Neither did
Harlan Howard, who moved from Bakersfield to Nashville after hitting it big
with “Heartaches by the Number.” “I got two hits out of the Army,” said How-
ard. “‘Heartaches by the Number,’ because everything in the Army is by the
number, and I turned ‘above and beyond the call of duty’ into ‘Above and
Beyond the Call of Love.’ You take things that are part of your life and turn
’em into love songs.”
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Howard liked talking shop at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, located across the
alley from the Grand Ole Opry, where he’d drink with such songwriters as
Roger Miller, Hank Cochran, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson. For years
Jennings and Nelson labored as radio disc jockeys to support their work as
musicians. While working at KVAN in Oregon, Nelson asked the advice of
Mae Axton, the co-writer of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.” “If I could
write half as well as you,” said Axton, “I would be the happiest woman in the
world. . . . either come to Nashville or go home to Texas if you want to make
it as a songwriter.”
Nelson at first chose Dallas but headed to Nashville in 1960 after a week
in which he wrote “Night Life,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and “Crazy.”
Nelson moved his family into Dunn’s Trailer Court, where, according to for-
mer resident Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” there were “trailers for sale or
rent, rooms to let, fifty cents.” Before long, Faron Young took Nelson’s “Four
Walls” to the top of the country charts; Young declined the songwriter’s offer
to sell him the tune for $500 and kindly lent him the money. At about that
time, Hank Cochran (brother of Eddie “Summertime Blues” Cochran) helped
Nelson sign a writer’s contract with Pamper Music, a publishing firm that was
half-owned by Ray Price, who would make “Night Life” a hit.
Price’s version of “Night Life” reflected the “Nashville sound” that had
come to dominate country music, a style that typically replaced the fiddles
and steel guitars of 1950s country with lush strings and background singers.
Conceived as an “adult” alternative to rock ’n’ roll, the “countrypolitan” style
also gave Buck Owens a counterintuitive avenue to country success. Though
Chet Atkins had little success producing Nelson for RCA, it boded well for
the songwriter’s future that “Night Life” could be both a mellow country hit
for Price and a long-time staple in the repertoire of blues singer and guitarist
B. B. King.
Patsy Cline came to be the ultimate embodiment of the Nashville sound.
Cline achieved regional success on Town and Country Time, a Washington,
DC, radio show hosted by country star Jimmy Dean and His Texas Wildcats.
But her mid-1950s recordings went nowhere until she cut “Walkin’ After Mid-
night,” a bluesy shuffle that featured Don Helms on steel guitar. After she
performed the song on a 1956 episode of the television show Arthur Godfrey’s
Talent Scouts—the producers insisted that she swap her usual cowgirl outfit
for an evening gown—Cline won the competition, and the song sailed to
#2 on the country chart and just missed reaching the pop Top 10. But Cline
 Blowin’ in the Wind 63

failed to find a follow-up hit until producer Owen Bradley signed her to Decca
Records in 1960.
Cline’s first recording for the label was “I Fall to Pieces,” a song written by
Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard that topped the country charts and was
also a pop hit. Like “Walkin’ After Midnight,” the song was a savvy blend of
pop and country that found Cline employing a vocal technique known as
“back phrasing.” “From the songwriter’s viewpoint,” said Howard, “Patsy Cline
was the greatest reader of lyrics that I’ve ever worked with. She understood
that certain lines in a song are just there to be sung. They’re not emotional
lines. Patsy had the knack to hold back on those lines, then when she got to
the really juicy part of the song, she’d give it everything she had.”
Willie Nelson recorded “Crazy” on his 1962 debut album. One night at
Tootsie’s, Nelson played his recording on the jukebox and piqued the interest
of Hank Cochran and Cline’s husband, Charlie Dick. Though the hour was
late, they decided to wake up Patsy. A nervous Nelson stayed in the car and left
the pitch to Cochran. “[Patsy] went out there and drug his ass in [the house]
and had him sing it to her,” said Cochran. But Cline thought that “Crazy” was
too much of a pop song; Owen Bradley had to twist her arm to give it a shot.
But first she had to ignore Nelson’s version. “No one should try to follow my
phrasing,” said Nelson. “I’ll lay back on the beat or jump ahead . . . I believe
in taking my time. When it comes to singing a song, I’ve got all the time in
the world.”
Cline had a similarly distinctive approach, and “Crazy,” one of the best-
selling country songs of all time, made her a legend. “She understood the
lyrics on the deepest possible level,” said Nelson. “She sang it with delicacy,
soul, and perfect diction.” Cline transcended genres, and generations, with a
catalog of songs still cherished by Americana artists. “Even though her style
is considered country,” said Lucinda Williams, “her delivery is more like a
classic pop singer.”
Patsy was a singular stylist not unlike Ray Charles, who’d become a star
by fusing gospel with rhythm & blues before releasing his own take on coun-
trypolitan, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962). Other black
artists had found success with country songs, including Solomon Burke, who
had a 1961 hit with a Faron Young song from 1952, “Just out of Reach.” But the
Charles record was something more: a complete set of country songs featur-
ing his own soulful interpretation of the Nashville sound. Charles had heard
plenty of country music growing up in Florida. “I can’t recall a single Saturday
RAY CHARLES
 Blowin’ in the Wind 65

night in those years when I didn’t listen to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio,”
said Charles, who was particularly fond of Hank Williams and Hank Snow. “I
could do country music with as much feeling as any other Southerner,” said
Charles. “And why not? I had been hearing it since I was a baby.”
Although it feared that a country album would alienate his black audi-
ence, ABC Records, which had signed Charles away from Atlantic, had little
leverage because his contract guaranteed artistic control. Charles considered
a list of 250 country songs before choosing four by Hank Williams (“Half as
Much,” “You Win Again,” “Worried Mind,” “Hey, Good Lookin’”), an Everly
Brothers hit (“Bye Bye Love”), a Cindy Walker tune (“You Don’t Know Me”)
that had been sung by Eddy Arnold, and “I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You,” which was
a 1958 hit for its writer, Don Gibson. Charles’s version of that song spent five
weeks atop the pop charts; it’s perhaps telling that while it was also a #1 R&B
hit, the song failed to scale the country chart.
Charles saw a natural affinity between country music and the blues. “The
words to country songs are very earthy like the blues,” he said. “They’re not as
dressed up, and the people are very honest and say, ‘Look, I miss you, darlin’,
so I went out and I got drunk in this bar.’ That’s the way you say it. Whereas in
Tin Pan Alley, it will go, ‘Oh, I missed you darling, so I went to this restaurant
and I sat down and I had dinner for one.’ That’s cleaned up now, you see? But
country songs and the blues is like it is.”
Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music confirmed Charles’s status as
an American roots-music star, and as such, a seminal figure in Americana.
Cline’s greatest hits assured her similar standing, but her temporal stardom
ended on March 5, 1963, when she died, just like Buddy Holly, in a small
plane felled by stormy weather. Friends in Nashville knew the flight was long
overdue, and early the next morning Roger Miller found himself at the crash
site. “I came up over this little rise,” he said, “and my God, there they were. It
was ghastly. The plane had crashed nose down.”

   
When Bob Dylan arrived in New York in 1961, he knew where to go. “Green-
wich Village was a universe unto itself,” said musician and composer David
Amram. “It felt like an oasis where people from all over the world came to
commune . . . a place where they could fit in because the village was actually
a joyous community of misfits.” Dylan fit right in and feasted on the musical
smorgasbord. “Washington Square was a place where people you knew or
66 Chapter 4

met congregated every Sunday and it was like a world of music,” said Dylan.
“There could be 15 jug bands, 5 bluegrass bands, an old crummy string band,
and folk singers of all kinds and colors, singing John Henry work songs. . . .
That is what New York was like when I got there.”
Musical Sundays in Washington Square had flourished during the 1950s.
In the middle of the decade, Dave Van Ronk heard Tom Paley playing an
intricate finger-picking style of guitar that inspired Van Ronk to switch from
playing in a jazz combo to becoming a solo performer specializing in blues and
ragtime (Paley would soon form the New Lost City Ramblers). Dylan landed at
the Café Wha, where he blew harmonica behind Fred “Everybody’s Talking”
Neil, cadged a hamburger in the kitchen, and cruised the other clubs where
baskets were passed to collect tips for the performers. One afternoon, Dylan
stopped in an empty club to watch jazz pianist Thelonious Monk “playing
stuff that sounded like Ivory Joe Hunter.” Dylan told the pianist, “I play folk
music up the street. ‘We all play folk music,’” said Monk.
During his first week in the city Dylan caught a bus at the Port Author-
ity to visit Woody Guthrie at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital in Mor-
ristown, New Jersey. He brought along a pack of Woody’s favorite Raleigh
cigarettes. Guthrie, suffering from Huntington’s Disease, was losing control
of his muscles and could no longer play guitar. Dylan sang him his old songs
such as “Tom Joad” and “Pretty Boy Floyd” while mentally ill patients howled
in the hallway. “His influence on me was never in inflection or in voice,” said
Dylan. “What drew me to him was that hearing his voice I could tell he was
very lonesome, very alone, and very lost out in his time.” After the visit, Dylan
wrote his first significant original composition, “Song to Woody.”
One day at the Folklore Center, a music store run by Izzy Young that was at
the center of the Village folk scene, Dylan met Van Ronk, who was trying out
one of the shop’s Gibson guitars. Dylan asked Van Ronk how one could get a
job at the Gaslight café; the singer inquired about the stranger’s experience
mopping floors. Dylan, persisting, used the Gibson to sing “Nobody Knows
You When You’re Down and Out.” The vicar of the Village mellowed and
invited Dylan to come by the Gaslight and sing a few songs during his set.
Musicians far from the mainstream enriched (and were educated by) the
Village folk scene. “Everything I needed was in New York,” said Judy Collins,
who moved to the city from Colorado. “I lived in the center of the folk music
revival.” Native New Yorker John Sebastian enjoyed an early apprenticeship
with Lightnin’ Hopkins after the Houston bluesman performed on the same
 Blowin’ in the Wind 67

television show as Sebastian’s father John, a harmonica virtuoso who played

classical music. “Lightnin’ would stay with me in New York when he came to
play at the Village Gate or some other places in Midtown,” said Sebastian of
their relationship. “It became all about getting Lightnin’ to the gig, carrying
his guitar, and getting him his pint.”
John Herald sang and played guitar with the Greenbriar Boys, a bluegrass
group that formed at the University of Wisconsin and that, in 1960, had the
chutzpah to perform at the Old Time Fiddlers’ Convention in Union Grove,
North Carolina. It was during this trip that Herald and another band member,
Ralph Rinzler, met a blind guitar player, Doc Watson, who had spent much of
the previous decade playing electric guitar in a rockabilly band. “Ralph and
I went down to Doc’s house [in western North Carolina] with a tape recorder
and got him to play [acoustic] guitar,” said Herald, “and he played breaks
like we never heard in our lives. And I’d ask, ‘Can you play it hotter?’ and it
would just get hotter and hotter.” The musicians cherished these visits. “I
was learning from Doc,” said Herald, “and since I didn’t want to practice in
their little living room, I’d go sit under the steps to their house.” Hearing the
distant guitar, Watson would insist that the shy New Yorker come inside.
“Ralph told me once,” said Watson, “‘Doc, if you play the ethnic music,
the old-time music we call it, you can get your foot in the door. Then you can
expand the repertoire to play some of these other things.’” To that end, Watson
reacquainted himself with a lifetime of songs. “My first acquaintance with
finger style was the old Carter Family style where Maybelle did the thumb
lead and the fingers for the rhythm part,” said Watson. “Later on, I began to
fool around doing a vamp with my thumb and doing the lead with my fingers.
Merle Travis inspired me to do that.”
A few years later, Rinzler briefly managed Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass
Boys and helped expose the group to fans of the folk revival. Rinzler shared an
apartment in Nashville with another northerner, Bill Keith, who’d taken up
the banjo while studying nineteenth-century French literature and mathemat-
ics at Amherst College. After learning the basics from Seeger’s How to Play
the 5-String Banjo, Keith became frustrated when trying to re-create complex
fiddle melodies on the instrument. To solve this problem, he found chord
fingerings up the neck that accommodated arpeggios and fluid, fast-picked
melodies. Keith’s innovations proved to be a vital link between Earl Scruggs’s
work with Bill Monroe in the late 1940s and the music of such modern banjo
players as Tony Trischka and Bela Fleck.
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In early 1963 Keith was in Nashville to help Earl Scruggs write a banjo
instructional, and on the weekends he joined backstage jam sessions at the
Grand Ole Opry. Bill Monroe was quick to hire Keith but had one problem.
“There’s only one Bill in the Blue Grass Boys,” said Monroe, who subsequently
called Keith by his middle name, Brad. “Before he came along, no banjo player
could play those old fiddle numbers right,” said Monroe. “You have to play
like Brad could play or you would be faking your way through a number.”
Keith lasted only nine months with the group; bad pay and arduous travel
prompted him to give notice before an engagement at the Ash Grove in Los
Angeles. Keith tutored a talented teenager, Ry Cooder, to take his place for
the second week and soon joined a group more attuned to his bohemian
sensibilities, the Jim Kweskin Jug Band.
The Greenbriar Boys recorded with Joan Baez and had their own contract
with Vanguard. In September 1961 the group played New York’s premiere
folk club, Gerde’s Folk City. Opening the show was the new kid in town, Bob
Dylan. Robert Shelton reviewed the show for the New York Times, and the
headliners were likely chagrined by the headline: “Bob Dylan: A Distinctive
Folk-Song Stylist.” “If not for every taste,” wrote Shelton, “his music-making
has the mark of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his
youth. Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it mat-
ters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to
be straight up.”
Coincidentally, Dylan had been hired to play harmonica for a recording
session with Carolyn Hester, signed by Columbia Records in search of its
own Joan Baez. Dylan arrived at the studio with a copy of the Times under
his arm, but he needn’t have bothered; John Hammond, Hester’s producer,
had already read the review, and he asked for a few minutes with the young
musician. Dylan was well aware of Hammond’s history with such artists as
Count Basie, Charlie Christian, and Billie Holiday. “It seemed like eons ago
since I’d been in . . . southeast Minneapolis listening to the Spirituals to Swing
album and the Woody Guthrie songs,” said Dylan. “Now, incredulously, I was
sitting in the office of the man responsible for the Spirituals to Swing album
and he was signing me to Columbia Records.”
Dylan had been in New York for less than a year, soaking up repertoire and
starting to write his own songs. Only two originals appeared on his 1962 debut,
Bob Dylan: “Song to Woody” and the playful “Talkin’ New York.” The album
included blues by Jesse Fuller (“You’re No Good”) and Blind Lemon Jefferson
BOB DYLAN
70 Chapter 4

(“See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”) and a Blind Boy Fuller tune that Dylan
had learned from Eric Von Schmidt, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down.” The
album was cut in three afternoon sessions for less than $2,000. “Half of the
cuts on it were renditions of songs that Van Ronk did,” said Dylan. “It’s not
like I planned that, it just happened. Unconsciously I trusted his stuff more
than I did mine.”
His artistic growth was explosive. His girlfriend Suze Rotolo encouraged
an interest in politics and social justice, which prompted him to write topical
material. As a result, his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, on which
he’s pictured strolling on Jones Street with Rotolo, included such topical tunes
as “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (written during the Cuban Missile Crisis)
and “Masters of War.” The collection also featured one of his sweetest ballads
(“Girl from the North Country”) and a song that would become an anthem of
social justice, “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Dylan saw himself as a part of the folk
tradition and was more confident writing lyrics than creating melodies. “I
tend to base all my songs on old songs,” he said, “like the old folk songs, the
old blues songs; they are always good. They always make sense.”
When he first signed Dylan, John Hammond sent him home with a copy
of what would prove to be a very influential collection, Robert Johnson’s King
of the Delta Blues Singers. Hammond had tried to recruit Johnson to play 1938’s
“Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall only to discover that the blues-
man was dead, said to have been poisoned by a jealous husband. Dylan took
the LP over to Van Ronk’s apartment, where his friend dismissively identified
the recorded antecedents to some of Johnson’s “original” songs. “I did see
what he meant,” said Dylan, “but Woody had taken a lot of old Carter Family
songs and put his own spin on them, too.” Back at home, Dylan listened to
the album repeatedly and wrote down the lyrics to see how they scanned.
Dylan was also touched by a production of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny
Opera, and in particular, the song “Pirate Jenny.” “I took the song apart and
unzipped it,” said Dylan. “It was the form, the free verse association, the
structure and disregard for the known certainty of melodic patterns to make
it seriously matter, give it its cutting edge.” That song, with music by Kurt
Weill, gave him the insight and courage to write such unorthodox tunes as
“Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).” Similarly,
he said, “If I hadn’t heard the Robert Johnson record when I did, there prob-
ably would have been hundreds of lines of mine that would have been shut
down.” Suddenly, it was all systems go. Van Ronk remembers the first time
 Blowin’ in the Wind 71

Dylan sang “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” at the Gaslight. “I had to get out
of the club,” said Van Ronk. “I couldn’t speak—to Bobby or anybody else for
that matter. I remember being confused and fascinated that night because,
on one hand, the song itself excited me, and on the other, I was acutely aware
that it represented the beginning of an artistic revolution.”
Dylan’s career caught fire alongside his songwriting. After the release of
his first album he agreed to be managed by Albert Grossman, who’d relocated
to New York, where he was the mastermind behind a popular folk group.
Grossman had auditioned both Van Ronk and Carolyn Hester before casting
Peter Yarrow, Noel Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers as Peter, Paul, and Mary.
The idea was to create a hipper Kingston Trio and to jazz up folk music with
humor, social consciousness, and a sexy woman. Peter, Paul, and Mary’s 1962
debut album sold more than two million copies and earned Pete Seeger a nice
payday by including his “Where Have All the Flowers Gone.” Dylan, fiercely
loyal to Hammond, resisted Grossman’s interest in voiding his contract with
Columbia but was quick to take $1,000 of his manager’s cash to buy himself
out of his publishing deal with Leeds Music, for which he’d received a $100
advance. Grossman then arranged for Dylan’s songs to be published by Wit-
mark and Sons, with whom the manager had his own deal to receive half
of the publishing income of any artist he brought to the company. All was
in order by the time Peter, Paul, and Mary’s second album made a hit out of
“Blowin’ in the Wind.”
“They were kindred spirits,” said Rotolo of Dylan and his manager. “Albert
never denied who he was, but he had that way of observing and not being
forthcoming. Bob never gave a straight answer. . . . He was creating his own leg-
end and his own fiction of himself.” The two changed each other’s lives. “You
could look at Albert’s passport pictures,” said Vinny Fusco, who worked for
Grossman, “[and] there was B.D. and A.D.—Before Dylan and After Dylan.”
Hammond sent copies of Dylan’s albums to another Columbia artist,
Johnny Cash, who was particularly impressed by “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Cash
sent a letter of appreciation to Dylan, who replied that he’d been a fan since
hearing “I Walk the Line.” At about that time, folk music’s bright young knight
met the queen. “When I heard him sing ‘With God on Our Side,’ I took him
seriously,” said Joan Baez. “I never thought anything so powerful could come
out of that little toad . . . I realized he was more mature than I had thought. He
even looked a little better.” Baez would soon invite Dylan to join her onstage;
they’d warm up backstage singing songs by the Everly Brothers. “When he
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was on tour with me and we were getting close,” said Baez of their romance,
“it was very sweet between us. I was very nurturing, and he was incredibly
vulnerable and endearing.”
On April 28, 1963, Baez and Dylan participated in the March on Wash-
ington. Martin Luther King delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech;
Dylan sang “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Dylan
was now a public figure. “He came on my radio show,” said singer Oscar
Brand, “and he said nothing but lies about his life. . . . I don’t think many of us
really believed he was that Dust Bowl character he pretended to be. Nobody
really cared very much one way or another, because everybody was faking
something and afraid in our own way. But he didn’t know that.” To Dylan’s
chagrin, a profile in Newsweek let the biographical cat out of the bag.
Bob and Joan had become the figureheads of folk. Pete Seeger and the folk
music establishment considered them saviors who could attract and influence
a whole new generation of fellow travelers. “To the old left,” said Brand, “Dylan
was the second coming.” Said Theodore Bikel: “I think of that highlight of the
1963 Newport Folk Festival, that stunning, stirring ringing out of ‘We Shall
Overcome’—as the apogee of the folk movement. There was no point more
suffused with hope for the future.” But the times, as Dylan would sing on his
third album, were a-changing.
 TURN! TURN! TURN!

“[America] is where the music came from that influenced me as a child,” said
John Lennon. “And we had all the Doris Day movies and the Heinz beans. . . .
I was brought up on Americana.” To the boys who would become the Beatles,
America meant music and cowboys. Ringo Starr loved how Gene Autry would
ride his horse Champion while singing “South of the Border.” George Har-
rison discovered Jimmie Rodgers’s “Waiting for a Train” in a family record
collection that also included 78s by Hank Williams.
Then came Elvis Presley. “We’d never heard American voices singing like
that,” said Lennon. “They’d always sung like Sinatra or enunciated very well,
and suddenly there was this hillbilly, hiccupping on the tape echo, and the
bluesy background. . . . My whole life changed.” Paul McCartney liked Elvis,
but he flipped for Richard Penniman. “Little Richard was this voice from
heaven or hell, or both,” said McCartney. “This screaming voice seemed to
come from the top of his head. I tried to do it one day and found I could. You
had to lose every inhibition to do it.”
But it was Buddy Holly (along with Gerry Goffin and Carole King) who
inspired Lennon and McCartney to start writing their own songs. “Practically
every Buddy Holly song was three chords,” said Lennon, “so why not write
74 Chapter 5

your own?” Harrison saw Holly as a musical role model. “First of all,” said
Harrison, “he sang, wrote his own tunes and was a guitar player, and he was
very good. Buddy Holly was the first time I heard A to F-sharp minor. Fan-
tastic—he was opening up new worlds there.” Many years later, McCartney
purchased the publishing rights to Holly’s songs.
But in the beginning, John, Paul, and George were smitten by “skiffle,” a
synthesis of folk and blues that developed in the U.K. at virtually the same
time Elvis was helping create rock ’n’ roll. Skiffle emerged from Lonnie Do-
negan’s vocal performance during the otherwise instrumental program of
the Chris Barber Jazz Band. Donegan’s “Rock Island Line,” a Lead Belly tune
recorded with only guitar, string bass, and washboard percussion, became an
international hit in 1956 and spawned an English skiffle fad that put guitars in
the hands of such future rock stars as Jimmy Page, Keith Richards, and Eric
Clapton, as well as John, Paul, and George. “I liked Elvis at the time, and Buddy
Holly,” said Richards, “and [my classmates] didn’t understand how I could
possibly be an art student and be into blues and jazz. . . . For me, it reflected
an incredible explosion of music, of music as style, of love of Americana.”
Lennon formed the Quarrymen to play skiffle in 1957; McCartney joined
within months, and they were soon joined by Harrison, who passed his au-
dition by playing the guitar instrumental “Raunchy” on the top deck of a
municipal bus. By 1960 the group had a local following in Liverpool, but
the musicians truly gelled during five trips to Hamburg, Germany, to play
extended residencies at clubs in the city’s red light district. The group was
now called the Beatles, a name that evoked Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets.
On its final trip to Germany, in 1962, the quartet included Starr, a drummer
poached from another Liverpool band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes.
The Beatles’ lengthy stays in Hamburg amounted to rock ’n’ roll boot camp,
with the group playing every night for up to eight hours. Malcolm Gladwell
cited this experience in his book Outliers, in which he maintained that it takes
ten thousand hours of “deliberate practice” to become world-class in any field.
“Paul would be doing ‘What’d I Say’ for an hour-and-a-half [and we’d be] lying
on the floor and banging our guitars and kicking things, always drunk,” said
Lennon of a typical performance at the Kaiserkeller. “And all these gangsters
would come in, like the local Mafia, and send a crate of champagne on stage
. . . and we had to drink it or they’d kill us. They’d say, ‘Drink it and then do
“What’d I Say.”’”
THE BEATLES
76 Chapter 5

Deliberate or not, the long hours sharpened the band’s instincts and abili-
ties. Over the course of an evening, the Beatles would perform songs by Elvis
Presley, Carl Perkins, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Eddie Co-
chran, the Coasters, and Jerry Lee Lewis. Such performances didn’t merely
hone the band’s instrumental and vocal skills, but like Bob Dylan absorbing
a deep catalog of folk and blues songs, they provided a musical foundation
that would inform the future songs of Lennon and McCartney.
While in Hamburg the Beatles were tempted by sex, amphetamines, and
American guitars. Lennon purchased a blonde Rickenbacker 325; on return-
ing to England, Harrison traded his Futurama guitar for a Gretsch Duo Jet
similar to one played by Nashville’s Chet Atkins, whose playing had taught
him the value of using a variety of chord voicings. Gigs at Liverpool’s Cavern
Club made the Beatles local stars. “If the Beatles ever wanted ‘a sound,’” said
McCartney, “it was R&B—that was what we used to listen to, what we used to
like, what we wanted to be like. Black. That was basically it. Arthur Alexan-
der. It came out white because it always does—we’re white and we were just
young Liverpool musicians.” The band’s debut album included “Anna (Go to
Him),” a 1962 hit for Alexander, a southern black man who grew up listening
to country music.
The Beatles played a package tour of the United Kingdom headlined by
Little Richard, who’d returned to playing the rock ’n’ roll songs that he’d
abandoned in a religious pique. “Right from the start,” said Billy Preston, the
sixteen-year-old keyboardist in Richard’s band, “I fell in love with the Beatles.
. . . They didn’t get any meals from the promoter, but Richard, being the big
American headliner, got steaks and chops and a fabulous spread nightly, so I
made sure they [the Beatles] were well fed and watered.” In 1969 George Har-
rison went to a Ray Charles concert and discovered that his old friend was
in the band. Preston subsequently played on the Beatles’ “Get Back,” a tune
about the days before their music and celebrity changed both them and the
world. But six years earlier, the Beatles were little more than a rumor in the
land that had given them a repertoire.

   
By the time the Beatles played on The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964,
Bob Dylan was the preeminent folk singer of his generation. Dylan’s record
sales were dwarfed by those of Peter, Paul, and Mary, but he was the face of folk
with a growing repertoire of original songs. Dylan’s first album was dominated
 Turn! Turn! Turn! 77

by folk and blues standards, but The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Times
They Are A-Changin’ included original songs that were both political (“A Hard
Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game”) and personal (“One Too
Many Mornings,” “Boots of Spanish Leather”). Dylan published some of his
topical songs in Broadside, a mimeographed magazine that featured song lyrics
and passionate debates about the state of folk music. Political activists loved
these songs, but Dylan hated being called a protest singer. “All my songs are
protest songs,” he said. “Every single one of them. That’s all I do is protest.”
In February 1964 Dylan took a road trip across the country that included
a couple of concerts and concluded with an appearance with Joan Baez at
a folk festival in Monterey, California. They stopped in North Carolina to
pay an unannounced visit to poet Carl Sandburg and went to Mardi Gras in
New Orleans, which inspired Dylan to start writing “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
During the long drive, songs by the Beatles dominated the radio hit parade.
“He [Dylan] practically jumped out of the car,” said his road manager, Victor
Maymudes, about the first time they heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
“They were doing things nobody was doing,” said Dylan. “Their chords
were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid. Ev-
erybody else thought they were for the teenyboppers, that they were gonna
pass right away. But it was obvious to me that they had staying power. I knew
they were pointing to the direction where music had to go. I was not about to
put up with other musicians, but in my head the Beatles were it.”
Dylan didn’t want to be in a band, but he did want to rock. “I played all the
folk songs with a rock ’n’ roll attitude,” said Dylan. Musician Peter Stampfel
heard Dylan sing the folk standard “Sally Gal” at Gerde’s Folk City. “His sing-
ing style and phrasing were stone rhythm and blues!” said Stampfel. “He
fitted the two styles together perfectly, clear as a bell, and I realized for the
first time that my two true loves, traditional music and rock music, were in
fact one.” Still, when he went into the studio in June to record what would
become Another Side of Bob Dylan in a single ten-hour session, he arrived not
with a band but with his guitar, his harmonicas, and a couple bottles of wine.
But the songs were different. “There aren’t any finger-pointing songs in
here,” Dylan told Nat Hentoff, who attended the session while preparing a
profile for the New Yorker. “Me, I don’t want to write for people any more—you
know, be a spokesman. From now on, I want to write from inside me, and
to do that I’m going to have to get back to writing like I used to when I was
ten—having everything come out naturally.” Some in the folk community
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were disappointed that songs like “All I Really Want to Do” and “My Back
Pages” ditched social commentary for more personal concerns.
“The political folkies were very black and white,” said Izzy Young, who’d
known Dylan since his arrival in New York. “They had all decided he was
on their side—oh boy! He’s one of us! Then he sings a couple of songs that
aren’t about some dying coal miner, and now—oh no! He’s not one of us!”
The editor of Sing Out!, Irwin Silber, sounded the alarm: “You seem to be in
a different kind of bag now, Bob—and I’m worried about it. I saw at Newport
[in the summer of 1964] you had somehow lost contact with people. . . . Your
new songs seem to be inner-directed now, inner-probing, self-conscious. . . .
You’re a different Bob Dylan than the one we knew. The old one never wasted
our precious time.”
Those puzzled by Dylan’s evolution either hadn’t been paying attention
or were unaware of the myriad influences that had shaped him. At Newport
that summer, Dylan sat on the floor and swapped songs with another festival
headliner, Johnny Cash. He made a tape recording of two songs for Cash: the
just-recorded “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and “Mama, You Been on My Mind.” Cash
gave Dylan a Martin guitar and recorded a hit version of “It Ain’t Me, Babe”
with June Carter.
Later that summer, the Beatles were touring the United States following
the July release of their first movie, A Hard Day’s Night. In the preceding year
they had become a musical and social phenomenon, lobbing multiple songs
to the top of the charts while leading an invasion of such British rock groups
as the Rolling Stones and the Animals, who had a huge hit by adding a rock
feel to “House of the Rising Sun,” a song that Dylan had taken from Dave
Van Ronk’s repertoire for his debut album. The Beatles were well aware of
Dylan. Lennon said that he started “A Hard Day’s Night” with Dylan in mind
before it evolved into a Beatles song, and his influence was clearly evident
in the more intimate language of Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood” and “You’ve
Got to Hide Your Love Away.” The Beatles absorbed Dylan’s music the way
Harrison echoed the rockabilly guitar of Carl Perkins (“I Don’t Want to Spoil
the Party”), and Lennon and McCartney aimed for the compositional rigor
of Buddy Holly (“Every Little Thing”).
Dylan was a star in the Village, but he’d never seen anything like the
crowds gathered behind police barricades surrounding the Delmonico Ho-
tel in midtown Manhattan. When he gained entrance and met the Beatles,
worlds collided, with the Fab Four wearing collarless mod suits and Bob in
 Turn! Turn! Turn! 79

blue jeans and motorcycle boots. Dylan asked if they wanted to get stoned and
was shocked to discover that they’d never smoked marijuana (pills, they knew).
Dylan figured the Beatles had to be pot smokers because he understood the
background vocals on “I Want to Hold Your Hand” as “I get high, I get high”
instead of “I can’t hide.” Neither Dylan nor the Beatles went to college, but
on this occasion the era’s five most influential musicians were like university
students careful to hide the smell of turning on.
Back in London, the Beatles threw a party for Carl Perkins after the last
date of a U.K. concert tour during which he opened for Chuck Berry. “We
wound up—John, Paul, George and Ringo—sitting on the couch and me on
a floor with a guitar,” said Perkins. The Beatles invited Perkins to a recording
session at Abbey Road. “It was a magic time,” said Perkins. “I was in the stu-
dio when they cut [my] ‘Honey Don’t,’ ‘Matchbox,’ and ‘Everybody’s Trying
to Be My Baby.’ And then they did a version of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ that was
never recorded.” Nearly ten years after the country boy had found fame at
Sun Records, Perkins enjoyed a publishing windfall that allowed him to buy
his parents a farm.

   
“I first saw the Beatles on television in New York,” said Jim McGuinn, who at
the time was working with Bobby Darin. “It was the clip with all the scream-
ing girls. I loved the music! I got it right away and started playing folk songs
with a Beatle-beat down in Greenwich Village.” He also started growing his
hair. Relocating to Los Angeles, McGuinn played the Troubadour, where he
met Gene Clark, another Beatles freak who’d toured with the New Christy
Minstrels. They were soon joined by David Crosby, who added a harmony
voice and a business connection to Jim Dickson, who’d been making demo
recordings of Crosby. Dickson agreed to manage the band that called itself
the Jet Set and recruited a new member, Chris Hillman, an L.A. bluegrass
player who switched from mandolin to bass guitar. (The Dillards, a bluegrass
band in the same California scene, won national attention by playing music
as “The Darlings” on The Andy Griffith Show. Douglas Dillard later formed
Dillard & Clark with Gene Clark.)
Dickson put the Jet Set to work at a studio owned by World Pacific Records.
“We learned faster than any other garage band you ever saw,” said Crosby.
“[Dickson] would sit down and make us listen to tapes . . . we’d come back and
try more, and eventually we got pretty good at it.” McGuinn recalled: “A lot of
80 Chapter 5

bands have to work on the road for years to get the kind of sound we recorded
together in about eight or nine months.” For the musicians, this studio time
was akin to the experience that the Beatles found in the clubs of Hamburg; a
crucial difference was that while they learned how to make records, the band
lacked the in-person panache of the Beatles and left a legacy of erratic live
shows.
In the summer of 1964, the Jet Set went to see A Hard Day’s Night. “I can
remember coming out of that movie so jazzed that I was swinging around
stop-sign poles at arm’s length,” said Crosby. “I knew right then what my life
was going to be. I wanted to be that.” After seeing the film, McGuinn bought
the twelve-string Rickenbacker model that George Harrison played. The band
also changed its name to the Byrds, with the unique spelling mirroring that of
the Beatles. Dickson had by then come into possession of an unreleased song
that Dylan had recorded during the Another Side sessions, “Mr. Tambourine
Man.” The band recast the song in 4/4 time and cut all but one verse, but had
doubts about its potential until Bob Dylan stopped by the studio and said,
“Wow, man. You can dance to that!”
Back in New York, Tom Wilson, Dylan’s record producer, had the Animals
in mind when he experimented with adding electric instruments to “House
of the Rising Sun.” “We tried by editing and by overdubbing to put like a Fats
Domino early rock and roll thing on top of what Dylan had done,” said Wil-
son. “That’s where I first consciously started to try to put these two different
elements [folk and rock] together.” Wilson would soon jump-start the career
of Simon and Garfunkel by overdubbing a band onto the original acoustic
take of “The Sounds of Silence.”
In January 1965 the Byrds cut “Mr. Tambourine Man” with Columbia staff
producer Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day. Uneasy with the band’s musi-
cianship, Melcher hired members of the “Wrecking Crew,” an elite group of
studio musicians who recorded with the Beach Boys and producer Phil Spec-
tor. While the Byrds provided vocals—McGuinn and Clark typically sang in
unison with Crosby adding a harmony—McGuinn was the only one to play
an instrument, and it was the ringing, sustained tone of his twelve-string that
evoked the “jingle jangle” referred to in Dylan’s lyrics.
“Mr. Tambourine Man” topped the charts in both the United States and
the United Kingdom; critics dubbed this new sound “folk rock.” The group’s
debut album fleshed out this new style with three more Dylan songs (“All I
Really Want to Do,” “Spanish Harlem Incident,” and “Chimes of Freedom”),
THE BYRDS
82 Chapter 5

three originals by Gene Clark (including the enduring “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot
Better”), and “The Bells of Rhymney,” a Pete Seeger song about an Irish min-
ing disaster that McGuinn had already recorded with Judy Collins.
The Byrds inspired others to pursue folk rock, with the Turtles making
the Top 10 with Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and Sonny and Cher, a couple
of showbiz bohemians, hitting with such vaguely Dylanesque songs as “I
Got You, Babe” and “Laugh at Me.” Soon to come was Barry McGuire’s “Eve
of Destruction,” the Spinal Tap of protest songs. While the Byrds became
the talk of Los Angeles by playing to Hollywood hipsters at Ciro’s, the city
was also home to a very popular folk-pop quartet, the Mamas and the Papas
(“California Dreaming”), and Buffalo Springfield (“For What It’s Worth”), a
rock band that included two bright stars, Neil Young and Stephen Stills.
The Lovin’ Spoonful was the most successful folk-rock band from the East
Coast. John Sebastian had grown up in Greenwich Village and played in the
Even Dozen Jazz Band with Maria Muldaur on vocals, David Grisman (man-
dolin), and Stefan Grossman (guitar) before forming the Lovin’ Spoonful.
The name came from a lyric in Mississippi John Hurt’s “Coffee Blues.” The
rediscovered songster was a favorite in Village coffeehouses. “I remember
working with the Spoonful at the Night Owl Café,” said Sebastian, “and we’d
be playing to maybe six beatniks. Then I’d go to see John at the Gaslight and
the place would be filled with all these beautiful college girls that we couldn’t
get down to our little club.”
That changed when the Spoonful produced a run of hits that included “Do
You Believe in Magic?,” “Daydream,” and “Summer in the City.” The band’s
jug-band roots were reflected by the fact that Sebastian played not only the
guitar and harmonica but the autoharp. Their appreciation of country music
was apparent in “Nashville Cats,” a tuneful tribute to the musicians of Music
City. “Nashville cats,” say the lyrics, “been playin’ since they’re babies. Nash-
ville cats, get work before they’re two.”
Amidst this bounty of bands, Dylan was a singularly influential singer-
songwriter who was still searching for a sound. Lennon and McCartney wrote
their own songs but got an invaluable assist in the recording studio from
producer George Martin. Dylan’s gift was in his compositions and perfor-
mances, and he believed that making good records depended on capturing
the magic of the moment. Still, Dylan saw a model of what he wanted in So
Many Roads, an urban blues album that John Hammond Jr. (the son of the
 Turn! Turn! Turn! 83

man who’d signed him to Columbia) had cut with members of a band that
he’d discovered in Canada, Levon and the Hawks.
When Dylan went into the studio in January 1965, he and producer Wilson
spent the first day recording Dylan by himself; a second session was held with
a small band. Some songs, such as “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” were recorded
both solo and with the band; in that case, the group performance made the
final cut. By contrast, “Mr. Tambourine Man” didn’t work with the group. It
was completed with Dylan accompanied only by the electric guitar of Bruce
Langhorne. “I remember that we didn’t do any rehearsal,” said Langhorne,
“we just did first takes and I remember that, for what it was, it was amazingly
intuitive and successful.”
Bringing It All Back Home underscored the expansive nature of Dylan’s latest
songs, with the second side of the LP including not only “Mr. Tambourine
Man” but such loquacious epics as “Gates of Eden” and “It’s Alright Ma (I’m
Only Bleeding).” But it was two blues-rock songs that signaled something
new. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” consisted of four fast-talking verses that
tumbled out of Dylan’s mouth like silver on a hot skillet of guitars, drums,
and harmonica. “You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind
blows,” he sang, just one of the couplets from the song that would resonate
with the political protesters of the 1960s. It is noteworthy that he didn’t model
the song after something by Woody Guthrie or the Carter Family. “It’s from
Chuck Berry, a bit of ‘Too Much Monkey Business,’” said Dylan, “and some
of the scat songs of the ’40s.” “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was (barely)
Dylan’s first Top 40 single, peaking at # 39.
“Maggie’s Farm” mated a blues-based melody with rat-a-tat lyrics about
the injustice of working like a slave. Rhythm & blues singer Solomon Burke
covered the tune in a manner that suggested the frustrated fury of civil rights
demonstrators. Sam Cooke, touched by Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” was
a bit chagrined that a white man had written such a profound civil rights
anthem. Cooke added the tune to his nightclub repertoire and then wrote a
socially conscious masterpiece of his own, “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

   
In the spring of 1965 Dylan toured the United Kingdom. He was trailed by
documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, whose Don’t Look Back showed a
high-strung Dylan indulged by his entourage and quick to ridicule reporters
84 Chapter 5

and celebrity fans like Donovan. Joan Baez is seen singing Hank Williams with
Dylan in a hotel room but was not welcomed onto his concert stage. The film
captures the end of their romance but ignores a dead-end recording session
in which Dylan tried to record “If You Gotta Go, Go Now” with John Mayall’s
Bluesbreakers and its hot new guitarist, Eric Clapton. After one ramshackle
take, drummer Hughie Flint said, “You haven’t worked much with bands,
have you?”
Back in the United States, Dylan made another stab at electric music, ex-
tracting the lyrics for a new song from a twenty-page prose poem. His new
recruit on electric guitar was Mike Bloomfield, a Chicagoan making his name
with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. “The first thing I heard was ‘Like a
Rolling Stone,” said Bloomfield. “I figured he wanted blues, string bending,
because that’s what I do. He said, ‘Hey, man, I don’t want any of the B. B. King
stuff.’ He had heard records by the Byrds that knocked him out. He wanted
me to play like McGuinn.” New York musician Al Kooper brought his guitar
to Dylan’s recording session but put it away as soon as he heard Bloomfield
play his Telecaster. Kooper settled behind a Hammond organ, and although
he was a neophyte on the instrument, improvised his way onto “Like a Rolling
Stone.” As the tape rolled, the Byrds’ version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” was
at the top of the charts. In July, a week before Newport, Dylan released the
song that Rolling Stone would later call rock’s greatest single.
Arriving in Newport, Dylan looked more like a Beatle than a folk singer.
“There was a clear generation and cultural gap widening as the weekend went
on,” said Joe Boyd, who was working at the festival and had been Tom Rush’s
roommate at Harvard. “The year before, Dylan had been a pied piper in blue
jeans. This year he was in a puffed polka-dotted dueling shirt and there were
rumors that they were smoking dope. The old guard—Seeger, Lomax, [Theo-
dore] Bikel—were very upset. They had gotten to the point of having all their
dreams come true two years before, having this gigantic mass movement of
politically active kids. And suddenly they could see it all slipping away in a
haze of marijuana smoke and self-indulgence. As far as they were concerned,
Grossman was the money changer at the gates of the temple.”
The friction between the old and the new was evident at a Friday after-
noon workshop called “Blues: Origins and Offshoots,” which included perfor-
mances by Mance Lipscomb, Son House, and, closing the show, the Butterfield
Blues Band. The emcee for the program was Alan Lomax, who in the early
1940s had traveled through the Mississippi Delta and recorded House and
 Turn! Turn! Turn! 85

Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress. “Today you’ve heard some of the
greatest blues musicians in the world playing their simple music on simple
instruments,” said Lomax, looking at a stage now filled with microphones,
drums, and amplifiers. “Let’s find out if these guys can play at all.”
The band left no doubt. “We were boogying and totally blown out by the
Butterfield Band,” said Maria Muldaur. “I had heard a lot of blues, but . . . I’d
never heard real Chicago electric blues like this, and we loved it.” But at show’s
end, the talk wasn’t about the music as much as it was about the fistfight.
“Lomax walked down off the stage,” said Paul Rothchild, who was produc-
ing the Butterfield band’s debut album and mixed their sound at Newport.
“And Albert [Grossman] . . . walked up to him and said, ‘What kind of fuckin’
introduction was that?’ And Lomax said, ‘What do you know about blues?’
Albert said, ‘I don’t have to know anything about blues to know that was a
terrible introduction.’ . . . And before anyone knew what was happening there
were these two giants, both physically and in the business, wrestling around
in the dust!”
Bloomfield rejected Lomax’s doctrinaire definition of the blues. “What we
played was music that was entirely indigenous to the neighborhood, to the
city that we grew up in,” said Bloomfield. “There was no doubt in my mind
that this was folk music; this was what I heard on the streets of my city, out
the windows, on radio stations and jukeboxes in Chicago. . . . That’s what
folk music meant to me—what people listened to.” After the scuffle, Lomax
demanded that Grossman be banned from the festival grounds. The board
demurred because three of Grossman’s clients (Dylan, the Jim Kweskin Jug
Band, and Peter, Paul, and Mary) had yet to play and just might leave with
their manager. Meanwhile, Dylan held a late-night rehearsal that included
Bloomfield, Al Kooper, and Butterfield’s rhythm section (drummer Sam Lay
and bassist Jerome Arnold). “We just learned the tunes right there,” said
Bloomfield. “He sang and we played around him. But he never got with the
band so that we could groove together. . . . He always seemed to be fighting
the band.”
On the festival’s last night, Dylan took the stage with a sunburst Fender
Stratocaster like the one played by Buddy Holly. Dylan and the band, which
now included pianist Barry Goldberg, then played the most famous three-
song set in the history of popular music. Books and countless articles have
tried to explain why (and if ) the crowd at Newport booed Dylan’s first live
performance with a band. The truth remains murky; many complained of a
86 Chapter 5

lousy sound mix that buried Dylan’s vocals; others cited a blues-band rhythm
section that never gelled with the material. Fans also felt shortchanged by a
set that consisted of “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Phantom
Engineer,” an early version of what became “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes
a Train to Cry.”
Tumult reigned backstage during Dylan’s set; the volume outraged Pete
Seeger, who was said to have wanted to take an axe to the power cords. Dylan’s
hasty exit, and the rowdy crowd he left behind, prompted Peter Yarrow to beg
him to return to the stage and sing an acoustic tune. He reluctantly obliged and
used Johnny Cash’s guitar to play “Mr. Tambourine Man” and an elegiac “It’s
All Over Now, Baby Blue.” But Dylan was no longer the puckish folk singer
who’d charmed Newport; he was now the most influential Americana artist
since Hank Williams.
Dylan’s friends in the folk world were either dismissive or jealous. “We
had been playing for tips and sleeping on floors,” said Dave Van Ronk, “and
when one of us suddenly could get a suite at the top of the Plaza, naturally
that hurt.” Some griped that that they, too, would be stars with the right con-
nections and record contract. “Yeah, sure you could,” said Van Ronk. “All you
had to do was write ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’—for the first time. That was
what Bobby did, and none of the rest of us did that. Even if everyone didn’t
admit it, we all knew that he was the most talented of us.”
Four days after his controversial appearance at the Newport Folk Festival,
Dylan returned to a New York studio and in three days, with new producer
Bob Johnston behind the recording console, cut the album that would make
him a rock star, Highway 61 Revisited. The title itself reflects Dylan’s musical
journey. “Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins
about where I began [Duluth],” said Dylan. “I always felt like I’d started on
it, always been on it and could go anywhere, even down into the deep Delta
country. . . . It was my place in the universe, always felt like it was in my blood.”
With Bloomfield and Kooper leading the band, Dylan looked to pair his liter-
ary lyrics with the kind of brawny folk rock he’d created on “Like a Rolling
Stone.” Easier said than done. “We did 20 alternative takes of every song,”
said Bloomfield. “It was never like, ‘Here’s one of the tunes, and we’re gonna
learn it and work out an arrangement.” It didn’t matter. Dylan knew a good
take when he heard it.
Tony Glover observed Dylan working in the studio. “After finishing [an-
other] rollicking, hard-driving, rock and roll version [of ‘It Takes a Lot to
 Turn! Turn! Turn! 87

Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’],” said Glover, “and while the group took a
lunch break, Dylan reworked the tune alone at the piano and came back
with the sweeter, bluesy version which appeared on Highway 61 Revisited.
The juxtaposition of these extremely variant versions made a lasting impres-
sion.” Dylan followed his vision to the end; dissatisfied with numerous takes
of “Desolation Row,” he recorded it as an acoustic duet with a visitor from
Nashville, Charlie McCoy, who contributed Flamenco-flavored guitar fills.
Ten years after absorbing the Memphis music of Elvis and Cash, and four
years after meeting Woody Guthrie, Dylan had joined them as American
icons. So many artists covered his tunes in 1965 that Dylan’s publishing in-
come was said to be greater than the combined royalties of Richard Rodgers,
Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter. As an
influential international star, Dylan stood alongside the Beatles, who were
touring America on the release of a second film, Help! When the Beatles spent
a week in Los Angeles they rented the Beverly Hills mansion of Zsa Zsa Gabor.
One day, the Byrds joined them for an LSD party during which twelve-string
guitars were played amid enthusiastic chatter about Ravi Shankar and John
Coltrane. (George Harrison had already sent the Byrds a note of appreciation
for the guitar lick he’d taken from “The Bells of Rhymney” for his “If I Needed
Someone.”) That same week, the Beatles also accepted Colonel Tom Parker’s
invitation to visit Elvis Presley at his Bel Air home.
Presley was now quite different from the artist who’d rocked the world
in the mid-1950s. Though he’d made some great singles since getting out of
the army in early 1960 (“Stuck on You,” “Little Sister,” “Can’t Help Falling in
Love”) and had just enjoyed a hit with a song he’d recorded in 1960, “Crying
in the Chapel,” Presley mostly cranked out formulaic movies and medio-
cre soundtracks; he’d already released three in 1965 (Girl Happy, Tickle Me,
and Harum Scarum). In a pop world that revolved around the Beatles, Dylan,
Motown, and the burgeoning counterculture, Presley was a King without a
kingdom. Still, the Beatles tumbled out of a limousine foggy with pot smoke
like giggly kids excited to meet their original hero.
Details of the meeting are sketchy. Elvis greeted the Beatles in a red shirt
and gray trousers and sat on a white couch playing bass guitar to a recording
of “Mohair Sam,” a current hit for Charlie Rich, who’d gotten his start at Sun
Records. Elvis drank 7-Up while the Beatles had scotch and Coke; George
smoked a joint and talked about Hinduism with Larry Geller, Presley’s spiri-
tual advisor and hairstylist. John and Paul were said to have played “I Feel
88 Chapter 5

Fine” on acoustic guitars with Elvis on bass and Ringo thumping on a table.
Beatles manager Brian Epstein gambled at roulette with Colonel Parker and
pitched him the idea of having Elvis tour the United Kingdom.
“Long live ze king,” said John as the Beatles said goodbye. “He was our
greatest idol,” said Paul, “but the styles were changing in favor of us.” Pete
Seeger might have had a similar feeling after Bob Dylan made a rock ’n’ roll
racket on a Newport stage built by acoustic folk music. On the pop charts,
Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do,” the second single by the Byrds, was beaten
into the Top 20 by Cher’s cover of the same song. Desperate for a hit, Mc-
Guinn thought of “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” a Pete Seeger song that he’d recorded
with both the Limelighters and Judy Collins. Seeger wrote the chorus—“To
everything (turn, turn, turn), there is a season (turn, turn, turn)”—and, like a
true folklorist, found his verses in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. And in this
season of folk rock and the British Invasion, it was only natural for McGuinn
to open his band’s second (and last) #1 record with the reverberating sound of
the twelve-string Rickenbacker that he’d bought after falling for the Beatles.
 WHITE LINE FEVER

Merle Haggard, inmate A-45200, was released from San Quentin State Prison
on November 3, 1960, and caught a bus to Bakersfield. Haggard had spent
three years in lockup; when he got caught drinking moonshine he spent a
week in solitary, and used a Bible for a pillow. Now Haggard hustled music
gigs at local clubs like the Blackboard and the Lucky Spot. Working in Las
Vegas, Haggard met Johnny Cash, whom he’d seen play a 1958 concert at San
Quentin; Cash offered the ex-con a Benzedrine and a sip of wine. Haggard
also heard Wynn Steward perform “Sing a Sad Song,” which in 1964 would
become his first hit for a small label owned by his manager, Fuzzy Owens.
Within a year, Haggard was on Capitol Records.
Haggard grew up in a renovated boxcar in the Bakersfield suburb of Oil-
dale. His father died of a brain hemorrhage when he was eight; at fourteen,
Haggard hitchhiked to Texas in a failed attempt to meet his favorite singer,
Lefty Frizzell; months later, he saw him play at Bakersfield’s Rainbow Gardens.
“His songs hit me right in the heart,” said Haggard. “It was strange; it was
like listening to my own voice.” Haggard absorbed the influence of Frizzell’s
soft, melodious style before finding what writer David Cantwell calls a voice
that’s “relaxed, warm and rugged; intensely felt, unmistakably masculine, and
90 Chapter 6

unabashedly Okie-accented; but smooth, too, for all that, and tending toward
what we might fairly term pretty. Haggard’s a crooner.”
Bonnie Owens, Buck’s ex-wife, was singing with Haggard when she took
him to meet Liz Anderson. “If there was anything I didn’t wanna do,” said
Haggard, “it was sit around some danged woman’s house and listen to her
cute little songs.” Minutes after arriving, he picked up a guitar to learn what
would become his next hit, “(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers.” That tune
gave his band a name, the Strangers. Another Anderson song, “The Fugitive,”
based on the popular television show, hit #1 in 1967 and encouraged Haggard to
plumb his own past to write songs like “Sing Me Back Home,” “Mama Tried,”
and “Branded Man.”
Haggard became the biggest act in Bakersfield this side of Buck, who con-
tinued to crank out buoyantly rocking tunes to great success. Haggard was
different, more apt to sing about the troubled aftermath (“Tonight the Bottle
Let Me Down”) than the party itself. He wrote about hard work (“Working Man
Blues”) and couples facing tough times (“If We Make It Through December”).
Bonnie, who became the second of his five wives, witnessed the birth of the
songwriter. “It’s amazing to me the things that came out of Merle’s mouth
when he’s writing,” said Owens. “He’d later say, ‘Bonnie, I don’t ever remember
saying these words. It’s like God put ’em through me.” Sometimes, God spoke
fast. In Dallas, Haggard asked Bonnie to fetch him a late-night hamburger. By
the time she returned, he’d scribbled the words to “Today, I Started Loving
You Again” on a paper bag. He then sang the song and made Bonnie cry.
Haggard forged the lean sound of these songs with the Strangers and such
hired hands as James Burton, a master of the Telecaster who’d played guitar
for the Louisiana Hayride as a teenager, created the unforgettable guitar lick
of Dale Hawkins’s 1957 hit “Susie Q” and was Ricky Nelson’s lead guitarist for
more than a decade. At about the time Burton played on such Haggard tunes
as “Swinging Doors” and “Life in Prison,” he turned down an offer from Bob
Dylan to tour the world in his first electric band.
Dylan might have been hip to Haggard, but he more likely knew Burton
from his work with Nelson because songs from the country charts were largely
unknown to those listening to the Beatles and the Byrds. Two exceptions were
Roger Miller, who enjoyed pop success with such sharp-witted hits as “Dang
Me” and “Chug-a-Lug,” and Buck Owens, who was introduced to the rock
audience when the Beatles covered his “Act Naturally” on the soundtrack to
Help! (the song was also the flip side of “Yesterday”). Johnny Russell wrote
MERLE HAGGARD
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“Act Naturally,” but he acceded to Owens’s demand that he be given the pub-
lishing rights before he recorded the song. Russell later sued to regain his
lucrative copyright. Owens, meanwhile, took a little flack when he and the
Buckaroos began performing a Beatles medley at live shows; this prompted
his 1965 pledge to Music City News that “I Shall Sing No Song That Is Not a
Country Song.”
Buck Owens’s fondness for the Beatles should hardly be a surprise because
country and folk were increasingly prominent in the band’s mid-sixties music.
Consider “Yes It Is.” “That’s me trying a rewrite of ‘This Boy,’” said John Len-
non, “but it didn’t work.” With its close harmonies and melancholy lyric, “Yes
It Is” is not unlike a ballad by the Everly Brothers. Rubber Soul (1965) included
other songs with American roots: Lennon’s “Run for Your Life” recalled Elvis
Presley’s “Baby Let’s Play House,” while McCartney’s “I’m Looking Through
You” mixed acoustic and electric instruments in consummate folk-rock style.
One night banjoist Bill Keith of the Kweskin Jug Band listened to Rubber Soul
with Doc Watson. “Man!,” said Watson. “Those boys have been doing their
homework!”
Haggard and Owens created a repertoire that would prove highly influen-
tial for Americana artists. So did Loretta Lynn, who arrived in Nashville in the
early 1960s. Born Loretta Webb in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, she was a coal
miner’s daughter and one of eight children. She married Oliver “Doolittle”
Lynn when she was fifteen, and the couple relocated to the state of Washington
when she was seven months’ pregnant with the first of six children. Doo gave
his wife a $17 Harmony guitar for her eighteenth birthday and encouraged
her to sing in a local honky-tonk. “He thought I was something special,” said
Lynn, “more special than anyone else in the world, and never let me forget
it.” In 1960 Lynn recorded a song of her own, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl.” She
and Doo lived in their car while promoting the song at local country stations;
when it reached the Top 20 they drove to Nashville, where Lynn played the
Opry and was signed to Decca by Owen Bradley.
“I remember my first recording session for [Decca],” said Lynn, “I was so
scared I just stood in the background and was even afraid to speak to the
musicians. . . . Owen would put up a screen, so I couldn’t see nobody; I’d just
sing to myself. He said he did the same thing for Brenda Lee.” Early on, Lynn
cut records in the honky-tonk style of Kitty Wells, but she soon found her own
unique voice. In the country music world dominated by men, Lynn wrote
 White Line Fever 93

songs such as “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)”
that showed a distinctively feminine perspective.
“The way most of my songs got started,” said Lynn, “was I’d hear a good
line, or make one up.” One night, she recalled, “a little girl came back stage
and said her husband didn’t bring her to the show—he brought his girlfriend.
. . . I peeked out and there she was, painted up like you wouldn’t believe. I
looked ’round to the little girl that was talking to me. And she didn’t have no
makeup at all. And I said, ‘Honey, she ain’t woman enough to take your man.’
I went straight to my dressing room and wrote ‘You Ain’t Woman Enough (To
Take My Man)’ in ten minutes.”
Musicians quickly learn that the real money in the music business is in
songwriting; Willie Nelson struggled as a recording artist but bought a fam-
ily compound outside Nashville with the earnings from tunes recorded by
Patsy Cline (“Crazy”) and Faron Young (“Hello Walls”). But country music
remained stubbornly far from the coastal mainstream. “The country music
jamboree was as ambitious, colorful, star-laden, uneven, beautiful and banal
as a circus,” wrote Robert Shelton in the New York Times in 1964 about a show
at Madison Square Garden that featured George Jones, Buck Owens, Bill
Monroe, and Ernest Tubb. “There was a bit of noise, a lot of nostalgia, but
enough good music-making for this circus to be one that country music fans
will long remember.” That same year, a young woman from the mountains
of east Tennessee arrived in Nashville, won a publishing deal, and had a few
minor hits. But it wasn’t until Dolly Parton started singing duets with Porter
Wagoner that the world would meet the woman who would become one of
the most successful songwriters in country music history.

   
With Newport in the rearview mirror and Highway 61 Revisited about to be
released, Bob Dylan needed a band. Guitarist Mike Bloomfield, happy to stick
with the Butterfield Blues Band, wasn’t interested, and James Burton preferred
session work and playing in the house band on television’s Shindig! Mary
Martin, who worked for Albert Grossman, suggested the Hawks, a Toronto
group that had backed Ronnie Hawkins, a rockabilly singer from Arkansas.
Hawkins had paired Levon Helm, a drummer from his home state, with a
quartet that he’d cultivated in Canada. Dylan was a fan of the album some
of the Hawks had recorded with John Hammond Jr.
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By the summer of 1965 the quintet had left Hawkins and were playing on
the Jersey shore and calling themselves Levon and the Hawks. Guitarist Rob-
bie Robertson of the Hawks traveled to New York to meet Dylan; they broke
the ice at a Manhattan music store where Robertson suggested that Dylan try
a Fender Telecaster, which tended to stay in tune better than a Stratocaster.
Dylan settled on a black Tele with a white pick guard. Back at Grossman’s of-
fice, Dylan and Robertson played acoustic guitars. “That was the first time I
really heard Bob Dylan,” said Robertson. “Sitting on a couch with him singing
in the room. And that was the first time I said to myself, ‘There’s something
to this; it kind of rambles a bit, but there is something about it.’ I was playing
a little loud, and I could see from his attitude that he wanted it to be rough.”
Grossman had concerts booked at New York’s Forest Hills Tennis Stadium
and the Hollywood Bowl, with Al Kooper and bassist Harvey Brooks already
recruited to accompany Dylan; Robertson and drummer Levon Helm agreed
to play the dates, leaving the other Hawks to hold down the Jersey gig. Dylan
opened the Forest Hills concert with an acoustic set that ended with the con-
cert debut of “Desolation Row.” During intermission, he gave the group a pep
talk. “I don’t know what it’ll be like out there,” said Dylan. “It’s gonna be some
kind of carnival. . . . So just go out there and keep playing no matter how weird
it gets.”
New York was as restive as Newport; Kooper thought people booed “be-
cause they’d read that they were supposed to.” Robertson couldn’t believe
that electric guitars were even an issue. “It was like, jeez,” said Robertson,
“somebody’s bought a television!” The old-school folkies howled; others saw
Dylan as a pop star and sang along to “Like a Rolling Stone.” Los Angeles,
home of the Byrds, gave the electric set a much better reception. When Gross-
man booked a full national tour, Robertson and Helm wouldn’t commit un-
less Dylan hired the other Hawks: Rick Danko on bass, Richard Manuel on
piano, and Garth Hudson on a variety of keyboards. Since Al Kooper had
already passed on the full tour, Dylan agreed, and rehearsed with the Hawks
in Toronto.
Dylan’s idiosyncratic songs were a far cry from the blues and R&B they’d
performed with Ronnie Hawkins. “I’d watch where he was going all the time,”
said Danko, “and he really liked the fact that I could anticipate the way he
broke meter.” Though Robertson found the rehearsals inadequate, when the
tour got under way Dylan and his protégés developed a fierce new sound. “It
was like thunder,” said Robertson, “with this Elmer Gantry speaking, talk-
 White Line Fever 95

ing these words, singing them, preaching them. He was no longer doing his
nasally folk thing; he was screaming his songs through the rafters.”
“It was so in your face,” said Angus Wynne, who booked Dylan for shows in
Austin and Dallas. “You couldn’t really understand the words—quality concert
sound systems were nonexistent back then—but you could feel the energy. It
was like being knocked over by this huge burst of sound.” Dick Alderson was
the tour’s sound engineer. “There were hardly any monitors at all,” he said,
“so you could never really hear yourself. . . . We were in territory that nobody
had ever been in. No one had played those kind[s] of halls before.” Except for
the Beatles, of course, who were typically drowned out by the excited squeals
of teenage girls.
With tour dates scheduled around weekends, Dylan and his band went
into Columbia’s Manhattan studio to begin recording a follow-up to Highway
61 Revisited. The first completed recording was a single that flopped, “Please
Crawl out Your Window”; other tracks were left unfinished except for “One of
Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),” which would appear on Dylan’s next album,
Blonde on Blonde. Frustrated by the slow progress, Dylan took Bob Johnston’s
suggestion of trying to record in Nashville. Before Dylan’s arrival, Johnston
spent two days recording Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” and “I
Am a Rock.”
Charlie McCoy, who’d accompanied Dylan on “Desolation Road,” played
about four hundred recording sessions in 1966. Tasked to hire the musicians,
he enlisted two members of his weekend group, Charlie McCoy and the Es-
corts: guitarist Wayne Moss and drummer Kenneth Buttrey. He also called
pianist Hargus “Pig” Robbins, who’d been accidentally blinded at the age
of four. All had extensive recording résumés; McCoy had played harmonica
on Roy Orbison’s “Candy Man,” while Moss had played guitar on Orbison’s
“Pretty Woman.” Joe South, a guitar player who’d have later solo success with
1969’s “Games People Play,” also played the sessions. Dylan brought along
Al Kooper to be his interface with the southern musicians. “He’d teach me
a song,” said Kooper, “and I’d play it over and over again, and he’d write the
lyrics. He had a piano in his room. Then I’d go to the session an hour before
him, and teach the band the songs that I knew.”
When Dylan arrived at Columbia’s Nashville studio on February 14, 1966,
he told Johnston that he needed time to polish his first batch of songs. “John-
ston came to us,” said McCoy, “and said, . . . ‘He’s not finished writing a lyric,
so go ahead and do your dinner and get on back because I don’t know when
96 Chapter 6

he’s gonna be ready.’ So we all left and came back, and then sat around for
eternity.” On this night, the musicians signed two three-hour session cards
before playing a single note. Then, in the wee hours, three songs were re-
corded: “Fourth Time Around,” “Visions of Johanna,” and “Leopard Skin
Pillbox Hat.”
The next night turned into a nocturnal challenge when Dylan wrestled
with the lyrics to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowland,” which at eleven minutes
and twenty-two seconds would occupy the fourth side of what became one
of rock’s first double albums. Kris Kristofferson, a Rhodes Scholar and U.S.
Army captain who’d taken a job as the studio’s janitor in an attempt to launch
a career in music, recalled an opened Bible on a music stand. “I saw Dylan
out in the studio at the piano,” he said, “writing all night long by himself.
And wearing shades.” Recording commenced at around four a.m., ten hours
after the start of the session. “After five or six minutes,” said drummer But-
trey, who was twenty years old, “we started looking at the clock. We’d build
to a peak, and bang, there goes another harmonica solo, and we’d drop down
into another verse. About ten minutes of this thing, and we were cracking up
at what we were doing. I mean, we peaked five minutes ago.” It was far from
a typical night in Nashville. “It was one of those deals,” said McCoy, “[where
you think,] ‘Please don’t let me make a mistake.’” “This,” according to Kooper,
“is the definitive version of what 4 a.m. sounds like.”
Reuniting with the Hawks for more concerts, Dylan played his new record-
ings for Robertson. “He was really impressed by the Nashville [musicians],”
said Robertson. “He said, ‘I just went in there—these guys didn’t know me,
they didn’t know this music—I went in there, and they just all get in a huddle,
and they figure it out so quickly and come up with an arrangement, a whole
idea for the song.” Robertson joined Dylan on his next trip to Nashville, where
he impressed the studio pros with an especially raucous guitar solo on “Obvi-
ously Five Believers.”
Dylan might have taken his time with words, but musical ideas were ex-
ecuted with alacrity. When Dylan played the bluesy “Rainy Day Women #12
& 35,” Johnston said that he imagined a Salvation Army horn section. McCoy
unpacked his trumpet, and though it was after midnight, scared up a trom-
bone player. For “I Want You,” the last tune recorded for the album and a
subsequent hit single, guitarist Moss created the sixteenth-note obbligato that
runs throughout the song. All told, Dylan was in the studio for nearly seventy
hours. “The time we spent on Blonde on Blonde was for us like an eternity,”
 White Line Fever 97

said McCoy. “Most Nashville artists at the time would record a whole album
in three [three-hour] sessions.”
Dylan later said that the Nashville musicians had captured what he was
looking for: “that thin, that wild mercury sound.” But when the folk-singer-
turned-rock-star headed out on a world tour, Levon Helm was no longer be-
hind the drums. “We’d look at one another and try to figure out if we were
playing great music or total bullshit,” said Helm, who went home to Arkansas.
“I began to think it was a ridiculous way to make a living; flying to concerts
in Bob’s thirteen-seat Lodestar, jumping in and out of limousines, and then
getting booed.” Mickey Jones, who drummed with Johnny Rivers, got the gig.
Touring the world, Dylan and the Hawks found their own wild mercury
sound. “By the time we did Australia and Europe,” said Robertson, “we had
discovered whatever this thing was. It was not light, it was not folky. It was
very dynamic, very explosive, and very violent.” This was not the ramshackle
sound of the Newport performance and not at all like the folk rock of the
Byrds; instead, this was a rough blueprint for the kind of singer-songwriter
rock that would inspire artists from Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp
to Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams. Dylan was also starting to spiral out of
control.
“He was what you call a real road dog,” recalled Rick Danko. “You never
got to sleep [in his company].” There were amphetamines to keep you up, pot
to get you high, pills to put you to sleep, and by some accounts, a snort or two
of heroin for a change of pace. Cinematographer D. A. Pennebaker, who’d
fashioned Don’t Look Back from the 1965 British tour, was again shooting film,
this time as a hired gun for an ABC television special. Robertson would often
share a hotel suite with Dylan, and guitars were always nearby.
“In those hotel rooms,” said Robertson, “I also found that Bob probably
knew more songs than anybody walking the earth.” When Dylan and his en-
tourage settled into a London hotel, the music world came to pay its respects.
Paul McCartney dropped by with a copy of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” a new
Beatles song that reflected McCartney’s interest in electronic music. “It was a
little bit ‘An Audience with Dylan’ in those days,” said McCartney, who after
a bit of a wait played the record for Dylan. “I remember his saying, ‘Oh, I get
it, you don’t really want to be cute anymore.’ And I was saying, ‘Yeah, that’s
it.’” Singer Marianne Faithfull observed the encounter. “Paul was obviously
terribly proud of it,” she said. “He put it on the record player and stood back
in anticipation, but Dylan just walked out of the room.”
98 Chapter 6

Johnny Cash also paid a visit. “Bob and Johnny were on a wavelength that
actually matched, high-voltage madness,” said Robertson. Cash bounced
in his chair. Rattled by a knock at the door, he bolted from the room. “‘If it’s
June, tell her I’m not here,’” he said, according to Robertson. “And with that he
disappeared into the other room and hid in the closet, yelling, ‘I’m not here.’”
When the coast was clear, Dylan picked up a guitar and Cash sang along as
he played Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”
The Beatles and other rock royalty attended Dylan’s concert at the Royal
Albert Hall and were quick to defend him against those who still had a prob-
lem with the show’s electric half. But it was Dylan’s widely bootlegged concert
at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester that would give the world a taste of the
music that had caused such a commotion (the live recording was officially
released in 1998). “The concerts were incandescent because the singer was
living for art,” wrote critic Paul Williams, “was literally burning himself out,
not to please the audience and certainly not out of obligation, but for the
sheer joy of doing it, traveling with intrepid companions out into unknown
aesthetic realms, shining lights into unexplored darkness.” At the end of the
Manchester set, Dylan confronted his combative audience with the acerbic
“Ballad of a Thin Man.” “Something is happening here and you don’t know
what it is,” bellowed Dylan, prompting an audience member to scream the
most famous heckle in rock ’n’ roll history: “Judas!” Dylan was both hurt and
defiant. “I don’t believe you,” he cried, “you’re a liar!” Turning to the band, he
said, “Play it fuckin’ loud!” and closed the show with an especially scathing
version of “Like a Rolling Stone.”
How does it feel? How does it feel to be on top of the world? Pennebaker
filmed two men who would know, Dylan and John Lennon, in the back of a
limousine; years later Lennon would say that they were high on heroin. What
we see is a barely coherent Dylan mumbling about the Beatles’ publishing
deal before vomiting on the floor. “Come, come, boy,” said Lennon. “Pull
yourself together.” At Dylan’s Mayfair hotel, Lennon and Pennebaker carried
him up to his room. “We laid him down on his bed,” said Pennebaker, “and
he looked really weird. We sat on his bed and I just looked at him. He looked
dead. We went downstairs and back outside, and John said, ‘Well, I think
we just said good-bye to old Bob.’” But Bob didn’t go away; he went home to
Woodstock, New York.
But there was no rest for the weary. Dylan was late delivering his first book,
ABC wanted its television special, and Albert Grossman was booking another
 White Line Fever 99

round of U.S. concerts. Reunited with his new wife, the former Sara Lownds,
and first-born child, Jesse, Dylan struggled to keep all these balls in the air.
On the morning of July 29, 1966, he steered his Triumph 650 Bonneville mo-
torcycle over a hilltop before descending steep Striebel Road. “I was drivin’
right straight into the sun,” said Dylan, “and I looked up into it even though
I remember someone telling me a long time ago when I was a kid never to
look straight at the sun.” But Dylan was no Icarus, getting too close to the
sun; he was a strung-out pop star fresh from touring the world and hanging
with Cash and the Beatles, and he was now flying over the handlebars of his
Triumph.
SOMETHING IN THE AIR

“Of course it was a drug song,” said David Crosby of the Byrds about “Eight
Miles High.” “We were stoned when we wrote it. We can justifiably say that
it wasn’t a drug song because it was written about the trip to London. But it
was a drug song and it wasn’t a drug song at the same time.” “Eight Miles
High” (like Dylan’s “Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35”) was banned by many radio
stations because of its presumed drug references, but you didn’t have to listen
to the words to tune in, turn on, and drop out; McGuinn’s lead guitar, played
in a modal scale, was enough to suggest a hit of LSD. “The Rick by itself is
kind of thuddy,” he said of his Rickenbacker twelve-string. “It doesn’t ring.
But if you add a compressor, you get that long sustain. With compression, I
found I could hold a note for three or four seconds, and sound more like a
wind instrument. Later, this led me to emulate John Coltrane’s saxophone
on ‘Eight Miles High.’ Without compression, I couldn’t have sustained the
riff’s first note.”
McGuinn’s distinctive guitar was the instrumental signature of the Byrds,
and his political instincts made him the leader of an unruly flock. Gene
Clark, who made his bandmates jealous by buying a Ferrari with the pro-
ceeds of his original songs, quit the Byrds over his fear of flying. David
 Something in the Air 101

Crosby always irritated McGuinn and Chris Hillman, but the three found
folk-rock grace on 1967’s Younger Than Yesterday. Clarence White played
guitar on Hillman’s “Time Between,” one of a number of the group’s early
songs (including “Hey Mr. Spaceman” and a cover of Porter Wagoner’s “Satis-
fied Mind”) that showed an affinity for country music. Hillman knew White
from his days with the Kentucky Colonels: the world-class picker was now
a successful session musician.
At the Monterey Pop Festival (1968), Crosby annoyed McGuinn by introduc-
ing “He Was a Friend of Mine” with a rant about the Warren Commission’s
investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Crosby then
sat in for an absent Neil Young during the Buffalo Springfield’s festival per-
formance. Los Angeles had other hit bands, including the Beach Boys and
the Mamas and the Papas, but Buffalo Springfield was the only act with the
hipster credentials of the Byrds. The Springfield had problems of its own;
after Stephen Stills’s “For What It’s Worth” became a counterculture anthem,
group comity was in short supply, and Young quit the band.
Crosby, too, wasn’t long for the Byrds. First the group refused to release his
song about a ménage à trois, “Triad” (the song was recorded by the Jefferson
Airplane). Then Crosby refused to sing on “Goin’ Back,” a folk-rock ballad
by Gerry Goffin and Carole King. Tempers flared, Crosby stormed out of the
studio, and McGuinn and Hillman kicked him out of the Byrds with a $10,000
settlement for his share of the band’s name. It was about this time that Jim
McGuinn changed his name to Roger after becoming associated with Subud,
an international spiritual movement with roots in Indonesia.
Crosby licked his wounds in Coconut Grove, Florida, where he shopped for
a sailboat and revisited haunts from his folkie days, including a club called the
Gaslight South. “Joni [Mitchell] was singing one of those songs,” said Crosby,
“like ‘Michael from Mountains,’ ‘Both Sides Now,’ one of those songs, and it
just slapped me up against the back wall. . . . I’d never heard anybody that
good, playing [guitar] tunings like that. I didn’t know anybody who could
write songs that well or sing like that and I immediately had a crush on her
as well.”
Mitchell’s path to Coconut Grove began in rural Canada, where Roberta
Joan Anderson was born to a schoolteacher mother and a Royal Canadian
Air Force lieutenant. She contracted polio at the age of nine and taught her-
self guitar by studying a Pete Seeger songbook; the lingering effects of her
illness encouraged her to employ alternate tunings. Leaving college, where
JONI MITCHELL
 Something in the Air 103

she studied art, Anderson played music in Toronto and met another Canadian
musician, Neil Young. After Mitchell played “Both Sides Now” for Young, he
offered his coming-of-age tune, “Sugar Mountain,” which inspired her to
write “The Circle Game.” She met and married folk singer Chuck Mitchell;
they lived in Detroit and played coffeehouses. Tom Rush, a folk singer from
Cambridge, Massachusetts, crashed on their couch and left with a song for
his next album, Joni’s “Urge for Going.”
The marriage ended in early 1967 and Mitchell moved to New York, where
she played some of her songs for Al Kooper. “One song especially killed me,”
said Kooper, “‘Michael from Mountains.’ I thought it would be great for Judy
Collins.” Collins liked the song and helped get Mitchell and another Canadian
singer-songwriter, Leonard Cohen, slots at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival.
Collins then recorded two of Mitchell’s songs (“Michael from Mountains” and
“Both Sides Now”) and a pair of Cohen’s (“Sisters of Mercy” and “Hey, That’s
No Way to Say Goodbye”) on her album Wildflowers.
At the Café Au Go Go in Greenwich Village Mitchell met Elliot Roberts,
an agent at the William Morris Agency. “I went up to her after the show,” said
Roberts, “and said, ‘I’m a young manager and I’d kill to work with you.’ She
said she was going on tour, and if I wanted to pay my own expenses, I could
go with her.” Roberts quit his job; a month later, Mitchell asked him to be her
manager. Meanwhile, Rush contacted Mitchell looking for more songs. She
sent a tape that included “The Circle Game,” writing in an accompanying
note, “It sucks and you’re going to hate it.”
Rush titled his album The Circle Game and included a third Mitchell song,
“Tin Angel,” alongside original compositions from two other little-known
singer-songwriters, James Taylor (“Something in the Way She Moves” and
“Sunshine Sunshine”) and Jackson Browne (“Shadow Dream Song”). Browne
had a publishing deal with Elektra and had made demos of thirty songs,
including “These Days” and “Jamaica, Say You Will.” Taylor had met Rush
at Elektra’s New York office and pitched his songs in person. All told, the two
albums by Collins and Rush introduced four singer-songwriters who would
become stars in the 1970s and collectively influence generations of Americana
musicians.
This new crop of songwriters wrote from personal experience and was as
strongly influenced by contemporary music as by traditional folk songs. But
to varying degrees Bob Dylan touched them all. “When I heard ‘Positively
4th Street,’” said Mitchell, “I realized that this was a whole new ballgame;
104 Chapter 7

now you could make your songs literature.” “I heard Bob Dylan,” said Co-
hen, “listened to him carefully, and thought ‘He has already done it.’ It was
exactly what I wanted to do: write as well and simply as possible and lay it at
the feet of the people.” “He turned the world on its ear and opened the door
for a lot of us,” said Taylor. “He and the Beatles were the biggest influences
on my lyrics.” When asked how he went from writing a rock ’n’ roll song like
“Hey Schoolgirl” to “The Sounds of Silence,” Paul Simon said, “I really can’t
imagine it could have been anyone else besides Bob Dylan.”
Mitchell played three sold-out shows at the Troubadour in Los Angeles
and was quickly signed to Reprise with Crosby to produce her first album. “He
was going to protect the music and pretend to produce me,” said Mitchell; the
strategy was to record Mitchell as a solo artist and eschew typical folk-rock
arrangements. Mitchell would make more musically adventurous albums
than Song to a Seagull (1968), but the collection firmly established her status
as a singular singer-songwriter.
Mitchell moved into a house in Laurel Canyon, a neighborhood in the
Hollywood Hills that was thick with songwriters and musicians. Cass Elliot
of the Mamas and the Papas was the scene’s social director. “She was very
important not only as an individual artist and a great singer,” said Jackson
Browne, who’d played with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band as a teenager and then
recorded with Nico of the Velvet Underground, “but also for knowing . . . who
should be working with or singing with whom.” Elliot played musical match-
maker for Crosby and his friend Stephen Stills. “David and I were messing
around,” said Stills, “and she came up to me and says, ‘Do you think you need
a third voice?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ She said, ‘OK, don’t say anything, especially
to Crosby.” The third voice belonged to Graham Nash, a member of the Brit-
ish pop group the Hollies, who declined to record his new songs, including
“Marrakesh Express.” Crosby, Stills & Nash became a folk-rock supergroup,
and Nash and Mitchell soon shared a very fine house with two cats in the
yard.

   
Jerry Lee Lewis looked out at the audience from a Los Angeles stage. “Oh,
beware, my lord, of jealousy,” said the Killer. “It is the green eyed monster
which doth mock.” Jerry Lee was playing Iago in a rock ’n’ roll adaption of
Shakespeare’s Othello called Catch My Soul. “I never worked so hard in my life,”
said Lewis of his unlikely side project. “I mean two hours and forty-five min-
 Something in the Air 105

utes running up and down stairs—it was a mess.” During the play’s six-week
run, Lewis was surprised to see that a song he’d reluctantly cut in Nashville,
“Another Time, Another Place,” had risen to #4 on the country charts.
In an astonishing turn of events, rock ’n’ roll’s bad boy became a major
country star, with seventeen Top 10 country hits between 1968 and 1977, in-
cluding four chart toppers. Compared to most of the competition in that
genre, Lewis’s records had a stripped-down sound and featured a voice that
was as distinctive as those of George Jones and Merle Haggard. Jerry Lee still
punctuated his songs with piano glissandos and never stopped performing
his rock ’n’ roll hits in concert, but he caught a second wind by focusing on
the country side of the musical hybrid that he and Elvis had created at Sun
Records.
Lewis’s country hits were largely unknown to rock fans because there was
little crossover from the country to the pop charts. Glen Campbell was a
notable exception, hitting first with “Gentle on My Mind” by folk musician
John Hartford, who was a regular on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. But
it was the more pop-oriented Jimmy Webb who wrote Campbell’s biggest hits
(“By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston”); Webb also
penned pop hits for the Fifth Dimension (“Up, Up, and Away”) and Richard
Harris (“MacArthur Park”). More often than not, however, country and rock
fans had little in common.
In 1968 one artist bridged that gap: Elvis Presley. With Presley’s movie and
soundtrack career running out of gas, Colonel Parker arranged for him to star
in a Christmas television special. Parker imagined a show filled with seasonal
carols, but producer Steve Binder had a different idea after seeing Presley
casually jamming in his dressing room. By show time, Binder had convinced
Presley to play before a studio audience with a small band that included his
original guitarist (Scotty Moore) and drummer (D. J. Fontana). Dressed in a
tight black leather suit, Presley seemed to rediscover his own legend as he
played a set that included “That’s All Right,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and “Don’t Be
Cruel.”
“We didn’t rehearse it,” said Binder of the onstage jam session. “The beauty
of it for me was that . . . he forgot he was doing a show with Scotty and Bill,
and they were just playing again.” The performance on what came to be called
the “Comeback Special” inspired Presley to record new material in Memphis,
and he returned to the pop charts with “In the Ghetto,” “Suspicious Minds,”
and “Burning Love.” The next year, Presley was booked to perform fifty-seven
106 Chapter 7

shows at the International Hotel in Las Vegas. That’s when James Burton got
an unexpected phone call. Burton told his wife to take a message, but she
said this might be important. He chatted briefly with a member of Presley’s
entourage before Elvis got on the phone to say that he used to watch The Ozzie
and Harriet Show to see Burton play guitar. “We talked for two hours,” said
Burton, who had turned down the offer to tour with Bob Dylan but took the
job of Presley’s bandleader.
George Jones had hits throughout the 1960s, but one of pop music’s great
vocalists was all but unknown beyond the country audience. Jones had hit
duets with Melba Montgomery, starting with “We Must Have Been out of
Our Minds,” and solo hits such as “The Race Is On” and “A Good Year for
the Roses.” But washing down amphetamines with booze had become a
drag on his career. During one multiday bender his first wife Shirley hid
the car keys. “It might have taken an hour and half or more for me to get
to the liquor store,” said Jones of riding his lawnmower into town, “but get
there I did.”
One night Jones went to dinner at the house of a couple who had opened
his shows, Don Chepel and his wife Tammy Wynette. Jones had drinks while
the contentious couple prepared dinner, and he lost his temper when Chepel
cursed out his wife. Chepel asked what business it was of his. “Because I love
her,” said Jones, “and she’s in love with me, aren’t ya, Tammy?” Tammy nodded
and took her three children to a hotel. Jones soon had a new wife and duet
partner; they shared a tour bus with the inscription “Mr. and Mrs. Country
Music.”
Newcomers to Nashville struggled to be heard. “When I came to Nashville,”
said Kris Kristofferson, “the people I hung out with were serious songwriters,
none of whom were successful. Willie was the hero of the soulful set—the
people who were in the business because they loved the soul of country mu-
sic.” While working as a janitor at Columbia studios, Kristofferson slipped a
tape of his songs to June Carter Cash that got lost in a pile of her husband’s
ignored demos. When the former army captain took a job as a commercial
helicopter pilot in southern Louisiana, he wrote “Help Me Make It Through
the Night” while perched atop an oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. Krist-
offerson tried once more to pitch his music to Cash, this time by landing a
helicopter outside his home in Henderson, but the touring country star missed
his aerial ballet. Finally, in 1969, after Kristofferson had tunes recorded by Ray
Stevens and Jerry Lee Lewis, Cash cut his “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,”
 Something in the Air 107

which became a #1 country hit and was named the song of the year by the
Country Music Association.
It turns out that Cash might have missed the helicopter in his yard even
if he had been at home. “I was always sick,” he said, “and Maybelle [Carter]
was always trying to take care of me. She saw me at my very worst and never
pointed it out to me except to say loving things like ‘I hope you’ll take care of
yourself because we really need you.’” Maybelle and June would scour the
house for pills. In October 1967 Cash was again arrested for drug possession;
then, after driving a tractor into the lake on his property, he crawled into a
cave to die. Instead, he emerged to go cold turkey in a locked bedroom; June,
Maybelle, and Eck surrounded his bed and prayed. They kept him fed and
heard him ransacking the room looking for pills. After nearly a month of
nightmares and stomach cramps Cash emerged, and if he was not exactly a
new man, there was a spring in his step. Within months, he recorded a hit
live album, At San Quentin, and proposed to June while onstage in London,
Ontario. They were married in 1968.
As for Kristofferson, with his literary airs and bohemian instincts, one
could imagine him hanging with the hipsters in Laurel Canyon. But few in
Hollywood knew of “Me and Bobby McGee” when Roger Miller recorded the
song in 1969. Bob Neuwirth, a pal of Dylan’s, heard the tune sung by Gordon
Lightfoot at the office of his manager, Albert Grossman. “That very night, I was
having dinner with Janis [Joplin],” said Neuwirth. “I went down and picked
her up, and while she and her girlfriend were getting ready, I played the song
on her guitar. She goes, ‘What is that song, man? Teach it to me!’ So I did.”
Kris and Janis later had an affair. It was brief, but they are forever bound by
her reading of his song. Joplin died of a drug overdose in October 1970; “Me
and Bobby McGee” was her only #1 hit.
Willie Nelson, a songwriter with a decade of experience and a catalog of
albums on RCA, continued to search for his singular voice. He cut tunes by
Kristofferson and James Taylor (“Fire and Rain”) alongside his own songs and
tunes by Hank Williams and Merle Haggard. Then Nelson found a valuable
partner when he broke the neck of his electric guitar and bought a rosewood
Martin acoustic that his guitar tech outfitted with the electronics of his old
instrument. He named his new nylon-stringed guitar Trigger after Roy Rog-
ers’s trusty palomino. “I had the sound I’d been looking for,” said Nelson. “I
heard it as a human sound, a sound close to my own voice. Didn’t take long
for me to pick a hole in it. That’s ’cause classical guitars aren’t meant to be
108 Chapter 7

picked. But that hole, along with the aluminum amp—aged by just the right
amount of beer that’d been spilled inside—seemed to deepen its soulful tone.”
Nelson was at a Nashville Christmas party in 1969 when he learned that his
house was on fire. By the time he got home, volunteer firefighters were dous-
ing the flames, and they cried out in alarm when Nelson ran into the burning
building to retrieve two totems that would define his future: Trigger and a
trash bag filled with primo Columbian pot.

   
What exactly happened that July morning in 1966 when Bob Dylan tumbled
off his Triumph motorcycle? Questions remain. Sara Dylan was following in
a car to bring her husband home after leaving his bike at the repair shop, but
instead of calling an ambulance for transport to a hospital in nearby Kings-
ton, she drove her husband to the home of Doctor Ed Thaler in Middletown,
more than an hour away. Dylan was subsequently seen with a neck brace,
but his convalescence at Thaler’s home led many to believe that he was re-
ally in recovery from his drug-fueled twenty-four-hour days. “The turning
point was back in Woodstock,” said Dylan. “A little after the accident. Sitting
around one night under a full moon I looked out into the bleak woods and
said, ‘Something’s gotta change.’”
That had already happened. Dylan was now a father, and he and Sara were
raising their family in an Arts and Crafts house called Hi-Lo-Ha on the edge
of the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, New York. His tour plans were
thwarted by his recuperation, though by early 1967 he was once more working
on Eat the Document, a willfully incomprehensible film that was ultimately
rejected by ABC. “Tarantula,” an opaque prose poem, was published to criti-
cal disregard in 1971. The twin failures suggested that Dylan was not working
in his artistic wheelhouse. Still, while secluded from the outside world, 1967
turned out to be one of the most productive years of Dylan’s musical life.
Robbie Robertson, who like the other Hawks was still on retainer, came to
Woodstock to work on Eat the Document. Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and
Garth Hudson soon followed and moved into a secluded, nondescript house
in nearby West Saugerties that was painted pink. The bachelors shared chores,
with Manuel cooking, Hudson doing the dishes, and Danko responsible for
taking out the trash and keeping logs on the fire. Robertson and his wife-to-
be, Dominique Bourgeois, had already settled into a cabin on the grounds of
Albert Grossman’s home. Dubbed “The Duke” by Ronnie Hawkins, Robertson
 Something in the Air 109

was the musician closest to Dylan; he also bonded with Grossman, who taught
him about the business of music.
Before long, the band started having informal musical sessions with their
boss, first in the so-called Red Room of Dylan’s home and then in the basement
of the house that came to be called Big Pink. Dylan began by surveying his past
via a wide variety of folk, country, and blues songs. “With the covers Bob was
educating us a little,” said Robertson. “The whole folkie thing was still very
questionable to us—it wasn’t the train we came in on. He’d be doing this Pete
Seeger stuff and I’d be saying, ‘Oh God. . . . ’ And then . . . he’d come up with
something like ‘Banks of the Royal Canal,’ and you’d say, ‘This is so beautiful!’”
After a world tour that was a high-decibel firestorm, playing this music was a
far more intimate exercise. “[He’d] pull out some old song,” said Robertson,
“and he’d prepped for this. He’d practiced this, and then . . . [he’d] show us.”
Dylan’s students were attentive, and by the time the sessions moved to Big
Pink, Hudson had cobbled together a studio in the basement. Dylan would
arrive in the late morning, put up a pot of coffee, and sit down at a typewriter
to knock out whatever came into his caffeinated head. The others assembled
by noon and descended to the basement to bang out a loose-limbed take of
Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line” or maybe one of his obscure Sun tracks like
“Belshazzar.” Casual fun sometimes led to new compositions. “Bob would be
running through an old song,” said Robertson, “and he’d say, ‘Maybe there’s
a new song to be had here.’”
The songs Dylan played in the basement suggested a latter-day version of
Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. They included an old blues
(“Goin’ Down the Road”), another that he’d done on his debut album (“See
That My Grave Is Kept Clean”), and songs by Hank Williams (“My Bucket’s Got
a Hole in It”), John Lee Hooker (“I’m in the Mood”), Bobby Charles (“See You
Later, Alligator” rendered as “See You Later, Allen Ginsberg”), the Carter Fam-
ily (“Wildwood Flower”), Ian Tyson (“Four Strong Winds”), Eric Von Schmidt
(“Joshua Gone Barbados”), and Elvis Presley (“I Forgot to Remember to For-
get”). Some of the takes were rickety, others spot-on; all were imbued with wit
and a sense of fun. Many were recorded without drums; others found Manuel
or Robertson behind the kit. Hudson operated a tape recorder set within easy
reach of his keyboards.
“We played in a circle,” said Robertson, “like mountain musicians sittin’
where they can hear each other, someone singing lead and someone singing a
harmony, maybe, and you would just play at that volume.” If the instruments
110 Chapter 7

got too loud, everybody turned the volume down. The atmosphere was key.
“You know,” Dylan said, “that’s really the way to do a recording—in a peace-
ful, relaxed setting, in somebody’s basement, with the windows open and a
dog lying on the floor.” The dog in question was Hamlet, who had proved too
unruly for the Dylan household and moved to Big Pink to live with Danko.
New songs soon began to tumble out of Dylan’s typewriter. “It amazed me,”
said Hudson, “how he could come in, sit down at the typewriter, and write
a song.” He gave some lyrics to Richard Manuel, who put music to “Tears
of Rage,” and to Rick Danko, who co-wrote “This Wheel’s on Fire.” Dylan
wrote all of “I Shall Be Released,” and all three of these songs would be on
Music from Big Pink, an album by the boys in the band that was recorded after
Levon Helm rejoined his old group in Woodstock. Robertson couldn’t help
but be impressed by Dylan’s songwriting. “Bob just made me think I could
write these stories and not feel like every song I was writing was ‘Once upon
a time,’” said Robertson. “I’d have songs that I thought would only work if
Jimmie Rodgers sang them, songs I’d be embarrassed to play to people. Bob
broke down a barrier, and I wasn’t embarrassed after that.”
The original songs Dylan recorded in the basement included at least an
album’s worth of superior material that would have provided a stark contrast
to the most influential album of 1967, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band. One can only imagine the impact if Dylan had done properly pro-
duced studio recordings of “I Shall Be Released,” his two new co-writes, and
“You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” “Too Much of Nothing,” “Quinn the Eskimo (The
Mighty Quinn),” “Nothing Was Delivered,” and “Crash on the Levee (Down
in the Flood).” And that doesn’t include more prosaic tunes prized by Dylan
aficionados such as “Goin’ to Acapulco” and “Sign of the Cross,” a consider-
ation of Christianity that included a recitation that Hank Williams might have
cut as Luke the Drifter. Dylan wasn’t oblivious to the outside world. “It was
the Summer of Love,” said Dylan, “so we did our thing and wrote ‘Million
Dollar Bash.’” He also composed “Clothes Line Saga” in response to a big hit
of the day, Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe.”
Grossman kept tabs on the sessions and had sixteen Dylan songs copy-
righted in hopes of generating lucrative cover versions. The object was to
create “mailbox money,” which is to say revenue for Dwarf Music, the new
publishing company that Grossman had established for Dylan. (It wouldn’t
take long for the songwriter to learn that Grossman owned 50 percent of
Dwarf.) Dylan had spent the summer writing new songs that reflected his
roots in folk, blues, country, and rock. He’d also inadvertently pointed to the
 Something in the Air 111

future. “Listening back to the Basement Tapes now,” said British folksinger
Billy Bragg, “it seems to be the beginning of what is called ‘Americana.’”
The songs were circulated to the usual suspects, with Peter, Paul, and Mary
releasing “Too Much of Nothing,” and another of Grossman’s clients, the duo
Ian and Sylvia, recording three songs (including “Tears of Rage”). The Byrds
released a single of “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” in April 1968, months before
it was included (along with “Nothing Was Delivered”) on their country-rock
album Sweetheart of the Rodeo. The tapes also circulated in London, with Man-
fred Mann making “The Mighty Quinn” into a worldwide pop hit and Brian
Auger and the Trinity with Julie Driscoll reaching #5 on the U.K. charts with
“This Wheel’s on Fire.” Fairport Convention, England’s premiere folk-rock
group, which included Richard Thompson and Sandy Denny, crowded into
the office of Dylan’s U.K. representative to hear all the songs before choosing
to record “Million Dollar Bash.”
Joe Boyd, who’d worked behind the scenes at Newport the night Dylan went
electric, was now living in London and producing Fairport Convention. “There
was something fascinating and intimidating about the relentless confidence of
Dylan at that time,” said Boyd. “Those guys . . . sat up there in Woodstock and
they felt no necessity to broadcast it. There was a feeling that you could be as
cool as you want at the Scotch of St. James or in Laurel Canyon or Greenwich
Village, but up here in Woodstock, in this basement room, we are doing shit
we know is the best.”
But in late 1967 the biggest surprise was that Dylan also recorded an album
of songs that got nowhere near the basement of Big Pink. Some speculate
that it was the death of Woody Guthrie on October 3 that inspired Dylan’s
new collection. “Every artist in the world was in the studio trying to make
the biggest-sounding record they possibly could,” said producer Bob John-
ston, referencing the influence of Sgt. Pepper’s. “So what does [Dylan] do? He
comes to Nashville and tells me he wants to record with a bass, drum and
guitar.” The Blonde on Blonde rhythm section of Charlie McCoy on bass and
Ken Buttrey on drums was booked, and Dylan arrived with three polished
songs: “The Drifter’s Escape,” “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” and “Ballad
of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest.” “The songs were written out on paper,” said
Dylan, “and I found the tunes for them later. I didn’t do it [that way] before,
and I haven’t done it since.” Johnston, McCoy, and Buttrey were stunned that
Dylan got three final takes in one three-hour session.
Just two more sessions were required to complete John Wesley Harding, one
of Dylan’s most stylistically coherent collections of songs. His language was
112 Chapter 7

pared to the bone and filled with biblical allusions; Ben Cartwright’s Bible in
the Lyrics of Bob Dylan cites more than sixty biblical references in the thirty-
eight-minute album. Yet songs such as “All Along the Watchtower” and “Dear
Landlord” were as elegantly plainspoken as something by Hank Williams. The
last session tipped toward country rock with Pete Drake contributing pedal
steel guitar to “Down Along the Cove” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” But
the album was hardly standard Nashville fare. “Some of it is country,” said
Johnston. “Some of it is like the ’29 dust-bowl days of Woody Guthrie.”
Dylan originally thought that Robertson and Hudson would add some
overdubs to the recording, but back in Woodstock, everybody agreed that
there was poetry in the album’s simplicity. If the basement sessions had pre-
pared Dylan for this artistic sprint—John Wesley Harding was released in late
December—it had also transformed the Hawks from a hard-edged bar band
to an ensemble thick with voices and instrumental textures. While Dylan was
at work in Nashville, Grossman had the group cut some demos. When the
results failed to win over Columbia Records, Grossman hired John Simon,
who’d recently produced Simon and Garfunkel and Leonard Cohen, to work
with the group.
“I realized quickly that these guys were different from other artists I worked
with,” said Simon, “and that they had a deep respect, bordering on rever-
ence, for the roots of American music.” They also had three distinctive lead
voices—Helm’s southern twang, Manuel’s soulful moan, and Danko’s country
honk—that could blend into a unique harmonic union, with Manuel on top,
Danko in the middle, and Helm down below. The instrumental work was
equally seamless, with Robertson contributing subtle rhythms and spiky
guitar solos and Hudson adding rich keyboard accompaniment. At the dawn
of 1968 Simon took the group into a Manhattan studio.
“The guys were accustomed to playing in close proximity to each other in
the basement,” said Simon. “So we put the baffles away and re-grouped ‘in the
open.’ Besides, they didn’t need the protection of separation, in which, if some-
one made a mistake, that mistake wouldn’t ‘bleed’ into the other microphones.
They didn’t make mistakes.” In two sessions the quintet recorded “Tears of
Rage,” “We Can Talk About It Now,” “Chest Fever,” “This Wheel’s on Fire,” and
“The Weight.” Capitol Records loved the music but wouldn’t let the group call
itself The Crackers, an epithet used to refer to poor white southerners. So they
took the name that everybody called them in Woodstock: The Band.
 SWEETHEART OF THE RODEO

Chris Hillman of the Byrds met Gram Parsons of the International Submarine
Band in line at a Beverly Hills bank. The Byrds had fired David Crosby, and
Roger McGuinn wanted to add keyboards and make a concept album about
the history of American music. “I asked Gram if he could play some McCoy
Tyner type of piano,” said McGuinn, “because I was into John Coltrane.”
Parsons played some rudimentary rock ’n’ roll piano and won the gig when
he picked up the guitar.
“He started singing a Buck Owens song, ‘Under Your Spell Again,’” said
Hillman, “and I immediately started singing harmony with him on it. I
thought, ‘Oh my God, he knows who Buck Owens is! . . . I used to write little
songs for the band in that vein, but the rest of the band always shouted me
down. Then Gram joined and I had an ally.” Instead of becoming a profit-
sharing “official” Byrd, Parsons was put on salary; he didn’t care because he
was already living large on the payments from a trust fund. Hillman and
Parsons then convinced McGuinn to have the Byrds make a country record
in Nashville. To get in the mood, McGuinn bought a Nudie suit and listened
to country radio in his Cadillac.
114 Chapter 8

Parsons was born to a wealthy southern gothic of a family. His father was
a World War II pilot; the fortune came from his mother’s father, a citrus mo-
gul who owned large tracts of real estate. His father committed suicide on
Christmas Day when Parsons was twelve; his alcoholic mother, who remar-
ried, died of cirrhosis on the day he graduated from high school. Parsons
saw Elvis Presley at the age of ten and played in a teenage rock band at the
Derry Down, a club owned by his stepfather. Parsons sang folk music with
the Shilohs and spent the summer of 1965 playing coffeehouses in Greenwich
Village and meeting Dave Van Ronk, Fred Neil, and Stephen Stills. Matriculat-
ing at Harvard University, he skipped classes and listened to Merle Haggard,
George Jones, and the Louvin Brothers. The International Submarine Band
lived together in the Bronx before relocating to Los Angeles.
They opened for such local stars as the Doors and Love and recorded an al-
bum called Safe at Home for a label run by Lee Hazelwood, who’d hit it big with
Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” But before Safe at Home
was released, Parsons and the Byrds went to Nashville to record Sweetheart of
the Rodeo, a collection that amounted to an Americana hit parade. It included
two selections from Dylan’s basement tapes (“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” and
“Nothing Was Delivered”) and songs written by or associated with Merle
Travis (“I Am a Pilgrim”), George Jones (“You’re Still on My Mind”), Woody
Guthrie (“Pretty Boy Floyd”), Gene Autry (“Blue Canadian Rockies”), Merle
Haggard (“Life in Prison”), the Louvin Brothers (“The Christian Life”), and
William Bell (“You Don’t Miss Your Water”). (Bell, who co-wrote the Albert
King blues classic “Born Under a Bad Sign,” won the Americana Grammy for
his 2016 album This Is Where I Live.) The record also included two of Parsons’
finest original songs, “Hickory Wind” and “One Hundred Years from Now.”
When the Byrds were in Nashville, Columbia pulled strings to get them
booked on the Grand Ole Opry; for the occasion, the group got haircuts and
McGuinn went without his trademark granny glasses. Still, when the Byrds
played a recent Merle Haggard hit, “Sing Me Back Home,” the audience re-
acted as if they were setting fire to draft cards. “I wanted to crawl off the stage,”
said Lloyd Green, who played pedal steel on Sweetheart and accompanied the
Byrds on country’s sacred stage. “I didn’t believe they’d get such rude, red-
neck treatment.” Matters got worse when Parsons, during the live broadcast,
scuttled a second planned Haggard song to play his own “Hickory Wind.”
Opry officials were not amused.
 Sweetheart of the Rodeo 115

Back in Los Angeles the Byrds completed Sweetheart with sidemen more
accustomed to cutting country records. “[When recording] with Buck Owens
we had to get at least three songs done in our three-hour period,” said pianist
Earl Ball. “Then I’d go over and record with the Byrds, where if you got one
song all night you were doing good. And Don Rich [Buck’s guitarist and ar-
ranger] was insistent about everybody being in tune, and everybody having
the intros together. . . . I’d get over to the Byrds and the first thing they’d do
was get high and try to tune their guitars.” Pedal steel player Jay Dee Maness
noted, “I learned something important from that record. That steel guitar can
fit into any kind of music.” Pete Drake learned the same thing when George
Harrison flew him to London to play pedal steel on All Things Must Pass.
Lee Hazelwood, meanwhile, threatened to sue Columbia because he still
had Parsons under contract. (When the International Submarine Band’s LP
was finally released, it sank without a trace.) Here the truth gets murky. Some
say that McGuinn and Parsons both recorded lead vocals for some selections
with an eye toward picking the best. Others say that McGuinn replaced Par-
sons’s lead vocals because of the legal imbroglio and that the settlement came
in time to retain three of them, including “Hickory Wind.” There’s another
interpretation. “McGuinn was reluctant to have Gram sing an entire Byrds
album when he was the newest member of the group,” said producer Gary
Usher. “The album had just the exact amount of Gram Parsons on it that
McGuinn, Hillman, and myself wanted.”
The Byrds flew to the United Kingdom for a concert at the Royal Albert
Hall before a planned tour of South Africa. The after-show party was espe-
cially memorable when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards proposed driving
to Stonehenge to watch the sun come up. “Wandering around out there in
the dark with the Stones was like a Middle Earth fantasy trip,” said Chris
Hillman, “except that Gram was so enamored with Mick and Keith that he
was behaving like a schoolgirl with a crush on the teacher.” The Stones told
Parsons that it was wrong to play South Africa because of racial apartheid.
But something more than politics might have prompted Parsons to miss the
flight to Johannesburg. Carlos Bernall, the band’s road manager, who ended
up substituting for Parsons on guitar, said the reason was that “he couldn’t
have things exactly how he wanted. . . . He wanted a steel guitar on a lot of
his tunes and things that the band wasn’t prepared to jump into overnight.”
Parsons stayed in England with his new best friend, Keith Richards.
GRAM PARSONS
 Sweetheart of the Rodeo 117

“He taught me the mechanics of country music,” said Richards, “the Nash-
ville style as opposed to the Bakersfield style. . . . He started to turn me on to
certain classic tracks and [a] certain style of playing things—George Jones,
Merle Haggard, Jimmie Rodgers.” Parsons also showed Richards “Nashville”
tuning, in which the lower four strings of the guitar (low E through G) are
replaced with strings that are tuned an octave above standard tuning. At about
this time Richards also soaked up valuable expertise from guitarist Ry Cooder,
who played sessions with the Rolling Stones, adding a slide guitar solo to
“Sister Morphine” and mandolin to the band’s version of Robert Johnson’s
“Love in Vain.” It was Cooder who introduced Richards to the open-G guitar
tuning that he used on such songs as “Honky Tonk Women” and “Brown
Sugar.” In the early 1970s Cooder made albums like Into the Purple Valley and
Paradise and Lunch that were infused with American roots music. In the late
1990s Cooder played on and helped promote The Buena Vista Social Club, an
internationally successful album that introduced a venerable ensemble of
Cuban musicians.”
McGuinn fired Parsons from the Byrds before the release of Sweetheart
of the Rodeo, which, selling fewer than fifty thousand copies, was the group’s
least successful album. His replacement was Clarence White, the guitar vir-
tuoso who’d already played on the group’s albums. “Clarence White’s brother,
Roland, got me my first job with Lester Flatt’s band,” said Marty Stuart, who
joined the group as its mandolin player in 1972, when he was fourteen. “For
a while, I lived with Roland and his family, and in his house he had a stack of
Byrds records. I said, ‘What’s that about?’ and he said, ‘My brother Clarence
recorded with the Byrds.’”
“I remember buying Sweetheart of the Rodeo in 1973,” continued Stuart. “It
was already in the discount bin. I was blown away, because it was the first time
I had heard folk and gospel and bluegrass and rock ’n’ roll and country come
together in one place.” Sweetheart similarly moved Gillian Welch, who bought
the album while in college in the late 1980s. “It was my gateway record,” said
Welch, a singer-songwriter who would become a star of Americana. “It’s like
the spokes of a wheel and, in many respects, my record collection radiates
out from this record.”

   
On January 20, 1968, The Band backed Bob Dylan at the Woody Guthrie
Memorial Concert at Carnegie Hall, but this wasn’t the thunderous ensemble
118 Chapter 8

that had stunned folk fans. Rather, it was a performance born in the base-
ment of Big Pink, with tangy vocal harmonies, atmospheric keyboards, and
the occasional cry of an electric guitar. Dylan sang three Guthrie tunes on a
program that also featured Pete Seeger and Judy Collins; it was his first public
appearance since being secluded in Woodstock. Coming just weeks after the
release of John Wesley Harding, the performance served to introduce both the
country-dad Dylan and a group about to complete its debut album.
The Band and producer John Simon traveled to Los Angeles to record at
Capitol’s Los Angeles studio. “I wanted to discover the sound of The Band,”
said Robertson. “So I thought, ‘I’m gonna do this record and I’m not gonna
play a guitar solo on the whole record. I’m only going to play riffs, Curtis May-
field kind of riffs. I wanted the drums to have their own character. I wanted
the piano not to sound like a big Yamaha grand. I wanted it to sound like an
upright piano.” As for the vocals, said Robertson, “I didn’t want screaming
vocals. I wanted sensitive vocals where you can hear the breathing. . . . I like
voices coming in one at a time, in a chain reaction kind of like the Staple
Singers did.”
That kind of sound required an attention to detail, a specialty of Garth
Hudson, who Simon said was “many levels above the organists and pianists
in other rock groups.” Hudson introduced “Chest Fever” with a solo sprung
from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor; on “The Weight,” he fed his Rock-
Si-Chord electric keyboard through a wah-wah pedal to make the sound rise
and fall within the vocal harmonies. Hudson used a telegraph key to add a
playfully percussive element to “This Wheel’s on Fire.” Meanwhile, at Robert-
son’s suggestion, Helm tuned his drums to accentuate the deep, woozy meter
of “Tears of Rage.” “You make the drum notes bend down in pitch,” said Helm,
noting that Ringo Starr used the same technique. “You hit it, it sounds, and
then it hums as the note dies out. If the ensemble is right, you can hear the
sustain like a bell, and it’s very emotional. It can keep a slow song suspended
in an interesting way.”
And then there was the material. “Robbie had obviously learned a lot from
being in such close proximity to Bob,” said Simon, “particularly in the story
songs and the freewheeling imagery.” Musically, however, Robertson drew
from a wider menu of styles and chords. Simon said that the group’s three
voices “gave Robbie as a songwriter a rich vocal palette to utilize. His use of
the guys’ individual distinctive vocal qualities reminds me of Duke Ellington’s
use of the special colors of his horn soloists.” Those different hues are clearly
 Sweetheart of the Rodeo 119

evident on “The Weight.” “The characters that appear in the lyric—Luke,

Anna Lee, Crazy Chester—were all people we knew,” recalled Helm. “The
music was the sum of all the experiences we’d shared for the past ten years,
distilled through the quieter vibe of our lives in the country.” And the vo-
cals reflect that history, with Helm and Danko singing individual verses and
Manuel joining them on the chorus.
Manuel took the majority of lead vocals, including soulful turns on his
own “Lonesome Susie” and the song he wrote with Dylan, “Tears of Rage,” a
grief-stricken ballad that was a willfully offbeat choice to open Music from Big
Pink. “They were seasoned veterans whose debut album sounded more like
a band in its prime,” said Simon. “The songs were more like buried treasure
from American lore than new songs by contemporary artists. The reason for
this is they were playing out of what I call their ‘Appalachian scale,’ a pen-
tatonic, five-note scale like the black keys on the piano. That was the palette
from which those melodies came.”
The album contained one cover song, “Long Black Veil,” a country ballad
by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin that sounded as old as the hills but was
actually a country hit for Lefty Frizzell in 1959. Robertson said that country
music wasn’t in the mix during their days with Ronnie Hawkins. “When we
were up in Woodstock,” he said, “something happened. . . . All of a sudden
this bluegrass music, this mountain music became something that we would
do in our living room. We would do it with guitar, mandolin, and Rick some-
times would play acoustic bass. It was a nice setup and Richard would just
sing and maybe play along on a tambourine and Garth would sometimes play
accordion. Then, that actual setup of instrumentation kind of entered into
what we were doing on other kinds of things that weren’t necessarily even
mountain music.”
Music from Big Pink, released on July 1, 1968, was as different from the music
of the day as moonshine at a pot party. Al Kooper gave it a rave review in Rolling
Stone that concluded, “There are people who will work their lives away in vain
and not touch it.” Time magazine put The Band on its cover with the headline,
“The New Sound of Country Rock.” Eric Clapton travelled to Woodstock to
meet the musicians, dreamed of joining the group, and then broke up his
popular blues-rock power trio, Cream. “These guys were the real thing,” said
Clapton, “and I was touring with this band of psychedelic loonies.”
Dylan first heard Big Pink at a listening party in Albert Grossman’s liv-
ing room. “When ‘The Weight’ came on,” said Robertson, “he said, ‘This is
120 Chapter 8

fantastic. Who wrote that song? That was so good. You did it man, you did
it.’” Dylan, who’d taken up painting, had already given his friends a naïve
image for the album’s cover that depicted not five but six musicians plus a
pachyderm. Some consider the sixth musician to be Dylan in that he had a
hand in three of its songs, but I choose to think that it’s the producer of the
recording, John Simon, and that Dylan is actually the elephant in the room.
(Dylan and Grossman’s Dwarf Music published all the songs on Big Pink.)
The Band kept a low profile in Woodstock while Music from Big Pink made
waves among rock ’n’ roll tastemakers. There were no plans for the group to
tour, but that didn’t stop promoters from offering increasingly larger paydays.
But there would be no shows. First, Helm and Manuel were involved in a
multivehicle accident that involved a Woodstock police car. Then Manuel
burned his foot firing up a barbecue grill using gasoline, and Danko broke
his neck in another car accident. In the meantime, Hudson kept to himself,
and Robertson took care of business.
“He alone of them was organized enough to present this mountain lion
energy they all had,” said Libby Titus, who grew up in Woodstock and was
at the center of the town’s social scene. “He knew how to call it in and turn
it into art that could be put on record. He suffered later for this quality, but I
saw him as a great young man.” Titus also noted that Dylan and his musical
pals had attracted “charming and attractive vultures” to Woodstock. “As The
Band was trying to continue their career,” she said, “a major heroin scene
began to surround the picture. They were very dangerous times for all of us.”

   
Gram Parsons wasted little time after being fired from the Byrds and enlisted
bass player Chris Ethridge by telephone from the United Kingdom. Back
in Los Angeles, he approached Richie Furay, who had played with Buffalo
Springfield and who invited Parsons to a rehearsal of a new country-rock
band he was forming with Jim Messina called Poco. Meanwhile, Chris Hill-
man quit the Byrds after discovering that fiscal mismanagement had left the
group with only $20,000. Hillman and Parsons were soon sharing a house in
the San Fernando Valley and putting together a band of their own; they tried
but failed to poach Clarence White from the Byrds.
At night the pair hit the local clubs, where they were excited to discover the
gospel-tinged rock and soul being played by Delaney and Bonnie (Bramlett)
with such friends as guitarist J. J. Cale and pianist Leon Russell. “[Gram] had
 Sweetheart of the Rodeo 121

this sort of ‘wasted boy in Hollywood’ charisma about him,” said singer-song-
writer Tom Russell. “He had a real soulful voice, and he’d done his homework.
He could do Louvin Brothers songs, or Hank Williams . . . all day long. Gram
used to go out to cowboy country bars in Encino in his cape and long hair and
almost get killed until he’d sing a George Jones song. And he’d do the same
in hippie bars.”
Parsons already had a name for the new band, the Flying Burrito Broth-
ers, and Hillman’s history with the Byrds helped secure a deal with A&M.
Parsons encouraged his mates (who in addition to Ethridge included pedal
steel player “Sneaky” Pete Kleinow) to splurge on specially designed Nudie
suits. Hillman decorated his with a burning yellow sun, while Parsons de-
signed a head-turner that depicted pills, marijuana leaves, pinup girls, and
a throbbing red cross. (The suit is now on display at the Country Music Hall
of Fame.) Parsons and Hillman kept busy writing songs in the bachelor pad
they dubbed Burrito Manor.
“We drove to a modern cowboy’s ranch with wagon wheels paving the
driveway,” said Mercy Peters, who was accompanied by Pamela Des Barres.
Both women were members of Frank Zappa’s tongue-in-cheek girl group,
the GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously). “We entered the house and shy
Chris Hillman and the cat in the Nudie suit greeted us with a grocery bag
full of grass, and Gram was so down-home dazzling with sensuous southern
hospitality, it just slayed me. These are the first words I recall him speaking
to me: As he leaned over his pile of records, and put on an old George Jones
album, a tear fell from his eye, and he [said], ‘This is George Jones, the king
of broken hearts.’”
Parsons’s writing sessions with Hillman produced an enduring country
shuffle (“Wheels”) and an up-tempo rocker (“Christine’s Song”); both songs
featured vocals modeled on those of the Everly Brothers. “They were har-
monies,” said Hillman, “first and thirds. Gram would sing the harmony to
me, and we’d switch on the chorus, where I would sing the harmony and
he would sing the lead.” Kleinow added unorthodox fuzz-toned licks on the
pedal steel guitar. (During his tenure with the Burritos, Kleinow kept his
day job producing stop-motion animation for The Gumby Show.) Parsons
helped Hillman complete “Sin City,” a ballad that reflected his sour state
of mind. (“I was going through this horrible divorce,” said Hillman, “where
my wife had been going out with the road manager. . . . Our manager had
robbed us and I quit the Byrds and there was my life. ‘This whole town is
122 Chapter 8

filled with sin.’”) Parsons also put lyrics to two melodies that Ethridge had
written in high school. Hillman believes that Gram’s very best vocals were
on these two songs, “Hot Burrito #1” (often referred to as “I’m Your Toy”)
and “Hot Burrito #2.”
Parsons hated the term country rock; he called his work “Cosmic American
Music,” and an essential part of his musical gumbo was rhythm & blues.
That’s why it’s significant that the Burritos’ first album, The Gilded Palace of
Sin, included two songs written at the corner of country and R&B, “Do Right
Woman, Do Right Man” and “Dark End of the Street” (both by Dan Penn
and Chips Moman). “We were consciously welding the two,” said Hillman.
“That was the merging of the black and white blues. The crying out, taking
those R&B songs and putting a light country & western arrangement to
them.”
Penn, born in Alabama, fronted an R&B band called Dan Penn and the
Pallbearers (the group traveled in a hearse) while engineering recording ses-
sions in Muscle Shoals. He wrote songs with Lindon “Spooner” Oldham, who
played keyboards on Arthur Alexander’s 1961 debut, “You Better Move On” (the
first national hit recorded in Muscle Shoals) and Percy Sledge’s “When a Man
Loves a Woman.” When Aretha Franklin sat behind the piano to record the
gospel-tinged “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” Oldham slipped
behind an electric keyboard and created the distinctive lick—Penn called it
“the three-fingered dumb hum”—that introduced one of the most memorable
records of the soul era. After Penn and Oldham wrote their first big pop hit,
“I’m Your Puppet” (1966) recorded by James and Bobby Purify, Penn moved
to Memphis to try his hand at record production.
Penn hit pay dirt when he produced “The Letter” by the Box Tops (he and
Oldham wrote the group’s follow-up hit, “Cry Like a Baby”). He also bonded
with Lincoln Wayne “Chips” Moman, a Georgia-born guitarist whom he’d
met at a Wilson Pickett session and whose nickname referenced his fondness
for playing poker. After doing session work in Los Angeles and touring with
rockabilly star Gene Vincent, Moman settled in Memphis, where he worked
at Stax Records and produced the company’s first big hit, “Gee Whiz” by Carla
Thomas. He later established American Sound Studios, where he produced
Elvis Presley’s comeback album, From Elvis in Memphis (1969).
In the summer of 1966 Penn and Moman were playing cards with disc
jockeys visiting Memphis for a convention. Taking a break, they tried to ful-
fill an ambition. “We were always wanting to come up with the best cheatin’
 Sweetheart of the Rodeo 123

song,” said Penn. Less than an hour later, they’d arguably hit the mark with
“Dark End of the Street,” which became a #10 R&B hit for James Carr and
was subsequently recorded by everyone from the Burritos to Aretha Franklin
and Linda Ronstadt. The pair wrote “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” after
Moman invited Penn to his home, where his wife served quail for dinner. First
made famous by Aretha Franklin, the song, like “Dark End of the Street,” has
been covered by singers of both country and soul. The two tunes embody the
essence of Americana. The Flying Burrito Brothers also recorded “To Love
Somebody,” a soulful 1967 pop hit for the Bee Gees that was written with an
eye toward having it recorded by Otis Redding. Otis died before that could
happen but others who cut the song included Nina Simone, Roberta Flack,
and Janis Joplin.
The country–soul connection was artfully underscored in the early 1970s
by soul singer Al Green, who was encouraged to sing country music by Audrey
Williams. “I met Miss Audrey,” said Green, who visited her Nashville home,
“and asked, ‘Waddya want to do?’ ‘First,’ she says, ‘I wanna get a bottle of
champagne.’” Williams played a selection of her country favorites, including
some by her late husband. Green subsequently recorded slow, poignant ver-
sions of Kristofferson’s “For the Good Times,” Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I
Could Cry,” and Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away.” “Every R&B
record you hear is not necessarily an R&B song,” said Green. “It might have
derived from country music.”
The Flying Burrito Brothers peaked with the release of The Gilded Palace
of Sin, which despite lackluster production remains a milestone of country
rock and, by extension, Americana. Unfortunately, the Burritos were a poor
live band. “I cannot recall one performance where I wasn’t embarrassed,” said
Kleinow, including a showcase at the Whisky-A-Go-Go where Parsons and
Ethridge were too stoned to play and A&M executives left in disgust. “I was
the taskmaster, and I should have gotten it together,” said Hillman. “That first
line-up was bad onstage.”
On their first national tour the Burritos floundered in front of rock audi-
ences who had little interest in country music. A surfeit of pills, pot, and
cocaine didn’t help, and a snowstorm in the Northeast caused the band to
miss its highly promoted New York City debut at The Scene. The Burrito
Brothers returned to Los Angeles with good reviews for their debut album
(including a thumbs-up by Dylan in Rolling Stone) but minimal sales and a
six-figure financial debt to its record company. The group (except Parsons,
124 Chapter 8

who never worried about money) made ends meet by playing local clubs and
the occasional out-of-town gig.
Hillman moved to bass when Ethridge left the group, and Bernie Leadon,
who would soon be a founding member of the Eagles, became the band’s
guitarist. (Leadon’s younger brother Tom was in Florida playing in Tom Petty’s
band, Mudcrutch. “We started listening to the first Flying Burrito Brothers
album and just loved it,” said Leadon. “Nobody in Florida was doing anything
like that.”) Longbranch Pennywhistle, a duo consisting of future Eagle Glenn
Frey and J. D. Souther, opened for the Burritos at the Troubadour. “Glenn Frey
was just in awe of Gram,” said Hillman. “He learned about stage presence and
how to deliver a vocal.”
“I always thought that what I was trying to do at the time was modern
country music,” said Souther. “I’d been listening to the Flying Burrito Broth-
ers, the Byrds, Poco, Dillard & Clark. Those guys had listened to Buck Owens
and Merle Haggard, and those guys had listened to Hank Williams and George
Jones, and those guys had listened to the Louvin Brothers and the Carter Fam-
ily.” One lesson of that history was that bad behavior didn’t preclude good
music. “Gram was very self-destructive,” said musician Walter Egan. “To see
him as a person, as opposed to a performer or a singer, was disappointing.
To hear him sing was amazing.”
Parsons was now living at the Chateau Marmont and developing a taste for
heroin. The comity of the Burritos was gone; Parsons and Hillman struggled
to write anything, let alone songs as strong as those on their debut. Parsons
was increasingly unreliable on stage; Leadon said that his acoustic guitar was
little more than a prop. Matters worsened in the fall of 1969 when Parsons was
distracted by the arrival of the Rolling Stones in Los Angeles to prepare for
an American tour and the release of Let It Bleed.
“Gram was one of the few people who helped me sing country music,”
said Mick Jagger. “[Especially] the idea of country music being played slightly
tongue in cheek.” He was also said to inspire the Stones to record “Country
Honk,” a down-home take on “Honky Tonk Women.” Parsons started wearing
makeup and miming Jagger’s stage moves, and he already shared dangerous
habits with Richards. “Gram was as knowledgeable about chemical substances
as I was,” said Richards. “He could get better coke than the mafia.” One night
the two motored to Joshua Tree State Park, dropped LSD, and wandered the
desert while scanning the sky for UFOs. Another time, they flew to Las Vegas
to catch a show by a mutual hero, Elvis Presley.
 Sweetheart of the Rodeo 125

During the winter of 1970 the Burritos struggled to complete their second
album, Burrito Deluxe, a mediocre effort best known for including a then-
unreleased Jagger-Richards song, “Wild Horses.” Jim Dickson, who’d helped
launch the Byrds, produced the album. “I think the Burritos had used up
their creative surge that had resulted in all the songs on that first album,” said
Leadon. “They had shot their wad.” In June Hillman finally fired Parsons when
he showed up late and loaded for a gig at the Brass Ring in the San Fernando
Valley.
But Parsons was already gone. The previous December, he’d begged the
Rolling Stones to let the Burrito Brothers play at their free show at the Al-
tamont Speedway. Organized on the fly, with the Hell’s Angels handling se-
curity, Altamont drew three hundred thousand people and is seen as the
apocalyptic counterpoint of the peaceful Woodstock Festival of the preceding
August. Jefferson Airplane played both events. “Woodstock was a bunch of
stupid slobs in the mud,” said Grace Slick, “and Altamont was a bunch of
angry slobs in the mud.” The Burritos played in the afternoon; the Stones
waited for nightfall. “When we went through the backstage area it was full
of people,” said Stones drummer Charlie Watts. “A lot of them were fucked
up and the Angels made a razor-sharp line for us to walk through. I felt very
worried as we walked to the stage. It was an event waiting to happen.”
And it did. As the Rolling Stones played, the crowd pushed toward the
stage, and Meredith Hunter, a black man, was seen to pull a gun. A Hell’s
Angel promptly stabbed him to death; the Stones played “Under My Thumb”
as Hunter bled out into the California dirt. The rock stars fled to a waiting
helicopter with Parsons close behind. The other Burritos were left to their own
devices as Parsons and the Stones flew back to San Francisco. The entourage,
shaken by the violence, gathered at the Huntington Hotel. “Gram was there,
leaning against the wall,” says Pamela Des Barres, “wearing black leather and
eye makeup, nodding out. Keith was wearing cowboy clothes. It looked like
they were turning into each other.”
AMERICAN TUNE

Merle Haggard looked out the window of his tour bus and saw an exit sign
along Interstate 40 for Muskogee. Haggard’s family had come from this part
of Oklahoma, and he poked his drowsy drummer, Roy Edward Burris, to
wager that people didn’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee. Haggard and the
Strangers were quick to think of other things that would raise rural eyebrows
such as Roman sandals, shaggy hair, and LSD. Burris said it took about fifteen
minutes to write the song that Haggard debuted the next night at Fort Bragg,
North Carolina. “Soldiers started comin’ after me on the stage,” said Haggard,
“and I didn’t know what was going to happen next until they took the mike
and said we’d have to do it again before they’d let us go. I had never had this
strong of a reaction before.”
Haggard recorded “Okie from Muskogee” in July 1969. Four months later it
was a divided nation’s #1 country song. “We wrote it to be satirical originally,”
said Haggard, who joked that Muskogee might be the only place where he
hadn’t smoked pot. “But then people latched on to it.” The song made Hag-
gard a player in the late-sixties culture wars and helped fortify a wall between
rock and country music just as the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers were
taking their latest music to the Fillmore.
 American Tune 127

Politics was not new to country music. In 1944 Jimmie Davis rode the popu-
larity of his song “You Are My Sunshine” to the governorship of Louisiana.
Davis called for racial segregation at the same time Woody Guthrie and Pete
Seeger gave modern folk music its leftist pedigree. When rock ’n’ roll became
the music of teenage America in the 1950s and of the counterculture of the
1960s, country music offered a more traditional sanctuary. “Many Americans
have sought reassurance that the older comfortable and predictable world
they once knew is still intact,” said Bill Malone in Country Music, U.S.A., pub-
lished in 1968. “In the realm of popular culture, country music seemed a safe
retreat to many because it suggested ‘bedrock’ American values of solidity,
respect for authority, old time religion, home-based virtues, and patriotism.”
President Richard Nixon saw the connection between “Okie from Musk-
ogee” and his Southern Strategy, which would turn the region Republican.
In 1970 (and for the next three years), he declared October Country Music
Month, and the Country Music Association produced an album that paired
various songs with excerpts from the president’s speeches. On December 21,
1970, Elvis Presley arrived unannounced at the White House and left a note
of introduction at the front gate. It said, in part, that Presley had done “an
in-depth study of Drug Abuse and Communist Brainwashing techniques.”
Hours later, Elvis was ushered into the Oval Office after the Secret Service
confiscated the World War II Colt 45 that he wanted to give to the president.
Presley told Nixon that the Beatles were a bad influence on youth and said
that he could help the cause if he were given a “Federal Agent at Large” badge
from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. Then the two men posed
for the photo seen around the world. The King left with cuff links bearing the
presidential seal and an honorary badge worth its weight in tin.
In 1972 Johnny Cash went to the White House to lobby for prison reform.
Nixon asked him to sing “Okie from Muskogee” and Guy Drake’s “Welfare
Cadillac.” “I don’t know those songs,” replied Cash. “But I got a few of my
own I can play for you.” With the press watching, Cash sang an anti-war song
(“What Is Truth?”) and a song about a Native American who enlisted and
“forgot the white man’s greed” (“The Ballad of Ira Hayes”). When Haggard
himself performed at the White House in 1973, he found that the political
swells had little interest in anything but “Okie from Muskogee.”
Nixon took to the stage of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry in 1974 in the midst
of the Watergate scandal. The Ryman Auditorium, rich in history, had hosted
its last show the night before his arrival; Nixon helped inaugurate the slick
128 Chapter 9

new $15 million theater at a suburban amusement complex called Opryland.

George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama who’d run against
Nixon in the presidential election, was in the front row as the president sat at
the piano and played “Happy Birthday” for his wife Pat. Nixon then praised
country music for its embrace of traditional values, led the audience in sing-
ing “God Bless America,” and exited to a bluegrass rendition of “Hail to the
Chief.”
One hundred forty-six days later, Nixon left the White House in disgrace.
The shuttered Ryman Auditorium, though recognized as a historic site, was
threatened with demolition and left to deteriorate for decades. In 1991 Em-
mylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers recorded At the Ryman before a small
audience; for safety’s sake, no one was allowed to sit beneath the unstable bal-
cony. Subsequent renovations revived the Ryman, which officially reopened
with a 1994 broadcast of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion.
Haggard followed “Okie from Muskogee” with the equally combative “The
Fightin’ Side of Me.” Haggard was one of the best singers and songwriters in
country music, but his “love-it-or-leave-it” politics led many to be oblivious to
his gifts. Haggard was hardly the only country artist championing conserva-
tive values. Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man” (1968) is both her biggest
hit and one of the most oft-recorded songs in country music history; it’s been
used in films as diverse as Five Easy Pieces and The Blues Brothers. Written in
fifteen minutes by Wynette and producer Billy Sherrill, the tune is known to
everyone and debated endlessly. The song’s subservient lyrics rankled femi-
nists, and its repute lingered; campaigning for her husband in 1992, Hillary
Clinton said that she wasn’t “some little woman ‘standing by my man’ like
Tammy Wynette.” Today, “Stand by Your Man” remains a cultural totem that
can be considered both campy and sincere.
In 1972 Wynette and George Jones performed for George Wallace during
his presidential race (Haggard declined to lend his support). Country music
slipped back into the White House in 1978 when Jimmy Carter of Georgia
invited Willie Nelson to perform. After the show, as Nelson was settling into
the Lincoln bedroom, there was a knock on the door, and the president’s son
Chip suggested a trip to the roof to enjoy a panoramic view of the nation’s
capital. As they admired the American monuments, Chip, who knew a thing
or two about Willie, fired up a joint.

   
 American Tune 129

The Band never recorded its own music at Big Pink, their famous home in
the Catskills. Their second album was made at a rich man’s home with a pool
house to use as a recording room and a nearby bathroom that was ideal for
adding echo. The Band, a quintessentially Americana album, was a group of
songs that naturally blended country, blues, ragtime, and gospel. One pictures
it being recorded in a comfy cabin surrounded by whispering pines; instead,
it was made at the Hollywood Hills pad of Sammy Davis Jr.
As John Simon assembled a portable studio, Helm visited a local pawnshop
and bought a $130 set of antique drums with wooden rims. “You can feel the
wood in this record,” said Robertson, describing the album’s organic sound
as well as Helm’s new tools. “We took great care with every instrument,” said
producer Simon, “to make it sound different for every song, and appropriate
for every song.” Afternoon rehearsals would refine and polish the arrange-
ments; recording would typically commence at night.
Songs were defined by details, and because the members were multi-in-
strumentalists, colorful variety was at their fingertips. “With ‘Rag Mama Rag,’
said Robertson, “we had the basic thing and then, ‘Oh, what about if Garth
played the piano on this, what about if we do the intro on violin and ’cause
you’re [referring to Rick Danko] playing violin, you can’t play the bass. It’s a
ragtime thing so what about this tuba [played by Simon] taking the place of the
bass.’ So we would start to add up the bits and pieces. ‘What about if Richard
played the drums on it in that kind of funny style he had.’ It’s ideas coming
until you get the character. All of a sudden it’s like, ‘Oh . . . we’re starting to
get a match here.’”
And then there was the special sauce. “We called Garth ‘H. B.’” said Helm.
“This stood for ‘Honey Boy,’ because at the end of the day, after the other in-
struments were put away, Garth was still in the studio sweetening the tracks,
stacking up those chords, putting on brass, woodwinds, whatever was needed
to make the music sing. Garth made us sound like we did.” The vocals were
recorded live alongside the instruments and not overdubbed separately. Other
groups would assemble songs from separate sessions; during the recording of
Sgt. Pepper, for example, Paul McCartney played his bass guitar in isolation.
The Band recorded as a unit.
“Everybody played a major role in our balance and musicianship,” said
Robertson, who wrote all the songs, including three collaborations with Man-
uel and one with Helm. “Mostly [Richard] would get a music thing going,”
said Robertson of songs such as “Whispering Pines” and “When You Awake,”
130 Chapter 9

and “we would finish that up together.” Robertson wrote lyrics that seemed
to spring from the past. “I could relate to farmers in the Depression getting
together in unions better than I could relate to going to San Francisco and
putting flowers in your hair,” said Robertson. “The way I get the most effect
out of something is to come in from another door.”
When Robertson decided that the narrator of one song would be a Con-
federate soldier, it was clear that the drummer from Arkansas would sing
“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Robertson did some research at
the Woodstock library and took Helm’s advice to “make General Robert E.
Lee come out with all due respect.” The drummer found his own way into
singing the tune. “Instead of keeping full time rhythmically,” said Helm, “we
found if we halved the beat we could lay the lyrics in a different place, and
the pulse would be easier to move to, more danceable.”
The album was originally set to be called Harvest in reference to the last
track, “King Harvest (Has Surely Come).” The song had verses about a belea-
guered union man and a farmer praying for a bountiful crop, with a coiled
guitar solo by Robertson that was not at all like the wailing improvisations
he played with Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan. “It was like you have to
hold your breath while playing these kinds of solos,” said Robertson of the
instrumental passage that concluded the tune. “You can’t breathe or you’ll
throw yourself off.”
To get the album done, the group took what Manuel called “high-school
fat girl diet pills.” By the time The Band flew to San Francisco to make its
concert debut at Bill Graham’s Winterland, Robertson, who’d suffered over
each detail of the recording, was utterly exhausted. With the show just hours
away, a hypnotist was summoned to his bedside. “The tall, silver-haired hyp-
notist, Pierre Clement, [was] rubbing Robbie’s forehead,” said Simon. The
Band finally reached the stage after midnight and played an abbreviated set.
“The hypnotist did help him get over it,” said photographer Elliott Landy. “He
said, ‘Every time I snap my fingers, you’ll feel better,’ and it worked. Robbie
says there was this cacophony of sound on stage, with all the instruments
and amplifiers—and yet, every time the hypnotist snapped his fingers—he
heard it.”
The Band mesmerized concert audiences with its delicate ensemble
work. “My drums were on a riser, stage right,” said Helm, “next to Garth’s
organ, also on a riser in the middle of the stage. Richard’s grand piano was
stage left. These were sight lines we’d worked out years before so we could
THE BAND
132 Chapter 9

see one another’s eyes to know where the music was going. Robbie stood
between me and Garth; Rick between Richard and Garth. It was right and
tight.” Musicians were especially impressed. “Me and a bunch of guys from
New Orleans would listen to that second album all the time and it would
just tickle us that Robbie was from Canada,” said Malcolm “Dr. John” Re-
bennack. “The music sounded to me like a cross between Memphis and
New Orleans, it was really in the pockets of those places without ever, like,
copying the original stuff.”
Fairport Convention, a British folk rock band, recognized that The Band
presented them with a personal challenge. “Fairport had been an American
folk-rock band playing that style of music, even though they were English,”
said the group’s producer, Joe Boyd. “Knowing their sensibilities and their
knowledge, they could never be The Band. So the next logical thing was to
say, ‘Hey, we’re good, so we can do with our own culture what they did for
American culture.’”
“The Band had such a soulful rhythm section in Rick Danko and Levon
Helm,” said Nick Lowe, who played bass with the British pub-rock band Brin-
sley Schwarz. “No one knows how to play soulfully any more. Many people
can play earnest . . . earnestness is what people today mistake for soulfulness.”
He also appreciated the history. “Bob Dylan,” said Lowe, “a Jewish bloke from
a northern state, a bunch of farm blokes from Canada, and Levon from 2,000
miles away in the South, a white black man. . . . There is North America right
there! Certainly as far as white popular music can be portrayed. Was there
ever anything better or more representative of North America?”

   
Happy Traum met Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village and was later a neighbor
in Woodstock. “It was very family oriented,” said Traum, “dinners together,
hanging out and playing a lot of music. He would come down to our house
and say, ‘Hey, you want to hear this new song I wrote?’ What were we gong to
say, ‘No’? I remember some of the songs from John Wesley Harding. Very few
people were let into that world—a couple of artists and a couple of stonema-
sons—we were very careful not to abuse the privilege.”
The year 1968 was a tumultuous time, with multiple assassinations, persis-
tent racial tensions, the escalation of combat in Vietnam, and anti-war dem-
onstrations fated to explode outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago.
Dylan wrote little music, perhaps wrung dry after a very prolific 1967. (Tracks
recorded at Big Pink appeared on the first well-known illegal bootleg, Great
 American Tune 133

White Wonder [1969].) But even without new music Dylan was heard all over
the radio, with Manfred Mann hitting the Top 10 with “The Mighty Quinn”
and Jimi Hendrix releasing the definitive version of “All Along the Watch-
tower.” Dylan songs were also central to The Band’s Music from Big Pink and
the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo.
Dylan was a public figure enjoying a private life. “He was hiding from the
world,” said Elliot Landy, “savoring the magical experience of having young
children.” Fans came to Woodstock in hopes of meeting the Bard; one day a
hippie and his old lady had to be thrown out of Hi-Lo-Ha’s master bedroom.
The aggrieved homeowner bought a gun. “I used to think that myself and my
songs were the same thing,” he said. “But I don’t believe that any more. There’s
myself and there’s my song.” Dylan was also angry that Albert Grossman
owned 50 percent of Dwarf Music (the songwriter’s next publishing company,
Big Sky Music, would have the same split with his manager) and pointedly
ignored him at the Woody Guthrie tribute. Dylan would eventually fire his
manager; lawsuits lingered until a final settlement in 1987 required Dylan to
pay Grossman’s estate $2 million.
Grossman was busy managing Janis Joplin, The Band, Paul Butterfield, and
a Bearsville music operation in Woodstock that would oversee the release of
albums by Jesse Winchester (produced by Robbie Robertson with a sound
similar to that of The Band) and Bobby “See You Later, Alligator” Charles,
whose brief time in Woodstock inspired him to write a quintessential Ameri-
cana song, “Small Town Talk.” Dylan was shaken when his father died of a
heart attack at the age of fifty-six. Over the years his relationship with his
parents had been strained, but he was also known to call home back when
he all but claimed to be an orphan. Dylan, now himself a father, returned to
Hibbing for the funeral. “Now there’s no way to say what I was never capable
of saying before,” said the son of Abe Zimmerman.
George Harrison and his wife Pattie Boyd traveled to Woodstock in No-
vember and stayed at Grossman’s house. “He hardly said a word for a couple
of days,” said Harrison of Dylan. When guitars emerged, they wrote “I’d Have
You Anytime,” which Harrison would use to open his first post-Beatles album,
All Things Must Pass (1970). Dylan played two new songs for Harrison: “I Threw
It All Away” and “Lay, Lady, Lay,” which was originally written (but not used)
for the film Midnight Cowboy. The Beatle said that the visit’s high point was
when The Band arrived for Thanksgiving dinner.
Dylan returned to Nashville in January 1969 intending to expand upon the
sound that had characterized John Wesley Harding with a band that included
134 Chapter 9

guitarist Charlie Daniels, pedal steel player Pete Drake, and Norman Blake, an
acoustic guitar virtuoso who played with Johnny Cash. Producer Bob Johnston
was now a veteran of Dylan sessions. “No one ever counted off for [Dylan],”
said Johnston. “He’d start tapping his foot. . . . I told everybody that I ever came
in contact with, ‘Just keep playing. Don’t stop.’” After tracking four songs in
the first day, Dylan returned to the Ramada Inn and wrote three more. “The
songs reflect more of the inner me than the songs of the past,” said Dylan.
“The smallest line in this album means more to me than some of the songs
on any of the previous records.”
Still, no one was going to mistake casual compositions like “Country Pie”
(“Listen to the fiddler play”) and “Peggy Day” (“By golly, what more can I say?”)
for “All Along the Watchtower” (“‘There must be some way out of here,’ said
the joker to the thief”). In a way, Dylan was emulating two of his songwriting
heroes, Hank Williams and Buddy Holly, but their personable poetry had
emerged fully formed. By contrast, Dylan had become famous for songs with
lyrics that could be both complex and poetic; now, he was willfully trying to
be simple. His best songs nonetheless hit their mark; “I Threw It All Away”
reeked of measured regret, while “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” was
playfully ribald. But the biggest shock of Nashville Skyline was Dylan’s baritone
croon. Dylan said the change occurred because he quit cigarettes (for a minute),
but others recognized this voice from his coffeehouse days in Minnesota.
Nashville Skyline reunited Dylan with the rhythm section of Ken Buttrey
and Charlie McCoy. Searching to create the right drum part for “Lay, Lady,
Lay,” Buttrey asked Dylan what he heard. The response: “Bongos.” Johnston
answered the same question with “Cowbell.” Thinking it would never work,
but aiming to please, Buttrey found a cowbell and a cheap set of bongos,
which he tuned to a higher pitch by heating the skins with his cigarette lighter.
Then he recruited Kris Kristofferson to hold the bongos in one hand and the
cowbell in the other. “We started playing the tune and I was just doodling
around on the bongos and the cowbell,” said Buttrey. “Come chorus time I’d
go to the set of drums. . . . It was the very first take, and to this day it’s one of
the best drum patterns I ever came up with.”
With little more than twenty-five minutes of music, Dylan was short of a
new album. He dropped by a Nashville recording session to see his friend
Johnny Cash, who’d made a big comeback that included a new recording of
his 1955 hit “Folsom Prison Blues.” When the pair went out to dinner, John-
ston, who was also Cash’s producer, quickly set up the studio like a Greenwich
Village cafe, with tables and chairs and microphones for two singers. When
 American Tune 135

the diners returned, “they looked at each other and went out and got their
guitars and started singing,” said Johnston. “People started yelling out song
titles. . . . They were laughing and having fun.”
The impromptu session, with backing by Cash’s band, including Carl Per-
kins on electric guitar, was essentially an Americana jam. It included songs by
Cash (“Big River,” “I Walk the Line”), Elvis Presley (Arthur Crudup’s “That’s
All Right”), Perkins (“Matchbox”), Jimmie Rodgers (“Blue Yodel No. 4”), and a
touch of gospel (“Just a Closer Walk with Thee”). Johnston’s notion of fashion-
ing an album from the superstar session was abandoned due to its more-than
casual execution. Nonetheless, the music was widely bootlegged, and was of-
ficially released in 2019 as Travelin’ Thru. One song, the pair’s duet on Dylan’s
“Girl from the North Country,” became the lead track of Nashville Skyline.
Rock critics, still a new breed in 1969, didn’t know what to make of the
album. Paul Nelson, who had known Dylan in Minneapolis, took kindly to
his unexpected turn. “Nashville Skyline,” he wrote in Rolling Stone, “achieves
the artistically impossible: a deep, humane, and interesting statement about
being happy.” Others weren’t as nice. Writing in Fusion, Tom Smucker said, “It’s
cast in the reactionary, Wallace-for-President, traditionally repressed cultural
form of country music.” In the Village Voice, Robert Christgau chided Dylan for
working with Johnny Cash, “an enthusiastic Nixon supporter,” and described
country music as a “naturally Conservative . . . intensely chauvinistic, racist,
majority-oriented and anti-aristocratic in the worst as well as the best sense.”
Dylan returned to Nashville in June 1969 to appear on the premiere epi-
sode of ABC television’s Johnny Cash Show, which was recorded at the Ryman
Auditorium. Dylan sang “I Threw It All Way” and was then joined by the host
for “Girl from the North Country”; in the same episode Joni Mitchell sang
“Both Sides Now” and, with Cash, “Long Black Veil.” The program featured
regular appearances by Cash’s traveling troupe including Perkins, Mother
Maybelle, and June Carter Cash singing with her husband. Subsequent epi-
sodes featured an eclectic mix of country and pop musicians including Loretta
Lynn, Linda Ronstadt, Merle Haggard, Neil Young, Tammy Wynette, Louis
Armstrong, and Eric Clapton’s band, Derek and the Dominos. All told, the
program celebrated the depth and diversity of American music.
Cash’s show became a magnet for Nashville songwriters looking to pitch
their songs. “When I told Mickey Newbury I’d been fired [as a janitor],” said
Kristofferson, “he said, ‘Great!’ So we became like the mascots of The Johnny
Cash Show. . . . There was [sic] all kind of stars coming in who’d never been to
Nashville. . . . Can you believe anyone having the audacity . . . to subject people
136 Chapter 9

[to our songs] when they [were] in a make-up chair?” Johnny and June would
often invite the out-of-towners to their home in nearby Hendersonville. “Joni
Mitchell sang ‘Both Sides Now,’” said Cash of one such gathering, “Graham
Nash sang ‘Marrakesh Express,’ Shel Silverstein sang ‘A Boy Named Sue,’ Bob
Dylan sang ‘Lay Lady Lay,’ and Kristofferson sang ‘Me and Bobby McGee.’”
The Johnny Cash Show ran from June 1969 to March 1971, and its fifty-eight
installments anchored a career resurgence that also included a second live
prison album, At San Quentin, and a #1 country single (Kristofferson’s “Sun-
day Mornin’ Comin’ Down”). But the program, with its Americana-like mix
of music from multiple genres, wasn’t the only television show that featured
country music. In 1968 Glen Campbell hosted a summer replacement show
for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a popular program that had become
a political hot potato due to its pointed criticism of the Vietnam War. (Both
Cash and the Smothers Brothers had to fight their respective networks in
order to book Pete Seeger.) Campbell, who was on a hit parade hot streak,
was eventually given his own show.
The next year, CBS debuted another summer replacement, Hee Haw, which
was co-hosted by Roy Clark and Buck Owens and presented country music
alongside comedy bits modeled after those of another hit show, Laugh-In. Hee
Haw’s depiction of rural America echoed the stereotypes of popular sitcoms
like The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres; the program featured the Buckaroos
as its house band and a posse of women called Hee Haw Honeys. Buck and
Roy performed a regular musical feature called “a-pickin’ and a-grinnin.’”
In a year that saw the moon landing and the Woodstock Festival, Hee Haw
put country music in a hick frame apt to give pause to rock fans who had
sampled the genre through Sweetheart of the Rodeo, The Gilded Palace of Sin, and
Nashville Skyline. Owens later said that the show killed his recording career.
“I couldn’t justify turning down that big paycheck for just a few weeks work
twice a year,” he said, referring to the program’s biannual shooting schedule.
“So I kept whoring myself out to that cartoon donkey.” Merle Haggard and
the Strangers made seven appearances on the first season of Hee Haw, and in
December 1969 celebrated the fellowship of the holiday season by performing
“Okie from Muskogee.”
 TROUBADOURS

“The Troubadour was the first place I went to when I got to L.A.,” said Don
Henley, the drummer for Shiloh, a country-rock band from Texas. “The first
night I walked in I saw Graham Nash and Neil Young, and Linda Ronstadt
was standing there in a little Daisy Mae kind of dress.’” Glenn Frey had moved
to Los Angeles from Detroit. On his first day there, Frey said, “I saw David
Crosby sitting on the steps of the Country Store in Laurel Canyon, wearing
the same hat and green leather bat-cape he had on for [the cover of ] Turn!
Turn! Turn!” Crosby, observed Jackson Browne, “had this legendary VW bus
with a Porsche engine in it, and that summed him up—a hippie with power.”
Fairport Convention’s first American show was at the Troubadour in 1970.
“Linda Ronstadt cheered them on from the audience,” said Joe Boyd, the
band’s producer. “When they ran out of encores, they invited her to join them.
‘I don’t know any English songs,’ she shouted. ‘That’s OK, we know all yours,’
said Simon [Nicol]. Pushed onstage, she sang the first acapella notes of ‘Silver
Threads and Golden Needles,’ then heard Fairport enter on cue, recreating
her arrangement perfectly. When Richard [Thompson] took an expert James
Burton-esque solo, she almost fainted in astonishment.”
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The Troubadour was ground zero for musicians playing various combi-
nations of rock and folk. Crosby, Stills & Nash dominated turntables in the
summer of 1969 the way Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band had during 1967’s
Summer of Love, but whereas the Beatles LP famously exploited the recording
studio, the CS&N album succeeded on the earthier strength of vocal harmo-
nies. “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” a Stills song about his girlfriend, Judy Collins,
showcased both his inventive use of alternate guitar tunings and the vivid
interplay of the group’s three distinctive voices. They had their own Albert
Grossman in David Geffen, a New York hustler who left the mailroom of the
William Morris Agency to become Laura Nyro’s booking agent and half-owner
of her publishing company, Tuna Fish Music. When Nyro’s artful songs turned
to gold through pop hits for the Fifth Dimension, Barbra Streisand, and Blood,
Sweat, and Tears, Geffen sold the company for more than $4 million. In the
same year he untangled the individual commitments of Crosby, Stills, and
Nash and got them a contract with Atlantic Records.
Before the trio hit the road, however, they decided to add Stills’s old foil
from Buffalo Springfield, Neil Young, who’d just released his first solo album
and who shared manager Elliot Roberts with Joni Mitchell. Crosby, Stills,
Nash, & Young played their second gig at the Woodstock Festival in August
1969. As a proviso for including the band in the subsequent film, Geffen in-
sisted that its recording of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” be heard over the
opening credits. Hugely successful on the concert circuit, the group never
made a better and more influential record than its debut.
“The beginnings of the singer-songwriters school,” said Jackson Browne,
“were the first albums by Neil [Young] and Joni [Mitchell]. After that you
started to get songs that only the songwriter could have sung—that were part
of the songwriter’s personality.” This was a new kind of folk music, not with
traditional songs passed between generations but new tunes expected to be
as individual as a fingerprint. By the release of her third album, Ladies of the
Canyon, Mitchell had evolved from a highly literate folk singer into the creator
of uniquely artful songs that employed unusual guitar tunings (and soulful
piano playing) to accompany lyrics that were both personal and poetic.
“Joni writes about her relationships so much more vividly than I do,” said
Neil Young. “I guess I put more of a veil over what I’m talking about.” Indeed,
in the case of Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” he wasn’t writing
about himself at all but about the dissolution of Mitchell’s relationship with
Graham Nash. Young was quick to establish a wider stylistic turf than the
NEIL YOUNG
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pensive songwriter suggested by 1969’s Neil Young. Later in the year he released
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, a collection born of sessions with a band
that would come to call itself Crazy Horse. Rock songs like “Cinnamon Girl”
and the extended guitar jams of “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the
Sand” established an electric style that would become the yin to the yang
of his acoustic songs. Young would flip this coin throughout his career, and
thereby embrace the two poles of Americana music.
The two Canadians ruled Los Angeles, but a new arrival from New England
by way of London made the biggest splash of 1970. James Taylor had played
music in Greenwich Village with a band called the Flying Machine; when he
relocated to London in 1968, the band’s guitarist, Danny Kortchmar, told him
to call his friend Peter Asher. Half of the duo Peter and Gordon, who’d had a
hit with a Lennon-McCartney song, “A World Without Love,” Asher was now
working for the Beatles’ record label, Apple. Taylor was signed to Apple after
auditioning in Paul McCartney’s living room. Asher produced Taylor’s self-
titled debut—work paused when the Beatles needed the studio to record “Hey
Jude”—but it attracted little notice, partly due to disorganization at Apple.
Taylor and Asher relocated to Los Angeles, where they recorded Sweet Baby
James for Warner Brothers. That album stayed in the Top 40 for more than a
year and included a Top 5 single, “Fire and Rain,” that established Taylor as
the era’s preeminent singer-songwriter.
“My style at that time was very intimate,” said Taylor. “To criticize it, I think
it was very self-centered, very autobiographical, and you could call it narcis-
sistic. But the upside of that was that it was very accessible, and I think people
liked that. It was just guitar and voice with some embellishments, and it was
miked very close.” In a word, Taylor’s music was “mellow,” not a term typically
associated with a heroin addict. Taylor was a junkie when he became involved
in a romantic relationship with Joni Mitchell, who was already working on
her most intensely personal album.
Mitchell recorded Blue at the same time Taylor was producing Mudslide
Slim and the Blue Horizon, an album that strained to re-create the easygoing
bonhomie of Sweet Baby James. Blue was altogether original, a mature and art-
ful collection that mixed romantic reveries (“All I Want,” “Carey”) with ballads
about the emotional costs of love (“River,” “A Case of You”). These were not
folk tunes but art songs that reverberated with Mitchell’s personality. “I was
at my most defenseless during the making of Blue,” said Mitchell. “I guess you
could say I broke down but I continued to work. In the process of breaking
 Troubadours 141

down . . . everything became transparent.” Paradoxically, Blue managed to

be both entirely personal and altogether universal. But the intimacy burned
Mitchell when Rolling Stone chronicled her love affairs with other famous
musicians and dubbed her “Old Lady of the Year.” “The ultimate irony,” said
writer Penny Stallings, “is that it is shy, circumspect Joni herself who’s to blame
for making her life an open record.”
Taylor didn’t write the biggest hit on Mudslide Slim; “You’ve Got a Friend”
was penned by Carole King, who (with lyricist Gerry Goffin) wrote songs in
the early sixties for acts such as the Chiffons (“One Fine Day”), Little Eva (“The
Locomotion”), and the Drifters (“Up on the Roof”). When Jerry Wexler was
collecting material for Aretha Franklin he gave the couple an idea for a song
title, “natural woman,” and they wrote a song that became one of Franklin’s
defining performances, “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.”
As a solo singer-songwriter, King produced lyrics that were far less artful
than those of Mitchell; the words to “You’ve Got a Friend” scan like a well-
written greeting card. But the magic was in the music, and Tapestry, King’s
1971 album, became one of the best-selling albums of all time and sealed
her transition from Brill Building tunesmith to California earth mother. “My
production values were . . . learned listening to James Taylor albums and Neil
Young albums,” said King. “I was able to get naked in my sound. I became
more honest by listening to those records and by working with those people.”
(Tapestry’s personnel included Taylor on guitar and vocals plus two players
who also worked on his albums, drummer Russ Kunkel and guitarist Danny
Kortchmar.) Joni Mitchell sang on Tapestry, but following the release of Blue,
she fled the City of Angels for the rural isolation of British Columbia, where
she composed the tunes for her next release, For the Roses. Taylor would sub-
sequently marry a more conventional singer-songwriter, Carly Simon.
Back at the Troubadour, Kris Kristofferson turned heads when he opened
for Linda Ronstadt, and the handsome singer-songwriter was soon making
movies. Ronstadt, meanwhile, was trying to reignite a career that had stalled
after the success of “Different Drum” (1967), a song by Michael Nesmith (of
the Monkees) that she’d recorded with the Stone Ponies. “One night I was
on my way to the bathroom and this band Shiloh came on and started doing
an exact version of ‘Silver Threads and Golden Needles,’” said Ronstadt of a
song that she’d recorded after hearing it done by the Springfields, a British
folk trio that launched the career of Dusty Springfield. Ronstadt recruited
Shiloh’s singing drummer, Don Henley, and paired him with Glenn Frey, a
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guitarist who played in Longbranch Pennywhistle with her boyfriend, J. D.

Souther. Joining Frey and Henley were guitarist Bernie Leadon of the Burrito
Brothers and bassist Randy Meisner from Rick Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band,
Nelson’s own venture into country rock. The quartet accompanied Ronstadt on
her self-titled 1971 album, which included “Rock Me on the Water,” a song by
another Troubadour regular, Jackson Browne. Due to various commitments,
however, all four actually only accompanied Ronstadt at one concert, though
the venue was as emblematic of southern California as was the Troubadour:
Disneyland.

   
Late on a Sunday night in the spring of 1971, John Prine was waiting to get
paid after a gig at Chicago’s Earl of Old Town. The phone rang behind the
bar, and Prine took a call from Steve Goodman, a folkie friend who’d just
finished a weekend opening for Kris Kristofferson at the Quiet Knight. Don’t
go anywhere, said Goodman, because Kristofferson had heard him sing a
Prine song and wanted to meet the writer. But that wasn’t all. On his flight
to Chicago, Kristofferson had run into pop star Paul Anka, who’d recorded
one of his songs; Anka was playing at a nightclub in the Loop and was on the
way to Old Town in a limo. “When Steve brought Kris down to see me,” said
Prine, who admired Kristofferson’s work, “he could have had the Cowardly
Lion and the Tin Man with him . . . Anka was just one more show-biz guy.”
Prine was new to this world. In high school he’d taken guitar lessons at
the Old Town School of Folk Music; his older brother introduced him to the
finger-style playing of Mississippi John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotten. (Cotten,
best known for her rendition of “Freight Train,” was “discovered” in the 1950s
when she was working as a maid for Pete Seeger’s father, Charles.) Prine also
played country songs by Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell. He was posted in
Germany upon being drafted into the army, but the war in Vietnam couldn’t
help but creep into his thoughts. Back in Chicago, he played at an open mike
night at the Fifth Peg and silenced the crowd with “Sam Stone,” an original
song about a veteran who’d become a junkie. “I started shuffling my feet and
looking around,” said Prine. “And then they started applauding, and it . . . was
like I found out all of a sudden that I could communicate.” Prine was soon
playing three nights a week and quit his day job as a mailman.
“We had an early wake-up ahead of us,” said Kristofferson, “and by the
time we got there Old Town was nothing but empty streets and dark windows.
 Troubadours 143

And the club was closing. But the owner let us come in, pulled some chairs
off a couple of tables, and John unpacked his guitar and got back up to sing.”
Kristofferson and Anka, who a decade earlier had hired Jim McGuinn before
he formed the Byrds, quickly forgot about the late hour. “It must’ve been like
stumbling onto Dylan when he first busted on the Village scene,” said Kristof-
ferson.
Anka, looking to expand into artist management, bankrolled a trip to New
York for Goodman and Prine to pursue record deals. Coincidentally, Kristof-
ferson was playing at the Bitter End; when he invited Prine to sing a couple
of songs, he chose the two that had made him a local hero in Chicago, “Sam
Stone” and “Hello in There,” about the isolated lives of the elderly. Jerry Wex-
ler of Atlantic, who was in the audience, invited Prine to come by his office.
“He offered me a $25,000 recording contract,” said Prine. “I hadn’t been in
New York 24 hours.” During their stay in Manhattan, Goodman and Prine
collaborated on a wry country song, “You Never Even Call Me by My Name,”
that became a hit for David Allen Coe. Goodman, who died in 1984 of leuke-
mia, signed a deal with Buddha Records; Arlo Guthrie, Woody’s son, had a
1972 hit with Goodman’s most celebrated song, “City of New Orleans.”
Prine wrote with the observant eye of a short story writer. “In my songs, I
try to look through someone else’s eyes,” said Prine, “and I want to give the
audience a feeling more than a message.” Prine said his principal influences
were Bob Dylan (his “Donald and Lydia” was modeled on Dylan’s “The Lone-
some Death of Hattie Carroll”) and Chuck Berry. “He [Berry] told a story in
less than three minutes,” said Prine, “and he had a syllable for every beat. . . .
Some people stretch the words like a mask to fit the melody. Whereas guys
who are really good lyricists have a meter that the melody is almost already
there.”
Arif Mardin, an engineer with a history of hits, produced Prine’s debut in
Memphis. Prine was called “the next Dylan,” a sobriquet ascribed to, among
others, Loudon Wainwright III, Bruce Springsteen, and Steve Forbert. Other
singers were quick to cover his tunes; Bette Midler sang “Hello in There” on
The Divine Miss M, and “Angel of Montgomery” became a concert standard for
Bonnie Raitt after she recorded it for Streetlights. Back in New York to play his
own show at the Bitter End, Kristofferson invited Prine to the apartment of his
girlfriend, Carly Simon. “So we come over and we’re sitting at Carly’s place,”
said Prine, “and there’s a knock on the door, and in walks Bob Dylan.” It turns
out that Wexler had sent Dylan a copy of Prine’s debut. “So he showed up at
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the Bitter End,” said Prine, “and played harmonica behind me on ‘Donald
and Lydia’ and ‘Far from Me.’ It was like a dream.”
Dylan had worked with Wexler when he sat in on sessions for Doug Sahm
and Band, which included the Dylan song “Wallflower.” Sahm, who at the age
of eleven witnessed the very last show by Hank Williams, was as Americana
as a musician could be. He grew up in Texas playing country, blues, R&B, and
almost anything that crossed the border from Mexico. In 1964 he responded to
the British Invasion by forming the Sir Douglas Quintet and recording such
effervescent hits as “She’s About a Mover” and “Mendocino.” Sahm was the
sort of rootsy musician who appealed to Wexler. So was Willie Nelson, whom
Wexler met in 1972 at the Nashville home of songwriter Harlan Howard.
“[Willie] got on the stool late at night when the party had thinned out,”
said Howard, “and he sang like a total album with a gut string and a stool.
He just went from one song to the other and Wexler . . . flipped out.” Wex-
ler was looking for new turf. The soul era was fading and Ahmet Ertegun
was filling Atlantic’s roster with rock acts like Led Zeppelin, CSN&Y, and the
Rolling Stones. So Wexler signed pre-Americana acts like Prine, Sahm, and
now, Nelson. Chet Atkins at RCA considered Waylon Jennings to have more
commercial potential than Nelson and gave him more creative freedom. So
Willie left RCA for Atlantic, and for the first time brought his own band into
the recording studio.
Wexler heard something in Nelson that Nashville had missed. “Your phras-
ing reminds me of Ray Charles and Sinatra,” Wexler told Nelson. “Like you,
they’re great proponents of rubato—elongating one note, cutting off another,
swinging with an elastic sense of time only the jazz artists understand.” Wexler
produced Nelson’s two albums for Atlantic, Phases and Stages (1972) and Shotgun
Willie (1973); the latter was recorded in Muscle Shoals, but Nelson really ran
the show. “I witnessed what I would later recognize as Wexler teaching Willie
that he could largely control his own musical destiny,” said Chet Flippo, who
was in the studio reporting for Rolling Stone. But Nelson’s records failed to sell
in the numbers that rock albums did, and Atlantic soon abandoned trying
to market country records. But Willie had enjoyed a tangy taste of freedom,
and his music would never be the same.
Dolly Parton was another country musician at a crossroads in the early
1970s. Parton’s first hit was “Dumb Blonde” (1967), and though she didn’t write
the song, and was whip smart, she knew the power of image. “If I’m going to
look like this,” said Parton of her big hair, bigger breasts, and wardrobe more
 Troubadours 145

saucy than chic, “I must have a reason. . . . It makes me different a little bit, and
ain’t that what we all want to do, be a little different?” Porter Wagoner brought
Parton into his organization to make recordings, do live concerts, and appear
on his syndicated television show. The first of their string of hit duets was a
contemporary folk song written by Tom Paxton, “The Last Thing on My Mind.”
Parton’s solo singles were less successful until Wagoner had her record
Jimmie Rodgers’s “Mule Skinner Blues,” which hit #3. After that, it was Dolly
bar the door, with original songs like “Coat of Many Colors” (written on the
tour bus) and “My Tennessee Mountain Home” establishing Parton as a solo
star and the best female songwriter in country music this side of Loretta Lynn.
After releasing “Jolene” in 1973, Parton decided to go solo. The song that she
wrote about Porter, “I Will Always Love You,” hit the top of the charts in 1974
but did little to console Wagoner. He sued Dolly for breach of a management
contract and eventually settled out of court for a reported $1 million.
Parton wasn’t shy about business. She was thrilled to learn that Elvis Presley
wanted to record “I Will Always Love You” until she learned that as part of the
deal Presley would own half of the publishing royalties. “I said, ‘Well, in that
case, I don’t guess Elvis is going to be recording “I Will Always Love You,”’” said
Parton. “Everybody said, ‘You’ve got to be out of your damn mind.’” Parton’s
wisdom paid off when Whitney Houston made the song an international hit
on the soundtrack of the 1992 film The Bodyguard.

   
“I got turned on to bluegrass in around 1960,” said Jerry Garcia. “My grand-
mother was a big Grand Ole Opry fan. This was in San Francisco, a long way
from Tennessee. . . . I heard Bill Monroe hundreds of times without knowing
who he was.” Garcia gained fame as the lead guitarist of the psychedelic rock
band the Grateful Dead and was known as Captain Trips. But he was schooled
in the roots of Americana. “Bluegrass bands are hard to put together because
you have to have good musicians to play,” said Garcia. Robert Hunter tried
to keep up on mandolin, but he gave up and made a career of writing songs
with Garcia. By the time Garcia’s group had evolved into Mother McCree’s
Uptown Jug Band, the lineup included future members of the Dead: blues
singer Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, drummer Bill Kreutmann, and teenage gui-
tarist Bob Weir. The Grateful Dead played an Americana mix of blues, folk,
country, and Chuck Berry; they famously performed improvisatory music at
“acid test” LSD parties hosted by novelist Ken Kesey.
JERRY GARCIA
 Troubadours 147

The Dead, stars of the counterculture, didn’t sell many records until they
found a new old-fashioned sound. “After hearing Dylan’s country,” said Garcia
of Nashville Skyline, “it was soon, ‘Hey, we can pull good ole country music
into our act!’” Garcia took up the pedal steel guitar and played it on a Crosby,
Stills, Nash, & Young song, “Teach Your Children.” “Crosby and those guys
were hanging around a lot,” said Garcia, “and nothing turns you on to sing-
ing more than three guys who can really sing good. They’d start singing, and
we’d think, ‘Wow! Why don’t we try making a simple record?’” The results
were Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty, a pair of Americana albums
that included such songs as “Uncle John’s Band,” “Casey Jones,” and “Friend
of the Devil.” The hippie musicians also adored the sound of Bakersfield.
“We used to go see those bands and think, ‘Gee, those guys are great,’” said
Garcia. “Don Rich was one of my favorites. . . . So we took kind of the Buck
Owens approach on Workingman’s Dead.”
The Dead’s concert repertoire came to include tunes by such Americana
icons as Merle Haggard, Buddy Holly, Bo Diddley, and Bob Dylan. Garcia
also played pedal steel with the New Riders of the Purple Sage and banjo
with an ensemble called Old & in the Way that included Vassar Clements on
fiddle and David Grisman (whom Garcia had met at a Bill Monroe concert)
on mandolin. Before meeting Garcia, Grisman had played in the Even Dozen
Jug Band (with John Sebastian and Maria Muldaur) and Earth Opera, a psy-
chedelic rock band that also included Peter Rowan, another influential roots
musician. Rowan belongs to an elite club of players who (like Lester Flatt and
Earl Scruggs) spent time with Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys. Others
include banjo player Bill Keith, guitarist Del McCoury, and fiddlers Richard
Greene and Byron Berline.
“Bluegrass music has been perfected,” said Grisman, “and you can’t play
better than Bill Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, and The Stanley Brothers.” Grisman’s
strategy was to make music that also embraced string band music, jazz fusion,
and the gypsy jazz of guitarist Django Reinhardt. Garcia gave Grisman the
nickname “Dawg,” and it became a shorthand term to describe his eclectic
music, which included an album cut with Reinhardt’s primary accompanist,
violinist Stephane Grappelli. The New Grass Revival, led by mandolin player
Sam Bush, also pursued a progressive style of bluegrass; in 1979 the group
toured as the opening act and backing band for Leon Russell, the rock pianist
who’d already cut his own country album, Hank Wilson’s Back. In 1981 Bela
Fleck joined the group on banjo.
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Other rock bands of the era, including Creedence Clearwater Revival, were
influenced by country. “There was definitely a message on that album,” said
John Fogerty of Creedence’s Willie and the Poor Boys. “I was using country
and blues music the way Jimmie Rodgers or Woody Guthrie might have.”
Fogerty, who name-checked Buck Owens on the Creedence hit “Lookin’ out
My Backdoor,” later recorded a one-man-band album, The Blue Ridge Rangers,
that included songs by Hank Williams, George Jones, and Merle Haggard.
Tracy Nelson, who sang in the band Mother Earth, covered the Americana
waterfront on two solo albums, one devoted to blues (1965’s Deep Are the Roots)
and the other to country (1969’s Mother Earth Presents Tracy Nelson: Country).
But it took the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who’d had a hit with Jerry Jeff Walker’s
“Mr. Bojangles,” to create an Americana classic: Will the Circle Be Unbroken
(1972). The triple album was not only a virtuosic portrait of American roots
music but it challenged the yawning generation gap with its unlikely col-
laborations between long-haired hippies and traditional country artists.
The project got started when the Dirt Band’s banjo payer, John McEuen,
who’d studied the virtuosic recordings of Earl Scruggs, learned that his
musical hero was coming to the group’s concert at Vanderbilt University in
Nashville. Scruggs, who’d raised eyebrows in conservative country circles
by speaking out against the war in Vietnam, had heard his kids playing the
band’s records and was happy to hear them playing acoustic instruments.
When Scruggs agreed to record with the Dirt Band, his involvement drew Doc
Watson to the project. The cast grew to include guitarists Merle Travis and
Maybelle Carter and singers Roy Acuff and Jimmy Martin. Supplementing
the Dirt Band were Nashville players like Norman Blake and Vassar Clements.
Bill Monroe declined to participate; beyond his disdain for hippies, Monroe
was still perturbed that Scruggs had left his Blue Grass Boys in 1948.
Personal moments animated the picking party. Doc Watson told Merle
Travis that he’d named his son Merle (a gifted guitarist) after his own favorite
picker. Maybelle Carter arrived carrying the 1929 Gibson flattop that she’d
bought shortly after the Bristol sessions and called her young patrons “the
dirty boys.” Like everybody else, they addressed her as “Mother.” The rep-
ertoire consisted mainly of songs associated with the invited guests—such
classics as “Keep on the Sunny Side” and “I Am a Pilgrim”—and most tracks
were cut in one or two takes.
Roy Acuff, known to be wary of longhairs playing country music, arrived
at the studio and asked to hear what had been recorded. Poker-faced during
 Troubadours 149

the playback, he asked what the young men called that music. “Uh, well, it’s
kind of Appalachian, old timey, American folk,” said the band’s manager, Bill
McEuen, who also looked after the career of another banjo player, comedian
Steve Martin. “Hell!” said Acuff. “It ain’t nothing but country music! Good
country music! Let’s go make some more, boys!” But it wasn’t all sweetness
and light. “Acuff made a couple of nasty remarks about Earl Scruggs in front
of him,” said band member Jeff Hanna. “We were sitting around a big table
and Acuff says something about people changin’, and then he turns and looks
at Earl in a real snide sort of way.” Later, Scruggs was driving in a car with
banjoist McEuen. “You know, John,” he said, “that Acuff really burns my ass.
He thinks he invented country music.”
Over the years, Will the Circle Be Unbroken has sold millions of copies. For
many, including Bruce Springsteen, it was the first country album that they’d
ever bought. A few years after its release, John McEuen and his friend Marty
Stuart paid a visit to Maybelle Carter to give her a “gold record,” explaining
that it signified that the collection had by then sold five hundred thousand
copies. “Well,” said the woman who’d traveled to Bristol all those years ago,
“I never knew that many people had even heard those old songs.” Then, re-
membering her manners, Mother Maybelle said, “Would you boys like some
lemonade?”

   
Jackson Browne had his songs cut by Tom Rush and the Byrds but struggled
to sign a record contract of his own. Even David Geffen couldn’t get a deal
for Browne. “I said, ‘You’ll make millions with him,’” said Geffen, recalling
his pitch to Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun. “And he said, ‘You know what? I got
millions. Do you have millions?’ I said no. He said, ‘Start a record company
and you’ll have millions. Then we can all have millions.’” So with seed money
from Atlantic, which handled distribution, Geffen (and Elliot Roberts) started
Asylum Records.
Asylum’s contracts were unique: The label would pay for the recording costs
and day-to-day living expenses of its artists, who would earn a royalty from
the first record sold but also relinquish half of the publishing income. Geffen
was intimately involved in the careers of his artists. He sent Jackson Browne
out on the road opening for Laura Nyro in advance of recording his debut
album. Browne also introduced Geffen to the musicians who soon named
themselves the Eagles; after buying out the existing recording contracts of
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Glenn Frey and Don Henley, Geffen financed a stay in Boulder, Colorado, so
that the band could woodshed far from the glare of the Troubadour.
“We did four sets a night for a month,” said Randy Meisner, “playing as
many originals as we’d written, and just about every other song we knew—
loads of Beatles and Chuck Berry, some Neil Young. It tightened the group up
pretty well. We learned how to play with each other.” The band’s producer of
choice was Glyn Johns, the longtime engineer for the Rolling Stones who’d
helmed records by the Steve Miller Band. Johns flew to Aspen to hear the
band. “They were doing Chuck Berry stuff and they were bloody awful,” said
Johns. “Though I knew they could sing, I turned it down.”
Geffen cajoled Johns into coming to Los Angeles and listening to a rehearsal,
but he remained unimpressed until the band took a break. “Somebody picked
up an acoustic guitar and they sat down and sang a song in four-part [har-
mony],” said Johns. “I said ‘This is what this band is all about.’” Johns recorded
the first Eagles album at Olympic Studio in London, and its lush production,
rich with ringing guitars and clearly articulated harmonies, firmly established
the group’s sound. “Take It Easy,” an unfinished Jackson Browne song that Frey
completed, opened the album. It was the group’s first (of many) hit singles to
evoke a hedonistic California dream that made the “two girls for every boy”
lyric of Jan and Dean’s “Surf City” sound positively quaint.
Browne, who included “Take It Easy” on his second album, scored his own
hit, “Doctor, My Eyes,” on his 1972 debut, Saturate Before Using; the collection
also included “Rock Me on the Water” and “Jamaica, Say You Will.” Browne
toured with Joni Mitchell, who had signed with Asylum to release her artful
For the Roses. When Geffen challenged Mitchell to write a hit single for the
album, she came up with the modestly successful “You Turn Me On, I’m a
Radio” about, of all things, a country music station. Mitchell and Browne were
the cream of the southern California singer-songwriter crop, but they were
hardly the biggest stars in town.
“Joni and Jackson and Don Henley may have represented a new social
order,” said Mark Volman, who’d taken an unlikely turn from singing with
the Turtles to playing with Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, “but they
only represented a minimal part of the real record industry. Probably the
most commercially successful L.A. artists of the whole period were Bread
and Three Dog Night. I love Jackson Browne but he never wrote an ‘American
Pie.’” The Eagles were built to compete. “We’d watched bands like Poco and
the Burrito Brothers lose their initial momentum,” said Glenn Frey, “and we
 Troubadours 151

were determined not to make the same mistake. Everybody had to look good,
sing good, play good, and write good. We wanted it all. Peer respect, AM and
FM success, No. 1 singles and albums . . . and a lot of money.”
“The Eagles were made to sell a million records,” said Elliot Roberts. “They
were made as a bridge between the avant-garde and commercial, between
the Dead and Chicago.” A commercial success from day one, with “Peaceful
Easy Feeling” and “Witchy Woman” becoming hit singles, the Eagles have
always had a tortured relationship with music critics. “Another thing that
interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them,” wrote Robert Christgau,
in 1972. “Do I hate music that has been giving me pleasure all weekend, made
by four human beings I’ve never met? Yeah, I think so.” Part of the issue for
Christgau was how the Eagles related to traditional country music: “It’s no
accident, either,” he continued, “that the Eagles’ hip country music excises
precisely what is deepest and most gripping about country music—its adult
working-class pain, its paradoxically rigid ethics—and leaves sixteen tracks
of bluegrass-sounding good feelin’.”
Like the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt, who also recorded for Asylum, got a gener-
ally cool critical reception, though no one disputed the quality of her voice.
Ronstadt benefited from the guidance of producer-manager Peter Asher, and
because she wasn’t a songwriter, her albums included material by artists like
Neil Young, Randy Newman, Lowell George of Little Feat, and J. D. Souther,
who also co-wrote some of the Eagles’ biggest hits. Ronstadt also championed
less familiar songwriters such as Anna McGarrigle (“Heart Like a Wheel”),
Karla Bonoff (“Someone to Lay Down Beside Me”), and Warren Zevon (“Poor,
Poor Pitiful Me”) and had hits with rock songs by Buddy Holly (“That’ll Be
the Day”), the Rolling Stones (“Tumbling Dice”), and Chuck Berry (“Back in
the U.S.A.”). She sang country songs by Willie Nelson (“Crazy”), Hank Wil-
liams (“I Can’t Help It [If I’m Still in Love with You]”), and Dolly Parton (“I
Will Always Love You”). In a word, her repertoire was Americana.
Ronstadt covered the title song of the Eagles’ second album, Desperado,
whose songs imagined the band as a gang of outlaws but brought less com-
mercial success than had their debut. The Eagles bristled at their producer’s
reluctance to put more crunch into their country rock. The dispute came to a
head during the production of the band’s third record, On the Border, when Bill
Szymczyk replaced Johns. “I saw through the Eagles as far as their acoustic,
cowboy elements went,” said Szymczyk. “I saw them as rockers who were
dying and screaming to get out.”
152 Chapter 10

David Geffen was himself restless, and in 1972, just two years after forming
Asylum Records, he sold it to Atlantic’s parent company, Warner Communica-
tions, whereupon it was merged into Elektra/Asylum Records. Some of his
artists, especially the hit-making Eagles, weren’t happy with Geffen or his $7
million payday. “Asylum was an artist-oriented label for about a minute,” said
Henley, “until the big money showed up, then my, how things changed.” A
few years earlier, Henley had been elated when Ronstadt offered him $200
per week to go on tour.
By 1971, as a solo performer and the Y in CSN&Y, Neil Young was already
a rock star. If Joni approached her songs as a painter, Neil was more like a
sketch artist. His most enduring contribution to the CSN&Y repertoire was
“Ohio,” a howling rocker dashed off in response to student protesters’ being
killed by the National Guard at Kent State University. Now Young had some-
thing different in mind. “I was saying, ‘OK, let’s get really, really mellow and
peaceful,’” he recalled. “‘Let’s make music that’s just as intense as the electric
stuff but which comes from a completely different, more loving place.”
Young and Elliot Roberts travelled to Nashville in February for an appear-
ance on The Johnny Cash Show. At a dinner party they met record producer
Elliot Mazer, who didn’t know much about Young beyond the fact that his
girlfriend wouldn’t stop playing Young’s After the Goldrush. He asked Mazer to
arrange a Saturday night recording session after Cash’s show. The last-minute
request taxed Mazer’s Rolodex, but he attracted musicians who would play
with Young for years, including bassist Tim Drummond, pedal steel guitarist
Ben Keith, and drummer Ken Buttrey.
“More than any artist I’ve worked with,” said Mazer, “you could sense when
it was gonna be the take. Neil’ll teach the band the song, but he’ll hold back
until he knows everything’s together.” According to Buttrey, Young all but
writes his own drum parts with the strum of his guitar. “His rhythm playing
is just perfect,” said Buttrey. “It’ll feel like he’s slowing down, but it’s just the
Neil Young feel. No drummer should ever hold Neil to a certain tempo because
if you put a metronome on it, you kill the Neil Young feel.”
Neil got Linda Ronstadt and James Taylor to help him sing “Heart of Gold.”
“We wound up on our knees around this microphone,” said Ronstadt. “I was
just shrieking this high harmony, singing a part that was just higher than God.”
Taylor played banjo on “Old Man” and said, “I don’t think I’ve played [a banjo]
before or since. Neil likes to be present in his own life, as in-the-moment as
 Troubadours 153

he can be. And that’s how he plays, that’s how he writes, that’s how he sings.
He’s present.”
Harvest, Young’s most popular album, made him an icon of (North) Ameri-
canaland. “This song put me in the middle of the road,” said Young of “Heart
of Gold,” his only #1 hit. “Traveling there soon became a bore so I headed for
the ditch.” Bob Dylan, known to stray outside the lines, couldn’t help but no-
tice. “The only time it bothered me that someone sounded like me was when
I was living in Phoenix, Arizona, in about ’72,” said Dylan. “The big song at
the time was ‘Heart of Gold.’ I always liked Neil Young, but it bothered me
every time I listened to ‘Heart of Gold.’ I think it was up at number one for
a long time, and I’d say ‘Shit, that’s me. If it sounds like me, it should as well
be me.’”
GRIEVOUS ANGELS

Gram Parsons felt right at home at Nellcote, a mansion in the south of France
that was home to Nazis during World War II and, in 1970, Keith Richards of
the Rolling Stones, who’d left the United Kingdom as tax exiles. A mobile
recording truck was parked in the driveway, and couriers from Marseilles
brought Richards (and his significant other, Anita Pallenberg) a steady sup-
ply of heroin. The other Stones found nearby accommodations and gathered
in the spectral basement to record Exile on Main Street, as dark and rootsy an
Americana album as could be made by a band of British rock stars.
“Engineers and technicians slept over,” said Dominique Tarle, a photogra-
pher who documented sessions that ran from April until November. “Illegal
power lines from the French railway system juiced their instruments, and
when the temperature hit 100, they rehearsed with their pants off.” The Stones
worked deep into the night; Keith spent his days indulging his excesses and
singing country songs with Parsons and, occasionally, Mick Jagger. “The three
of us would be plonking away on Hank Williams songs while waiting for the
rest of the band to arrive,” said Richards. “Gram had the biggest repertoire of
country songs you could imagine. He was never short of a song.”
 Grievous Angels 155

With his own career stalled, Parsons figured that if he couldn’t be a Rolling
Stone, then Keith could produce his solo album for the band’s new record
label. Excluded from the recording sessions, Parsons mostly got drunk and
argued with the woman who’d soon become his wife, Gretchen Burrell. Rich-
ards, preoccupied with the writing and recording of Exile, the last truly great
Rolling Stones album, gave little thought to making a record with Parsons.
“Mick, I think,” said Tarle, “was a little afraid [of a Parsons project]. And if
there is no room for Mick, there is no room also for the Rolling Stones.”
“A lot of Exile was done how Keith works,” said drummer Charlie Watts,
“which is, play it 20 times, marinate, play it another 20 times. He knows what
he likes, but he’s very loose.” As the Stones cut eighteen tracks of swampy
blues, rock, country, and gospel, the scene spun out of control. One Septem-
ber afternoon burglars stole nine of Richards’s guitars, Bill Wyman’s bass,
and a saxophone belonging to Bobby Keys. Jagger, newly married to Bianca
Pérez-Mora Macías, finally lost patience. “[Producer] Jimmy Miller was not
functioning properly,” said Jagger. “I had to finish the whole album myself,
because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies.” Amid this tur-
moil, Parsons and Burrell were exiled from Nellcote. Gram would never again
see Keith.
Back in the United States, Chris Hillman told Parsons about a special singer
whom the Burritos had encountered at a club in Washington, DC. “I got this
call,” said Emmylou Harris, “this long, drawled-out voice. Gram was in Bal-
timore, which is about a fifty-mile drive. He wanted to hear me, and to hear
how we sounded together, and would I pick him up? I said, ‘Hell, no!’” Instead,
Parsons and Burrell took a train to Washington, and Harris brought them to
her gig at Clyde’s. “We went down to the cellar,” said Harris, “sat among the
beer crates, and worked up ‘I Fall to Pieces’ and ‘That’s All It Took.’ It was a
rainy night and only about five people were in the audience. We just did the
two numbers, then chatted and exchanged phone numbers. Gram said he
would be in touch.”
Harris didn’t wait by the phone. “I was the jaded, cynical, old 25-year-old,”
said Harris, a high school valedictorian who dropped out of college to play
music. “I’d had a baby and a broken marriage and I’d worked as a waitress
and I’d been on food stamps.” Harris had recorded a folk album in the Joni
Mitchell–Judy Collins vein and knew little about country music. When Par-
sons got a record deal with Warner Brothers, he sent her a plane ticket and
156 Chapter 11

an album by the Louvin Brothers. “It really turned my head around,” said
Harris. “I love the Everly Brothers, but there’s something purer and more
raw about Charlie and Ira Louvin. It makes your hair stand up. . . . It got me
into duets.” Harris had found her métier. “It’s always intriguing, the infinite
combinations human voices can make together,” she said. “There’s a wonder-
ful feeling singing with somebody else. I suppose it is like what Fred Astaire
and Ginger Rogers felt. You aren’t conscious, you aren’t really thinking, you’re
just moving with a certain amount of abandon.”
Since Keith Richards wasn’t going to produce his record, Parsons asked
Merle Haggard. They met at Haggard’s house in Bakersfield and got ac-
quainted while playing with his model trains. “I thought he was a good writer,”
said Haggard, who turned down the job. “He was not wild though. That’s what
was funny to me. All these guys running around in long hair talk about being
wild and Rolling Stones.” Parsons hired key members of Elvis Presley’s band:
guitarist James Burton, keyboardist Glen D. Hardin, and drummer Ronnie
Tutt. (At the label’s insistence, he also paid part of their premium-scale sal-
ary.) Parsons was so nervous the first day of recording that he got too drunk to
perform. Barry Tashian, an old friend from Boston on board to play rhythm
guitar, recognized a change.
“One day his voice would be pretty shaky,” said Tashian. “Other times he
seemed very, very good. He shook a lot. I was ignorant about what he was
putting himself through. Today I realize what the problem was. He was very
sick. He had a lot of . . . devils.” The presence of Harris, who would crochet
between vocal takes, had a calming influence on Parsons. “When I looked at
her,” he said, “she had fantastic eye contact. Anything you were doing would
be in perfect harmony as long as you would look at her. If you raise your
eyebrows and go up on a note, she goes right up with you in perfect pitch.”
The album, GP, was released in 1973. Parsons and Harris reprised the duet
from their first meeting, “That’s All It Took,” and blended beautifully on “We’ll
Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning.” Parsons’s fragility was evident in the
performance of two of his original songs, “A Song for You” and “She” (writ-
ten with Chris Ethridge of the Burritos). Far more traditional than The Gilded
Palace of Sin, the album was less country rock than real country, and it failed to
find an audience in either camp. “I was the audience that he wanted to reach,”
said Harris. “I hadn’t really heard [country]. I couldn’t get past . . . country
music being politically incorrect. I grew up with rock and roll and folk and
was a huge Bob Dylan fan.” Sid Griffin, who’d later play in the Long Ryders
 Grievous Angels 157

and write books about Parsons and Dylan, recognized a kindred spirit. “When
I heard GP, I realized he was the guy,” said Griffin. “We hadn’t produced any
hip white Southerners who played any kind of anti-Vietnam dope-smoking
music. Gram was our boy.”
To promote the album, Parsons assembled a band (he couldn’t afford Pre-
sley’s men) that he called the Fallen Angels. Phil Kaufman, whom Parsons
had met through the Stones, was the tour’s road manager. “We had the most
disorganized rehearsals,” said Harris. “It was like we didn’t work up a single
song. I mean, we’d play them, but we didn’t finish one.” The tour’s opening
night in Colorado was a musical mess. “After that we decided we had better
really rehearse,” said Harris. “We went back to the hall and picked about
twelve songs and we decided on beginnings and endings and breaks.”
The album didn’t crack the Top 200, but it attracted influential fans. “Gram’s
first solo record was an event in my little circle of musicians,” said Steve Earle.
“When I heard that Gram and company were coming to Texas, I was off like a
prom dress, down the I-10 to the big city. It was loose but it was tough. Gram’s
hair was frosted and his fingernails were painted red. He sang through his nose
with his eyes closed while the band played catch-up for most of the night. I
saw and heard Emmylou Harris for the first time. I left a little bit in love and
absolutely certain of what I was going to be when I grew up.”
The group crossed paths in Houston with Neil Young, who came to their
show with his opening act, Linda Ronstadt, and invited everybody back to
his hotel for a party. “That was the first time Linda and Emmylou sang to-
gether,” said Jock Bartley, guitarist in the Fallen Angels. “It was an amazing
moment. Emmylou’s voice was angelic, fragile, and high, while Linda’s was
bigger, deeper, and more forceful. When they put those voices together it
was magical. And you could see it in their faces. They were as blown away
as everyone else.” Gretchen Parsons had become so jealous of the intimate
on-stage eye contact between her husband and Harris that she had to be sent
home. When the band played Oliver’s in Boston, a young writer approached
Parsons with a poem that he thought might make a good song: “Return of the
Grievous Angel.”

   
By the time Joni Mitchell returned to Los Angeles from British Columbia,
David Geffen’s Asylum Records had released hit albums by the Eagles, Jackson
Browne, and Mitchell (For the Roses). When Geffen invited Mitchell to join
158 Chapter 11

him on a trip to Paris to stay at the Ritz and eat at the finest restaurants, he
also brought along Robbie Robertson and his wife Dominique. Bob Dylan’s
recording contract was due to be renewed, and Robertson could be a valuable
ally in trying to get his old boss to record for Asylum. Joni Mitchell wrote “Free
Man in Paris” about Geffen—“nobody was calling me up for favors, no one’s
future to decide”—but his office was never really closed.
Geffen got his prize when Dylan signed to Asylum and used The Band to
record his first album of original material since 1970’s New Morning. “Planet
Waves was as good as we could make it in the situation,” said Robertson, cit-
ing a relatively undistinguished set of Dylan tunes that included one of his
most enduring albeit mawkish songs, “Forever Young.” The album was cut
quickly in order to be in stores when Dylan and The Band set out on a twenty-
one-city U.S. tour in January 1974. Dylan hadn’t toured since 1966 (with the
Hawks), and demand was high, with a mail-order lottery for the half-million
available tickets drawing 5.5 million requests. “The tour was damn good for
our pocketbooks,” said drummer Levon Helm, “but it just wasn’t a very pas-
sionate trip for any of us.” It was business, and in the 1970s, the bank was big.
Elton John debuted at the Troubadour in August 1970; two months later, he
released Tumbleweed Connection, an album highly influenced by The Band.
By 1975 John would be playing Dodger Stadium.
Joni Mitchell rose to the commercial occasion with Court and Spark, a sub-
lime collection of personal poetics and subtly moving melodies. This wasn’t
folk or rock but a sophisticated suite of songs recorded with Tom Scott’s jazzy
group, the L.A. Express. Robbie Robertson played lead guitar on “Raised on
Robbery,” but it was the heady propulsion of “Help Me” that gave Mitchell
her only Top 10 single. Alongside Blue and For the Roses, Court and Spark found
the idiosyncratic artist briefly in tune with a mass audience.
That changed with the more experimental The Hissing of Summer Lawn
(1975), known to have been a particular favorite of Prince. “[Joni] turned left
without signaling and the audience went straight on,” said Ron Stone, part
of her management team. Mitchell would make more remarkable music—
Hejira (1976) was a meditation on love and wanderlust animated by the lithe
electric bass of Jaco Pastorious—and future albums would include collabora-
tions with Charles Mingus and musical contributions by saxophonist Wayne
Shorter and jazz guitarist Pat Matheny. In 2008 pianist Herbie Hancock won
the Album of the Year Grammy for River: The Joni Letters, a collection of her
songs performed by, among others, Tina Turner, Nora Jones, and Leonard
 Grievous Angels 159

Cohen. Mitchell was unique among her pop peers, a genuine artist, and
generations of songwriters have gone to school on her transcendent streak
of classic albums.
Linda Ronstadt, the sweetheart of the Troubadour, followed her hit-mak-
ing years with successful albums of pop standards and Mexican folk music;
neither the Eagles nor Jackson Browne strayed far from their commercial
wheelhouse. Browne found a vital ally in David Lindley, whose slide guitar
and violin were integral to songs with lyrics focused on romance (“Jamaica,
Say You Will”) and the individual’s place in society (“For Everyman,” “The
Pretender”). Late for the Sky (1974) was Browne’s most artful collection of in-
timate, personal songs; his support of environmental and liberal political
causes anticipated the activism common among Americana artists.
The Eagles focused on solid songs and exquisitely produced records. “The
Byrds invented country-rock,” said Chris Hillman, “Gram and I refined it in
the Burritos, and the Eagles took it to the bank.” Parsons took a more critical
view. “The Eagles’ music is bubblegum,” he said. “It’s got too much sugar in it.
Life is tougher than they make it out to be.” Parsons and Harris once played a
show headlined by the Eagles and featuring Lester Flatt’s band as the open-
ing act. “Lester Flatt had Roland White on guitar,” said Bernie Leadon, “and
a 15-year-old Marty Stuart on mandolin. I remember Marty told me that that
night was when he realized that you could mix country, rock, and bluegrass.
He was all excited and went back to tell Lester all about it. Lester just said,
‘Aw, it won’t amount to shit.’”
The Eagles hit the big time with singles from 1974’s On the Border (“Al-
ready Gone,” “Best of My Love”) and 1975’s One of These Nights (“One of These
Nights,” “Lyin’ Eyes”), the latter both the first album totally produced by Bill
Szymczyk and the last with Bernie Leadon. The Eagles soon featured two
rock guitarists (Don Felder and Joe Walsh) with nary a banjo nor steel guitar
to be heard. Frey and Henley came to personify Hollywood hedonism. “They
were the horniest boys in town,” said a woman in their social circle, “living
life without rules or limits. And still they loved to portray themselves in their
music as the underdogs, the taken-advantage-of victims. We used to call that
song ‘Lyin’ Guys.’”
The Eagles capped their hit-making years with Hotel California; the title song
used ringing rock guitars to orchestrate lyrics about where living in the fast lane
can lead. But the album that truly reflected the end of the California singer-
songwriter and country-rock scene was Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty, a
160 Chapter 11

live album featuring original songs (the hit title track) and cover tunes capturing
the seamier side of the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle (Danny O’Keefe’s “The Road” and a
blues standard about the era’s drug of choice, “Cocaine”). In the end, the legacy
of the Eagles would rest not on their carefully crafted LPs but on a greatest hits
collection that became the biggest selling album in history.
Music critics weren’t the only people who gave the Eagles no respect. The
Dude was an iconic hipster played by Jeff Bridges in the Coen Brothers’ 1998
film The Big Lebowski. In one scene, a distressed Dude rides in a taxi while
“Peaceful Easy Feeling” plays on the radio. “Man, can you change the chan-
nel?” said the Dude. “I had a rough night and I hate the fucking Eagles, man.”
The black cabbie explodes into angry profanities, pulls the taxi to a squealing
stop, and throws the Dude to the curb. The polished harmonies and perfectly
rendered guitars of the Eagles would come to have a profound effect on com-
mercial country music. As for the Dudes of Americana, they typically dismiss
the group while remembering every last hit.

   
Willie Nelson went back to Texas after his house in Hendersonville, Tennes-
see, burned to the ground in December 1969. Neither Nelson nor Nashville
would ever be quite the same. “I was raised in Texas beer joints,” he said, “so
I went back to [playing] my old beer joints. I was home again.” His daugh-
ters returned from the Atlanta Pop Festival excited about seeing Janis Joplin,
Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Joe Cocker and wondered if their dad
might also appeal to the hippies. Nelson was surprised to learn that Leon
Russell, who’d played piano on some of his earliest recordings, had re-created
himself as a rock star.
Nelson was thirty-nine when he returned to Texas and was wise to the ways
of the music business. “I knew I only had a few years left to do what I was
going to do,” said Nelson. “I wasn’t going down there to quit.” Nelson’s hair
crept over his ears, and he traded his conventional stage wardrobe for blue
jeans, tee shirts, and sneakers. But he never denied his past. At his 1972 debut
at the Armadillo, the hippest club in Austin, he played to an audience split
between longhairs and rednecks and opened with his early classics: “Crazy,”
“Hello Walls,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” and “Night Life.” As the show
continued, he took more guitar solos and let his harmonica player, Mickey
Raphael, strut his stuff. The rich, distinctive sound on the bandstand is what
Nelson brought to his Atlantic albums.
 Grievous Angels 161

The Dripping Springs Reunion, a three-day festival that Nelson helped

promote in 1972, anticipated his genre-defying future. The bill placed such
mainstream Nashville stars as Roger Miller, Loretta Lynn, and Roy Acuff
alongside Willie and his more unorthodox friends Waylon Jennings and Kris
Kristofferson. Songwriter Donnie Fritts was at the festival to play keyboards
with Kristofferson. “You’d look out there and it’d be hillbillies, cowboy guys,
and then you have the hippies, all having fun together,” said Fritts. “It was
one of the most important gatherings of the seventies, bringing all the differ-
ent acts and people together in one place. And it happened through Willie
Nelson.”
Texas was thick with songwriters; Mickey Newbury was one of the most
successful, writing songs for everyone from Kenny Rogers and the First Edi-
tion (“Just Dropped In [To See What Condition My Condition Was In”]) to
Eddy Arnold (“Here Comes the Rain, Baby”) and Solomon Burke (“Time Is
a Thief ”). In 1968 Newbury met a songwriter named Townes Van Zandt in
Houston and brought him to Nashville to meet the man who would produce
his first record, “Cowboy” Jack Clement; a decade earlier, Clement had helped
Johnny Cash shape his signature sound at Sun Records.
“I also took Guy Clark,” said Newbury. “Guy only had a couple songs, but
I took him to Nashville, signed him with Columbine Music, basically off the
strength of . . . a song called ‘Step Inside This House.’ If I hadn’t taken Townes
to Nashville, then there would have been no Guy Clark. Then you think about
all the people that said that their major influences were Guy Clark and Townes
Van Zandt. Now you’re talking about Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith,
Joe Ely, all of those people.”
Born to a wealthy family with an attentive mother and a corporate lawyer
father, Van Zandt was excited to see Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show
and got his first guitar the following Christmas. But the smart student and
gifted athlete fell into binge drinking and depression at the University of
Colorado. Van Zandt was diagnosed with manic depression and underwent
three months of insulin shock therapy, which shattered his long-term memory
and foretold a lifetime of alcoholism and drug abuse. He quit college in 1967
to become a folk singer.
In Houston, Van Zandt played clubs such as the Jester Lounge and the
Old Quarter alongside performers like Guy Clark and Doc Watson; he was
especially drawn to the pulsing acoustic blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins. “Some
people don’t know what to think when you tell them your two biggest influ-
TOWNES VAN ZANDT
 Grievous Angels 163

ences are Lightnin’ Hopkins and Robert Frost,” said Van Zandt, but those
inspirations are clear in the precision of his language and the fluidity of his
fingerpicking. “Townes is the first person I heard who was writing his own
songs in a way that made me want to do it, too,” said Clark. “Not necessarily
in his style, but [with] the care and respect he took with writing.”
Van Zandt began recording in 1968, but his albums, released on small in-
dependent labels, drew little attention beyond a minor cult following. By
1972, when he recorded a live set at the Old Quarter, he’d already penned
some of his most famous and enduring songs including “Pancho and Lefty,”
“Tecumseh Valley,” “Flyin’ Shoes,” “Kathleen,” and “Waiting ’Round to Die.”
His songs would become country hits for such artists as Willie Nelson and
Merle Haggard and perennials in the repertoire of Americana performers.
Clark became equally influential. “I see myself as a folksinger and my songs
as poetry,” he said, adding, “I don’t need to prove I’m a poet in every line, and
I’m not afraid to speak plainly in my songs. . . . But it is my obligation as a poet
to be faithful to the verse. I write what I know. I write what I see.”
Sometimes, that can take time. “It was about four in the morning and I
was coming back from a club gig sleeping in the backseat of the car,” said
Clark of one writing experience. “I woke up to see where we were and said,
‘If I could just get off of this L.A. Freeway without getting killed or caught.’
Lights started going off in my head with that line, so I got Susanna’s eyebrow
pencil and a burger sack off the floor and wrote it down.” Clark carried the
scrap of paper around for a couple of years before completing “L.A. Freeway,”
which became a hit for Jerry Jeff Walker.
Guy and Susanna Clark were married in 1972; Van Zandt served as best
man, and for a time, lived in the couple’s East Nashville home. “In the early
years we were always together,” said Clark. “She and Townes were best friends,
and Townes and I were best friends. . . . And he was always in love with my
wife.” On one occasion the three were all stricken with the flu and living on
antibiotics and cough syrup. “I went to bed and had a dream about being
a folksinger,” said Van Zandt. “And I was on stage somewhere and I played
this song. And it was so vivid that I remembered it, woke up exactly after it
finished, turned on the light and reached for this little pad and pencil.” In
the morning he poured himself a cup of coffee and played the Clarks his new
song, “If I Needed You.”
“It was fucking Nashville, Tennessee,” said Clark, “home of Johnny Cash,
and you’re a songwriter from Texas. It was top of the world, like Paris in the
164 Chapter 11

Twenties.” In this crowd, you had to hold your own. In 1972, Earle played a
pass-the-hat gig in Houston to a sparse audience that included Van Zandt,
who kept calling out for him to play “The Wabash Cannonball.” “I finally
had to admit that I didn’t know the fuckin’ ‘Wabash Cannonball,’” said Earle.
“And he goes, ‘You call yourself a folksinger and you don’t know “The Wabash
Cannonball?”’ So I played this song of his called ‘Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold’
that has about 19 million words in it. And he shut up.”
Rodney Crowell knew “The Wabash Cannonball” because his parents
had met at a Roy Acuff concert. His father worked construction and played
small-time music gigs with his own band, J. W. Crowell and the Rhythmaires;
Rodney played drums with the group before forming his own teenage combos
and taking off for Nashville in 1972. Sleeping in his car, he made ends meet
by washing dishes and hung out at a popular folk club, Bishop’s Pub. That’s
where Crowell first met Earle. “Skinny kid with a big black felt cowboy hat,”
said Crowell. “It was like he stepped right out of a Cormac McCarthy novel.”
Crowell caught a break when country singer Jerry Reed heard him play,
signed him to his publishing company, and cut his “You Can’t Keep Me Here in
Tennessee.” Freed from his day job, Crowell focused on writing songs worthy
of being played at a song circle at Guy and Susanna Clark’s house. “Townes
Van Zandt was pretty much the alpha male,” said Crowell. “He was smart, he
was strung out; he’d come into town and be upstairs kicking heroin.” Clark
was a more stable role model; his 1975 debut, Old No. 1, included not only “L.A.
Freeway” but “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” an enduring classic that had
background vocals by Earle, Crowell, and Emmylou Harris. Clark helped
Steve Earle get a publishing deal and hired him to play bass in his band. “It
all revolved around Guy,” said Crowell, “’cause Guy was the curator of all the
wild spirits who were really just a group of songwriters trying to figure out
how to do it.” Crowell and Earle were among the lucky few who honed their
craft under Clark’s benign tutelage and who got to carve their initials into his
wooden dining table.

   
The Byrds took a slow glide into history after Sweetheart of the Rodeo. But
with Clarence White on lead guitar, the band also put on the best live shows
of its career. The most famous songs from those years were “The Ballad of
Easy Rider,” which Roger McGuinn composed after Bob Dylan gave him the
opening lyric (“The river flows, it flows to the sea / Wherever that river flows,
 Grievous Angels 165

that’s where I want to be”), and “Jesus Is Just Alright,” which was later a hit
for the Doobie Brothers. McGuinn dissolved the current Byrds in 1973 so that
the original members could reunite to create a critically dismissed album pro-
duced by the ex-Byrd who’d become the biggest star, David Crosby. White did
session work while a member of the Byrds, including recordings with Linda
Ronstadt, the Everly Brothers, and Jackson Browne. He hit the ground running
after the breakup, mounting a reunion tour with the Kentucky Colonels and
joining the Muleskinners, a progressive bluegrass group that included Peter
Rowan, Davis Grisman, Bill Keith, and Richard Greene.
White was, in a phrase, a working musician, and on the night of July 14,
1973, he and his brothers played the Jack of Diamonds in Palmdale, California.
At about 2 a.m. White was loading his equipment into a car, including his B-
Bender Telecaster, a unique guitar customized to allow him to emulate a steel
guitar by bending its B string as much as a minor third. In a tragic instant,
White was struck and killed by a drunk driver. More than a hundred mourners,
most of them musicians, gathered for a funeral at St. Mary’s Catholic Church.
A drunken Gram Parsons joined the mourners for the burial at Joshua Me-
morial Park. As dirt was thrown onto the coffin, Parsons and Bernie Leadon
began to softly sing a traditional gospel tune, “Farther Along,” that had been
recorded by both the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Byrds. “Farther along
we’ll know more about it,” they sang, joined by others. “Farther along we’ll
understand why.” Chris Ethridge overheard Parsons speaking to Kaufman.
“Phil,” said Parsons, “if this happens to me, I don’t want them doing this to
me. You can take me to the desert and burn me. I want to go out in a cloud of
smoke.”
Parsons nearly got his wish when the Laurel Canyon home he shared with
Gretchen burned to the ground. Parsons, in a downward spiral of alcohol and
heroin abuse, was due to cut a second album; Harris was excited to get back
to work. “G.P. was a struggle,” she said, “but Gram’s singing was so much bet-
ter after a year on the road.” Once more, members of Presley’s band were in
the studio alongside Bernie Leadon and Byron Berline. “Our singing came
together on two songs: ‘Love Hurts’ and ‘Angels Rejoiced [Last Night],’” said
Harris. “I finally learned what I was supposed to do. . . . And the fact that his
voice sometimes suffered from the hard life that he lived gave it a vulnerable
quality.”
“The things I like of Gram’s were when he was singing with Emmy,” said
Linda Ronstadt, who added a third voice to one song on the record. “She was
166 Chapter 11

very strong and was able to see the uniqueness in what he did. With Gram,
most of it was sloppy, but Emmy was able to make it clearer.” The album, titled
Grievous Angel after the tune Parsons wrote using the words of Tom Brown,
was Parsons’s best work since Sweetheart of the Rodeo (reissues included his
vocals, which were omitted from the original release) and The Gilded Palace
of Sin. It also planted the seeds that would make Emmylou Harris the Queen
of Americana.
Whereas GP was solid but stiff, as if straining to be a true country record,
Grievous Angel projected a personality of its own. It included superior songs
from Parsons’s past including “Brass Buttons,” which he’d sung as a folk song
in 1965, and “$1000 Wedding,” which was attempted but abandoned by the
Burrito Brothers. “Love Hurts,” an Everly Brothers tune by Felice and Boud-
leaux Bryant, captured the delicate vocal chemistry between Parsons and
Harris. “Return of the Grievous Angel” spoke to the allure of love: “Twenty
thousand roads I went down, down, down / And they all lead me straight back
home to you.” Parsons’s newest song, “In My Hour of Darkness,” written in
part as a tribute to Clarence White and sung in close harmony with Harris,
closed the album with elegiac grace.
Completed in less than two weeks, the album suggested that Parsons was
on his best behavior; Philip Kaufman was said to have acted as something of
a babysitter. Parsons considered giving Harris co-billing and putting a photo
of them astride a motorcycle on the cover. But those were details to be deter-
mined, and with a month before scheduled live dates, Parsons, who’d men-
tioned plans to divorce his wife, took his new girlfriend, Margaret Fisher, to
his spiritual home, Joshua Tree National Park. Hank Williams took his last
ride in the back of a blue Cadillac; Parsons drove to Joshua Tree in a new
white Jaguar.
During the day, they went to a local bar. “They had one song from Gram’s
first album on the jukebox,” said Fisher, “which he played incessantly.” One
night, they hit a different bar after supper. “They had a band playing,” said
Fisher, “and Gram sat in with them. He was singing ‘Okie from Muskogee’ and
he was making up his own words like ‘We all smoke marijuana in Muskogee.’”
But back at the Joshua Tree Inn Parsons wanted something stronger than pot,
and a local dealer obliged not with heroin but with morphine. Parsons, high
from the first shot, requested a second, and out went the lights. He was pro-
nounced dead at High Desert Memorial Hospital at 12:15 a.m. on September
19, 1973.
 Grievous Angels 167

The hospital sent Parsons’s body to Los Angeles International Airport for
transport to his stepfather’s home in New Orleans. Acting on his friend’s re-
quest, Kaufman and an associate drove a beat-up hearse to the airport, talked
their way into possession of the remains, and headed to Joshua Tree, pausing
only to buy beer, a bottle of booze, and a five-gallon container of gasoline. They
stopped near one of Gram’s favorite spots, Cap Rock, and pulled the casket out
of the hearse. Opening the lid, Kaufman tucked a “Sin City” jacket into the
coffin and soaked everything in gasoline. He then struck a match and sent the
grievous angel home in a fireball. A few days later police arrested Kaufman
at his home for what one wag called “Grand Theft Parsons.” Coincidentally,
director Arthur Penn had rented the house as a location for the film Night
Moves. As the police took Kaufman into custody, Penn said, “I have a feeling
I’m directing the wrong movie.”
THE RED-HEADED ICON

Willie Nelson paid a 1972 visit to Kris Kristofferson in Durango, Mexico, where
he was acting in director Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Krist-
offerson had urged Bob Dylan to write a song for the film; he came up with
“Knocking on Heaven’s Door” and also made his dramatic debut playing a
cowboy called Anonymous. He was “a little shy, scared to death,” said Nelson.
“They had him jumpin’ and runnin’ on them horses, and he ain’t no cowboy.”
Dylan was more comfortable with six strings than six guns. “Willie ended up
serenading the cast and crew all day long at Peckinpah’s house,” said Kristof-
ferson, “gladly accommodating Dylan’s requests to hear more and more.”
Nelson, who was now settled outside Austin, Texas, imagined a record
that was equally unadorned. He got the chance after he aligned with Neil
Reshen, who’d negotiated a new RCA contract for Waylon Jennings that gave
him creative control and increased his royalty rate from 5 percent to 8 percent.
(Executive and artist Chet Atkins had a long-term pact at 5 percent.) Reshen
leveraged the relative success of Nelson’s Atlantic releases to get him a com-
parable deal with Columbia Records.
The inspiration for Nelson’s career reinvention came from a song he’d sung
as a Fort Worth deejay in the 1950s and to his kids at bedtime, “Tale of the Red
 The Red-Headed Icon 169

Headed Stranger.” Nelson fleshed out the story of the enigmatic cowboy and
his black steed with original songs (“Time of the Preacher”) and covers of Eddy
Arnold’s “I Couldn’t Believe It Was True” and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,”
a song written by the man who’d discovered Hank Williams, Fred Rose. But
the true revelation of Red Headed Stranger (1975) was a stripped-down sound
built on Nelson’s acoustic guitar, a low-key, often absent rhythm section, and
instrumental flourishes by Mickey Raphael on harmonica and Willie’s sister
Bobbie on piano. Cut and mixed in five days for $4,000 at a studio in Garland,
Texas, Nelson used the rest of his $60,000 recording budget for living expenses
and to upgrade the band’s equipment and tour bus.
Columbia executives were more than skeptical about a submission that
sounded like demo recordings in need of a Nashville polish. But Nelson held
fast, and Red Headed Stranger became both a cultural signifier and a commer-
cial smash, with “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” Nelson’s first #1 country hit.
The country music maverick had hit the big time with an Americana concept
album that felt familiar to anyone who’d grown up watching cowboys at the
movies and on television. “Texans have known for 15 years what Red Headed
Stranger finally revealed to the world,” said his biographer, Joe Nick Patoski.
“That Nelson is simply too brilliant a songwriter, interpreter, and singer—just
too damn universal—to be defined as merely a country artist.”
It would be another five years before Nelson came up with the song that
would define his career, “On the Road Again”; he wrote it for the film Honey-
suckle Rose, in which Nelson played, well, Willie. But it was the mainstream
success of Red Headed Stranger that ensured a long and profitable run on the
concert circuit; along the way, Nelson would release a steady stream of al-
bums that ranged from the artistically inspired to the amiably workmanlike.
Nelson’s triumph rubbed off on his musical pals, including Waylon Jennings,
with whom Nelson often shared concert bills.
It was Hazel Smith, a publicist for Jennings, who came up with the idea to
promote Waylon and Willie as outlaws. “To us,” said Jennings, “outlaw meant
standing up for your rights, your own way of doing things.” Jennings had
anticipated the moment with a 1973 album of Billie Joe Shaver songs called
Honky Tonk Heroes, but its lean, wiry sound hadn’t reached much beyond his
country fans. That changed in 1976, when RCA catered to the outlaw coun-
try hype with a compilation album of previously recorded tracks by Nelson,
Jennings, his wife Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser. “Waylon was selling, if
we were lucky, two hundred and fifty thousand albums,” said RCA producer
170 Chapter 12

Jerry Bradley. “Willie comes out with Red Headed Stranger and that took off
and sold a million records. Jessi Colter put out ‘I’m Not Lisa’ on Capitol. That
damn thing sold half a million, or a million, and set our butt on fire.” So RCA
put old wine in a new bottle, called it Wanted! The Outlaws, and moved more
than a million copies while topping the country charts and hitting the pop
Top 10.
There’s a clear analogy to be made between “outlaw country” and “Ameri-
cana”; both are terms coined in the interest of marketing music. “You couldn’t
find two guys who are less like outlaws than Waylon Jennings and Willie
Nelson,” said their manager, Neil Reshen. “It’s all horseshit really. But if the
public wants outlaws, we’ll give them outlaws.” The two men responded differ-
ently to mass success. Nelson kept busy on the road, ventured into acting, and
repurchased the song copyrights he’d sold during his leaner years. Jennings
spent long days (and nights) in the recording studio fueled by a $1,500-a-day
cocaine habit, and like all addicts, worried about his supply line. On one
occasion his management company in New York arranged for 23 grams of
cocaine to be sent via air courier. The DEA detected the suspicious package,
removed 22 grams, and sent the rest on its way to Nashville. In his autobiog-
raphy Jennings said that he escaped arrest thanks to a flawed search warrant,
but he neglected to note that Mark Rothbaum, an assistant to Reshen, pled
guilty to cocaine distribution to avoid implicating Jennings. Nelson recognized
Rothbaum as an outlaw’s best friend; he went to work for Willie after serving
a brief sentence and later became his manager.

   
Bob Dylan spent the first two months of 1974 on a U.S. arena tour with The
Band that reconfirmed his status as a cultural superstar. Then he devoted two
months, five days per week, from 8:30 until 4:30, to a painting class at Nor-
man Raeben’s art studio above Carnegie Hall. “He taught you [about] putting
your head and your mind and your eye together,” said Dylan, “in a way that
allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt.” Raeben also gave
Dylan more concrete ideas. One day, he criticized Dylan’s rendering of a blue
vase by saying he was “tangled up in blue.”
A few days later Dylan had a rough draft of “Tangled up in Blue,” which
became the lead track of his next album, Blood on the Tracks. “I was just trying
to make [the song] like a painting where you can see the different parts but
then you also see the whole of it,” said Dylan. “With that particular song, that’s
 The Red-Headed Icon 171

what I was trying to do . . . with the concept of time and the way the characters
change from the first person to the third person, and you’re never quite sure
if the third person is talking or the first person is talking. But as you look at
the whole thing, it really doesn’t matter.”
Dylan titled “Idiot Wind,” his most vitriolic song since “Like a Rolling
Stone,” after another of Raeben’s dicta. But Dylan’s studies did more than
inspire some new songs. “I went home after that and my wife never did under-
stand me ever since that day,” said Dylan. “That’s when our marriage started
breaking up.” To be sure, more than adult education contributed to the dis-
solution of the marriage; although the official divorce was still years away,
Dylan spent the summer of 1974 with Ellen Bernstein, a woman he’d met at
his new-old label, Columbia Records, at a home he owned alongside the Crow
River in Minnesota.
“He was at his best there, at his most comfortable,” said Bernstein, “with
his brother’s house down the road. He had a painting studio out in the field,
and the house was far from fancy, out in the middle of nowhere. He was very
relaxed, and that’s where and when he was writing Blood on the Tracks.” One
of Dylan’s most celebrated albums, its meditations on les histoires de coeur were
assumed to be about the troubled state of his marriage, but these were not
like the intimate confessions of Joni Mitchell; they were more like reflections
from a lifetime. “Simple Twist of Fate” originally bore the subtitle “Fourth
Street Affair,” suggesting that it was about Suze Rotolo, while “You’re Gonna
Make Me Lonesome When You Go” anticipated the end of his relationship
with Bernstein.
Dylan polished his lyrics before entering the studio, but recording the
music, which he’d composed mainly on a guitar tuned to open D, proved to
be a challenge. Dylan played the material for Mike Bloomfield, his guitarist
for Highway 61 Revisited, who failed to get his arms around songs he heard
as long and monochromatic. Eric Weissberg (of “Dueling Banjos” fame) and
his band Deliverance joined Dylan in the recording studio, but he used the
musicians selectively and enlisted other players for subsequent sessions. “He
knew as soon as he heard something whether or not it was what he was going
for,” said Bernstein. “It was all very immediate and very emotional.” Dylan
played a test pressing of the album for his brother, David Zimmerman, who
was troubled by the minimalist sound and urged him to recut five of the songs
with musicians from Minneapolis. This was done over the course of two days
in December.
WILLIE NELSON
 The Red-Headed Icon 173

Columbia released Blood on the Tracks in January 1975, the same month it
issued Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger. Critics judged Dylan’s album his best
since his mid-sixties hot streak, and July saw the commercial release of The
Basement Tapes, a 2-LP selection of the tunes that Dylan and The Band had
recorded in Big Pink. At about that time Dylan started turning up on Green-
wich Village stages playing with Muddy Waters, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, and Patti
Smith. His buddy Bob Neuwirth also organized jam sessions with such players
as Mick Ronson, lead guitarist of David Bowie’s glam-rock band, the Spiders
from Mars; T-Bone Burnett, an unknown guitarist and singer-songwriter from
Texas; and Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan had invited to play after seeing her
walk down Second Avenue carrying a violin case.
“We were all very close,” said Dylan. “We had this fire going ten years ago
and now we’ve got it burning again.” Dylan might have sought the intimacy
of his early years in the Village, but as the Rolling Thunder Revue took shape,
with bassist Rob Stoner leading the band, there was no doubt about who was
the star of the show. Mounted as a sort of guerilla tour, with an impromptu
itinerary that focused on secondary markets, more than seventy were in the
troupe when final rehearsals were held at the Sea Crest Beach Motel in Mas-
sachusetts, where Dylan serenaded the participants of a mah-jongg tourna-
ment with “Simple Twist of Fate” and poet Allen Ginsberg read his elegy for
his mother, “Kaddish.”
Joan Baez reunited with Dylan for the entire outing, as did Ramblin’ Jack
Elliott and Roger McGuinn of the Byrds; Joni Mitchell, Arlo Guthrie, and
Gordon Lightfoot appeared at a handful of shows. A film crew was on hand to
record some of the concerts as well as scenes like Dylan and Ginsberg playing
a blues at the grave of Beat writer Jack Kerouac. Despite the presence of play-
wright Sam Shepard, everything was improvised. “The filming happened in
gleeful little happenings,” said Baez, who participated alongside Sara Dylan,
“enacting whatever dream Dylan had had in the night.” Baez had just had a
Top 40 hit with an original song, “Diamonds and Rust,” about her love affair
with the auteur. “Naturally,” said Baez, “I was playing a Mexican whore—the
Rolling Thunder women all played whores.”
The resulting film, Renaldo and Clara, clocked in at nearly four hours.
Widely panned by critics, it played only a limited run in Los Angeles and New
York. Critics were kinder to the live show in which Dylan, wearing feathered
hats and mime-style whiteface, performed tunes from Blood on the Tracks,
174 Chapter 12

debuted new material such as “Isis,” and recast old songs in novel arrange-
ments. As if completing a circle, Dylan ended each concert leading the entire
cast in singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” The tour inspired
Burnett to form the Alpha Band with two other members of the ensemble,
David Mansfield and Steven Soles.
“From a myth-making point of view,” said Jon Landau in Rolling Stone, “this
is all astonishingly effective stuff. . . . This is one rock star who still knows the
importance of mystery in creating art and in calling attention to the artist.”
Landau had recently helped Bruce Springsteen complete Born to Run, an
album that landed the singer on simultaneous covers of Time and Newsweek
in September 1975. A few months later, Springsteen saw the Rolling Thunder
Revue in New Haven and went backstage to meet the maestro. “Hey,” said
Dylan, “I hear you’re the new me.”

   
Emmylou Harris was at her parents’ home in Maryland when she learned that
Gram Parsons had died; she then spent a weekend with Barry Tashian and
others (including banjo virtuoso Bill Keith) at a cabin in Connecticut. Playing
a tape of her last session with Parsons, she wept as he sang “Brass Buttons.”
“When Gram died,” said Harris, “I felt like I’d been amputated, like my life
had been whacked off. I’d only been with him a short time, but it was like
everything had become clear to me in that short period.”
Grievous Angel was released in January 1974. At the insistence of Gretchen
Parsons, the cover photo of Gram and Emmylou was scuttled for a ghostly im-
age of Parsons against a pale blue sky. Despite the album’s poor sales, Warner
Brothers offered Harris a solo deal with an advance sufficient to hire the same
Presley-honed musicians. Pieces of the Sky amounted to an Americana sampler
with songs by Parsons (“Sleepless Night”), Merle Haggard (“The Bottle Let
Me Down”), Dolly Parton (“Coat of Many Colors”), and a Top 5 country single
(sung with Herb Pederson) of the Louvin Brothers’ “If I Could Only Win Your
Love.” “Blueberry Wine,” the LP’s opening track, was written by an unknown
from Houston named Rodney Crowell.
“The first time I laid eyes on her,” said Crowell, “she was playing a show
at a folk club in Washington D.C. There was talk of her recording one of my
songs, so I had gone to meet her. Afterwards, we went to the house of one
of her friends and sat until the wee hours with guitars talking about songs. I
would sing an obscure Townes Van Zandt song, or a Louvin Brothers song,
 The Red-Headed Icon 175

and she would say, ‘I know that.’” Music cemented the bond. “It was great
to find a new writer who was of my generation,” said Harris. “He was like a
kid brother. If we had grown up together we would have been making music
together all our lives.”
Harris, like Parsons, made country music with an album-rock sensibility.
“After Gram died,” said Harris, “I wanted to carry on his music in some small
way. I also felt I could speak to some people like me who’d sort of looked down
on country music. . . . I was kind of an ex-hippie—I was one of them. I also
brought to it more than a love for traditional country; I could get really excited
by a Louvin Brothers song, and I’d also cut a Beatles song. I was genuinely
affected by both of these things.”
On tour with the same musicians who’d recorded her album—now called
the Hot Band—Harris reconnected with Crowell in Austin, where he sat in at
the Armadillo World Headquarters. At the end of the evening, Harris offered
Crowell a gig as the Hot Band’s rhythm guitarist. He left the next day for Los
Angeles. “It wasn’t my musicianship at all,” said Crowell, who was thrilled to
play guitar alongside James Burton. “It was the conversation that Emmy and
I were having about songs . . . I was part of the discussion about the material
that was being done.”
Elite Hotel, released in December 1975, consolidated the success of Harris’s
debut, becoming a #1 country album on the strength of hit singles identified
with Patsy Cline (“Sweet Dreams”) and Buck Owens (“Together Again”). The
eclectic repertoire included tunes by Hank Williams (“Jambalaya [On the
Bayou]”), Lennon-McCartney (“Here, There, and Everywhere”), and more
selections by Parsons (“Sin City,” “Ooh Las Vegas,” and “Wheels”). Harris sang
Crowell’s “Till I Gain Control Again” and co-wrote a song with him called
“Amarillo.”
In the space of twelve months, Harris had become the kind of hipster
country artist that Parsons had hoped to be. “I’m influenced by the real Old
Guard country music,” said Harris. “George Jones and Webb Pierce and the
real stone-hard country. But I can’t pretend to be that kind of artist.” Instead,
she became the kind of interpreter who’d also perform songs by Crowell and
his songwriting heroes, Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. Crowell blossomed
while playing in the Hot Band and harmonizing with Harris on songs such
as the Louvin Brothers’ “You’re Running Wild.” By now, everybody wanted
to sing with Emmylou, including Bob Dylan, who invited her to sessions for
Desire, the follow-up to Blood on the Tracks.
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Dylan wrote most of the album with Jacques Levy, a theater director known
for the controversial Oh! Calcutta, and eschewed the personal in favor of nar-
rative songs about boxer Hurricane Carter (“Hurricane”) and gangster Joey
Gallo (“Joey”). Dylan attempted to record Desire with a large ensemble, but
the final album, one of his most commercially successful, featured a small
group. “I’d never heard the songs before, and we did most of them in one or
two takes,” said Harris. “His phrasing changes a lot, but Gram did that a lot,
too . . . I watched him all the time, so I did just the same thing with Dylan.”

   
“Those first royalty checks we got almost killed some of us,” said The Band’s
Rick Danko, who earned a couple of hundred thousand dollars from “This
Wheel’s on Fire,” which he co-wrote with Dylan. “Suddenly we had all the
money we needed, and people were falling over themselves to make us happy,
which meant giving us all the dope we could stand.”
“After The Band,” said Robertson, “something threw us off track. . . . Men-
tally, health wise, success was not the best thing for The Band.” The five
musicians were never less than world-class, but their next two studio efforts,
Stage Fright and Cahoots, lacked the cohesive artistry that distinguished the
group’s first two albums. Those had followed years of playing with Ronnie
Hawkins and a wild ride with Bob Dylan. Now they were rock stars living in
a world of distractions. The albums also lacked new songs by, most crucially,
Manuel, as well as Danko and Helm. That brought another issue into focus:
money. Helm, who was taking heroin while Manuel was increasingly lost
to alcoholism, complained about Robertson’s writing the group’s material
without sharing his publishing income with the other members.
“Levon was influenced by a more recent model,” said John Simon. “Song-
writers in [some] bands would show up in the studio with their songs only
in fragmentary form. Then the other players in the group would contribute a
little bit, often only their parts, and claim partial authorship for their efforts.
But what those players did is not writing. Writing is the creating of melody
and lyrics. . . . And though I completely understand and sympathize with
Levon’s anger about it, all in all I have to side with Robbie on the traditional
definition of authorship.”
Rock of Ages, a live album recorded during a series of concerts at the Acad-
emy of Music in New York at the end of 1971, captured the group at its musical
peak. A five-piece horn section playing arrangements by Allen Toussaint, a
 The Red-Headed Icon 177

master of New Orleans rhythm & blues, iced the cake. “I was determined to
maintain their original sound,” said Toussaint, who traveled to Woodstock to
do the job, and in the process, experienced his first snowstorm. “If I didn’t spoil
anything they’d already achieved, then it was a good job.” After midnight on
New Year’s Eve, Bob Dylan, who’d only recently begun to step back out into
the spotlight, joined his old group to welcome in 1972.
After Rock of Ages, The Band’s albums became less consequential—Moon-
dog Matinee was an amiable collection of rock ’n’ roll oldies, while Northern
Lights—Southern Cross was crucially enhanced by Garth Hudson’s instru-
mental expertise. The musicians had relocated to Los Angeles, with homes
scattered around Malibu and music made at a leased recording compound
dubbed “Shangri-La.” But Shangri-La wasn’t Big Pink, and the brotherhood
of old was gone. “We were drifting further apart, we weren’t putting our hearts
into it,” said Richard Manuel, who lived in a converted stable on the compound
and drank endless bottles of Grand Marnier.
“I walked out of my house,” said Robertson, “and the first thing I saw was
Keith Moon lying unconscious on the beach with the tide coming in and
lapping around his body. I remember thinking, ‘Hey, this is taking things a
little too close to the edge.’” It was the mid-’70s peak of rock-star decadence.
“That was the first sense I had of Robbie’s slight alienation from the whole
thing,” said Jonathan Taplin, who worked as The Band’s road manager before
producing such Martin Scorsese films as Mean Streets and Taxi Driver. “He
didn’t want to be a baby sitter anymore.” That’s when Robertson came up with
the notion of The Last Waltz, a concert extravaganza that would essentially
mark the end of The Band.
Scorsese, who’d been a cameraman for the movie Woodstock, was engaged
to film a concert that would find The Band backing significant figures from
their musical past, including Ronnie Hawkins, Muddy Waters, Dr. John, and
Paul Butterfield. Rock star colleagues like Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Neil
Young, and Eric Clapton were also on the bill. It was held on Thanksgiving
Day in 1976 at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, where promoter Bill
Graham provided a turkey dinner for the audience. The stage was dressed with
scenery borrowed from the San Francisco Opera’s production of La Traviata.
Warner Brothers put up $1.5 million for a movie and soundtrack with the
proviso that Bob Dylan would perform with his original backing group.
The Last Waltz was an artful concert movie that captured a musical perfor-
mance polished in post-production. “Rick’s bass was generally out of tune,”
178 Chapter 12

said John Simon, who was the event’s musical director, “and Richard hit a lot
of the cracks between the piano keys. Garth always looked for opportunities
to improve his parts and Robbie was a perfectionist who wanted to fix his
parts too. . . . So everyone re-did their parts—except for Levon.”
To complete the film and to illustrate the group’s roots in country and
rhythm & blues, the five original members of The Band assembled for the last
time on a Hollywood soundstage. Scorsese filmed “The Weight” with verses
sung by Pops and Mavis Staples of the Staple Singers and a new Robertson
song, “Evangeline,” that was derived from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Long-
fellow. The Band performed that song with a gifted singer whose career had
come a long way in a short time, Emmylou Harris.

   
Walking the beach in Malibu in 1977, Willie Nelson met Booker T. Jones, the
keyboardist of Booker T. and the MG’s, a band best known for its instrumental
hit “Green Onions.” They became fast friends, and Nelson asked Jones to write
him an arrangement of a pop song from the 1940s, “Moonlight in Vermont.”
Nelson was very comfortable in his musical skin after the success of the Red
Headed Stranger, and now he had a notion to do an album drawn from the
Great American Songbook. “I remember the first night I sang [Hoagy Car-
michael’s] ‘Stardust’ with my band at the Austin Opera House,’” said Nelson.
“There was a kind of stunned silence in the crowd for a moment and then they
exploded with cheering and whistling and applauding. The kids in the crowd
thought ‘Stardust’ was a new song I had written. The older folks remembered
the song well and loved it as much as I did.”
“We had a lot of common influences,” said Jones, who ended up producing
and arranging an album that came to be called Stardust. “Ray Charles was a
big influence of mine and he was a big influence on Willie. I had heard Bob
Wills and his Texas country jazz. Willie just loved jazz.” Nelson also appreci-
ated great songs. Besides the title tune, the album included Duke Ellington’s
“Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone
to Watch over Me,” and Kurt Weill’s “September Song.”
Stardust was recorded at the home studio of Brian Ahern, who’d used the
facility to produce records by the woman who became his wife, Emmylou
Harris. Mickey Raphael, who’d recorded with Emmylou, already knew that
recording his harmonica in the bathroom provided natural reverb. Bobbie
Nelson and Booker T. handled the keyboards; Chris Ethridge, the former
 The Red-Headed Icon 179

Burrito Brother who was now a member of Willie’s band, played bass. The
album’s cover featured a painting by Susanna Clark, the wife of another Lone
Star songwriter, Guy Clark.
Columbia Records predictably balked at the prospect of selling an album
of standards by a singer they’d already promoted as an outlaw. Then Stardust
became a multi-platinum #1 country album with two chart-topping singles,
Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia on My Mind” and Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies.”
Critical reaction was positive. “These tunes have become part of the folk music
of exurban America,” wrote Ariel Swartley in Rolling Stone. “And that’s the
way Nelson plays them—spare and simple, with a jump band’s verve and a
storyteller’s love of a good tale.”
“I’m a melody man,” said Nelson. “I like stating the melody plain and
simple. Simplicity is always the key. . . . My kind of singing isn’t meant to be
perfect. It’s meant to reflect the imperfections of a human being like me.”
Booker T. Jones recognized a kindred spirit. “He’s more special because he’s
a journeyman musician,” said Jones. “He comes from where I come from in
the music, and making six dollars a night playing to four a.m.”
Ray Charles knew of those late-night gigs, and with the success of Stardust,
Willie Nelson joined Charles among a handful of American music icons (in-
cluding Louis Armstrong) that transcended musical genres. Charles had done
that when the rhythm & blues pioneer embraced country music with Modern
Sounds in Country and Western Music (1962). “I wasn’t trying to broaden a damn
thing,” said Charles. “I was just singing songs I’ve always loved.” Nelson knew
that he had another link with Charles. “All the artists I loved the most,” said
Nelson, “from Hank Williams to Django Reinhardt to Ernest Tubb to Ray
Charles, played the blues.”
Nelson and Charles would appear together on a television special and duet
on a 1984 #1 country hit, “Seven Spanish Angels.” Ray also challenged Willie
to a friendly game of chess that was played in a dark room with nondescript
pieces identified in braille. And together they sang “It Was a Very Good Year,”
a song identified with another exceptional American singer, Frank Sinatra.
Charles died in 2004 after a very good life, and the Red-Headed Icon was at
the funeral to sing the song that they’d both made their own, “Georgia on My
Mind.”
PUNKS, GOD, AND URBANE COWBOYS

In the wee hours of November 22, 1976, Jerry Lee Lewis drove his Lincoln
Continental to the home of Elvis Presley. Lewis had been drinking at the
Vapors, a club where he often played impromptu shows, and where a sher-
iff had just presented him with a .38 caliber derringer pistol. The loaded
gun was on the dashboard when Lewis cracked a window trying to throw
an empty champagne bottle to the side of the road. Then he crashed into
the gates of Graceland. “He was out of his mind,” said Harold Loyd, who
was guarding the entrance. “Get on the goddamn phone,” said Jerry Lee.
“Tell him the Killer’s here to see him.” Elvis, watching over a closed-circuit
camera, said to call the police. “Tell ’em to lock his butt up, and throw the
goddamn key away.” Jerry Lee looked nonplussed on the mug shot seen
around the world.
It had been a long twenty years since the impromptu meeting of the Mil-
lion Dollar Quartet. Elvis and Jerry Lee were now both patients of Dr. George
Nichopoulos; in the first eight months of 1977 “Dr. Nick” wrote prescriptions
for more than ten thousand doses of sedatives, amphetamines, and narcot-
ics for Elvis. On the morning of August 16, 1977, the King of Americanaland
collapsed. He was due to leave for another tour later in the day. Instead, the
 Punks, God, and Urbane Cowboys 181

world learned that he’d died of “cardiac arrest.” Fourteen different drugs were
found in his broken forty-two-year-old body.
Word traveled fast. Steve Earle was spending the day with Townes Van
Zandt. They planned to stay sober until they heard the news and then got
seriously smashed. “I went over my whole life,” said Bob Dylan. “I went over
my whole childhood. I didn’t talk to anyone for a week.” That night, Willie
Nelson played a show at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, with Emmylou
Harris and the Hot Band as the opening act. At the end of the concert, Jerry
Lee joined Willie for an encore of gospel songs dedicated to the first-born son
of Sun. But the Killer didn’t shed a tear. “Looked to me like he was celebrat-
ing,” said Rodney Crowell, a guitarist in the Hot Band. “He’s the king now.”
But Jerry Lee had faded on the country charts, and each marriage was
worse than the last; one wife’s drug-related death inspired a Rolling Stone story
that essentially called Lewis a literal killer. In 1979 the IRS auctioned off his
possessions to settle back taxes. Meanwhile, his cousins were hitting it big,
with Mickey Gilley having hits that sounded more than a little like Jerry Lee
and Jimmy Swaggart selling gospel albums through a television ministry that
would ultimately collapse after he was arrested for consorting with prostitutes.
In 1981 Lewis nearly died of a perforated stomach; painkillers, sometimes
injected directly into his stomach, had replaced amphetamines as his drug
of choice.
Lewis wasn’t the only legend in decline. George Jones and Tammy Wyn-
ette divorced in 1975; she left with both their band and the bus. Jones now
chased his liquor with cocaine. “I missed more personal engagements than
I kept from 1975 through 1980,” said Jones, who earned a new nickname,
“No Show Jones.” A history of bad investments, including such ill-fated
projects as the George Jones Rhythm Ranch, led to bankruptcy in the late
1970s. Then 1980’s “He Stopped Loving Her Today” became his first #1 hit
in six years. Jones hated the ballad in which the singer, swaddled in lavish
strings and the lonely peel of a steel guitar, is reunited with his lost love at
his own funeral. Producer Billy Sherrill pieced together Jones’s vocal from
multiple drunken takes; the result was a country classic that shamelessly
embraced the genre’s worst clichés.
Johnny Cash was another legend living in the cultural shadows. In 1980 he
invited Marty Stuart, twenty-two, to join his band. Stuart had spent his teens
playing mandolin and other stringed instruments with Lester Flatt and Doc
Watson. “Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three were my Beatles,” said Stu-
182 Chapter 13

art. “I knew every record they did, and I was a little torn to see what he had
become. I was hoping to work with the guy who was at Folsom Prison . . . but
I found myself in the middle of this kind of family show. It wasn’t as rock ’n’
roll as I thought it would be.” Stuart spent five years playing with Cash.
“I felt he was a little lost in this world,” said Stuart. “He had a lifestyle that
was huge. He and June had houses upon houses; they had kids upon kids;
employees upon employees; it was really a cumbersome lifestyle.” Stuart mar-
ried Cash’s daughter Cindy in 1983. They divorced in 1987, but he remained
close to the Man in Black. “Every December, [Johnny] and I would go to the
graveyard to visit Luther [Perkins, Cash’s original guitarist] and bring him a
cigarette,” said Stuart. “We would lie down on the grave, smoke, and talk to
Luther, telling him what a lazy son of a bitch he was for lying there while we
were out touring, killing ourselves to promote him.”

   
Emmylou Harris was now a major country star and a world-class bandleader.
When James Burton left the Hot Band she recruited a British guitar star,
Albert Lee, who would later play with a reunited Everly Brothers. (The Ever-
lys’ career had foundered during the 1960s; they broke up in 1972 when Phil
famously smashed his guitar and walked off the stage at Knott’s Berry Farm
in California.) When Rodney Crowell left the group for a solo career, Harris
found another instrumental and vocal foil, Ricky Skaggs.
Born in Kentucky, Skaggs started playing mandolin at the age of five; a year
later, he jammed with Bill Monroe. As a teenager Skaggs played with Ralph
Stanley’s Clinch Mountain Boys and in 1976 formed Boone Creek, a progressive
bluegrass group that included dobro virtuoso Jerry Douglas. Skaggs brought
his understanding of mountain music to Emmylou’s bluegrass album Roses in
the Snow, singing harmony and playing guitar, mandolin, banjo, and fiddle. He
was a traditionalist who understood history. “I was influenced by the Beatles
and the Stones,” he said. “The Beatles sounded like the Everly Brothers, who
sounded like the Louvin Brothers, who sounded like the Stanley Brothers,
who sounded like the Monroe Brothers. It just goes right back all the way to
the Delmore Brothers.”
Crowell had honed his talents performing with Harris, and his profile rose
when his songs were included on her albums. One night he and Emmylou
went to a party thrown by Waylon Jennings; Crowell took the opportunity to
play one of his new songs, “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight.” “I was
 Punks, God, and Urbane Cowboys 183

stunned,” said Rosanne Cash, who was a student at Vanderbilt University. “I

thought it was just about the best song I had ever heard.” Susanna Clark made
the introductions. Cash later asked Crowell to help cut demos for a record that
was to be released in Europe, a strategy that she thought would allow her to
escape the shadow of her father. The Ariola release went nowhere until her
father played it for the head of Columbia’s Nashville division, who signed
Cash’s eldest daughter to cut an album that would be produced by Crowell.
Rosanne Cash was wary of show business, having grown up with an absent
father who cheated on her mother. But she was drawn to the art of songwrit-
ing, and after high school she travelled with her father’s road show. Along
the way, he introduced her to his canon of essential country and folk songs.
Crowell was soon courting Rosanne and had occasion to borrow her dad’s
Cadillac; he cracked up the car and was quick to pay for the repairs. They
married while recording Right or Wrong in Los Angeles with musicians from
Emmylou’s band. The album was a hit, but a pregnant Rosanne was unable
to promote it with a concert tour. Her breakout moment came a year later
with Seven Year Ache.
Rosanne was a different kind of country star. Whereas Emmylou was seen
as an interpretive singer, Rosanne was considered a singer-songwriter. She
was also suddenly selling more records than her father. “When I was having
hit records,” said Cash, “my dad and I felt competitive with each other. He
admitted it later. I mean, he would ask me about my contract and how many
points I was getting. . . . But when he felt that I was pulling away from him,
he gave me a lot of space. I think it probably hurt him some.”
Crowell’s albums weren’t big sellers, but Waylon Jennings had a hit with
“Ain’t Living Long Like This,” and then Michigan rocker Bob Seger took his
“Shame on the Moon” to #2 on the pop charts. The song featured a harmony
vocal by Glenn Frey of the Eagles, who knew Seger from his days in Detroit.
Having songs recorded by others was how Nashville songwriters typically
made a living. Singer-songwriter John Hiatt moved to town from his native
Indianapolis in 1970 at the age of 18; within a few days he had a publishing
deal for $25 per week. “I couldn’t believe it,” said Hiatt. “I walked out of there
four feet off the ground. It was like, ‘Holy crap. I’m a songwriter.’”
Harris, her marriage to Brian Ahern failing, moved to Nashville in 1982.
“Rodney and Rose had moved here,” said Harris. “And through Rodney, I’d
met Guy and Susanna [Clark] and gotten to know them.” There were also
new kids in town. “There was a little handwritten sign in the window [of the
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Bluebird Café] that said ‘Steve Earle and the Dukes,’” said Harris. “I’m think-
ing, ‘That has to be a made-up name.’ And so we walk in there and there’s
Steve with a drummer and a bass player. And one of the first songs he did was
‘The Devil’s Right Hand.’ And I turned to Paul [Kennerley, her new producer
and next husband] and said, ‘This was the right move.’”

   
Popular music began to splinter during the 1970s, with the rise of punk rock
and disco reflecting the increased bifurcation of the mass audience. Steve
Earle saw the Sex Pistols, the safety-pinned icons of British punk, at Randy’s
Rodeo in San Antonio. “Sid [Vicious] got hit by a bottle and probably lost
half a pint of blood,” said Earle. “If it hadn’t been such a shitty, short show
he probably would have died! I didn’t think they were very good but . . . it
had a big effect on me, and this is the point of it all; hey, this is supposed to
be fucking fun.”
Punk rock was a conscious response to the slick professionalism of popular
bands like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. Though the musical elements of
punk can be traced from Chuck Berry and rockabilly through such 1960s rock
bands as the Who and the Rolling Stones, the music pointedly embraced
politics, anger, and irony. British punk met Americana when singer-songwriter
Joe Ely from Lubbock, Texas, toured with the Clash. The unlikely alliance
was struck when the Clash arranged to meet Ely, whose 1977 debut caused a
buzz in England with its rocky spin on country, blues, and folk. In London
to promote the album, Ely couldn’t identify the strangers at his sound check.
“We didn’t think they were a band,” said Ely. “We thought they were probably
trying to steal our gear.”
Ely and Joe Strummer of the Clash bonded over Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran,
and the Everly Brothers; Sonny Curtis, a Lubbock musician who’d played with
Holly, had written “I Fought the Law,” the band’s first British hit. The short U.S.
tour included a show in Monterey and, said Ely, “some of the places [Strum-
mer] wanted to play in Texas that were the names of Marty Robbins songs.”
The show drew a big audience in Lubbock, where Ely and his band joined the
Clash for an encore of their “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” “It was such a full
onslaught of power chords that the meaning of the song completely flipped,”
said Ely. “All of a sudden it’s, ‘I’m rocking out in the U.S.A.’”
When punk bands dabbled in country, critics called it “cowpunk,” and
it was often delivered with an ironic wink. The biggest punk band in Los
 Punks, God, and Urbane Cowboys 185

Angeles, X, put off-kilter folkie harmonies atop loud guitars; later, some of
the members turned down the volume to record country and folk songs as
the Knitters. Rank and File, comprised of members from two San Francisco
punk bands, the Dils and the Nuns, wrote stripped-down country & western
songs. The band’s Alejandro Escovedo later became an acclaimed solo artist.
The Long Ryders played country rock with a nod to Gram Parsons, a musical
hero of band member Sid Griffin; Green on Red gave the world another tal-
ented solo artist, Chuck Prophet. In Nashville, Jason and the Scorchers played
originals alongside songs by Hank Williams (“Lost Highway”) and Bob Dylan
(“Absolutely Sweet Marie”).
The Blasters influenced Americana with their superior roots-rock musi-
cianship and their influential support of Los Lobos (a Latino roots-rock band)
and Dwight Yoakam (a country singer from Kentucky-via-Ohio). Los Lobos
(Spanish for “the wolves”) had a #1 hit in 1987 with a cover of Richie Valens’s
“La Bamba” and spent subsequent decades making albums that artfully mixed
a variety of styles from north and south of the border. Yoakam played honky-
tonk country with the passion of a punk and the discipline of a pro. “I look
to John [Prine] as a benchmark,” said Yoakam. “His first album had the song
‘Paradise,’ about his family migrating to Chicago from western Kentucky.
. . . What that meant to me as a songwriter was, ‘Hey, I can do exactly this,
the things that are from my musical legacy, and my family’s culture and the
culture I was born into, and have it still remain pertinent for a contemporary
audience of my generation.’”
Yoakam stood out in the Los Angeles music scene. “It was shocking to see
bodies slamming,” he said of punk rock’s mosh pits. “It was crazy. We were
slammin’, but we were in tune.” He was also sharp in a bolo tie and Stetson
hat atop his tight jeans and cowboy boots. When Yoakam met guitarist Pete
Anderson, it was akin to when Buck Owens found Don Rich. That was when
Dave Alvin of the Blasters saw Yoakam play the Palomino in North Hollywood.
“There were maybe thirty people there,” said Alvin, “including the band, and
I just sat at the bar and watched this guy deliver a totally complete, profes-
sional show, as if there were a thousand people. . . . They sounded like they
would three years later when he was a star.”
Robbie Robertson was already a rock star, but after The Last Waltz he saw
a lot more of director Martin Scorsese than he did of his colleagues in The
Band. “There was a period there where Robbie and Marty saw the sun come
up every day for at least six months, maybe longer,” said Jonathan Taplin.
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But the odd couple weren’t cruising the rock clubs; instead, they were snort-
ing cocaine and screening classic movies at Scorsese’s house on Mulholland
Drive. This unique albeit debauched film school prepared Robertson to serve
as the music supervisor for such Scorsese films as Raging Bull and The King of
Comedy.
Bob Dylan, who was born with the cantankerous attitude of a punk rocker,
surprised everybody by becoming a born-again Christian. A few years after
his divorce from Sara, an actress girlfriend brought Dylan to church at the
Vineyard Christian Fellowship. Musicians from the Rolling Thunder Revue
were in the congregation. “T-Bone was the first one to go through this [born
again] experience and Steve [Soles] sort of followed him, and I eventually
did, too,” said David Mansfield. “And T-Bone has more than a bit of preacher
in him and was probably hammering at all of his friends in the way that he
could be most effecting—arguing. . . . Bob would be way in the back [of the
church] incognito, but T-Bone, Steven and I were all playing in the church
band.”
Dylan approached his newfound devotion to Jesus Christ with the same
dedication that he’d shown to painting, taking a three-month, four-day-a-
week course at the Vineyard Fellowship. The evangelical church embraced
an apocalyptic vision wherein the wicked would wither during the coming
battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ would usher in a mil-
lennium of peace. Dylan’s songs, most notably those on John Wesley Harding,
had long included biblical allusions, but his new songs stunned fans whom
he’d once told “Don’t follow leaders, watch the parkin’ meters.”
Slow Train Coming was produced by Jerry Wexler and keyboardist Barry
Beckett and recorded at a citadel of southern soul, Muscle Shoals Sound
Studio in Sheffield, Alabama. Wexler hired guitarist Mark Knopfler of Dire
Straits, instructing him to play like Albert King, and was initially caught off
guard by the fundamentalist tenor of Dylan’s new material. “I had no idea
he was on this born-again Christian trip,” said Wexler, “until he started to
evangelize me. I said, ‘Bob, you’re dealing with a sixty-two-year-old confirmed
Jewish atheist. I’m hopeless. Let’s just make an album.” Critics were stunned
by Dylan’s dogmatic lyrics but pleased by the soulful sound of Slow Train
Coming. Dylan’s touring band was similarly praised for making some of the
best live music of his performing career. But Dylan’s hellfire preaching also
alienated fans. “I told you ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’,’ and they did,”
he told one concert audience in 1979. “I said the answer was ‘Blowin’ in the
 Punks, God, and Urbane Cowboys 187

Wind,’ and it was. I’m telling you now Jesus is coming back, and He is! And
there is no other way of salvation. . . . There’s only one way to believe, there’s
only one way—the Truth and the Life.”
Britain’s Richard Thompson, who was raised a Presbyterian, had his own
religious conversion after leaving Fairport Convention: He became a follower
of Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism that encourages introspection in order
to forge a spiritual connection with God. “I had been waiting as long as I could
remember for an appropriate way to thank God,” said Thompson. Praying,
he said, allowed him “to stop using [his] brain for thinking and to start using
it for reflecting.”
Thompson the guitar player had always aimed to play with individuality.
“At some point, I said, ‘No blues,’” said Thompson, who was well schooled in
the licks of B. B. King and Chuck Berry. “It was a conscious decision to really
turn away from the blues, and if I used bent notes on guitar, it was to make
them more Celtic than blues.” Joe Boyd recognized this when he produced
Fairport Convention. “In his playing you can hear the evocation of the Scot-
tish piper’s drone and [the] melody of the chanter as well as echoes of Barney
Kessel’s and James Burton’s guitars and Jerry Lee Lewis’s piano,” said Boyd.
“But no blues clichés.”
During the 1970s Thompson recorded as a duo with his wife Linda, and
for a time, the couple and their two young children lived in a Sufi commune.
Their albums were well received but sold poorly. The couple’s fortunes took
an ironic turn when Boyd proposed recording an album in a couple of days
and using the rest of the budget to finance a U.S. tour. The result was 1981’s
Shoot Out the Lights, a critically acclaimed collection about a relationship on
the rocks that suggested Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks with better guitar solos.
By the time the Thompsons finished the U.S. tour their marriage was over,
and Richard had secured a devoted following that would allow him to cut
albums and tour both with an electric band and as a solo acoustic performer.
Dylan and Thompson were too set in their ways to care much about punk
rock; Neil Young responded by bookending his 1979 Rust Never Sleeps with
acoustic and electric versions of “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” “It’s bet-
ter to burn out than to fade away,” sang Young, who the previous year had
found success with a largely acoustic album, Comes a Time. All told, the early
mating of punk and country didn’t result in much enduring music, but punk’s
do-it-yourself philosophy helped inspire what came to be called alt-country.
Jeff Tweedy, who would form both Uncle Tupelo and Wilco, was a punk rock
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fan from Belleville, Illinois. Shopping at Target with his mother, he hesitated
to put the Clash’s London Calling in the shopping cart because of a sticker that
read “Parental Advisory: Explicit Content, Strong Language.” On subsequent
visits to the store, Tweedy carefully scraped the label off the record’s cover,
which he’d protectively filed under “Z.” Mission finally accomplished, Mrs.
Tweedy bought her son the Clash.

   
No longer just a country star, Dolly Parton was a household name. “Here You
Come Again” (1977) was a huge pop hit, and in 1980 she starred alongside Jane
Fonda and Lily Tomlin in the film 9 to 5, for which she also wrote and sang the
#1 title tune. Then came “Islands in the Stream,” her chart-topping duet with
Kenny Rogers on a tune written and produced by the Bee Gees. But nothing
defined country music in the early eighties more than Urban Cowboy, a film in
which John Travolta courted Debra Winger on the back of a mechanical bull
at Gilley’s, a Texas honky-tonk run by Jerry Lee’s cousin Mickey Gilley. The
soundtrack included a hit by Johnny Lee (“Lookin’ for Love”), and popular
not-exactly-country songs by Gilley, the Eagles, Bonnie Raitt, Boz Scaggs,
and Linda Ronstadt. The film positioned country music as the sound of the
suburbs, where couples did line dances wearing polyester cowboy shirts and
well-polished boots.
The seeds of Americana lived at clubs and song circles in Austin, Nashville,
and New York, not at Gilley’s. Lucinda Williams was the daughter of Miller
Williams, a widely published poet and college professor. A single father, he
took his three children on a tour of the southland; by the time Lucinda was
in the tenth grade she’d lived in Mississippi (Vicksburg and Jackson), Geor-
gia (Atlanta and Macon), Louisiana (Lake Charles, Baton Rouge, and New
Orleans), and Santiago, Chile. Wherever the family landed, writers gathered,
and Lucinda spent time with James Dickey, Charles Bukowski, and Flannery
O’Connor. “Those were the best parties in the world,” she said. “Everybody
was there—talking, drinking—and there I was, playing my songs on the gui-
tar.” She got started at the age of twelve, taking her cues from the Hank Wil-
liams and Bob Dylan albums in her dad’s collection. (Lucinda’s father had
seen Hank play, and after the show, bought him a drink.)
Williams was thrown out of high school for protesting the Vietnam War by
refusing to stand for the pledge of allegiance. She was accepted into college
anyway but dropped out to play coffeehouses in Austin and Houston, where
 Punks, God, and Urbane Cowboys 189

she rubbed shoulders with Townes Van Zandt and Steve Earle and jockeyed
for gigs alongside Nanci Griffith and Lyle Lovett. Williams made two records
for Folkways. Her 1979 debut, Ramblin’, featured blues and folk with multiple
songs by Robert Johnson and A. P. Carter, as well as tunes by Memphis Minnie
(“Me and My Chauffeur”) and Hank Williams (“Jambalaya [On the Bayou]”).
Williams wrote original songs for her Happy Woman Blues (1980), and while
she didn’t come into her own as a songwriter until the late eighties, she already
understood the elements of her style. “It’s American roots music,” said Wil-
liams. “It’s coming from different sounds, including country, but also blues
and traditional folk. I think Gram Parsons and I are coming from a lot of the
same places.”
Nanci Griffith played folk clubs as a teenager in Austin and continued doing
gigs while studying at the University of Texas and teaching kindergarten. After
winning a songwriting competition at the Kerrville Folk Festival she recorded
for tiny independent labels. Lyle Lovett, a student at Texas A&M University,
interviewed Griffith for the campus newspaper. Lovett graduated with degrees
in German and journalism but intended to pursue a life in music. “When
we met,” said singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen, who shared a house with
Lovett, “Lyle was a lot more advanced in making music a career than I was.
I didn’t want to hang around with the old men playing fiddle tunes till I was
70. I wanted to write and play music I wrote. Lyle was already doing that.”
Griffith met Jim Rooney at a barbecue and believed that he was the pro-
ducer to take her career to the next level. When she arrived in Nashville to
record, she brought Lovett along to add background vocals. Rooney’s path
to Nashville was filled with bohemian connections. As a student at Amherst
College in the late 1950s he met banjoist Bill Keith, and they began playing as
a duo; one of their first gigs was opening for Joan Baez at Dartmouth College
(Rooney sings and plays guitar). While attending graduate school at Harvard
University, he and Keith performed weekly at Club 47. Rooney eventually left
school to book a who’s who of musical artists at the venerable folk and blues
venue; in the summertime he worked for George Wein at the Newport Folk
Festival.
In 1969 Rooney formed the Blue Velvet Band with Keith, violinist Richard
Greene, and multi-instrumentalist Eric Weissberg; the group released one
album, Sweet Moments with the Blue Velvet Band. Rooney wrote a book called
Bossmen about two very different bandleaders, Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters
and later collaborated with Eric Von Schmidt on an oral history of the Cam-
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bridge folk scene, Baby, Let Me Follow You Down. He spent time in Woodstock,
New York, overseeing the building of Bearsville Studios for Dylan’s manager
Albert Grossman and played in the Woodstock Mountain Revue with John
Herald, Happy Traum, and Bill Keith. Relocating to Nashville in the mid-
1970s, he fell in with the songwriting circle that revolved around Guy Clark
and Townes Van Zandt and worked at a studio owned by Jack Clement, who’d
gotten his start working at Sun with Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash.
By the time Rooney met Griffith he was also working with John Prine,
whose 1978 album Bruised Orange, produced by his friend Steve Goodman,
was the best he’d made since his debut. Prine subsequently formed his own
record label (Oh Boy!) and discovered that selling fifty thousand albums as
an independent was more profitable than selling hundreds of thousands for
a major label. Rooney met Prine at a music festival in Maine. “We had some
quality time in the bar where we got acquainted,” said Rooney, who struck
Prine as a latter-day Huckleberry Finn. “I had a motor home instead of a
raft, but I was certainly floating freely down the river of life.” Along the way,
Rooney produced Townes Van Zandt’s At My Window.
Griffith’s Once in a Very Blue Moon (1985) included originals as well as a
song by Lyle Lovett (“The Woman I Am”) and a title tune by Pat Alger. Players
included veteran steel guitarist Lloyd Green and a pair involved in expanding
the vocabulary of bluegrass, Bela Fleck and Mark O’Connor. Griffith’s next
Rooney-produced album, The Last of the True Believers, included her most
famous composition, “Love at the Five and Dime.” Griffith then signed with
MCA, which required her to use an in-house producer. It was a tough lesson
for Rooney, who learned another when he advised Lovett to take his promising
collection of songs to a Nashville publisher. Rooney soon became a partner in
a new publishing company, Forerunner; payday came a few years later when
the firm’s most successful songwriter, Pat Alger, started writing tunes with a
newcomer named Garth Brooks.

   
In the early 1980s future figures of Americana were gigging in, of all places,
New York City. The Buddy Miller Band played regularly at the Lone Star Café,
the Fifth Avenue club with a giant iguana on its roof. Miller, who’d grown up
in New Jersey, was a soulful singer and guitarist who came to the city from
Austin, Texas, where he’d fallen in love with Julie Griffin, the singer in a band
for which he played guitar. Buddy and Julie soon met Larry Campbell, who
BUDDY MILLER
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joined the band to play fiddle and guitar. Campbell had grown up in the
city and gigged around the country before playing with John Herald (of the
Greenbriar Boys) and working recording sessions in New York. (Herald also
hired Cindy Cashdollar, a Woodstock native, to play dobro and lap steel; she
later joined Asleep at the Wheel and played with Van Morrison and Ryan
Adams.) Working musicians are happy (and economically obliged) to play
with a lot of people. “At the time,” said Campbell, “I was also working with
Soozie Tyrell and Patti Scialfa, from way before Patti [and Soozie] got together
with Bruce [Springsteen].”
The Buddy Miller Band played country gigs at City Limits and other clubs
while backing headliners at the Lone Star. “Since we loved that music so
much,” said John Leventhal, another musician on the scene, “we would re-
ally listen to the great country records, and analyze them—Ray Price records
of the fifties, Merle and Buck records of the sixties, or George Jones records
from any period—to really understand not only the songwriting, but what
the musicians played, and how it was all put together.”
Jim Lauderdale came to New York to play the clubs and write songs after
attending college in North Carolina. “Doc Pomus lived in my building,” said
Lauderdale of the celebrated songwriter who wrote “Save the Last Dance
for Me.” “He was always very encouraging, but wouldn’t work with me until
I had a deal. . . . He’d have great visitors—Dr. John in the lobby—and great
birthday parties.” Lauderdale bonded with the other urbane cowboys. “In
the same way that British kids listened to blues records or rock & roll in the
late fifties,” he said, “for this group there was something about country that
affected us all deeply, made us pore over those records deeply, and share a
real passion for it.”
The Buddy Miller Band attracted the interest of record labels, but Julie,
who’d grown up with an abusive father, was hesitant. “Like many people,
I had a lot of unresolved, crippled parts of myself,” said Julie, “but I wasn’t
one of these people who were good at denial. I lived it out, every gig, have a
few drinks, a few drugs, and go a little crazy.” “We got out of the Lone Star
one morning around 4 a.m.,” said Larry Campbell, “and I brought her to the
hospital, Bergen Pines in New Jersey, and unwittingly got her committed. So
there was this [opening for] Muddy Waters gig the next day, and Buddy pulled
this One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest maneuver to get her out.” On stage, Julie
was an open book. “Her heart was right on her sleeve,” said Campbell, “this
 Punks, God, and Urbane Cowboys 193

primal emotional thing that would come out of her, sounding exactly like you
would hear her today—totally unfiltered. And what else could you want for
somebody singing this music?”
Then Julie left for good. “Yeah,” said Julie, “you might say that Buddy, be-
ing Jewish and all, was quite surprised. He and the band were at this bar that
we were playing, and they were wondering where I’d gone, and I called them
at this bar and said, ‘Buddy, you’re not going to believe this, but I’ve just met
some Christians and I’ve given my life to Jesus and I can’t come back.” Miller,
with a calendar full of upcoming gigs, called a singer who’d impressed him in
Austin, Shawn Colvin. She’d played in a country swing band and performed
as a solo folk singer, and was more than happy to come to New York in De-
cember 1980 to join a working band.
But Buddy had a broken heart, and he soon left New York, as did Campbell,
who went on the road with Doug Sahm. It was now the Shawn Colvin Band
and, in need of a lead guitarist, she reached out to John Leventhal, who’d seen
her play with Buddy. “I liked Buddy and the whole band,” said Leventhal,
“but Shawn kind of blew me away.” Colvin and Leventhal collaborated on
songs—and a romance. Buddy joined Julie in Texas. “It was weird enough
for me,” said Julie, “but then six months later, Buddy became a Christian too.
I’ll never get over it. He read that Bible that I left that was under the sofa. It
was like God said, ‘Okay, Buddy, time to meet me.’” God, as is said, works in
mysterious ways.
HARD-CORE TROUBADOURS

Emmylou Harris’s tour bus pulled into a truck stop near Oklahoma City. “Hey,”
said Harris to Tony Brown, her keyboard player, “go to the jukebox and play
[George Jones’s] ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today.’ It’s going to kill you!” Tour-
ing with the Hot Band was a musical education for Brown, who had never
listened to popular music as a kid in North Carolina because he played in his
preacher father’s family gospel group. Gospel music won Brown an audience
with Elvis Presley, and the Lord blessed him with a job playing keyboards in
the King’s band.
“He was Elvis the celebrity, not Elvis the King of Rock ’n’ Roll,” said Brown,
who was there at the end. “I was just as excited about playing with James Bur-
ton and [drummer] Ronnie Tutt as I was playing with Elvis.” The Hot Band
schooled Brown about country music and about how Emmylou, Rodney, and
Rosanne Cash were crazy for the Beatles. “These people were like musicolo-
gists,” said Brown. “They showed me how [my gospel piano playing] fit into
this big important picture of American music making. . . . With Emmy I found
out about that whole country-rock scene and about Gram Parsons.”
Rodney Crowell formed the Cherry Bombs to back both himself and
Rosanne Cash; the first-call guitarists were Vince Gill, Richard Bennett, and
 Hard-Core Troubadours 195

Albert Lee. Tony Brown played keyboards, but he really wanted to produce
records, so he took a job at RCA, where he signed Alabama and his pal Vince.
Jimmy Bowen of MCA hired Brown away in the mid-1980s. Bowen was riding
high as the producer of two of the day’s biggest country stars, George Strait
and Reba McEntire; both were dubbed “new traditionalists” because they
had hits without trying to cater to the pop audience. Ricky Skaggs, who was
also in that school, hit it big after playing in the Hot Band, scoring eleven #1
country hits in five years. At MCA Brown signed artists whom he might have
met backstage at an Emmylou show, including a trio of singer-songwriters
from Texas: Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, and the wild card of the bunch, Steve
Earle.
Earle had bounced in and out of Nashville for a decade. A singer-songwriter
who grew up on rock, he cut a rockabilly record for Epic that went unreleased
until his MCA debut became a hit. “I was way into Creedence [Clearwater
Revival], the Beatles, and the Stones,” said Earle, “but when I started writing
and playing coffeehouses, I couldn’t make my guitar sound like theirs. But I
could make my guitar sound like Tim Buckley or Tim Hardin.” Townes and
Guy were major influences, but rock was still the root. “The turning point for
me,” said Earle, “was seeing Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. tour, and watching
him turn a 20,000-seat arena into a coffeehouse. I went home and literally
started writing Guitar Town the next day.” On a beach-house weekend on the
Gulf Coast Earle met Tony Brown, who was bowled over when Earle played
him a ballad called “My Old Friend the Blues.”
Earle travelled to Los Angeles to write with guitarist Richard Bennett bring-
ing along a cassette of new songs like “Guitar Town,” “Hillbilly Highway,” and
“Fearless Heart.” Earle and Bennett wrote “Good Ol’ Boy,” and Bennett’s snaky
electric guitar provided an instrumental foil akin to Pete Anderson’s work with
Dwight Yoakam. Bennett relocated to Nashville to help record Guitar Town
(1986), a mixture of country twang and rock ’n’ roll that remains a defining
album of Americana. Brown thought it important that Earle have a backing
group just as Emmylou had her Hot Band; Emory Gordy Jr. left her combo
to play bass, and Harry Stinson joined to play drums and sing harmony.
Tony Brown credits Bennett for informing the album’s elemental sound,
but there was no mistaking that Earle was the auteur. “I thought Steve was
writing the real stuff and I felt like he was the guy he was writing about,”
said Stinson. “It felt like his experience.” And since he’d grown up as a fan of
rock ’n’ roll, Earle made a country record that could also appeal to rockers.
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Guitar Town reached the top of the country charts—in the end, Earle’s only
real country hit—but his raspy vocals and working-class lyrics also reminded
many of Bruce Springsteen.
A decade earlier, Bob Dylan had teased Springsteen about being “the new
me.” Now Earle and midwestern rocker John Mellencamp found themselves
in the shadow of Bruce, who’d become a star with Born to Run (1975) and kept
his songs focused on working-class characters with 1978’s Darkness on the Edge
of Town (1978). “I wanted to write about the way people lived and the possibili-
ties of life,” said Springsteen. “Country asked all the right questions. It was
concerned with how you go on living after you reach adulthood. I was asking
those questions myself. Everything after Born to Run was shot full with a lot of
country music—those questions.” On The River (1980) Springsteen achieved
a new sense of lyrical rigor; every word counted. And on Nebraska (1982), a
dark, minimalist album that Springsteen recorded at home, he made music
that was firmly in the folk tradition. He was soon singing Woody Guthrie’s
“This Land Is Your Land” during his concerts.
Born in the U.S.A. (1984) applied these lessons to a rock album that sold in
the multi-millions and established Springsteen as mainstream rock’s biggest
star. Earle sang Springsteen’s “State Trooper” in concert, and critics noticed
when Mellencamp started writing lyrics about the workingman’s blues. The
songs on Mellencamp’s Scarecrow depicted rural troubles, and he helped Wil-
lie Nelson launch Farm Aid, an annual benefit devoted to supporting family
farms struggling to compete with industrial operations. (Bob Dylan invented
the idea of Farm Aid during a ramshackle appearance in 1985 at Live Aid with
Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones; performing at a ben-
efit to help victims of famine in Africa, Dylan said that somebody should also
help the American farmer.) Featuring socially conscious songs with a band
that now featured fiddle, mandolin, and dobro, The Lonesome Jubilee (1987)
anticipated the sound of Americana. “These instruments,” said Mellencamp,
“almost give the music a timeless feel. Nobody’s going to say that sounds like
1987, because it was a conscious effort to look at the music of today and try to
get 180 degrees away from it.”
The country crowd knew nothing of Mellencamp, whose albums sold in the
millions. But a photo of Springsteen carrying a copy of Guitar Town gave Earle
credibility with a rock audience with which he had much in common. The
same went for Griffith and Lovett, the other Texas singer-songwriters signed
and produced by Tony Brown. Griffith had cut stylish independent albums
 Hard-Core Troubadours 197

produced by Jim Rooney; with a more lavish recording budget, Brown put a
flattering focus on Griffith’s angelic voice and finger-style guitar, a combina-
tion that placed her in the folk-pop lineage of Judy Collins.
But country stardom proved elusive; Griffith’s most celebrated original
song, “Love at the Five and Dime,” was a Top 5 country hit only after it was
sung by Kathy Mattea; “From a Distance,” by Julie Gold, helped Griffith estab-
lish a loyal audience in Ireland, but the Grammy-winning U.S. hit was sung
by Bette Midler. Still, Griffith was pleased. “My role models for what I wanted
out of my career were Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark and Jerry Jeff Walker,”
she said. “I really expected to spend my life driving myself around America,
playing small clubs and following in the footsteps of my heroes.”
Lyle Lovett, with a high-rise haircut that recalled David Lynch’s Eraserhead,
was a nimble singer and guitar picker with a wry way with words; his songs
drew not only from country but also from blues, swing, folk, and gospel. His
eclectic style made him and Griffith appealing to baby boom singer-songwriter
fans but a tough sale to country radio. Steve Earle got more coverage in the
rock press, but Lovett sold more records, beginning a run of gold albums with
Pontiac (1988). Brown, who found big-time country success producing Vince
Gill, Patty Loveless, and Wynonna Judd, came to recognize that Griffith and
Lovett fundamentally appealed to a different audience.
“Artists who are singer-songwriters,” said Brown, “if they can have com-
mercial success on their terms, when the commercial success is over, they
can still succeed on their terms. To this day Guy Clark and Lyle Lovett can
play all kinds of places and make good money performing their music to an
audience that really appreciates their work, as opposed to playing empty
houses to fans who have moved on to . . . whomever the latest artist du jour
is in country music.” Performing songwriters such as John Prine and Townes
Van Zandt enjoyed similarly scaled careers.
Kathryn Dawn Lang, known professionally as k. d. lang, was another ex-
ceptional talent who rattled Nashville in the 1980s. Born in Canada, lang was
drawn to country by the music of Patsy Cline; her U.S. debut, Angels with a
Lariat (1987), included a cover of Cline’s “Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray.” That
song inspired an unlikely collaboration with Cline’s producer, Owen Bradley,
for Shadowland (1988), a collection steeped in “countrypolitan” orchestrations.
But Nashville remained wary of a self-consciously artful mezzo-soprano who
would soon come out as gay and who won a Grammy for a duet with Roy
Orbison on his “Crying.” Lang found pop success in 1992 with Ingénue (and
198 Chapter 14

its hit single “Constant Craving”), cut an album with Tony Bennett, and on
Hymns of the 49th Parallel (2004), fashioned an Americana album composed
of songs written by Canadians.
Among the musicians of the mid-1980s, only one became a true country
star: Dwight Yoakam. “I was around for Rank and File and all the cowpunk
movement,” said record executive Bill Bentley, “and from a million miles away
you could tell that Dwight wasn’t part of that. He played those shows with
them and the Blasters and got in with that crowd pretty good. But it was apples
and oranges.” Yoakam’s 1986 debut album, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., included
a #3 country hit, a cover of Johnny Horton’s “Honky Tonk Man.” When Yoakam
first met guitarist-producer Pete Anderson he had twenty-one original songs,
all of which appeared on one of his first three million-selling albums.
“We were definitely the same graduating class,” said Steve Earle, “but dif-
ferent. I was making a singer-songwriter record, and what Dwight did was
based on honky-tonk music as a specific art form.” But that wasn’t the whole
story. “We made our records from a rock, West Coast perspective,” said Ander-
son, “not from a Nashville perspective. We made them like we were rock and
roll guys.” And though he and Anderson were clearly creating an amped-up
version of Buck Owens’s Bakersfield sound, Yoakam also cited the influence
of a California rock band. “I was really inspired by Creedence Clearwater
Revival illustrating that country-hyphen-rock/pop could be pertinent for a
young audience,” said Yoakam. “The Byrds were folk rock, but country rock
is John Fogerty. ’Cause you can’t get any harder rockin’, and in some places
more country, than Creedence—a real hybrid that was a commercial success.”
Owens had stopped performing live after his musical partner, singer-guitar-
ist Don Rich, died in a motorcycle accident in 1974. In 1988 Yoakam arranged to
pay Buck his respects when he played a concert in Bakersfield. “I didn’t know
that he had not sang [sic] with anyone live in years and never had gotten up
and sat in with anyone in Bakersfield until he got to the fairgrounds,” said
Yoakam. “And I said, ‘We know a few of your songs if you wanna get up.’ And
he did.” Yoakam and Owens then collaborated on a song Buck had recorded
in 1973, “Streets of Bakersfield.” The song became Yoakam’s first #1 hit and
Buck’s biggest record since he’d begun hosting Hee Haw.
A less likely intergenerational encounter involved Nick Lowe, a British
musician who’d produced records by Graham Parker and Elvis Costello, the
latter of whom travelled to Nashville to make Almost Blue, an album of country
covers (with a handful of original songs) with producer Billy Sherrill. (Costello
 Hard-Core Troubadours 199

later recorded his “Stranger in the House” with George Jones.) Lowe married
into country royalty when he wed singer Carlene Carter. “You’re always a little
nervous about your in-laws,” said Lowe, “but Johnny Cash and June Carter
gave it a whole new twist.”
Lowe had Cash in mind when he wrote a song called “The Beast in Me.”
“John was the most charismatic man I’ve ever met,” he said. “But he was in a
lot of pain, physical and emotional. He was a flawed man but I adored him.”
Johnny and June would stay with Nick and Carlene when in London. “We
used to get sloshed together and listen to old records,” said Lowe, with Cash
introducing him to some of his country and gospel favorites. “I’d get up in
the morning and he’d be sitting in his dressing gown strumming a guitar in
my tiny kitchen while June would be there in a bejeweled turban frying some
eggs. It was brilliant!”

   
Bob Dylan was bored. “During one show in Australia we were supposed to
do ‘When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,’” said Mike Campbell, lead
guitarist for Dylan’s latest backing band, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers,
“and he didn’t feel like doing it. He turned to me and said, ‘You know the
chords for “All Along the Watchtower,” don’t you?’ And we’d never rehearsed
it. I said, ‘There’s only three, right?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, let’s go!’”
The 1980s were something of a lost decade for Dylan. He’d come out of his
born-again period, but his records were mediocre, and few of the new songs
could compete with the best of his songbook. The excitement surrounding
Biograph (1985), a career overview seeded with unreleased performances, sug-
gested that his renown was rooted as much in the past as in whatever might
be next. But Dylan still sold concert tickets, and in 1986 he toured the world
with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, who played their own hits and backed
the Bard. “We’d all been huge Dylan fans,” noted Petty, “and we were very
intrigued by the idea of playing with Bob. So off we went.”
The preparation was a blast for a band that counted the Byrds as one of its
original inspirations. “The times I remember the fondest are the rehearsals
where Bob might start playing some songs that we didn’t know,” said Petty,
“and you’d discover something new.” Now and then it was hard to tell the new
from the old. “He knows a million songs, old Delta blues songs and stuff like
that,” said keyboardist Benmont Tench. “Sometimes, I wasn’t sure if they were
blues songs or a new arrangement of ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding).’”
200 Chapter 14

The Grateful Dead were Dylan’s backing band for six stadium shows in
the summer of 1987. “It was one of those things [where] we’d always thought,
‘Wow, that’d be far out’—Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead,” said Jerry Garcia.
Maybe that’s why the Dead agreed to a 70–30 financial split with Dylan, whose
rehearsals with the band were more about the roots of Americana than about
Bob’s back pages. “We talked about people like Elizabeth Cotten, Mississippi
Sheiks, Earl Scruggs, Bill Monroe, Gus Cannon,” said Garcia. “I showed Bob
some of those songs: ‘Two Soldiers’, ‘Jack-A-Roe’, ‘John Hardy.’ Trouble was,
Bob seemed to prefer to do these rather than rehearse his songs.”
The Grateful Dead had become big business, and Garcia, a diabetic drug
addict, was the bankable star of the show. No wonder he relished playing
acoustic music with his old pal David Grisman; their deep bond and musi-
cal synchronicity are captured in the film Grateful Dawg. As they played folk
and bluegrass, sea shanties and modal instrumentals, their improvisations
anticipated the acoustic side of Americana. Other bluegrass players were
drawn to the electric jams of the Dead and the jazz-rock fusion of Weather
Report. Bela Fleck, an innovator on the banjo during his years with New
Grass Revival, went even further with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones. Featur-
ing Howard Levy on harmonica, Victor Wooten on bass, and Roy Wooten on
synthesizer-based percussion, Fleck’s Flight of the Cosmic Hippo (1991) topped
Billboard’s contemporary jazz chart.
Garcia died of a heart attack in 1995 at the age of fifty-three; his music, with
and without the Grateful Dead, inspired a school of “jamgrass” bands includ-
ing Leftover Salmon and the Yonder Mountain String Band. “I didn’t know
anybody who listened to bluegrass,” said Vince Herman of Leftover Salmon,
“but because of Jerry Garcia, I got into it. Talk to anyone on the jam scene,
or bluegrassers who didn’t grow up with bluegrass, and most everyone will
tell you that Old and In the Way got their attention. Grisman did as well. If
you listened to his quintet, you heard Tony Rice and turned on to J. D. Crowe
and the New South.” If Americana music has roots in the past, Captain Trips
helped tip it into the future.

   
George Harrison, in Los Angeles, needed a new tune for the B side of a single
from his 1987 album Cloud Nine. He called the record’s co-producer, Jeff Lynne
of the Electric Light Orchestra, who was making a record with Roy Orbison.
Lynne suggested that maybe they could use the studio in Dylan’s Malibu
 Hard-Core Troubadours 201

garage. “We phoned up Bob,” said Harrison. “He said, ‘Sure, come on over.’
Tom Petty had my guitar, and I went to pick it up; he said, ‘Oh, I was wonder-
ing what I was going to do tomorrow!’ And Roy Orbison said, ‘Give us a call
tomorrow if you’re going to do anything—I’d love to come along.” (Orbison,
who’d gotten his start at Sun Records, went on to record hits like “Oh, Pretty
Woman” and “Only the Lonely” in the 1960s. He enjoyed a late-life renais-
sance when his “In Dreams” was prominently featured in David Lynch’s 1987
movie Blue Velvet.)
Dylan joined the jam, and when Warner Brothers told Harrison that “Han-
dle with Care” was just too good to use as a B side, the Beatle formed his
second group, the Traveling Wilburys. “We’d go to Bob’s house and we’d just
sit outside,” said Orbison, “and there’d be a barbecue, and we’d all just bring
guitars, and everyone would be throwing something in here and something
in there, and then we’d just go to the garage studio, and put it down.” The
sessions taught Petty about Dylan’s methods. “I had never written more words
than I needed,” said Petty, “but he tended to write lots and lots of verses, then
he’ll say, this verse is better than that, or this line. . . . He was very good in The
Traveling Wilburys; when somebody had a line, he could make it a lot better
in big ways.”
The Traveling Wilburys was an international hit, selling more than five mil-
lion copies, but its convivial alchemy felt strained on the inevitable follow-up,
recorded after the death of Orbison. The fun, and massive sales, occurred as
Dylan recorded his best album of the decade. At the suggestion of Bono, he
met with Daniel Lanois, a producer who’d worked with U2 and specialized
in crafting unique musical atmospheres; Dylan was particularly impressed
by his production of the Neville Brothers’ Yellow Moon. “The recording studio
is very foreign to me,” said Dylan, who by now had been making records for
nearly three decades. “You need somebody there who knew you, who could
push you around a little bit. Daniel got me to do stuff that wouldn’t have en-
tered my mind.” The resulting album, Oh Mercy, was yet another comeback
for Dylan, and it anticipated his even greater collaboration with Lanois on
1997’s Time out of Mind.
The Traveling Wilburys weren’t the only impromptu supergroup of the
late 1980s; the three women who recorded 1987’s Trio didn’t even bother to
cook up a name. That’s because everybody already knew Dolly Parton, Em-
mylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt. Harris met Parton in 1975 when her debut
album became a hit. “So I come to Nashville,” said Harris, “and the first day
202 Chapter 14

I’m there I meet Dolly Parton and George Jones and I throw up. Not because I
was drinking or anything; it was just so overwhelming.” Back in Los Angeles,
Emmylou invited Dolly to her house and then telephoned her friend Linda. “I
jumped in my car,” said Ronstadt, “and pushed it as fast as I dared. . . . Emmy
and Dolly were sitting on the sofa, trading stories and laughing together.”
Emmylou soon picked up a guitar and the trio sang its first song, the Carter
Family’s “Bury Me Beneath the Willow.”
The women sang on Parton’s mid-1970s television show, Dolly!, and went
into the studio in 1979 for sessions that were ultimately abandoned, though
some of the tracks appeared on albums by Harris (“Mister Sandman,” “Evan-
geline”) and Ronstadt (“My Blue Tears”). Feeling that their previous sessions
were too pop-oriented, the trio reconvened in 1987 with a different strategy.
“We wanted to bring that part of her voice, that part of Dolly back into Ap-
palachia,” said Harris. “And using it to our purposes, too, having Dolly’s voice
there, and just Dolly’s presence there, made us authentic.” For Parton, the col-
laboration offered something else. “Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou for Dolly
were street cred,” said Rodney Crowell. “Really intense street cred.”
“[Trio] hit Nashville like a bomb,” said the album’s producer, George Mas-
senburg. “They loathed it.” Then it topped the country charts (and reached
#6 on the pop chart) on the way to selling more than four million copies. The
album’s first hit single was “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” a song written by
Phil Spector about his father that was a #1 hit for his group the Teddy Bears
in 1958. Trio later won a Grammy and was the 1987 Academy of Country Music
award winner for Album of the Year. It was neither the first nor the last time
that traditional music that went against Nashville’s contemporary grain would
be so honored.
Trio II didn’t come out until 1999 because the recording sessions ended in
acrimony when Parton requested that the release be timed to accommodate
her schedule. “It got into a power play,” said Parton. “I was made to feel hurt,
insulted, burdened with guilt. . . . Finally, I just said, ‘The hell with it, sue me.’”
Parton demanded that her vocals be stripped from the recordings. Ronstadt’s
1995 album, Feels Like Home, ended up including three tracks from the ses-
sions, one featuring all three voices and two with just Linda and Emmylou.
Trio II ultimately won a Grammy for the three women’s interpretation of Neil
Young’s “After the Goldrush.”
Young had signed with Geffen Records and spent the 1980s releasing al-
bums in a dizzying array of styles, including electronic music (Trans, 1982)
DOLLY PARTON
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and, after Geffen rejected a country album (Old Ways), a rockabilly record
(Everybody’s Rockin’, 1983). David Geffen sued Young for producing albums that
were “unrepresentative” and “uncharacteristic” of his rock-y oeuvre. Young
countersued, and the matter was resolved with an apology to the artist and
the release of Old Ways. The album included a single, “Are There Any More
Real Cowboys?,” that was promoted with a video featuring Young’s new best
friend, Willie Nelson.
“I remember the first time he came back from Willie’s,” said Joel Bernstein,
a photographer and archivist who worked for Young, “he literally looked like
Charlton Heston down from the mountain.” Young had grown a beard, and
when he started wearing a headband some of those in his road crew took to
calling him “Willie Neil.” The delayed release of Old Ways put fire in Young’s
belly; he told Geffen, “Back off or I’m going to play country music forever. . . .
I’ll turn into George Jones.” When Young returned to his old label, Reprise, he
made his most characteristic album of the decade, Freedom, which included
“Rockin’ in the Free World.” In 1992 he released Harvest Moon, the mid-life
follow-up to Harvest that was recorded with many of the same musicians.
“The real sense of the album,” said Young, “is how do you keep going? How
can you keep an old relationship new? How do you make love last?”

   
“Guitar Town made us all feel redundant,” said Rosanne Cash. “I remember
the reporter coming up to me at the record release party . . . and say[ing] ‘Do
you think [Steve Earle] has the potential to be a star?’ And I said, ‘Doesn’t
matter. He’s already changed everything.’” Cash enjoyed hit singles and a
Grammy for her 1985 album Rhythm and Romance, but now found its country-
pop sound lacking. She had also taken to cocaine the way her father had to
pills. Rodney Crowell was also in a slump; Warner Brothers had rejected his
Street Language album and wanted a more country-oriented effort. He retooled
the album for Columbia, but it still bombed. Both albums included songs
written by John Hiatt, who’d been kicking around Nashville and recording
since 1972. In 1987 Hiatt recruited an all-star band (Ry Cooder on guitar, Nick
Lowe on bass, and Jim Keltner on drums) and found critical and commercial
success with Bring the Family. Bonnie Raitt then scored with his “That Thing
Called Love.” That’s how things worked in Music City. Hipsters knew about
Lucinda Williams, but the business knew her as the writer of a hit by Mary
Chapin Carpenter called “Passionate Kisses.”
 Hard-Core Troubadours 205

Rodney advised Rosanne to try something different for King’s Record Shop
(1987). “He described a more rootsy sounding record,” said Cash, “not just
in reaction to the heavy pop vibe of Rhythm and Romance, but as something
fresh and more suited to my natural instincts. I studied Bob Dylan’s Writings
and Drawings (a book of lyrics and sketches) as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls,
and dissected Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt songs as exercises to bet-
ter myself as a songwriter. I should, I thought, make a record that reflected
those sensibilities.” But it was the album’s stunning vocal and instrumental
performances that made King’s Record Shop a career milestone with four #1
country singles, including one by Hiatt (“The Way We Make a Broken Heart”)
and another by Johnny Cash (“Tennessee Flat Top Box”) that had hit #11 in
1961. When Rosanne recorded the tune, which featured her old friend Randy
Scruggs, another child of a country legend, playing the song’s flat-top guitar
solos, she thought it was in the public domain; its success made her father
proud.
Producing a modern yet traditional collection for his wife inspired Crow-
ell (with co-producer Tony Brown) to make one of his own, Diamonds and Dirt
(1988). The confident swing of Crowell’s cover of Buck’s “Above and Beyond”
was reflected in his own “I Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried.” Crowell wrote
“She’s Crazy for Leavin’” with Guy Clark and three other songs with Will
Jennings, best known for his work with the British rock musician Steve Win-
wood. But Crowell’s ace in the hole was a studio band that included Barry
Beckett on keyboard, Paul Franklin on steel guitar, and Mark O’Connor on
fiddle and mandolin. Vince Gill and Rosanne Cash, who dueted with her
husband on “It’s Such a Small World,” provided background vocals. Like
Guitar Town and King’s Record Shop, Diamonds and Dirt was a hit country
album (it contained five #1 songs) made by people who’d grown up with
rock ’n’ roll.
In 1988 Tony Brown also co-produced Steve Earle’s most overtly rocking
album, Copperhead Road, the first record that didn’t include Richard Bennett on
guitar. (Bennett never toured with Earle because he played far more lucrative
concert dates with Neil Diamond. More recently, he has recorded and played
live with Mark Knopfler, who has also collaborated with Emmylou Harris.)
Brown said that when he played Copperhead Road for Jimmy Bowen, MCA’s
Nashville chief, “he said the album was a piece of shit.” The company’s pop
division would subsequently market the label’s so-called renegades—Earle,
Lyle Lovett, and Nanci Griffith.
STEVE EARLE
 Hard-Core Troubadours 207

Earle released Guitar Town when he was thirty-one years old. Sudden suc-
cess can kill a young star, but Earle was no innocent; he’d been toying around
with heroin since he was thirteen. “I started traveling,” said Earle, speaking
of his tours behind Guitar Town and its follow-up, Exit 0, “which brought me
to places where there was good cheap heroin. Suddenly I was going to New
York, and I was going to L.A. and Amsterdam. . . . I had a pretty steady habit
going. . . . Usually before tours I would kick. But I would usually come back
off a tour strung out, depending on where we played.”

   
Robbie Robertson broke up The Band because of his fear of dying on the
road. Initially, the members of The Band pursued solo careers, with Helm
and Danko cutting solo albums and Hudson playing sessions. Helm found
a second calling as an actor and made a vivid debut alongside Sissy Spacek
in the 1980 movie about the life of Loretta Lynn, Coal Miner’s Daughter. He
also had a role in Philip Kaufman’s 1983 film The Right Stuff, adapted from
Tom Wolfe’s book about America’s first astronauts. That same year, The
Band reformed minus Robertson and hit the road without recording new
music.
In January 1986 Albert Grossman died of a heart attack while flying to Eu-
rope on the Concorde. Richard Manuel, one of Grossman’s troubled charges,
sang “I Shall Be Released” at his Bearsville funeral. A little more than a month
later, The Band played the Cheek to Cheek Lounge in Winter Park, Florida.
After the show Manuel spent time with Helm, telling him it was a drag do-
ing club gigs after playing big shows and jetting around the country with
Bob Dylan. “We’re just musicians,” Helm told Manuel. “We’re just working
for the crowd. It’s the best we can do.” Manuel returned to his room in the
Quality Inn and finished a bottle of Grand Marnier. Then he went into the
bathroom and used a leather belt to hang himself. At his funeral in Canada,
Garth Hudson played “I Shall Be Released” on the organ.
Steve Earle’s drug use was flagrant by the time he was recording Copperhead
Road; Tony Brown was surprised but said nothing when he began snorting
heroin in the studio. “Copperhead Road” was about the son of a bootlegger
who comes home from Vietnam and starts growing pot. The music mixed a
droning bagpipe with mandolin and hard-driving drums and guitars. Earle
described it as a cross between heavy metal and bluegrass; it sure wasn’t coun-
try music. Ignored by country radio and embraced by rock critics, Copperhead
208 Chapter 14

Road became Earle’s best-selling album; Waylon Jennings had a Top 5 hit with
the collection’s second-best song, “The Devil’s Right Hand.”
In the song, the devil’s right hand is a handgun. One time, Earle was to
open a concert for Rosanne Cash but was late because he was arrested trying
to board a plane with a .45 Colt automatic. Earle closed the show, and Cash
was not amused. “You don’t have to create drama in your life,” she said. “You
embody it.” While in Memphis Earle obtained prescriptions for Tussionex, a
narcotic cough suppressant, from Dr. George Nichopolous. “For me,” he said,
“going to see Dr. Nick was just like going to Graceland. I went for the same
reason. Then I got the cough mixture, too, which was a bonus.”
The tours became increasingly toxic. “I felt like [Steve] was lost and I
wasn’t speaking to him anymore,” said drummer Harry Stinson. “And so I
had enough. . . . It took awhile for me to recover from being on the road with
all that going on.” Stinson, who would later play with Marty Stuart and His
Fabulous Superlatives, had been there before. “I remember being with Etta
James, and you know, you’re living the blues,” he said. “You might be doing a
show and getting paid for it, but when you’re traveling with Etta, it’s the blues
lifestyle, and it rubs off on you.”
Townes Van Zandt knew all about the highs and lows of life on the road.
In 1987 Robert Palmer wrote a review in the New York Times that compared
Van Zandt to Hank Williams. “Their songwriting craft and vocal musicianship
are exceptional,” said Palmer, “but what you hear is beyond all that; it seems
to be the direct, untrammeled expression of a man’s soul. You can hear the
South and Southwest in the accents, the casually mentioned names of towns
and rivers, the music’s unforced swing. But the highway runs from one end
of America to the other, and for men like these the highway is heritage and
home.”
Earle traveled those roads, and along the way the music took a back seat
to dope. Since he needed to finance his habit and the $8,000 per month he
owed in alimony and child support, his guitars started showing up for sale
in Nashville music shops. “Towards the end,” said Earle, “I had to have some
heroin in my system or I couldn’t sing, I’d just throw up. At the very end, I
did heroin just to get straight. That’s why I started smoking cocaine, to get
high, because I was using heroin or methadone just to stop from getting sick.”
Townes Van Zandt tried to counsel his friend. “I must be bad if they’re sending
you,” said Earle. Then the two old friends poured themselves drinks.
 Hard-Core Troubadours 209

Earle was ultimately saved by a traffic stop. He was on a drug run when he
got arrested for driving with a suspended license and for being in possession
of a crack pipe, three rocks of cocaine, and ten syringes. Around the time Van
Zandt nearly died after entering Vanderbilt Hospital in a dire, “late-stage”
alcoholic state, Earle was sentenced to a year in jail; he was released to a
drug rehab program after three months. He wrote two songs while behind
bars, the rocking “Hard-Core Troubadour” and a poignant ballad, “Goodbye.”
“There’s probably women all over the world that think ‘Goodbye’ was written
for them,” said his singer-songwriter son Justin Townes Earle, who had his
own struggles with addiction. “But I guarantee you, ‘Goodbye’ was written
for junk.” In August 2020 a sober father spoke by telephone to the son he’d
named after an old friend. “I said, ‘Do not make me bury you,’” said Steve to
Justin. “And he said, ‘I won’t.’” Later that night, he died of an accidental drug
overdose.
THE “BIRTH” OF AMERICANA

Alison Krauss began playing classical violin at the age of five and turned to
bluegrass after winning her first fiddle contest at eight. Her father had emi-
grated from Germany in 1952, and she grew up not in a rural mountain holler
but in the college town of Champaign, Illinois. “My grandmother played the
piano, my mother played the guitar and we listened to Hank Williams and
classical music,” said Krauss. She was naturally drawn to folk music that fea-
tured the fiddle. “I was really into the second-generation bluegrass people,”
said Krauss, citing Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. “But my hero was Ralph
[Stanley],” she said, “that kind of real mountain singing.”
Krauss was named Most Promising Fiddle Player by the Society for the
Preservation of Bluegrass Music at the age of twelve; while playing at blue-
grass festivals she learned to modulate her voice to intimate effect and met the
players who would form her group, Union Station. At sixteen Krauss went to
Nashville to record her 1987 debut album for Rounder Records. The players
were the cream of the acoustic crop and included Sam Bush, Bela Fleck, Tony
Trischka, and Jerry Douglas, who would join Union Station in 1998.
“At one point, Jack Clement brought Johnny Cash upstairs,” said Jim
Rooney, the record’s engineer. “Johnny volunteered to put a bass harmony
 The “Birth” of Americana 211

on one song (which [producer] Ken Irwin chose not to use). Alison was young
enough that her parents were still with her, and you wouldn’t have blamed her
if she’d let all of this throw her, but it didn’t. She kept her focus. You could tell
she was going somewhere.” Krauss won her first Grammy Award for the title
song of her 1990 album I’ve Got That Old Feeling. By 2019 she’d won twenty-
seven Grammys, fourteen of them with Union Station.
Krauss’s success was an anomaly in the relatively cloistered world of blue-
grass, where the big time meant a contract with an independent label such as
Rounder or Sugar Hill and gigs at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival (started in
1974) and Merlefest, an annual roots music event in North Carolina launched
by Doc Watson in 1988. Festival attendees often bring their own instruments
for campground jam sessions, while the pros network backstage. That’s how
Krauss became acquainted with Nickel Creek, a young bluegrass trio consist-
ing of Chris Thile (mandolin) and siblings Sara Watkins (fiddle) and Sean
Watkins (guitar). Krauss produced the trio’s self-titled 2000 album, an influ-
ential success that, though grounded in bluegrass, also incorporated elements
of jazz, classical, folk, and rock. Americana lived in this music, and the young
players would become stars of the new genre.
Gillian Welch took a more circuitous path to find her musical home. She
was adopted at birth (literally delivered to her new parents via a Manhattan
taxi) by a showbiz couple who did comedy and wrote songs; when she was
three, the family moved to Los Angeles when her parents got a job writing
music for The Carol Burnett Show. She studied photography at the University
of California before the untrained guitarist (she’d played bass in a Goth rock
band) enrolled in the Berklee College of Music, where she shared a house
with members of a string band. “I discovered bluegrass music,” said Welch,
“and it was like an electric shock. . . . I hadn’t heard people playing the music
I had sung as a kid [at a progressive school], and it made me think, I know
these songs, and I sound good singing them.” Welch (like Krauss) adored
Ralph Stanley.
Welch studied songwriting at Berklee and left without a degree. “I looked
at my record collection,” she said, “and saw that all the music I loved had been
made in Nashville—Bill Monroe, Dylan, the Stanley Brothers, Neil Young—so
I moved there. Not ever thinking I was thirty years too late.” Welch and David
Rawlings met at Berklee and played music alongside other talented students.
But they found their sound in the kitchen of his Nashville apartment when
their voices and guitars fused on “Long Black Veil.”
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Gillian and David played open mike nights in Nashville, where Welch
honed an original repertoire that was as leanly artful as the duo’s perfor-
mances. Denise Stiff, who was managing Alison Krauss, got Welch a publish-
ing deal. At the Station Inn, T-Bone Burnett saw her play and said, “Do you
want to make a record?” Burnett has a gift for producing new artists with a
résumé that includes debut recordings by Los Lobos, Counting Crows, the
BoDeans, and Joe Henry. He also produced one of Elvis Costello’s best records,
King of America, and hired Presley’s guitar player, James Burton, and drummer
Jim Keltner to play the sessions. Both musicians appeared on Welch’s first
album, Revival.
Burnett “had a deep and abiding concern that I find my way as an artist,”
said Welch, and “that my first record should show the world what I wanted
to talk about and what I wanted to sound like.” Burnett kept the focus on
Gillian and David’s harmonies, which built on country music’s rich history
of duets. Ann Powers, reviewing Revival for Rolling Stone, said that Welch and
Rawlings created “settings they could only know from reading James Agee
and listening to Folkways recordings.” After mentioning Welch’s Hollywood
background, she continued: “Concentrate only on the sound, and these songs
will haunt you; Welch’s musical precision is eerie, the mark of a true obsessive
so deeply wedded to her subject that she has become it. Ultimately, though,
Welch’s gorgeous testimonies manufacture emotion rather than express it.”
Krauss, a fan of the rock band Foreigner, fielded few complaints about her
authenticity, and Bob Dylan was one of many who studied the songs of Harry
Smith’s Anthology. No matter. Emmylou Harris cut Welch’s “Orphan Girl” for
her Wrecking Ball before it appeared on Revival. “One of the things that Gil-
lian did very well was sing the song rather than the notes,” said Pat Pattison,
her songwriting teacher at Berklee. “You have singers who have a really great
instrument, but you don’t feel they’re inside the song. When Gillian sings, it’s
about the presentation of emotion. Even back then, she didn’t sing notes; she
sang feelings and ideas.”
Other musicians approached roots music from a different perspective.
“We’d all been involved in rock bands, and punk rock, which is fun to listen
to but doesn’t always age well,” said Gary Louris of the Jayhawks. “When we
stumbled on country music, it sounded rebellious to us. It was definitely out-
sider music.” Both the Jayhawks, based in Minneapolis, and Uncle Tupelo, a
band from Belleview, Illinois, developed their sound far from the scrutiny of
coastal critics. “Most of these bands were like us,” said Rob Miller of Bloodshot
 The “Birth” of Americana 213

Records in Chicago, “discovering the music as they were creating it. Terms
like ‘alternative country’ are now standard critical fare, but back then no one
had any idea of what to do with it.”
“We were conscious of the juxtaposition of putting a loud electric guitar
next to acoustic folk-oriented songs, but at the time we didn’t feel like we were
really doing anything that different,” said Jay Farrar of Uncle Tupelo. “It just
seemed like more of a continuum[,] really,” said Farrar on another occasion,
“following bands like the Byrds and the Burrito Brothers.” Farrar met Jeff
Tweedy in high school and they played 1960s rock ’n’ roll and punk covers in
a band called the Primitives. “It wasn’t like we were ever intentionally trying
to merge punk and country,” said Tweedy. “That’s just what came out.” Uncle
Tupelo and the Jayhawks embraced the do-it-yourself ethos of punk, record-
ing for small labels and sleeping on couches during club tours entailing long
hours in dilapidated vans.
“If there was a class on how to start an alt.country band,” said BJ Barham
of the group American Aquarium, “this is your syllabus on Day One. You’re
talking Gram Parsons and then you’re talking about Uncle Tupelo. This was
punk-rock kids from the Midwest who listened to Iggy Pop and the Stooges,
who decided to pick up mandolins and acoustic guitars and fiddles and start
playing their own kind of music. It’s paramount that you mention Uncle Tu-
pelo when you mention this genre, because without them kind of paving that
way between the late-Eighties scene and the early Nineties rock scene, you
don’t have what we call Americana now, what we called alt.country in the late
Nineties.”
In 1993 Uncle Tupelo opened for Johnny Cash in a California club. Tweedy
said that Cash let out a cheer when they played “No Depression,” a Carter
Family song by June’s uncle A. P. “I don’t remember saying much,” said
Tweedy. “What was there to say to Johnny Cash? It was like talking to the
Empire State Building or a bald eagle.” No Depression was the title of Uncle
Tupelo’s 1990 debut; early in the decade, the name would be used for an AOL
message board populated by Tupelo fans. In 1995 No Depression became the
name of an influential publication covering a style of music that was mutating
from alt.country to Americana.
In an era dominated by the grunge rock of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, the alt-
country crowd embraced a different sort of alternative rock. Uncle Tupelo had
two singer-songwriters: Farrar, who sang in a deep, resonant voice and whose
lead guitar was influenced by Neil Young, and Tweedy, who played bass (and
214 Chapter 15

guitar) and whose vocals owed more to folk-rock than to blues. Both wrote
songs about an industrial Midwest that had seen better days. On a lark, Uncle
Tupelo played occasional acoustic shows as Coffee Creek, performing country
classics by Buck, Cash, and Haggard.
Farrar and Tweedy shared a band, a van, and an apartment in Belleville; by
the time they’d recorded three indie albums (including March 16–20, 1992, an
acoustic record produced by R.E.M.’s Peter Buck) and Uncle Tupelo’s major
label debut (Anodyne), they barely spoke. So Farrar left the group. Tweedy
renamed the band Wilco, and Farrar formed Son Volt. But before then, Uncle
Tupelo contributed a song to Arkansas Traveler, a 1992 collection in which the
folk singer Michelle Shocked recruited a veritable who’s who of Americana.
Besides Tupelo, Shocked’s guests included Levon Helm and Garth Hudson of
The Band, Pops Staples of the Staple Singers, the Red Clay Ramblers, Alison
Krauss and Union Station, fiddler Mark O’Connor, and such powerful pickers
as Doc Watson, Norman Blake, Jerry Douglas, and Bernie Leadon.
Uncle Tupelo never made it big, but it cast a large shadow. Patterson Hood’s
band Adam’s House Cat opened for the group in “a small, little punk-rock dive
bar” in Memphis. Hood was no stranger to country music. “A friend of mine,”
he said, “made me this mix tape of all this old-timey country stuff, the kind of
stuff I’d hear at my great uncle’s farm, or he would play, that I didn’t embrace
at all growing up. But now I heard it with fresh ears.” He heard that music
reflected in Uncle Tupelo’s March 16–20, 1992. Hood and Mike Colley would
soon form a punk-inflected roots band of their own, Drive-By Truckers.
“Uncle Tupelo’s influence wasn’t as musical innovators,” said writer Peter
Blackstock, “but they were very influential in galvanizing a fan base and a base
of artists interested in this kind of music. It’s a smaller version of what R.E.M.
did for alternative rock in the ’80s.” Peter Buck played guitar for R.E.M. “They
were the right band at the right time,” said Buck, “and maybe just as important,
they broke up at the right time. Just when a lot of stuff that was influenced
by them was starting to break through to the mainstream, and older artists
doing the same thing—like Steve Earle and Lucinda Williams—were starting
to get recognized, the bright young hope called it quits. It reminds me a lot of
bands like the Velvet Underground and Big Star, who made great music and
were playing to audiences of like eight people, and it was only years later that
a larger audience figured out how great they were.”
When Blackstock and Grant Alden launched No Depression it was a quar-
terly; the first cover featured Son Volt. The Americana chart created in the
 The “Birth” of Americana 215

early 1990s didn’t last long, but in 1999 the genre inspired the creation of the
Americana Music Association. By then, No Depression was a bi-monthly and
considered to be the Bible of Americana, though it persisted in calling itself
“A magazine about alt.country (whatever that is).” (No Depression ceased print
publication in 2008 and subsequently maintained an online presence; in 2014
it was bought by FreshGrassLLC, a nonprofit company that also promotes an
annual music festival.)
Whiskeytown was Americana’s first big band. Ryan Adams played punk
in the Patty Duke Syndrome but never forgot the country music that he’d
heard growing up in North Carolina. “I started this damn country band,” sings
Adams on the title track of Whiskeytown’s indie-label debut, Faithless Street,
“because punk rock is too hard to sing.” Jim Scott produced Whiskeytown’s
second album and major label debut, Strangers Almanac, and gave the band’s
music clarity and crunch (Scott had engineered Tom Petty’s Wildflowers). The
repertoire was eclectic; Adams touched on classic country (“Excuse Me While
I Break My Own Heart Tonight”), country rock (“16 Days”), and folk rock (Turn
Around”); acoustic songs evoked his singer-songwriter side. “By listening to a
bunch of great songs, [Adams had] taught himself to be a great songwriter—
across all genres,” said Thomas O’Keefe, Whiskeytown’s road manager.
Adams made the cover of No Depression, and Strangers Almanac was mod-
estly successful, selling 150,000 copies. But an Americana star was a main-
stream nobody, and Adams hated it when Whiskeytown opened a tour for
John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival. Before Whiskeytown’s sub-
sequent demise, the band appeared on a television tribute to Gram Parsons
on Sessions at West 54th Street. Musicians appearing on the show included
Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Wilco, Chris
Hillman, Jim Lauderdale, and Buddy Miller. The high regard in which Adams
was held in the world of Americana was reflected by the fact that he opened
the show singing “Return of the Grievous Angel” with Emmylou. After the
taping, musicians gathered at an East Village bar where Welch and Adams
were at the center of a song swap. “We ended up playing music until four or
five a.m.,” said Welch. “Ryan seemed kinda burnt on Manhattan [where he
was living] and he kept saying, ‘Nobody ever does this up here, just play for
fun.’ We mostly did old covers—George Jones, Hank Williams, the usual fare.”
Welch was enlisted by T-Bone Burnett to help create a soundtrack for Joel
and Ethan Coen’s 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a Depression-era
musical nominally based on Homer’s Odyssey. For inspiration, and before the
216 Chapter 15

script was completed, they burned compilation CDs of country, blues, and
bluegrass music from the 1930s. Burnett and the filmmakers then gathered a
roomful of musicians including Welch, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, and
Norman Blake. “Everyone’s sort of hanging out and playing, picking, and then
Ralph [Stanley] walked in,” said Ethan Coen. “It was like they’d wheeled in
one of the heads from Mount Rushmore. The whole room just kind of fell
silent.”
The film starred George Clooney, who lip-synched “Man of Constant Sor-
row,” a folk song recorded in the 1950s by the Stanley Brothers and in the 1960s
by Bob Dylan. Dan Tyminki of Union Station sang the song for O Brother,
and his wife said, “Your voice coming out of George Clooney’s body? This is
my fantasy come true.” The lively rendition was ear candy compared to the
soundtrack’s other indelible tune, “O Death.” Burnett first had Ralph Stanley
cut the song while playing the banjo, but then had him sing it a cappella be-
cause “it was much more terrifying that way.” The O Brother soundtrack sold
more than eight million copies and won five Grammys, including Album of the
Year, a producer award for Burnett, and Best Male Country Vocal for Stanley.
“[Burnett] said he understood what I’d been doing all these years,” said
Stanley, “sticking with my old-time mountain music when everybody else was
going uptown. I told him it wasn’t a strategy. More like an instinct.” Burnett said
he wasn’t surprised at the success of O Brother, which also included songs by
Jimmie Rodgers (“In the Jailhouse Now”) and the Carter Family (“Keep on the
Sunny Side”). “To me it just sounded like a really good record,” he said. “I had
high hopes for it because we had a broadcast medium that wasn’t dependent
on the power structure in Nashville. We had this movie—a movie starring
George Clooney at that—and I thought, if people hear this music they’ll like
it, because it’s good.”

   
“Johnny was one of the few people who wrote me when I was locked up,” said
Steve Earle. “He sent me a very encouraging letter saying how everybody was
pulling for me, and that he and June were praying for me.” Earle knew that
he’d walked right up to the edge. “I probably would have died,” he said. “I’m
not about to thank the judge or anybody, but he probably saved my life. I went
into treatment not to get clean but to get out of jail. But something happened
in treatment, and I can’t talk about it very much. One thing about me that’s
 The “Birth” of Americana 217

not very unique is this fucking disease I have, and somehow, this program
[Alcoholics Anonymous] is helping me keep it under control.”
Music also helped. Shortly after he was released from rehab, Earle cut
an acoustic album with Norman Black on guitar and fiddle, Peter Rowan
on mandolin, and Roy Huskey Jr. on acoustic bass. “We were all in the room
playing with each other,” said Rowan. “The acoustic music tradition has a
sense of the moment and the rough edges are still there.” Intimacy is the key.
“Everybody can hear each other,” said Blake. “Just really listening to what’s
going down and getting it to where you’ve got a real good recording to start
with before you get to the point of ‘we can fix it in the mix.’”
Train a-Comin’ included songs Earle had written but never recorded and
covers such as “I’m Looking Through You” by the Beatles and “Tecumseh
Valley” by Townes Van Zandt. Hoping to get Emmylou Harris to add some
harmonies, Earle sent her a tape of the sessions. She was moved to tears by
“Goodbye,” the ballad he’d written in jail, and asked Earle for permission to
record the song for Wrecking Ball, inviting him to play on the track. Guitarist
Richard Bennett, who hadn’t seen Earle in years, was also on the date. “Out
of the corner of my eye,” said Bennett, “I saw this mountain of a redneck in
these overalls . . . and I thought, ‘Who the fuck is this in here with Emmy?’
And he came up and said, ‘Richard, it’s Steve.’”
Bennett agreed to help produce the electric album that Earle was already
planning and which is now considered one of his very best. “It’s a modern,
mid-90s Guitar Town,” said Bennett, “in that it’s back to being very simple.
. . . It’s a great rock album without trying to be ‘rock.’ In that sense, some
kind of circle had closed.” I Feel Alright included the hard-rocking title song;
“Hard-Core Troubadour,” which echoed Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl”
and referenced Bruce Springsteen’s “Rosalita”; “Now She’s Gone,” a song that
evoked the sound of Rubber Soul; and a duet with Lucinda Williams, “You’re
Still Standin’ There.”
Earle issued another album, El Corazon, a year later, and hired Buddy Miller
to play lead guitar on the subsequent tour; Miller did double duty by open-
ing some shows with his wife Julie. Earle found both solace and purpose in
writing “Ellis Unit One” for a Tim Robbins film about a convict’s execution,
Dead Man Walking. “You’re kind of a new person when you’re sober,” said Earle,
“and I’d yet to write something that I felt real serious about in a topical slash
political vein. So when I wrote it, there was something of a catharsis for me;
218 Chapter 15

it was as if now the picture was complete.” While recording “Ellis Unit One,”
he ran into another contributor to the soundtrack, Johnny Cash.
“When I got to the studio, nobody was there but John and the engineer,”
said Earle. “I walk in and there’s this old-fashioned picnic basket sitting in the
middle of the pool table—you know, gingham tablecloth, the whole bit. John’s
got his hand in that picnic basket, and he looks up and says, ‘Steve, would
you like a piece of tenderloin on a biscuit that June made this morning?’ I
was really hungry so I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘I knew you would.’ We could
have talked about our shared demons—I’d been clean probably a year and
a half—but he knew that sometimes it’s better to leave some things private
and just talk about tenderloin and biscuit.”
Earle then agreed to produce Lucinda Williams’s 1998 album Car Wheels
on a Gravel Road. Williams had already discarded a nearly complete version
of Car Wheels that she’d recorded with her longtime guitarist and producer,
Gurf Morlix. “Steve Earle and I,” said Williams, “write with a contemporary
point of view but with reference to traditional music forms.” But they ended up
butting heads, and Roy Bittan, a keyboardist for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street
Band, completed the album. Musicians playing on the record include Buddy
Miller on guitar and Jim Lauderdale and Emmylou Harris on background
vocals.
Car Wheels was a hit with critics, topping the Village Voice’s annual “Pazz
and Jop” poll and winning the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk. “The
album turns that much-maligned genre—call it American roots rock—into a
heady, soul-baring and, would you believe, unabashedly sexy art form,” said
Gavin Martin of Britain’s New Music Express. “What she has over all the other
girls with guitars is a masterful sense of pace and rhythm, deliciously tailored
tunes and a big, warm, enveloping voice with a burnished edge.” Lucinda’s
songs smelled of the South and were thick with love, regret, and the urge for
going. Williams would continue to make noteworthy music, but Car Wheels
remains both her best-selling album and an enduring masterpiece.
Earle’s fellow Texans, Nanci Griffith and Lyle Lovett, sustained success-
ful, low-key careers. Griffin reunited with producer Jim Rooney to cut Other
Voices, Other Rooms, a collection of songs written by artists who’d inspired her,
including Townes Van Zandt, Dylan, John Prine, Gordon Lightfoot, and Jerry
Jeff Walker. Griffith sang the Carter Family’s “Are You Tired of Me, Darling?”
with Emmylou and Iris DeMent. Rooney had produced DeMent’s 1992 debut,
 The “Birth” of Americana 219

Infamous Angel, and her striking voice and songs of rural life and emotional
introspection created such a buzz that Warner Brothers bought out her con-
tract with Rounder Records and rereleased the album. DeMent later sang the
title song of John Prine’s 1999 album of duets, In Spite of Ourselves.
Lovett was encouraged to curb his offbeat instincts and tailor songs for the
radio. Instead, he brought horns into his band to add a little swing and acted
in two films by Robert Altman, Short Cuts and The Player. (It was on the set
of the latter that Lovett met actress Julia Roberts; they married and amicably
divorced two years later.) “I want to be successful enough to keep my job,” said
Lovett, “but somehow make the records the way I want to, without outside
influence, with freedom of thought. . . . And that attitude comes from those
nights at the Anderson Fair Retail Restaurant in Houston, where, after the
gig was over . . . we would play songs till four in the morning and tell stories
about Guy and Townes.”
Lovett would honor the Texas school with Step Inside This House (1998). The
title song was Guy Clark’s first original song, which the notoriously self-critical
songwriter never recorded; the album also included Van Zandt’s “If I Needed
You” (“If I needed you . . . Would you come to me and ease my pain?”) and
“Sailing Shoes” (“Days full of rain / Sky’s comin’ down again / I get so tired /
Of the same old blues”). Van Zandt was by now, to borrow the title of one of
his songs, waiting around to die. Live shows kept him solvent but were apt
to run off the rails. “He started doing some of his songs,” said musician Jim
Calvin of a gig in Dallas, “except for half of it was in tongues, half of it was
just howling.” Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley offered him a deal to cut
a record for Geffen, but before sessions commenced in Memphis near Christ-
mas 1998, Van Zandt took a drunken tumble; declining medical attention, he
arrived at the recording studio in a wheelchair.
“He hadn’t shaved in a few days, and he was gaunt,” said writer Robert
Gordon. “He was a very heavy drinker and I remember when he took a shot
during the sessions, you could hear . . . it moving through his blood going
into his body and then out again.” The sessions went nowhere. At his ex-wife
Jeanene’s insistence, Van Zandt finally went to the hospital and discovered
that he’d broken his hip. The next morning, against doctor’s orders but at Van
Zandt’s request, Jeanene took him home. It was New Year’s Day 1997, forty-four
years to the day after Hank died in the back of his Cadillac. Townes would join
him before sunset. The funeral was at Belmont Church, just off Music Row
220 Chapter 15

in Nashville. Steve Earle, sober as a judge, introduced tributes in the form of

spoken words and musical performances by Lyle, Emmylou, Nanci, and Guy
Clark, who said, “I booked this gig thirty-something years ago.”

   
“What records do I listen to?” said Bob Dylan to Bono of U2. “I still listen to
those records that I listened to when I was growing up—they really changed
my life. They still change my life. Robert Johnson, the Louvin Brothers, Hank
Williams, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Charlie Patton.” In 1992, thirty years
after releasing his first album, Dylan used his acoustic guitar and harmonica
to record Good as I Been to You in the garage of his Malibu home. The album
contained the kind of folk (“Frankie and Albert”) and blues (Blind Boy Fuller’s
“Step It Up and Go”) that he might have played opening for John Lee Hooker
at the Gaslight Café. Dylan repeated the format a year later with World Gone
Wrong. Revisiting the repertoire of his youth led to Time out of Mind (1997),
the first of a series of outstanding late-career recordings that were suffused
with the blues.
Dylan made the album with Daniel Lanois, who’d produced his 1989 album
Oh Mercy and co-produced U2 albums with Brian Eno. Dylan read Lanois the
lyrics he’d written for Time out of Mind and advised him to listen to records
by Charlie Patton, Little Walter, and Arthur Alexander for inspiration. Dylan
made demos with Lanois at Teatro, the studio he’d built in an old theater in
Oxnard, California, but the album was recorded in Miami. The assembled
musicians included a pair of drummers (Jim Keltner and Brian Blade), two
keyboardists (Augie Meyers and Jim Dickinson), multiple guitarists (including
Lanois and Duke Robillard), and Cindy Cashdollar on slide guitar. “There was
a lot of heart in the room,” said Dickinson, “and a lot of people of a certain
age. There was a lot of mortality there.”
“My years with Eno had provided me with an appetite for innovations,”
said Lanois, “and so my time in Miami was all about providing Bob with a
futuristic way of looking at his work.” Lanois established the proper pulse
by feeding pre-recorded rhythms into the drummer’s headphones and ran
Dylan’s vocal through a Gretsch guitar amplifier to get an old-fashioned sound.
The dense, spectral arrangements complemented Dylan’s autumnal songs.
“Love Sick,” a title that alluded to Hank Williams’s “Love Sick Blues,” set
the album’s tone with its opening line: “I’m walking through streets that are
dead.” Things lighten up, nominally, on “Not Dark Yet” (“It’s not dark yet, but
it’s getting there”). Dylan won a rock vocal Grammy for “Cold Irons Bound,”
 The “Birth” of Americana 221

in which his voice floats within a lattice of guitars, distorted keyboards, and
rattling drums.
A decade earlier Robbie Robertson had hired Lanois to co-produce his
first new music since leaving The Band. “Robbie and the Band made a great
impression on me as a kid coming up in Canada,” said Lanois. Recording
Robertson while also working on U2’s Joshua Tree, he encouraged his new
client to come to Ireland to record a pair of songs with the group. Whereas
the music of The Band seemed removed from the calendar, the album Robbie
Robertson was saturated in the sound of the day; its best song, “Fallen Angel,”
a eulogy to the late Richard Manuel, featured Peter Gabriel and sounded as
if it could have been on his own Lanois-produced album, So.
In 1995 Harris sent Lanois a tape of songs that she planned to record. “The
simplicity of her recording touched me,” said Lanois. “I heard the frailty inside
the confidence of this master singer’s voice.” Lanois asked U2’s Larry Mullen
to play drums and had Malcolm Burns bounce honky-tonk piano against his
own electric guitar, mandolin, and dulcimer (which he’d found in Emmylou’s
house). “The multiple strings of these instruments ringing in unison created
a harmonic cohesion,” he said, “a sort of choral group, moving with every
chord change.”
Harris has always been a curator of superior songs, and Wrecking Ball in-
cluded material by such Americana figures as Julie Miller (“All My Tears”),
Dylan (“Every Grain of Sand”), Lucinda Williams (“Sweet Old World”), Steve
Earle (“Goodbye”), Gillian Welch (“Orphan Girl”), and Jimi Hendrix (“May
This Be Love”). Neil Young, who would record an album (Le Noise) with La-
nois in 2010, added a harmony vocal to his song “Wrecking Ball.” Harris also
recorded “Goin’ Back to Harlan” by Anna McGarrigle, who sang on the record
with her sister Kate. “These great Canadian singers have a beautiful and spe-
cial blend, a sort of warbling bird sound,” said Lanois of the folk duo.
Wrecking Ball won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Recording
and sold 250,000 copies, a healthy figure that nonetheless paled alongside
sales of Emmylou’s earlier country albums. But she now thrived in the incipi-
ent genre of Americana, and when she put together a new band, she hired
Buddy Miller. “The first thing we sang after I got the gig was ‘Love Hurts,’”
said Miller of the Everly Brothers song that Harris had once performed with
Gram Parsons. “At that point I told her manager that he didn’t really have to
pay me.”
In 1998 Lanois and Emmylou met Willie Nelson in Las Vegas and rode his
tour bus to Oxnard to record an album called Teatro. Nelson was coming off of
EMMYLOU HARRIS
 The “Birth” of Americana 223

Spirit, an intimate album that he’d recorded with a small ensemble; Lanois’s
strategy was to frame Nelson’s Gypsy jazz guitar style with Latin accents. A
late-night ambiance was established when Willie and his sister Bobbie (on
electric piano) opened the album with a Django Reinhardt classic, “Ou Es-
Tu, Mon Amour?” Nelson’s Spanish-inflected guitar then introduced “I Never
Cared for You,” a song Nelson first recorded in 1964 (it was a hit in Texas).
Teatro exists somewhere between country and folksy Latin jazz, with pianist
Brad Mehldau making an appearance and Mickey Raphael anchoring some
of the tracks with a bass harmonica.
Teatro is utterly unique in Nelson’s voluminous catalog and sits comfortably
alongside Latin Americana recordings by Los Lobos, the Mavericks, and the
Texas Tornados. The Mavericks, led by Cuban American singer Raul Malo,
enjoyed Top 40 country hits in the 1990s (“What a Crying Shame,” “Here
Comes the Rain”) and continues to play music that mixes elements of Tex-Mex,
Latin, and rock ’n’ roll. The Texas Tornados were a Lone Star supergroup that
included Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers of the Sir Douglas Quintet, country
star Freddy Fender (“Wasted Days and Wasted Nights”), and a master of the
conjunto accordion, Flaco Jimenez. Recording in both English and Spanish,
the Tornados spiked rock and country songs with a variety of Mexican and
Latin styles.
Daniel Lanois recognized something when he recorded Dylan and Nelson.
“There is a similarity between [them],” said Lanois, “both tireless troubadours,
both relying on the call of the road.” While Willie lived to be on the road
again, Dylan had begun what became known as the “Never Ending Tour.”
“Bob considers himself a simple man who performs a trade,” said his road
manager, Victor Maymudes. “Like a plumber, carpenter, or stone mason . . .
Bob sees himself as a musician, that’s his trade, and musicians play concerts.”

   
“I had just had this huge record with King’s Record Shop,” said Rosanne Cash.
“I had a ton of leverage with the record label, but I just felt like I veered off
the track of my life. . . . When you think of yourself as a songwriter, and then
you make a record that’s truly successful, and there’s only a couple of yours
on there, I was a little shaken.” So she wrote Interiors (1990), a quietly intense
record she produced by herself. “Somebody wrote a review [of Interiors] and
said it was a ‘divorce record,’” said Cash, “and I was shocked. . . . And then, of
course, later on, I realized that he was right.”
224 Chapter 15

Country radio ignored Interiors, and at Cash’s request promotion of the

album was shifted to Columbia’s pop division. Rodney Crowell similarly
struggled to meet the commercial expectations generated by Diamonds &
Dirt. “It was different in the nineties,” he recalled. “I made a couple of records
for MCA that I wasn’t proud of.” So Crowell began releasing more personal
albums on smaller labels. In one respect, however, he never left mainstream
country music. “As a songwriter,” said Crowell, “every couple of years, some-
thing I write, somebody else will cover it and it’ll be a hit, and it subsidizes
the art.”
Crowell and John Leventhal co-produced an album in the early 1990s by
Jim Lauderdale, who’d moved from New York to Los Angeles and reconnected
with Buddy Miller, who played lead guitar in his band while helping his wife
Julie record albums for the Christian market. In the years since Buddy and Ju-
lie had left New York, Shawn Colvin and Leventhal had become romantically
involved and had begun collaborating on songs. “John would give me these
rhythm and blues type things that he had put on tape,” said Colvin, “and I’d
make it into a Richard Thompson kind of thing on my guitar. I wrote the first
verse and chorus of ‘Diamond in the Rough,’ and I called John thinking that
he’d hate it. But he didn’t, and encouraged me to keep on going. So I finished
it, and discovered that I’d found something that seemed to be unique to me.”
Colvin was part of the New York Fast Folk scene that launched Suzanne Vega.
Colvin sang on Vega’s hit song “Luka” and toured Europe in her band; she
then got a deal with Columbia Records. Leventhal produced Colvin’s Steady
On, and though the couple’s romance didn’t last, their record won the Con-
temporary Folk Grammy.
Leventhal had also co-written songs with Lauderdale. “For about a year and
a half, we had this magical thing going,” said Lauderdale of the collaboration,
“with many of the songs ending up on Planet of Love.” Colvin sang backup on
that album (as well as those by Julie Miller), but for “King of Broken Hearts,”
a song written about Gram Parsons, Crowell called in his old boss. “Emmylou
was like the Queen,” said Julie. “Nobody could imagine actually knowing her
personally!” Few people heard Planet of Love, but those who did mattered. “I
think nine out of ten tracks of that album have been recorded by others,” said
Lauderdale. Country star George Strait heard and cut both “King of Broken
Hearts” and “Where the Sidewalk Ends” on the same day. Lauderdale has
enjoyed a long career as a recording artist, but it’s songwriting royalties that
has kept him comfortably solvent.
 The “Birth” of Americana 225

Crowell, Cash, and Harris had ended the 1980s at the top of the country
heap, but that all changed in the 1990s. Dwight Yoakam had his biggest record
with a modern take on the Bakersfield sound, This Time (1993), but mislaid his
audience with Lost (1995). “It wasn’t a slow decline,” said Yoakam’s producer,
Pete Anderson. “We went from a triple platinum record [three million sold]
to a record that sold three hundred and fifty thousand copies.” Mainstream
country had changed with the arrival of Garth Brooks, whose arena-rock ver-
sion of country crushed everybody this side of Shania Twain, whose country-
pop albums were produced by her husband Mutt Lange, who also recorded
AC/DC and Def Leppard.
Rosanne Cash divorced her husband and moved to New York. “It was a mat-
ter of trying to figure out how not to destroy my kids’ lives,” she said. “How to
unleash myself from a 6,000-square-foot house and a big diamond ring and
a marriage that everybody had elevated to this kind of, I don’t know, iconic
entertainment.” Cash settled in Greenwich Village and reinvented herself as
the bohemian daughter of a country legend who wrote prose as well as songs.
When it came time to write and produce her next album (The Wheel), she
turned to John Leventhal, a Manhattan neighbor whom she’d met through
Crowell.
Shawn Colvin recorded her second album (Fat City) with bassist Larry
Klein, who was married to Joni Mitchell. “There was this whole incestu-
ous minidrama going on where Rosanne was now dating, and working
with, John Leventhal, I was working with [Rosanne’s previous guitar player]
Steuart Smith and Larry had just finished producing an album for Rodney
Crowell, Rosanne’s ex-husband, using Steuart and John on guitars.” By the
time Colvin collaborated with Leventhal on A Few Small Repairs (1996), he
would be married to Rosanne. Colvin’s “Sunny Came Home” won the 1998
Grammy Awards for both Song and Record of the Year. During the broad-
cast, Ol’ Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan interrupted her acceptance
speech to declare “Wu-Tang is for the children!” But that wasn’t the weirdest
thing that happened. When Bob Dylan, who won Album of the Year for
Time out of Mind, was performing “Love Sick,” a bare-chested man with “Soy
Bomb” written on his chest bounded onto the stage to do a spastic dance
alongside Dylan, who played a guitar solo as the trespasser was hustled off
the stage. Looking on with bemused concern was a new member of Dylan’s
group, Larry Campbell, who once played with Colvin in the Buddy Miller
Band.
226 Chapter 15

   
At the turn of the century, the Americana genre was coalescing as the music
business was falling apart. The CD boom was over, and digital file sharing
was both crushing profits and anticipating a future that would see physical
products replaced by internet streams. But it wasn’t just a business model
that was changing; it was the music itself. The genre of rock ’n’ roll, aside
from heritage acts such as Bruce Springsteen, U2, and the Rolling Stones,
was now a sliver of a music market dominated by dance, hip-hop, and other
styles that most grown-ups don’t know. Anemic record sales meant that art-
ists increasingly made their money from live performances, and Americana
emerged as a natural refuge for rock bands, singer-songwriters, and roots
musicians.
Americana was also helpful to artists whom country radio had kicked aside
in favor of younger performers. In 2000 Merle Haggard released his last great
record, If I Could Only Fly, named after the Blaze Foley title song, on Anti, a
subsidiary of the punk rock label Epitaph. The same label released Porter
Wagoner’s Wagonmaster, an old-school country album produced by Marty Stu-
art and featuring his band, the Fabulous Superlatives. Loretta Lynne attracted
a new crop of hipster fans when Jack White of the White Stripes produced
her Van Lear Rose. But nothing compared to the late-career renaissance of
Johnny Cash albums engineered by a producer who practiced transcendental
meditation and sported the long beard of a guru.
Rick Rubin co-founded Def Jam Records while living in a New York Univer-
sity dorm and producing hits by LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. After making
records with Tom Petty and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rubin approached
Cash with a proposition. “You’ll come to my house, take a guitar and start
singing,” he said. “You’ll sing every song you love, and somewhere in there
we’ll find a trigger song that will tell us we’re headed in the right direction.”
The odd couple clicked. Cash recorded American Recording (1994) in Rubin’s
living room with only his guitar (save two tracks from the Viper Room in Los
Angeles). The repertoire included folk evergreens (“Delia’s Gone”) and songs
by Leonard Cohen (“Bird on a Wire”), Loudon Wainwright III (“The Man
Who Couldn’t Cry”), and Nick Lowe (“The Beast in Me”). Before releasing the
album, Cash asked the opinion of a trusted friend. “I can’t see nothing wrong
with this,” said Marty Stuart. “This is as pure as it gets.” The stark, intimate
recording proved to be the most critically and commercially successful music
Cash had made in decades.
 The “Birth” of Americana 227

“Rick came along at exactly the right time,” said Rosanne Cash. “Before
Rick, Dad was depressed, discouraged. It was a powerful thing that happened
between them, and Dad was completely revitalized and back to his old en-
thusiastic self.” Unchained (1996) was largely recorded with Tom Petty and the
Heartbreakers at a studio in a seedy neighborhood of Los Angeles. One day
Cash arrived with a smile on his face. “He was laughing, so I said, ‘Hey, where
you been?’” said Petty. “He said, ‘June and I thought it would be fun to just
sit on the bus bench across the street for a while. I met the most interesting
people over there.’” Unchained won the Grammy for Country Album, rankling
Nashville music executives, who successfully lobbied the National Academy
of Recording Arts and Sciences to protect their franchise by creating new
Grammy categories in Contemporary Folk and, in 2009, Americana.
Cash’s work with Rubin reached its emotional epiphany when he sang
“Hurt” by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. “What have I become, my sweet-
est friend,” sang Cash in a voice that exposed his increasingly fragile health.
“Everyone I know goes away in the end.” A video for the song juxtaposed
triumphant scenes from his past with shots of June looking at her husband
with deep, loving concern. Cash showed his daughter the video before ap-
proving its release. “I told him, ‘You have to put it out,’” said Rosanne. “‘It’s
so unflinching and brave and that’s what you are.’” The father and daughter
had a complicated history. Shortly after Cash started working with Rubin,
Rosanne reluctantly accepted her father’s request to join him at Carnegie Hall
to perform a song that he’d recorded in 1958, “I Still Miss Someone.” “As we
sang together,” said Rosanne, “all the old pain dissolved and the old longing
to connect was completely satisfied under the lights and the safety of a few
thousand people who loved us, thus achieving something I’d been trying get
since I was six years old.”
As a boy in Dyess, Arkansas, Cash loved listening to the Carter Family on
the radio; years later, he married June and joined the clan. In early 2003 John
Leventhal put music to “September When It Comes,” lyrics that his wife had
written and put away in the mid-1990s; he encouraged her to make it a duet
with her father. Cash recorded three vocal takes. “I cannot be who I was then,”
he sang. “In a way, I never was.” The song was released in the spring of 2008
on Rosanne’s Rules of Travel. Johnny lost June in May and followed her home
the following September.
ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE

“If you’ll be my dixie chicken, I’ll be your Tennessee lamb,” go the lyrics
of Little Feat’s “Dixie Chicken,” the song that gave the Dixie Chicks their
name. Martie and Emily Robinson were multi-instrumentalists (fiddle, banjo,
mandolin, bass) who formed the group in 1989 with bassist Laura Lynch and
guitarist Robin Lynn Macy; the ensemble reorganized as a trio in 1995 when
singer-guitarist Natalie Maines joined the sisters. The repertoire was an Amer-
icana mix of country, bluegrass, folk, and pop. But when their first two albums
(Wide Open Spaces [1998] and Fly [1999]) each sold an astonishing ten million
copies, they became country stars instead of the darlings of Americana. Songs
by Buddy Miller, Jim Lauderdale, Marty Stuart, and singer-songwriter Patty
Griffin supplemented the band’s original tunes.
Then the group released Home and traveled to London in March 2002 to
start its “Top of the World Tour.” At the time, the United States was preparing
to attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein was said to possess weapons of mass
destruction. “We do not want this war, this violence,” said Natalie Maines
while introducing “Travelin’ Soldier” during the band’s first London show.
“We’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas.” In the
blink of a news cycle, the music of country music’s most popular group disap-
 Across the Great Divide 229

peared from country radio, and the career of the Dixie Chicks was carved up
like a Tennessee lamb.
The country audience is reliably conservative, and after the terrorist attack
of 9/11, airwaves crackled with songs like Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red,
White, & Blue (The Angry American)” and “This Ain’t No Rag, It’s a Flag” by
the Charlie Daniels Band. Maines tried to clarify her remarks and person-
ally apologized to President George W. Bush, but the die was cast, and the
naked Chicks soon appeared on the cover of Entertainment Weekly tattooed
with the epithets cast upon the group (“Traitors,” “Hero,” “Saddam’s Angels”).
The Dixie Chicks returned in 2006 with Taking the Long Way, produced by
Rick Rubin. The album debuted atop both the pop and country charts, but
the Chicks were now cultural totems and no longer country stars. They won
Grammys for Album of the Year and Song of the Year (“Not Ready to Make
Nice”), but then did not release new music until Gaslighter (2020). Before its
release, the trio responded to heightened racial sensitivity by officially drop-
ping “Dixie” from its name.
The Chicks wouldn’t have been banished from Americana, which has been
called “country music for Democrats.” Steve Earle wrote “John Walker’s Blues”
about the young American who travelled to Afghanistan and joined the Tali-
ban, and though the song generated some outrage on the right, the brouhaha
had little effect on Earle’s more modest audience and didn’t prevent him from
winning a Contemporary Folk Grammy for his highly political 2004 album,
The Revolution Starts Now.
Bruce Springsteen never hid his liberal leanings, and the rocker won the
Traditional Folk Grammy for We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (2006).
Though few of the selections from Pete Seeger’s repertoire were overtly politi-
cal, devoting an album to songs associated with a once-blacklisted artist was a
statement in itself. The recording was made at Springsteen’s New Jersey home
with musicians gathered by the E Street Band’s fiddle player, Soozie Tyrell.
Springsteen subsequently toured with “The Sessions Band” and joined Joan
Baez, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, John Mellencamp, and Roger McGuinn
at the Clearwater Concert, a (what else?) benefit held at Madison Square Gar-
den to celebrate Seeger’s ninetieth birthday. The musicians commemorated a
singular life bookended by riding the rails with Woody Guthrie and singing
“This Land Is Your Land” at the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama.
Seeger sang and played the banjo in pursuit of peace, equal rights, and a
healthy environment. He knew that his work would never be done, and on
230 Chapter 16

almost every Saturday until the day he died in January 2014, he would stand
on the shoulder of Route 9 near his home in Beacon, New York, and hold up
a placard that said “Peace.”

   
Wilco’s Yankee Foxtrot Hotel was to be released on September 11, 2001. Then
Warner Brothers rejected it. Tensions had been building between the band
and a label once known to be supportive of artists like Randy Newman and
Ry Cooder who made artful records that sold relatively few copies. Relations
with the label were cordial at the time of the band’s debut, A.M., which was of
an alt.country piece with Tweedy’s work with Uncle Tupelo. But that changed
when Tweedy began working with multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett to create
the densely layered rock of Being There (1996) and Summerteeth (1999).
Executives would have preferred the folk rock found on Mermaid Avenue
(1998), a collaboration between Wilco and British folk singer Billy Bragg for
which he and Tweedy put music to never-used lyrics by Woody Guthrie. The
collection included “California Stars,” a winsome shuffle that has remained
in Wilco’s concert repertoire for decades. But Tweedy was no dustbowl folkie.
“Summerteeth was partly a reaction to how defined the band had become by
the alt.country tag,” said Tweedy, “or roots rock, or No Depression, whatever
they were calling it that month.” Summerteeth was more concerned with rock
’n’ roll and electronic experimentation. “It was a great record, but it was Jeff as
pop genius rather than alt.country guy,” said Gary Briggs, a product manager
at the label. “That alt.country audience accounted for 70 percent of Wilco’s
sales base, and it still does. But that record shut the door on the No Depression
era of Wilco.”
That was okay with Wilco, which by the turn of the century was earning
more than a million dollars a year on the road and maintained a rehearsal-
and-recording space on the north side of Chicago. So when Warner rejected
Yankee Foxtrot Hotel, which had more in common with Britain’s Radiohead
than with the Burrito Brothers, Wilco posted the music on its web site and let
fans stream it for free. (By the end of the album’s troubled gestation, Tweedy
had fired Jay Bennett; both men were struggling with opioid addictions.) Wilco
then played a sold-out show at Town Hall in New York to an audience already
familiar with its new songs. Labels now jockeyed to release an album that had
already been paid for by Warner Brothers. Nonesuch won the prize, which
 Across the Great Divide 231

meant that a single recording conglomerate paid Wilco twice for the same
album.
In the new century, dance-oriented pop stars and hip-hoppers had the
hits while many who played rock or alt.country gathered under the ac-
commodating umbrella of Americana. Heartbreaker, the 2001 solo debut of
Ryan Adams, was the most popular record ever released by the independent
label Bloodshot Records. This was Adams the singer-songwriter nursing a
romantic breakup; Adams and David Rawlings wrote the opening song, “To
Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High),” which sounded like mid-1960s Dylan,
and Emmylou added a harmony to “Oh My Sweet Carolina.” The album
sold more than three hundred thousand copies, including one to music
fan Elton John. “I was completely and utterly floored by the simplicity and
beauty of the songs,” said John, who was inspired to streamline the sound
of his own records.
Adams made Gold (2001) for Lost Highway, a boutique label of Univer-
sal Records that marketed such Americana artists as Lucinda Williams. The
album highlighted both the balladeer (“La Cienega Just Smiled”) and the
rocker (“New York, New York”) and included a song written with Gillian Welch
(“Enemy Fire”). Adams’s most successful release (four hundred thousand
copies in the United States and an equal amount worldwide), the album also
included a ballad (“When the Stars Go Blue”) that became a country hit for
Tim McGraw. Gold was produced by multi-instrumentalist Ethan Johns, the
son of Glyn Johns, who’d produced the Eagles; in 2011 Adams would record
Ashes & Fire with Ethan’s father.
“The kid’s so prolific it’s unreal,” said Luke Lewis, who ran Lost Highway,
and hoped that “somewhere in the middle of it all, a radio hit pops out.” Ad-
ams formed the Cardinals (which for a time included Cindy Cashdollar on
lap steel) to play a jam-band style of country rock reminiscent of the Grateful
Dead. In 2006 Adams produced and the Cardinals played on Songbird, an
album by Willie Nelson; Ryan and Willie also appeared in an ad for the Gap
singing Hank’s “Move It On Over.” But Adams could be his own worst enemy.
His numerous and inconsistent records confused his audience, and substance
abuse made him an erratic and sometimes cantankerous live performer.
“My behavior was getting extreme,” said Adams. “I was running the risk
of becoming one of those people who talks to himself all the time.” He
went through a cold-turkey withdrawal (with the help of Valium) and was
232 Chapter 16

diagnosed with an inner-ear disorder, Meniere’s disease. Traditional rock

stardom remained elusive. “The part of me that’s missing self-respect would
have thought: ‘I am something,’” said Adams. “But I don’t write a song with
that in mind. I write a song to be a better song—200,000 sales is an honest
living.”
It’s also a big deal in the world of Americana. That’s what many learned
from John Prine, who had long operated his own label, Oh Boy! Adams estab-
lished Pax Americana and leased his more commercially oriented recordings
to major labels. Wilco created its own dBpm Records, while Gillian Welch
and David Rawlings formed the Acony label (Gillian also helps her partner
make records as the David Rawlings Machine). But in a world where streaming
music sites have cannibalized record sales, revenue from live shows became
increasingly vital.
“For years we were devoutly unsigned,” said Patterson Hood of the Drive-
By Truckers, “playing hundreds of shows a year and often saying as we were
about to go on stage in some dive bar in Ames, Iowa or Columbia, Missouri
or Fort Worth, Texas that ‘Tonight we were going to get signed!’” Hood grew
up in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. His father David was a successful studio mu-
sician at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio and played bass on albums by, among
many others, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon. Patterson was a
child when the Staple Singers recorded “I’ll Take You There.” “I would hear
it on the radio and Mavis would call out his name—‘David, little David,’” said
Patterson. “Before that, I knew he played on records but I think that made me
realize just how special it was.” David Hood’s record collection became his
son’s college of musical knowledge.
Hood formed Adam’s House Cat with Mike Cooley in 1985, but the band
broke up before it could release an album. In 1996 they launched the Drive-By
Truckers; the band struggled in obscurity until it made Southern Rock Opera
(2001), a concept album about the South in general and Lynyrd Skynyrd in
particular. When the group lost a guitar player, Hood and Cooley recruited a
local talent, Jason Isbell. “This chubby kid—he was 22 but looked like he was
15,” said Hood of Isbell, a guitarist who also wrote songs. Drive-By Truckers
were soon named No Depression’s “Band of the Year.”
For Decoration Day (2003) and The Dirty South (2004), Hood, Cooley, and
Isbell wrote rock and country songs about hard lives lived far from the glit-
tery coasts. Frequent tours led to better-sounding records and shows, but the
lifestyle could be a challenge, a reality noted by Isbell’s “Danko/Manuel,”
JASON ISBELL
234 Chapter 16

which referenced two late members of The Band. When the Truckers lost
their bass player, the band hired Isbell’s wife, Shonna Tucker. But the mar-
riage suffered because Isbell was having too much rock star fun with drugs
and Jack Daniels. “Some people get drunk and become kind of sweet,” said
Hood. “Jason wasn’t one of those people.” With the band about to implode,
and Isbell refusing to take a hiatus, he got a call from Cooley, who said, “That
isn’t going to work for us.” Isbell and Tucker divorced, and for a time, she
stayed with the band.
Drive-By Truckers held it together, barely, by going on an acoustic tour that
included keyboardist Spooner Oldham, a studio colleague of Hood’s father.
Isbell fronted his own group, the 400 Unit, until the bottle finally let him
down. In 2012 his musician girlfriend, Amanda Shires, reached out to family
and Isbell’s friend Ryan Adams to help encourage him to go into rehab. Isbell
emerged a couple of weeks later and was soon sharing bills with Adams. “It
was nice to be on the road with someone who had been through the recovery
process,” said Isbell, who on another occasion added, “I don’t remember a
lot of the good times from my days with the Truckers. This time I want to
remember it all.”

   
“In the Pines” is a folk song that’s as old as the hills; the most famous inter-
pretations are by Lead Belly and Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys. Kurt
Cobain of Nirvana sang the song under the title “Where Did You Sleep Last
Night?” on the group’s 1994 album MTV Unplugged in New York. In 2004 Robert
Plant and Alison Krauss met to rehearse for a Lead Belly tribute at the Rock
& Roll Hall of Fame. The first song they sang was “In the Pines,” and though
Krauss couldn’t help but be tickled to be singing with the lead singer of Led
Zeppelin, she had something to teach the rock star. Plant says that she asked
him, “‘Is there any chance you can sing the same thing twice, so I could find
out how to sing a harmony on it?’ I said, ‘Oh! A light came on. . . . I had to
learn to sing with somebody else.’”
Plant proposed making an album together, and Krauss suggested enlisting
T-Bone Burnett, the producer with whom she’d worked on O Brother, Where
Art Thou? Choosing a repertoire was the first step. “[T-Bone] knows so many
obscure songs,” said Burnett’s recording engineer, Mike Piersante, “so he’ll pull
together these lists and then he’ll pare them down and . . . end up with CDs
of original versions of suggested songs.” The final set list was an Americana
 Across the Great Divide 235

sampler that included songs by the Everly Brothers, Townes Van Zandt, Tom
Waits, Allen Toussaint, Doc Watson, and Gene Clark of the Byrds.
“It was very scary because both of us were out of our comfort zones,” said
Krauss. “We were away from our usual environments so we just had to go with
what we felt. I vividly remember calling [Robert] before we started Raising
Sand and saying, ‘I’m worried,’ and he said, ‘That’s good, because I am too.’”
Released on Rounder, the independent roots label that was home to Krauss,
Raising Sand sold 2.5 million copies and won five Grammy Awards including
Album of the Year and Record of the Year. When Burnett looked for a guitarist
to join the touring band, he hired Americana’s go-to guy, Buddy Miller.
Buddy and Julie Miller had moved to Nashville in the mid-1990s after Julie,
with Buddy’s assistance, had released four albums for the Christian market.
“We toured a little,” said Julie of those years, “and it was as different as it could
possibly be. I started out as a honky tonk girl so I wasn’t used to playing to
strictly Christian audiences”—which is not to say that Miller wasn’t serious
about her faith and her songs. “There was a small, hardcore, wounded little
pocket of Christians,” she said, “who seemed to really find some comfort in
my songs.” The tunes could be equally moving for a secular audience. Em-
mylou Harris sang background vocals on Miller’s 1993 recording of “All My
Tears” and included the song on her own Wrecking Ball. Miller knew she was
painting outside the rigid lines of Christian music. “It wasn’t like anything
contemporary Christian at all,” she said. “That song really had come from
my internalization . . . but even more so of Ralph Stanley, who is my Elvis.”
Buddy released his solo debut, Your Love and Other Lies, in 1995, and Julie
made her first secular album, Blue Pony, in 1997. They’re natural collabora-
tors. “If I’m working on a record,” said Buddy, “she’ll just write some great
country songs. But if it’s for her record, my role is to get her to finish it, and
maybe add something musically. If I have some music and need some help,
she’ll help me, and if she won’t, I’ll go find Jim Lauderdale.” In 1999 friends
surrounded Julie when she recorded her best record, Broken Things, including
Buddy, Emmylou, Steve Earle, Larry Campbell, and Patty Griffin. The title
song was a ballad reprised from one of her Christian albums. “I didn’t have
enough songs when we started playing and opening for Steve Earle,” said
Julie. “I was almost embarrassed to play [‘Broken Things’] there, but people
were saying, ‘What’s that song?’” In 2002 Buddy and Julie Miller, the couple’s
first duo recording, was named Album of the Year at the Americana Music
Association’s first Americana Music Honors and Awards ceremony.
236 Chapter 16

By the time Burnett called Buddy to join the Raising Sand tour, he’d already
served as the lead guitarist for Harris and Earle and played on the “Down from
the Mountain” tour spawned by the success of O Brother. Miller also produced
numerous records at the ground-floor studio of his and Julie’s Nashville home,
including works by Richard Thompson (Electric), the Carolina Chocolate
Drops (Leaving Eden), Jimmie Dale Gilmore (One Endless Night), and Solomon
Burke (Nashville). The “Three Girls and Their Buddy” tour found Miller in
an acoustic song swap with Emmylou, Shawn, and Patty Griffin. After a per-
formance in Baltimore, Miller complained of acute indigestion; the women
insisted that he go to Johns Hopkins Hospital. Miller had suffered a heart
attack, and the next morning he underwent triple bypass surgery.
Buddy had seen Led Zeppelin at the Fillmore East in the late 1960s, and the
guitarist was quick to bond with Plant. “Buddy Miller is everybody’s dream
date,” said Plant, who asked him to co-produce an Americana record to be
named Band of Joy after the group Plant shared with drummer John Bonham
before they joined Led Zeppelin. Miller suggested that Patty Griffin add a
second voice to a repertoire that included songs by Richard Thompson, Los
Lobos, and Townes Van Zandt. Griffin was a gifted singer-songwriter—her
gospel album, Downtown Church, had been produced by Miller—and was
quick to sign on. “Robert was one of my vocal inspirations early on,” said
Griffin. “I got to sing in so many styles singing with him [on tour]. I used all
my paint.” Griffin and Plant became a couple and later shared a house in
South Austin, while Buddy took up Burnett’s offer to produce songs written
by Griffin, Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams, and others, for the television
show Nashville.
“Any way you slice it, Plant is the biggest rock star ever to live within Aus-
tin city limits,” wrote Texas Monthly. “The hospitality and friendships and
initiation into Americana—not just the music—was marvelous,” said Plant.
When the pair played a benefit at the Continental Club, the bill read “Patty
Griffin & Her Driver.” Griffin opened the show with her quiet, intimate songs;
then her boyfriend, in a chauffeur’s cap, came out to play a set that included
such Zeppelin songs as “Black Dog” and “Going to California.” But Plant’s
celebrity proved problematic. “It was my own inability to deal with the rabid
attention that was paid to me,” Plant noted, “and there was no way to hide
it.” The pair broke up, and Plant moved back to the United Kingdom. “It was
one of the most rewarding, classic periods of my life,” he said of his time in
 Across the Great Divide 237

Americanaland. But it was over, at least until he and Krauss decide to finish
the record they abandoned: Raising Hell.

   
Larry Campbell was twelve when he saw Bob Dylan and The Band play the
1967 Woody Guthrie tribute concert at Carnegie Hall. Thirty years later, Camp-
bell began a seven-year tenure playing in Dylan’s band. “There are times when
I found myself on stage,” said Campbell, “playing certain tunes with certain
people and I just think, ‘How the hell did I get here?’” One of those moments
was during a particularly good Dylan concert. “At the end of the show, we did,
for the first time that I played with him, a version of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ It
was done in such an emotional way on everybody’s part—Bob and everyone
in the band. It sort of left the audience stunned. And we finish the tune and
I’m just thinking, ‘Man, I have arrived.’ This is the completion of a circle for
me . . . I’m at the source.”
When Campbell got the job, they spent a few days playing old rock ’n’ roll
and country tunes that never appeared on the set list. “It was a very amorphous
existence,” said Campbell of life in Dylan’s group. “There was no set way to do
anything until there was, and then that was the only way to do it, but then the
next day it wasn’t anymore.” Campbell played guitar, banjo, mandolin, and
violin on Dylan’s Love and Theft, which was released on September 11, 2001.
Produced by Dylan (using the pseudonym Jack Frost), the album drew on
American roots music including jump blues, country swing, and the ballads
of Tin Pan Alley. The albums that followed, Modern Time and Together Through
Life, which featured accompaniment by David Hidalgo of Los Lobos and Mike
Campbell of the Heartbreakers, continued Dylan’s critically acclaimed ramble
through Americana. Some accused Dylan of improperly lifting lyrics and
melodies from old blues songs and obscure literary sources; he shrugged off
the criticisms and said that it was part of the folk tradition.
Larry Campbell left Dylan’s Never-Ending Tour with an enhanced reputa-
tion and a literal suitcase full of cash because he’d saved most of his per diems
by basing his diet on the backstage buffet. He immediately played Manhat-
tan’s Bowery Ballroom with Buddy and Julie Miller as well as the opening act,
Olabelle, a group that included Levon Helm’s daughter Amy. She also played
at her father’s “Midnight Ramble” concerts in Woodstock, events that helped
Levon with the medical bills that came with throat cancer. Shows were held
238 Chapter 16

in the barn that also housed Helm’s recording studio; Levon played drums
while nursing vocal chords ravaged by radiation treatments.
“When he got sick I used to visit and we’d play together a lot,” said guitar-
ist Jimmy Vivino, who was in the house band of The Conan O’Brien Show and
plays in the Fab Faux, a band that re-creates the music of the Beatles. “Locking
into that snare drum is like when you get into a classic car and really enjoy
the ride.” Helm’s voice slowly began to recover. “He and I started to sing a
little bit with each other,” said Amy. “I remember one day he taught me the
words to a few of the old hymns, and I recorded him with a little hand-held
tape recorder so I could learn the tunes. I was excited when I listened to it
back, because his voice was getting stronger.” By the time Campbell joined
the troupe with his wife, singer Teresa Williams, Helm had regained most of
his vocal abilities.
“I remember early on when I was playing with Bob,” said Campbell, “and
there were something like fifty thousand people out there, and we were do-
ing ‘Forever Young’ at the end of the show and I thought, ‘Man, this is pretty
cool.’ But this Ramble is something else, like the audience is invited guests,
like friends or family. There’s no pressure, and it’s just about enjoying playing
the music. I read some Eastern philosophy book years ago that asked, ‘What is
music?’ And the explanation was that the first thing is that music is ‘joy.’ And
I went, ‘sure,’ but now, I finally get what that means, and it’s very profound,
because more than anything else, even if you’re playing the blues, it’s the joy
of self expression.”
“Levon is ground zero of the Americana genre to me,” Campbell continued.
“All the music that means anything to me, the genuine American music—
blues, rock ’n’ roll, country, bluegrass, gospel—Levon can perform and sing it
with complete authority. He does it all. That’s what The Band did back in the
day—they took all these relatively disparaged genres and blended them all
into one unique thing.” It’s no wonder that artists identified with Americana
came to perform at the Midnight Rambles including Emmylou, Gillian, Elvis
Costello, Dr. John, Mavis Staples, Kris Kristofferson, and Allen Toussaint.
When the Drive-By Truckers opened a Ramble, David Hood joined his son
Patterson’s band to play “I’ll Take You There.” Later, father and son sang along
to “The Weight.”
In 2007 Campbell and Amy Helm turned on the recording gear to produce
Dirt Farmer, Levon’s first studio album since 1982. The idea was to make a
largely acoustic album and present rhythmic tunes such as Paul Kennerley’s
 Across the Great Divide 239

“Got Me a Woman” and J. B. Lenoir’s “Feelin’ Good” alongside string band
songs like the Carter Family’s “Single Girl, Married Girl.” Contemporary
Americana was represented by Steve Earle’s “The Mountain” and Buddy and
Julie Miller’s “Wide River to Cross.” Helm’s comeback won the Grammy for
Best Traditional Folk Album. In 2009 Campbell produced the more urbane
Electric Dirt, which won the Grammy in a brand-new category, Americana.
By then Helm was taking his Ramble on the road. “Playing the Ryman with
Levon was almost like a Nashville Last Waltz,” said Campbell. “It felt really
triumphant for him. For musicians, especially on the singer-songwriter side of
Nashville, the non-commercial side, the people who are there because they’re
artists, Levon holds a high level of respect. And it’s understandable, because
he and The Band pretty much represent the whole Americana genre.” Amy
Helm was thrilled to play with her dad in Nashville. “It was like I had died and
gone to some kind of heaven,” she said. “I mean, I was singing background
for Emmylou Harris!”
But then the cancer returned; Helm’s last concert was at the Tarrytown
Music Hall in New York, where the set list included “When I Go Away,” a
song from Electric Dirt that Campbell had originally written for the Dixie
Hummingbirds. “We were still playing it live,” said Campbell, “and I’d sing it,
but I missed his voice in there. We did it that night, and I sang the first verse,
I’m about to come in on the second, and from the drums, clear as a bell with
strength I couldn’t imagine, here comes Levon. It just gave me chills, and the
whole place exploded. Oh God, the emotion I was going through. It was like
this incredible sadness that he couldn’t do this anymore, and the joy that he’d
just done it, and the hope that maybe it meant something and maybe he was
coming back again . . . and the despair of the knowledge that he couldn’t.”
Helm drummed at one more Ramble, but his time had come. “I got a mes-
sage that Levon was in the hospital,” said Robbie Robertson, his estranged
friend and bandmate, “and he was dying. I got on a plane and I went to the
hospital.” But there would be no reconciliation; by the time he arrived, Levon
had lost consciousness, and on April 19, 2012, he crossed the great divide.
Helm was buried a couple of miles from his barn at the local cemetery; after
the interment, Larry Campbell and Jimmy Vivino led a second line parade
thick with drummers into the heart of Woodstock.
YESTERDAY AND TODAY

Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman went on tour in 2018 to celebrate the
fiftieth anniversary of Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the pioneering country-rock
album that introduced the world to Gram Parsons. Emmylou Harris had al-
ready curated Return of the Grievous Angel (1999), a tribute album that featured
a who’s who of Americana. Parsons was also the subject of multiple biog-
raphies and documentaries, as well as a feature film about his unorthodox
cremation at Joshua Tree National Park (Grand Theft Parsons). Marty Stuart
and His Fabulous Superlatives accompanied the two Byrds. The Superlatives
are drummer Harry Stinson (from Steve Earle’s Guitar Town), guitarist Kenny
Vaughan (who’s toured with Lucinda Williams), and bassist and pedal steel
player Chris Scruggs (Earl’s grandson).
Stuart played mandolin with Lester Flatt as a teenager. After joining Johnny
Cash’s band he started collecting country music artifacts. “When I first ar-
rived in Nashville in 1972,” said Stuart, “it was a sight to behold when the stars
gathered. It truly was Hillbilly Hollywood. Rhinestone suits, Cadillacs, fancy
guitars, pompadours and beehive hairdos gave those hard hitting country
songs even deeper impact.” Stuart’s collection, which he plans to display at a
museum in his hometown of Philadelphia, Mississippi, includes recordings,
 Yesterday and Today 241

photographs, stage outfits, and musical instruments. Marty has a railroad lan-
tern that belonged to Jimmie Rodgers, one of A. P. Carter’s cancelled checks,
and handwritten lyrics by Hank Williams. He has Johnny Cash’s Sun-era “Man
in Black” suit and guitars that belonged to Lester Flatt and Pops Staples. “My
father was Marty’s godfather,” said Mavis Staples. “My sisters and I took him
in as our brother. . . . When he’s playing guitar, he sounds like Pop.”
Stuart also owns the sunburst B-Bender Telecaster that Clarence White
played as a member of the Byrds. In the early 1980s White’s widow Susie
had asked Stuart if he’d be interested in buying her late husband’s 1954 Stra-
tocaster. While looking at the Strat, Stuart played the B-bender. “She said,
‘That’s what you really came to see, wasn’t it? Well, I might consider selling,’”
said Stuart. “There were those two guitars, some Nudie suits, and some Byrds
memorabilia.” Stuart took out a blank check and asked her to name a price
(he was prepared to pay between $50,000 and $60,000). She wrote in the
amount of $1,450. “I said, ‘Susie, the E string alone is worth that.’ She said, ‘I
know exactly what it’s worth, but I think Clarence would want you to have
it. I know you will take care of it.’” There was history in White’s guitar, and
Stuart didn’t put it behind glass but, rather, played it on the Sweetheart tour.
“We had this 10-year-old Ford Econoline and we pulled a trailer and we just
did it,” said Patterson Hood of the years when the Drive-By Truckers all but
lived on the road. “Even though we may not have been pulling enough people
for some of the rooms we were playing, the people who came would drink so
much that the club was happy and would have us back.” David Hood played
bass on countless records and toured with Traffic, so it wasn’t crazy for his son
to harbor classic rock dreams. But by the time the Truckers first peaked during
their years with Jason Isbell (2002–2007), all but the most popular rock bands
played to a more limited audience. Bands can create a community, however,
and in that sense, Hood realized his dream. In February 2020, for the twentieth
consecutive year, fans from around the country traveled to Athens, Georgia,
to attend the Drive-By Truckers’ three-night “Heathens Homecoming” at the
town’s premiere rock club, the 40 Watt.
In 2015 Hood wrote an op-ed essay for the New York Times arguing that
people should stop flying the Confederate “Stars and Bars” flag. “If we want
to truly honor our Southern forefathers,” he said, “we should do it by moving
on from the symbols and prejudices of their time and building on the diversity,
the art and the literary traditions we’ve inherited from them.” Then the songs
on American Band (2016) took aim at racially tinged police encounters, school
242 Chapter 17

shootings, and immigration. “I have a feeling people are going to look back
on this moment in time as a very pivotal turning point,” said Hood of the era
of Donald Trump. Most country or rock bands (indeed, most popular artists)
avoid being overtly political. By contrast, the self-proclaimed “dance band of
the resistance” released a confrontational 2020 album called The Unraveling.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic canceled an election year full of tour dates.
Since playing with the Drive-By Truckers, Jason Isbell had become a super-
star of Americana; Something More Than Free (2016) and The Nashville Sound
(2018), swept all the applicable Grammy and Americana awards. “I definitely
don’t feel like I would be the musician that I am, or the type of songwriter,
had I not come from that particular place,” said the guitarist of growing up
in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. “The soul music that came out of there, and a
lot of the soul-influenced rock and roll and country music that came out of
the studios in north Alabama in the ’60s and ’70s had a big influence on me.”
Those roots were in evidence on his 2020 album, Reunions.
Isbell’s wife Amanda Shires makes her own albums while playing in her
husband’s band, the 400 Unit. In 2019 Isbell closed the last of seven sold-out
shows at the Ryman Auditorium by playing one of southern rock’s greatest
hits, the Allman Brothers Band’s “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” Ryan Ad-
ams is also a rock fan, and his most popular track on Spotify is his cover of
“Wonderwall” by the British band Oasis. He continued to produce music in
a variety of genres, including a rock album ( Ryan Adams [2014]), a re-creation
of Taylor Swift’s 1989, and a live collection of solitary singer-songwriter per-
formances recorded at Carnegie Hall.
Adams was married to Mandy Moore, a singer and an actress on television’s
This Is Us. The couple’s 2016 divorce informed his next release, Prisoner, with
“To Be Without You” nominated for Song of the Year at the Americana Music
Awards. In early 2019 Adams announced that before December he would re-
lease three studio albums. Then the New York Times reported that numerous
women (including his ex-wife) had accused Adams of seeking sexual favors
through manipulative and emotionally abusive behavior. He was also said to
have had improper online contact with a minor. Adams lost endorsements,
canceled concert tours, and released no new music until December 2020
(Wednesdays).
“If I picture what playing well into my 60s or 70s would look like,” said
Jeff Tweedy, who turned fifty-three in 2020, in a 2004 interview, “it would be
more like John Prine or Leonard Cohen—people who have been allowed to
 Yesterday and Today 243

grow old.” (Prine, who’d survived bouts with cancer, died in April 2020 from
complications related to Covid-19. Cohen passed in 2016 at the height of his
fame.) Tweedy’s band Wilco is the most enduring and critically acclaimed
band born in the days when alt-country morphed into Americana. Wilco has
had a consistent lineup since guitarist Nels Cline became its sixth member
in 2004. Cline’s background included playing jazz and experimental music,
which complemented Tweedy’s wide-ranging interests and added instrumen-
tal spice to compositions typically built on lyrical wordplay and folk-styled
rhythm guitar.
Besides recording with Wilco, Tweedy has cut a collection (Sukierae) with
his son Spencer and made solo albums. During the pandemic, Tweedy re-
corded Love Is the King (2020). “At the beginning of the lockdown I started
writing country songs to console myself,” said Tweedy, “folk and country
type forms being the shapes that come most easily to me in a comforting
way.” Working at Wilco’s headquarters, Tweedy has also produced an album
by Richard Thompson (2015’s Still) and worked with Mavis Staples on three
records. Since 2010 Wilco has curated the Solid Sound Festival at a Massa-
chusetts art museum, MASS MoCA; the band also promotes an annual music
festival, “Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky,” in Mexico.
“I have a great life,” said Tweedy, “but it’s an uncool life. It was a wonderful
revelation to move to Chicago and make music and just be normal [albeit with
migraine headaches and, for a time, an addiction to opioids]. So many art-
ists reach a certain level of success, and then they cross over. They surrender
everything to the service of their persona. . . . Even with Bob Dylan, there was
clearly a point early in his career where he was completely able to immerse
himself into that persona.”
Wilco toured with Dylan and My Morning Jacket on a 2013 package called
the Americanarama Festival of Music. One night Tweedy peeked out of the
dressing room door as Dylan’s group passed on its way to the stage. “As they
got to our door I heard what sounded like a Bob Dylan impression,” said
Tweedy. “‘Hey, Jeff, how’s it going, man? Good to see you!’ Without breaking
stride. And I was left in his wake trying to play it cool, but I could feel all of the
other folks around us looking at me. It was impossible to play it cool. ‘Dylan
talked to me. Did you guys see that?!’”
On another occasion Dylan said to Tweedy, “Tell Mavis she should have mar-
ried me!” (In the 1960s Dylan and the Staple Singers sang at civil rights rallies,
and the writer of “Chimes of Freedom” asked Pops Staples for his daughter’s
JEFF TWEEDY
 Yesterday and Today 245

hand.) When Tweedy passed along this comment to Mavis, she said to tell Bob
that she was still available. “Yeah?” said Dylan. “I wish.” Staples later opened
shows for Dylan. “I felt,” she said, “like a sixteen-year-old girl again.”

   
In 2017 Rosanne Cash was the resident artistic director of SFJAZZ in San
Francisco. After performing concerts with Emmylou Harris and Lucinda
Williams, Rosanne called Ry Cooder, who’d recently toured with country-
turned-bluegrass star Ricky Skaggs. “I offered a few ideas,” said Cash. “He
brushed off my initial thoughts and said, ‘What springs to mind is a show of
your dad’s songs.’ I’ve spent almost 40 years avoiding that very thing, but when
Ry suggested it, oddly, I didn’t even hesitate. I said, ‘Okay, let’s do Johnny.’”
Since her father’s death, Cash has made two albums that referenced him:
The List, a collection of covers drawn from the one hundred essential songs he
taught her on his tour bus, and The River and the Thread, an artful song cycle
about her family’s southern roots written by the daughter who’d become a
New Yorker. At Carnegie Hall Rosanne performed with Ry and a band led by
her husband, John Leventhal. Preparing for the short run of shows, Cooder
discovered that Rosanne’s half-brother John owned a Telecaster played by
Luther Perkins in the Tennessee Three. Cooder held the guitar up to the
audience like a talisman and used it to play the boom-chicka-boom rhythm
of “I Walk the Line” and “Folsom Prison Blues.”
Artists absorb musical history on their way to individual styles. Brandi
Carlile grew up outside Seattle and quit high school to busk on the street and
pursue music gigs. She formed a group with twin brothers Phil (bass) and Tim
Hanseroth (guitar); they performed songs written by Carlile and one or both
of the brothers and agreed to split everything three ways. Carlile attracted
notice with her second album, The Story (2007), produced by T-Bone Burnett,
who insisted that the band trade their everyday gear for vintage instruments.
“He took our confidence away and replaced it with vulnerability, discomfort
and tension,” said Carlile, who five years earlier had come out as a lesbian.
“And those three things are what essentially made the performance happen.”
Sales spiked when “The Story” and other tunes were played on episodes
of the television program Grey’s Anatomy. “After years of trying to get some-
where,” said Carlile, “my music is now all over TV, I’m selling records, and
Elton John sent me flowers and a bottle of wine from the year of my birth.”
246 Chapter 17

Elton performed a duet with Carlile on her next album, Give up the Ghost,
which was produced by Rick Rubin, who’d recorded Johnny Cash’s autumnal
records and championed another popular Americana act, the Avett Brothers.
In 2015 Carlile appeared with the Avett Brothers on Late Night with David Let-
terman singing the Carter Family’s “Keep on the Sunny Side.”
Carlile hit it big when By the Way, I Forgive You swept the Americana awards
at the 2018 Grammy; a star was born when she sang her song of empower-
ment, “The Joke,” on the telecast. Carlile then appeared on a PBS program
titled Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration, joining Kris Kristofferson for a duet and
then soloing on Mitchell’s “Down to You.” The performance turned out to be
a prelude for a 2019 concert performance of Mitchell’s deepest, most resonant
album, Blue. Carlile had married Catherine Shepherd in 2012, and they’re the
parents of two daughters. Now Hollywood stars were in the orchestra seats,
and Joni was sitting next to Elton.
The week of Mitchell’s seventy-fifth birthday, Chris Thile offered a fifteen-
minute tribute on his weekly National Public Radio show, Live from Here. Thile
is a mandolin player who found success with an acoustic trio, Nickel Creek,
and later played in a folk and bluegrass quartet called the Punch Brothers.
He’s recorded with a wide variety of musicians including jazz pianist Brad
Mehldau and classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Thile, a 2012 MacArthur Fellow, was a
frequent guest on the public radio program A Prairie Home Companion, which
regularly featured roots-oriented acoustic musicians; he won the program’s
hosting job upon the retirement of Garrison Keillor. (The name of the pro-
gram was changed to Live from Here when Keillor’s behavior was called out
by the Me Too movement.) For the Joni Mitchell tribute, Thile enlisted Aoife
O’Donovan to sing “Coyote” and “A Case of You.”
O’Donovan, who sang in the progressive bluegrass band Crooked Still,
now records solo albums and performs with I’m With Her, a trio that shows
how far string band music has come since the Carter Family left Poor Valley.
The group, who became acquainted at bluegrass festivals, consists of Sara
Watkins (violin, guitar), who played with Nickel Creek, Sarah Jarosz (banjo,
mandolin, guitar), and O’Donovan (keyboards and guitar). Both Jarosz and
O’Donovan studied at the New England Conservatory of Music; Jarosz was
in her dorm room when she learned that “Mansinneedof,” an instrumental
track from her 2009 debut album Song Up in Her Head, was nominated for a
Grammy. “I grew up appreciating musicians that were kind of on the edge,”
said Jarosz, “coming from acoustic folk and bluegrass backgrounds, but also
 Yesterday and Today 247

pushing the envelope.” Jarosz won two Grammy Awards for her fourth album,
Undercurrent (2016). Her 2020 album, World on the Ground, was made with one
of Americana’s go-to producers, John Leventhal.
I’m With Her, which won the best group award at the 2019 Americana
Awards, performs around a single microphone and plays music that touches
on folk, pop, and jazz. Alone or together, all are regulars on Live from Here, and
along with Thile himself, personify a public radio aesthetic that has embraced
Americana. They all play smart, roots-based music for the kind of grown-up
music fans who might also listen to All Things Considered. (Live from Here was
cancelled in 2020, a victim of the pandemic.) The same goes for Rhiannon
Giddens, who studied opera at the Oberlin Conservatory and gained notice
as a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a string band in which she
played the banjo. Her 2015 solo debut, Tomorrow Is My Turn, produced by T-
Bone Burnett, found Giddens singing songs associated with Nina Simone and
Patsy Cline and others written by Dolly Parton and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. “It
all came from a common well,” said Giddens, whose work won her a MacAr-
thur Fellowship. “I just want to talk about the banjo and American music, the
voices that have been lost, this rich tapestry that we keep trying to thin out.
That’s why I’m on this planet.” Giddens had a recurring role on the television
show Nashville and recorded Songs of Our Native Daughters, a 2019 album that
explored the lingering impact of slavery, with Amythyst Kiah, Allison Russell,
and Leyla McCalla.
Amanda Shires lives in a public radio world but was still annoyed about
“tomatogate,” a controversy that roiled Nashville when a radio consultant
advised country deejays to limit the airplay of female artists and to think
of them as the tomatoes in a male musical salad. Shire approached Brandi
Carlile with the idea of creating a group that would come to include Natalie
Hemby and another emerging star, Maren Morris. They called themselves the
Highwomen after the Highwaymen, the late-career quartet of Willie Nelson,
Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, and Kris Kristofferson. Carlile and Shire put
new words to the Jimmy Webb song that gave the Highwaymen its name,
and the original outlaw tale became a song about women challenged by im-
migration, sexism, and racism. “My existence is political,” said Carlile. “I was
married before it was legal in the states. I don’t know how to not write that
into my music. The plight of displaced peoples is fundamental to me and to
my faith.” That is why even though the Highwomen’s album debuted at the
top of the country charts, they are really citizens of Americanaland.
248 Chapter 17

   
“In many ways I don’t really feel as if I’m in the music business anymore,” said
Shawn Colvin. “What I do is kind of archaic. I don’t belong at a label that’s
going to want a million-selling record. That’s just not me, and aside from one
song and one record [‘Sunny Came Home’ and A Few Small Repairs], it never
really was. I go and play shows with a voice and a guitar, and people come
to see me because that is what they want to hear.” In 2016 Colvin reunited
with producer John Leventhal to co-write all but one of the original songs
on These Four Walls.
When Colvin went on tour she recruited guitarist Buddy Miller, who had
hired her in 1980 and who produced her next album, All Fall Down (2012).
“When we played Town Hall in New York,” said Colvin, “both Larry Campbell
and John Leventhal sat in. The circle had come around. We were all still play-
ing and doing well. It was such a moment of pride and satisfaction.” Shawn
and Steve Earle collaborated on a 2012 album called Colvin & Earle that was
produced by Miller. She teaches alongside Earle at Camp Copperhead, an
annual songwriting seminar that he hosts at the Full Moon Resort in the
Catskill Mountains. Colvin has also taught at Richard Thompson’s Frets &
Refrains music camp.
Earle borrowed the name of a Hank Williams song, “I’ll Never Get Out of
This World Alive,” for both the title of his first novel and an album produced
by T-Bone Burnett. Earle has also published a book of short stories (Doghouse
Roses), produced an album by Joan Baez (Day After Tomorrow), and acted in
and contributed music to two HBO dramas, The Wire and Treme. He hosts a
radio show (Hardcore Troubadour) on SiriusXM’s “Outlaw Country” channel;
Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale, who recorded an album of duets, offer The
Buddy and Jim Show on the same channel. These and other Americana artists
are regulars on such seafaring music festivals as the Cayamo Cruise and the
Outlaw Country Cruise.
Earle made two albums in honor of his heroes: Townes (2009) and Guy
(2019). “I knew when Guy [Clark] died that I’d have to make a record,” said
Earle, “because I don’t want to run into that motherfucker on the other side
having made Townes’s record and not made his.” “Old Friends” closed Guy
with Earle and Emmylou Harris harmonizing on a wistful chorus (“Old
friends, shine like diamonds”), and included spoken recitations by Emmylou,
Rodney Crowell, and Jerry Jeff Walker. Before Clark died in 2016 of lymphoma,
 Yesterday and Today 249

he’d asked singer-songwriter and visual artist Terry Allen to incorporate his
ashes into one of his sculptures. That’s how Clark, who had a special fondness
for crows, ended up in the belly of a bird. But before that, Earle, Crowell, and
other friends gathered for a private wake in Nashville. They then boarded a
bus for Santa Fe, where Emmylou, Lyle Lovett, and Joe Ely joined them in the
Land of Enchantment to sing the songs of their old friend around a campfire.
Emmylou and Rodney are old friends. “We have a rich, rewarding friend-
ship,” said Harris, who made two albums with Crowell, Old Yellow Moon (2013)
and The Traveling Kind (2015). “So many other friends and so much great music
has come from it.” Crowell concurs. “Our conversation hasn’t changed much
over 40 years,” he said. “It’s about our faith and passion when it comes to
music, and our sense of wonder that these songs that we love even exist.”
Crowell followed his brief run as a mainstream country star with a string of
more personal albums. “I had my 15 minutes of fame,” he remarked. “And if
I stayed on that path, I wouldn’t be on the path I’m on now.” Crowell’s trail
led to Texas (2019), an album on which he shared the microphone with such
other Lone Star musicians as Willie, Lyle, and Steve Earle.
When he was a young child, Crowell’s parents took him to a concert by
Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis; in 1991, he introduced his mother to Roy
Acuff backstage at the Grand Ole Opry House. “She told the most popular
country musician of her generation that she’d met the love of her life at his
concert in the Buchanan High School gymnasium,” said Crowell. “My mother
floated out of Mr. Acuff’s dressing room, an eighteen-year-old girl again. ‘Why,
Rodney, he was just like I always knew he’d be. . . . And didn’t his hair remind
you of your daddy’s?’”
“Country music could only have happened in America,” said Emmylou.
“Country music is the product of so many separate cultures of people com-
ing together to create something else. It used to be that everybody wanted to
get off the farm and get to the big city. In music you make it because you’re
a country boy or a country girl. Then you go get sophisticated pretty fast.
Nowadays, everybody has cable television.”
Welcome to Americanaland. Turn on the television and you see Americana
acts guesting on late-night talk shows and a fourteen-hour history of country
music by Ken Burns. On Netflix, Heartstrings presents vignettes based on Dolly
Parton songs. (In recent years, Parton has mostly recorded acoustic mountain
music. “I had to get rich in order to afford to sing like I was poor again,” said
Dolly, who in 2020 gave Vanderbilt University $1 million for research into a
250 Chapter 17

vaccine for Covid-19.) Independent filmmakers have made documentaries on

everybody from Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark (Heartworn Highways) to
Wilco (I Am Trying to Break Your Heart) and Drive-By Truckers (The Secret to
a Happy Ending). Gillian Welch and David Rawlings performed their Oscar-
nominated song “When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for Wings” at the 2019
Academy Awards; it was included in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a film by
the Coen Brothers, who also made a movie about the early-1960s folk revival,
Inside Llewyn Davis.
Bob Dylan once camouflaged his history with tall tales; more recently he’s
curated a more factual past with a memoir (Chronicles: Volume One), a pair of
documentaries produced by Martin Scorsese (Bringing It All Back Home and
Rolling Thunder Revue), and an expanding library of both new recordings and
archival releases from his exceedingly well-documented career. Dylan was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016 “for having created new poetic
expressions within the great American song tradition.” Dylan collected his
million-dollar prize after delivering the required Nobel lecture, during which
he referenced his myriad inspirations, including Buddy Holly, Lead Belly,
Moby Dick, Don Quixote, the Odyssey, and “ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia
sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs.”
Dylan, who turned seventy-nine in 2020, released an album in that year
called Rough and Rowdy Ways. It included everything from a rocking blues
(“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”) to “Murder Most Foul,” a seventeen-minute recita-
tion about both the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the rich
musical culture of the nation that he led. Dylan had lately taken an extended
turn singing tunes from the Great American Songbook, many of them associ-
ated with Frank Sinatra. He recorded these albums with a small combo that
used a fiddle and pedal steel guitar to suggest Sinatra’s orchestrations. Bob
was no stranger to this music. “‘Ebb Tide,’” he said, has “never failed to fill
me with awe. . . . When Frank sang that song, I could hear everything in his
voice—death, God and the universe.” Dylan the folk musician admired the
musical sophistication of these songs, and there’s a moving, autumnal quality
to his late-life walk in this world.
Dylan was among the stars of a 1995 television tribute on the occasion of
Sinatra’s eightieth birthday. When Sinatra invited the performers to a dinner
party at his home, the guest list included both Dylan and Bruce Springsteen.
In 2019 Springsteen made Western Skies, with original songs reminiscent of the
late-1960s country-pop hits that Jimmy Webb wrote for Glen Campbell. But
 Yesterday and Today 251

on this night Springsteen left the singing to his wife, Patti Scialfa. “Sometime
after dinner,” said Springsteen, “we find ourselves around the living room
piano with Steve [Lawrence] and Eydie Gorme and . . . I get to watch my wife
beautifully serenade Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan.” At one point during the
evening, Dylan found himself alone on the patio with the Chairman of the
Board. “‘You and me, pal, we got blue eyes, we’re from up there,” said Sinatra,
pointing to the stars. “These other bums are from down here.”
Willie Nelson, whose eyes are hazel, also made two albums of Sinatra songs,
My Way (2018) and That’s Life (2021). “I learned a lot about phrasing listening
to Frank,” said Nelson. “He didn’t worry about behind the beat or in front
of the beat, or whatever—he could sing it either way, and that’s the feel you
have to have.” Bob and Willie have a lot more than Frank in common. They,
like most musicians, live to play. In Woodstock, New York, Bill Keith and Eric
Weissberg (both now passed) were regulars at a weekly bluegrass jam. When
producer Jim Rooney started spending part of the year in Ireland, he made a
point to enlist his musician friends to play as Rooney’s Irregulars whenever
he returned to Nashville. And country star Vince Gill, who after the death of
Glenn Frey became a member of the Eagles, is a Monday night regular with
the Time Jumpers, a Western swing band filled with session players.
Bob and Willie are also both entrepreneurs. Dylan shocked many in 2020
when he sold the rights to his catalog of more than six hundred songs to Uni-
versal Music Publishing Group for a price said to be more than $300 million.
Dylan also sells original paintings and iron works in art galleries and markets a
line of premium whiskey under the name Heaven’s Door. Nelson sells Willie’s
Reserve marijuana products and makes a political point of operating his tour
bus (named Honeysuckle Rose after one of his movies) on biodiesel fuel. But
the bus really runs on music. “When Willie plays the jazzy Django Reinhardt
classic ‘Nuages,’” said musician Marshall Chapman, who was a late-night
passenger, “Bobbie never misses a chord or a beat. The bond between these
two runs deeper than deep. I’m thinking the whole ‘Willie Nelson & Family’
phenomenon begins right here with those two siblings.” And the tradition
continues: Willie’s son Lukas plays country rock with a band called Promise
of the Real that has toured as Neil Young’s backing band.
Imagine Willie and Bob boarding the Honeysuckle Rose with a couple of
acoustic guitars. It’s the Traveling Willieburys, on the road (again) and sing-
ing the songs of America in the long dark winter of the 2020 pandemic. They
roll through Alabama playing Hank’s “Howlin’ at the Moon” and trade blue
252 Chapter 17

yodels as they approach Meridian, Mississippi. Thinking of Memphis to the

north, they toast Cash with “Big River” and Elvis with “Mystery Train” and pay
tribute to the Black Lives Matter demonstrators not with Woody’s “This Land
Is Your Land” but the Carter Family song that gave him the melody, “When
the World’s on Fire.” They’re two old men, wise to the ways of a wicked world
and grateful to share the songs of a century. They roll past roadhouses that
will once again be filled with fiddles and Telecasters and quiet cafés where
songwriters will debut new songs at open mikes. They reach Texas, and like
a couple of kids, break into Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.” Bob and Willie,
trading tunes, and living in the heart of Americanaland.
 LAST CALL

Thanks to the musicians, past and present, who give voice to these pages. I’m
grateful to the Woodstock Library and the Mid-Hudson Library System for
providing a steady stream of pertinent books. Additional items were obtained
from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Please use and
support your local library, one of our most valuable public resources.
I offer grateful appreciation to the biographers of the principal musicians
in Americanaland: Rick Bragg, David Cantwell, Eddie Dean, Colin Escott, Chet
Flippo, Ben Fong-Torres, Holly George-Warren, Peter Guralnick, Robert Earl
Hardy, Paul Hemphill, Clinton Heylin, Robert Hilburn, Christopher Hjort,
Eddie Huffman, Bob Kealing, Rich Kienzle, Greg Kot, Mark Lewisohn, Barry
Mazor, Jimmy McDonough, David McGee, Don McLeese, David Menconi,
David N. Meyer, Philip Norman, Joe Nick Patoski, David Ritz, Johnny Rogan,
Lloyd Sachs, Robert Shelton, Richard D. Smith, Lauren St. John, Nick Tosches,
Elijah Wald, Sean Wilentz, and Mark Zwonitzer.
Other authors offered helpful insights in broader works about country,
folk, bluegrass, country rock, and songwriters. Among these are Joe Boyd,
John Einarson, Sid Griffin, David Hadju, Craig Harris, Barney Hoskyns, Bill
C. Malone, Greil Marcus, William McKeen, Alana Nash, Tom Piazza, Jim
PATSY CLINE
 Last Call 255

Rooney, Daryl Sanders, John Simon, Michael Streissguth, Dave Thompson,

Eric von Schmidt, and Paul Zollo. Amid all this reading, one book stood apart
for its informative sweep and artful prose: Nicholas Dawidoff’s In the Country
of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music.
For nearly twenty-five years, I’ve had the pleasure of singing and play-
ing with two roots-oriented Hudson Valley bands, the Comfy Chair and the
Sunburst Brothers. Thanks to the talented friends who’ve given me a world of
fun and made me both a better musician and a more informed writer: Baker
Rorick, Josh Roy Brown, Steve Burgh, Chuck Cornelis, Jake Guralnick, Steve
Mueller, Larry Packer, Eric Parker, and Doug Wygal. Members of my writer’s
group, Laura Claridge and Richard Hoffman, offered insightful critiques dur-
ing the preparation of my manuscript.
My agent Carol Mann helped get Americanaland signed not once, but twice.
Stephen P. Hull, who published our earlier book, Crossroads, originally bought
the proposal, but then the University Press of New England went out of busi-
ness; thanks to Laurie Matheson and the University of Illinois Press for picking
up a work in progress. I’m tickled by the synchronicity that during my first
week as the rock critic of the Chicago Daily News, I wrote the obituary for the
King of Americanaland, Elvis Presley. Thanks as well to Tim Geaney for pho-
tographing the artwork, Jennifer Comeau for editorial advice, Dustin Hubbart
for the cover design, Jane Zanichkowsky for the conscientious copyediting,
and Robert Pruter for attention to detail while creating the index.
Finally, thanks to Margie Greve for finding a way to use fabric and embroi-
dery floss to make her portraits sing. Love you, Margie. We’d make a great
team even if we weren’t married.
 NOTES

Introduction
1 “I originally wanted”: Fox and Ching, Old Roots, New Routes, 39.
1 “That one stuck with me”: ibid.
1–2 “Contemporary music”: Cain, Americana Revolution, 61.
2 “I’ve been bleeding outside the lines”: Fiona Sturges, “Emmylou Harris: ‘I
smoked country music but I didn’t inhale,’” Independent, April 17, 2001.
4 “You don’t get limos”: Fox and Ching, Old Roots, New Routes, 43.
6 “Where I come from”: Michael Ross, “Marty Stuart Interview,” Guitar Player,
November 2010.
6 “The blues is”: Jann Wenner, “The Rolling Stone Interview: John Lennon,”
Rolling Stone, January 1971.

Chapter 1. Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?

7 “When we made the record”: MacMahon and McGorty, American Epic, 65.
8 “[The Carter Family’s] style”: Mazor, Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, 187.
8 “It’s arguable”: ibid., 112.
10 “We’d get together”: MacMahon and McGorty, American Epic, 64.
10 “I’d gone to Sara”: Zwonitzer and Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m
Gone?, 67.
11 “If you believe”: Mazor, Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, 260.
258 Notes

12 “Man, you don’t know”: Gordon, Can’t Be Satisfied, xv.

14 “Charlie and I”: Rosenberg and Wolfe, Music of Bill Monroe, 26.
14 “He hit the bandstand”: Patoski, Willie Nelson, 36.
14 “Right across the street”: Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 225.
15 “The first hint”: Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting, 21.
15 “I learned a lot”: ibid., 18.
15 “Woody said, ‘Wait’”: Pete Seeger on NPR’s Fresh Air, January 28, 2014.
16 “The first time”: Zwonitzer and Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?,
7.
16 “I was his tape recorder”: ibid., 131.
16 “You don’t have to”: ibid., 132.
18 “Maybelle was kind of like a second mama”: Dawidoff, In the Country of
Country, 47.
18 “I’d lay my head”: Zwonitzer and Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m
Gone?, 273.
19 “The old, weird America”: Greil Marcus, liner notes to Anthology of American
Folk Music, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1997, 5.
19 “We knew every word”: Dave Van Ronk, ibid.
19 “I’m glad to say”: Harry Smith, ibid., 68.
19 “I owe everything”: Zwonitzer and Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m
Gone?, 286.

Chapter 2. The Lost Highway

20 “Hank said, ‘Jake’”: Michael Kosser, “Don Helms: Add Some Steel Guitar;
Don Helms and the Songwriting of Hank Williams, Sr.,” American Songwriter,
January 2009.
20–21 “When you paid”: Hemphill, Lovesick Blues, 36.
21 “All the training”: Escott, Merritt, and MacEwen, I Saw the Light, 6.
21 “It’s Roy Acuff”: Flippo, Your Cheatin’ Heart, 105.
21 “You’ve got a million-dollar voice”: Hemphill, Lovesick Blues, 39.
21–22 “I booked Hank”: Flippo, Your Cheatin’ Heart, 45.
22 “Real spiritual qualities”: Masino, Family Tradition, 29.
22–23 “When a hillbilly sings”: Rufus Jarman, “Country Music Goes to Town,”
Nation’s Business, February 1953.
23 “Characteristic of Williams”: Pleasants, Great American Popular Singers, 233.
23 “I’ll tell you”: Hemphill, Lovesick Blues, 81.
25 “Hank had the same look”: Escott, Merritt, and MacEwen, I Saw the Light, 82.
25 “One Sunday morning”: Hemphill, Lovesick Blues, 136.
26 “Hank’s recorded songs”: Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume 1, 96.
26 “Nobody notices this”: Marcus and Sollors, New Literary History of America,
845.
26 “I was sort of a tune pimp”: Broven, Record Makers and Breakers, 89.
 Notes 259

26 “When I heard”: Escott, Merritt, and MacEwen, I Saw the Light, 156.
27 “He had a way”: Hemphill, Lovesick Blues, 130.
27 “Oh no, I ain’t”: ibid., 121.
27 “I was embarrassed”: Zwonitzer and Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m
Gone?, 294.
28 “When I was about eight”: Ralph Gleason, “Hank Williams, Roy Acuff and
Then God!!,” Rolling Stone, June 1969.
28 “I was shinin’ shoes”: ibid.
28 “When you got to San Pablo”: ibid.
28 “And he had that thing”: ibid.
28 “No one could handle”: Frizzell, I Love You a Thousand Ways, 1.
29 “It’s good to have”: Escott, Merritt, and MacEwen, I Saw the Light, 171.
29 “Don’t call me ‘Mama’”: Zwonitzer and Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When
I’m Gone?, 297.
30 “I realized”: Hemphill, Lovesick Blues, 154.
30 “I introduced him”: Carlton Stowers, “Price He’s Paid,” Dallas Observer, Oc-
tober 12, 2000.
30 “We recorded”: Escott, Merritt, and MacEwen, I Saw the Light, 215.
31 “Heaven”: ibid., 265.

Chapter 3. Sunrise
34 “It was like everything”: Miller, Million Dollar Quartet, 122.
34 “It was a time”: Piazza, Devil Sent the Rain, 97.
34 “When I heard”: Segrest and Hoffman, Moanin’ at Midnight, 87.
34–35 “He would sit there”: ibid., 89.
35 “We were broke”: Guralnick quoted in Miller, Rolling Stone Illustrated History
of Rock ’n’ Roll, 23.
35 “I also dug”: Terkel, And They All Sang, 288.
35 “The reason I taped Elvis”: Pleasants, Great American Popular Singers, 267.
36 “Elvis picked up his guitar”: Guralnick, Sam Phillips, 212.
36 “Bill jumped up”: ibid., 214.
36 “‘That’s All Right’ is in”: Miller, Million Dollar Quartet, 81.
36 “We worked many a show”: Zwonitzer and Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When
I’m Gone?, 305.
36–37 “The thing is”: ibid., 311.
37 “Well”: ibid.
37 “He was the first boy”: Piazza, Devil Sent the Rain, 98.
37 “Get down close to it”: Perkins and McGee, Go, Cat, Go!, 13.
37 “We were set up and picking”: Guralnick, Sam Phillips, p 228.
37 “When I’d jump around”: Perkins and McGee, Go, Cat, Go!, 106.
39 “Hillbilly rock and roll”: Tosches, Country: Living Legends, 55.
39 “When the song was popular”: Piazza, Devil Sent the Rain, 95.
260 Notes

43 “I can remember”: Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting, 617.

43 “Buddy played the music”: Dylan, Nobel Prize lecture, https://www.nobel-
prize.org/prizes/literature/2016/dylan/lecture/.
44 “It has already”: Guralnick, Sam Phillips, 285.
44 “Most of the record-buying public”: Jones and Carter, I Lived to Tell It All, 35.
44 “We were having trouble”: Bill Friskics-Warren, “Ray Price, Groundbreaking,
Hit-Making Country Singer, Dies at 87,” New York Times, December 16, 2013.
44–45 “I took Willie”: Michael Corcoran, “Ray Price Changed Country Music While
Staying True to His Own Sound,” Statesman, December 17, 2013.
45 “I wanted to sound”: Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 203.
45 “A country singer”: Jones and Carter, I Lived to Tell It All, 54.
45 “It makes you sad”: Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 206.
45 “We knew when to switch”: ibid.,143.
46 “Driving back to Nashville”: Kurt Loder, “The Everly Brothers: The Rolling
Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, May 8, 1986.
47 “A natural born blues singer”: Bragg, Jerry Lee Lewis, 70.
47 “The worst singer”: ibid.
47 “It’s where I got my juice”: ibid., 78.
47 “Mr. Paul knew”: ibid., 123.
47 “We sat down at the little spinet”: Tosches, Hellfire, 103.
47 “I did notice”: Bragg, Jerry Lee Lewis, 163.
49 “I felt like we ought to get off of it”: Tosches, Hellfire, 122.
49 “He came off”: Guralnick, Feel Like Going Home, 183.
50 “One night we parked”: Bragg, Jerry Lee Lewis, 238.
51 “Follow that”: Vallee, Rancid Aphrodisiac, 80.
51 “He’s a great artist”: Bragg, Jerry Lee Lewis, 283.
51–52 “He hid her in his house”: ibid., 284.
52 “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash”: Zwonitzer and Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When
I’m Gone?, 346.
52 “From the time”: Hilburn, Johnny Cash, 190.
52 “There was a little bit of drugs”: ibid., 191.
53 “If Elvis Presley”: Guralnick, Rolling Stone History of Rock ’n’ Roll, 30.
53 “Everything was all happening”: Guralnick, Sam Phillips, 455.

Chapter 4. Blowin’ in the Wind

54 “There was a halo”: Jonathan Cott, “The Last Days of Buddy Holly,” Rolling
Stone, February 2009.
55 “Late at night”: Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!, 35.
55 “We gave Bob”: Shelton, No Direction Home, 54.
55 “I first met Bob”: ibid., 66.
55 “In 1959”: ibid., 151.
56 “There were little pockets”: David Grisman, Grateful Dawg, Sony Pictures,
2001.
56 “We’d go out”: Hajdu, Positively 4th Street, 10.
 Notes 261

57 “Do you know”: Van Ronk and Wald, Mayor of MacDougal Street, 58.
57 “From Odetta”: Ron Rosenbaum, “The Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan,” Play-
boy, March 1978.
57 “The sight of her”: Dylan, Chronicles: Volume 1, 254.
58 “They were screaming”: Bragg, Jerry Lee Lewis, 307.
58 “He started havin’ a lot of goons”: Tosches, Hellfire, 191.
58 “If the son of a bitch don’t die”: Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 145.
58 “It’s been thirty years”: ibid., 147.
58 “That tunnel of light”: Mike Boehm, “A Blue-Tinged Life for the Silver
Screen: Story of Rock Survivor Carl Perkins Could Be Sobering, Uplifting
Movie,” Los Angeles Times, August 6, 1989.
59 “Get so drunk”: Hilburn, Johnny Cash, 296.
59 “When I was six”: ibid., 246.
59 “Me and you”: Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 189.
59 “I’d watched”: Anthony DeCurtis, “Johnny Cash Won’t Back Down,” Rolling
Stone, October 26, 2000.
59 “We were the original”: Jennings and Kay, Waylon, 110.
60 “I will never forget”: Zwonitzer and Hirshberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m
Gone?, 342.
60 “The next day”: Michael Streissguth, “Merle Haggard’s Lost Interview,” Roll-
ing Stone, January 2017.
60 “I remember always saying”: liner notes, The Buck Owens Collection (1959–
1990), Rhino, 1992.
61 “I’m driving”: Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 241.
61 “Don and I”: Halpin, Experiencing the Beatles, 214.
61 “My songs are quite alike”: liner notes, The Buck Owens Collection.
61 “Buck was wild”: Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 241.
61 “I got two hits”: ibid., 29.
62 “If I could write”: Patoski, Willie Nelson, 79.
63 “From the songwriter’s viewpoint”: Nassour, Honky Tonk Angel, 135.
63 “[Patsy] went out there”: Patoski, Willie Nelson, 3.
63 “No one should try”: Nelson and Ritz, It’s a Long Story, 144.
63 “She understood”: ibid.
63 “Even though her style”: Jon Dolan, “Fifty Country Abums Every Rock Fan
Should Own,” Rolling Stone, September 22, 2019.
63–64 “I can’t recall”: Charles and Ritz, Brother Ray, 43.
65 “I could do country”: ibid., 88.
65 “The words to country songs”: Ben Fong-Torres, “Ray Charles: The Rolling
Stone Interview,” Rolling Stone, January 1973.
65 “I came up”: Nassour, Honky Tonk Angel, 365.
65 “Greenwich Village”: Petrus and Cohen, Folk City, 156.
65–66 “Washington Square”: Ron Rosenbaum, “The Playboy Interview: Bob
Dylan,” Playboy, March 1978.
66 “Playing stuff”: Dylan, Chronicles: Volume 1, 94.
262 Notes

66 “His influence”: Shelton, No Direction Home, 82.

66 “Everything I needed”: McKeen, Everybody Had an Ocean, 154.
67 “Lightnin’ would stay with me”: Bob Ruggiero, “John Sebastian and Lightnin’
Hopkins: The Odd Couple,” Houston Press, September 25, 2014.
67 “Ralph and I”: John Herald, author interview, June 10, 1999.
67 “I was learning”: ibid.
67 “Ralph told me once”: Doc Watson, author interview, June 18, 1999.
67 “My first acquaintance”: ibid.
68 “There’s only one”: Smith, Can’t You Hear Me Callin’, 176.
68 “Before he came along”: Bill Friskics, “Bill Keith, Who Uncovered Banjo’s
Melodic Potential, Dies at 75,” New York Times, October 26, 2015.
68 “If not for every taste”: Robert Shelton, “Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song
Stylist,” New York Times, September 29, 1961.
68 “It seemed like eons ago”: Dylan, Chronicles: Volume 1, 279.
70 “Half of the cuts”: ibid., 262.
70 “I tend to base”: Rosenbaum, “Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan.”
70 “I did see”: Dylan, Chronicles: Volume 1, 283.
70 “I took the song apart”: ibid., 275.
70 “If I hadn’t heard”: ibid., 287.
71 “I had to get out”: Petrus and Cohen, Folk City, 274.
71 “They were kindred spirits”: Goodman, Mansion on the Hill, 95.
71 “You could look”: ibid., 96.
71 “When I heard”: Hadju, Positively 4th Street, 147.
71–72 “When he was on tour”: ibid., 173.
72 “He came on my radio show”: ibid., 75.
72 “To the old left”: ibid., 210.
72 “I think of that”: ibid., 166.

Chapter 5. Turn! Turn! Turn!

73 “[America] is where the music came from”: Speaking of Everything, ABC Radio,
October 6, 1974, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfMLRW9nxbo&t=315s.
73 “We’d never heard”: WPLJ-FM interview, September 10, 1971.
73 “Little Richard was”: BBC Radio 2 interview, May 11, 2001.
73–74 “Practically every Buddy Holly song”: Lewisohn, Tune In, 11.
74 “First of all”: BBC Radio 1 interview, December 6, 1974.
74 “I liked Elvis”: Richards and Fox, Life, 71.
74 “Paul would be doing”: Lewisohn, Tune In, 366.
76 “If the Beatles”: ibid., 587.
76 “Right from the start”: Ono, Memories of John Lennon, HarperCollins, 219.
77 “All my songs”: Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!, 287.
77 “He [Dylan] practically jumped”: Hajdu, Positively 4th Street, 197.
77 “They were doing”: Rogan, The Byrds, 53.
 Notes 263

77 “I played all the folk songs”: Cameron Crowe, liner notes to Bob Dylan: Bio-
graph, Columbia Records, 1985.
77 “His singing style”: Wald, Dylan Goes Electric!, 70.
77 “There aren’t any”: Nat Hentoff, “Bob Dylan, the Wanderer,” New Yorker,
October 24, 1964.
78 “The political folkies”: Hajdu, Positively 4th Street, 210.
78 “You seem to be”: Irwin Silber, “An Open Letter to Bob Dylan,” Sing Out!,
November 1964.
79 “We wound up”: Harry, Ultimate Beatles Encyclopedia, 517.
79 “It was a magic time”: ibid.
79 “I first saw the Beatles”: Hjort, So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star, 16.
79 “We learned faster”: ibid., 17.
79–80 “A lot of bands”: ibid.
80 “I can remember”: Crosby and Gottlieb, Long Time Gone, 19.
80 “Wow, man”: Rogan, The Byrds, 55.
80 “We tried by editing”: Heylin, Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions, 34.
82 “I remember working”: author interview, Woodstock, NY, May 15, 2000.
83 “I remember that we didn’t”: Hajdu, Positively 4th Street, 233.
83 “It’s from Chuck Berry”: Robert Hilburn, “Rock’s Enigmatic Poet Opens a
Long-Private Door,” Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2004.
84 “You haven’t worked”: Hjort, So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star, 17.
84 “The first thing”: Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone, 110.
84 “There was a clear generation and cultural gap”: Boyd, White Bicycles, 42.
85 “Today you’ve heard”: Von Schmidt and Rooney, Baby, Let Me Follow You
Down, 253.
85 “We were boogying”: ibid., 253.
85 “Lomax walked down”: ibid., 258.
85 “What we played”: Ward, Mike Bloomfield, 44.
85 “We just learned”: Mike Bloomfield, “Impressions of Bob Dylan,” Hit Parader,
June 1968.
86 “We had been playing”: Van Ronk and Wald, Mayor of McDougal Street, 241.
86 “Yeah, sure you could”: ibid.
86 “Highway 61”: Dylan, Chronicles: Volume 1, 240.
86 “We did 20”: Hjort, So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star, 39.
86–87 “After finishing”: Polizzotti, Highway 61 Revisited, 2006.
88 “Long live ze king”: “The Beatles meet Elvis Presley,” https://www.beatles-
bible.com/1965/08/27/the-beatles-meet-elvis-presley/.
88 “He was our greatest idol”: ibid.

Chapter 6. White Line Fever

89 “His songs hit me”: Cantwell, Merle Haggard, 48.
89–90 “Relaxed, warm and rugged”: ibid., 68.
264 Notes

90 “If there was anything”: Haggard and Russell, Sing Me Back Home, 203.
90 “It’s amazing”: Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 257.
92 “I Shall Sing”: “Pledge to Country Music,” Music City News, March 1965.
92 “That’s me trying a rewrite”: Gould, Can’t Buy Me Love, 262.
92 “Man! Those boys”: Von Schmidt and Rooney, Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,
244.
92 “He thought”: Lynn and Cox, Still Woman Enough, 8.
92 “I remember”: Lynn and Vecsay, Coal Miner’s Daughter, 97.
93 “The way most”: ibid., 117.
93 “A little girl”: Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting, 140.
93 “The country music jamboree”: Shelton quoted in Jones and Carter, I Lived
to Tell It All, 98.
94 “That was the first time”: Sanders, Thin, Wild Mercury Sound, 24.
94 “I don’t know”: Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide, 97.
94 “Because they’d read”: ibid.
94 “It was like”: Sounes, Seventies, 122.
94 “I’d watch”: Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide, 100.
94–95 “It was like thunder”: ibid., 102.
95 “It was so in your face”: Sanders, Thin, Wild Mercury Sound, 29.
95 “There were hardly”: Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide, 112.
95 “He’d teach me”: Doggett, Are You Ready for the Country, 22.
95–96 “Johnston came to us”: Sanders, Thin, Wild Mercury Sound, 94.
96 “I saw Dylan”: Sean Wilentz, “Mystic Nights,” Oxford American, October 13,
2016.
96 “After five or six minutes”: Doggett, Are You Ready for the Country, 22.
96 “It was one”: Sander, Thin, Wild Mercury Sound, 115.
96 “This is the definitive version”: ibid., 117.
96 “He was really impressed”: ibid., 128.
96–97 “The time we spent”: ibid., 169.
97 “That thin”: Ron Rosenbaum, “Bob Dylan: The Playboy Interview,” Playboy,
March 1978.
97 “We’d look at one another”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 236.
97 “By the time”: ibid., 246.
97 “He was what you call”: Hadju, Positively 4th Street, 280.
97 “In those hotel rooms”: Robertson, Testimony, 232.
97 “It was a little bit”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 259.
97 “I remember his saying”: John Kruth, “On ‘Revolver’ the Beatles Quit Being
Cute and Become True Artists,” Observer, August 10, 2016.
97 “Paul was obviously”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 259.
98 “Bob and Johnny”: Robertson, Testimony, 232.
98 “And with that”: ibid.
98 “The concerts”: Williams, Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, 1:214.
 Notes 265

98 “Something is happening here”: Williams, Bob Dylan Live 1966, Columbia

Records, 1998.
98 “Come, come, boy”: Hajdu, Positively 4th Street, 291.
98 “We laid him down”: ibid.
99 “I was drivin’”: J. Hughes, Invisible Now, 164.

Chapter 7. Something in the Air

100 “Of course”: Rogan, Timeless Flight Revisited, 163.
100 “The Rick by itself”: Noe Gold, “7 Class Axes & the Guitarists Who Wielded
Them,” Best Classic Bands, https://bestclassicbands.com/best-rock-guitarists-
part-1-10-8-15/.
101 “Joni [Mitchell] was singing”: https://jonimitchell.com/library/view.
cfm?id=747.
103 “One song especially”: McKeen, Everybody Had an Ocean, 274.
103 “I went up”: Chris Morris, “Elliot Roberts, Neil Young’s Longtime Manager,
Dies at 76,” Variety, June 21, 2019.
103 “It sucks”: ibid.
103–4 “When I heard”: Chris LeDrew, “Joni Mitchell’s Skewered Perceptions of
Bob Dylan,” Onstage, June 2013.
104 “I heard Bob Dylan”: Bert van de Kamp, “Leonard Cohen—All culture is
nail polish,” OOR magazine no. 21, October 23, 1974.
104 “He turned”: Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriters, 533.
104 “I really can’t imagine”: “Bob Dylan: The Paul Zollo Interview,” American
Songwriter, January 2012.
104 “He was going”: Hoskyns, Hotel California, 38.
104 “She was very important”: McKeen, Everybody Had an Ocean, 300.
104 “David and I”: ibid.
104 “Oh, beware, my lord”: William Shakespeare, Othello, act 3, scene 3.
104–5 “I never worked so hard”: Guralnick, “Jerry Lee Lewis: Lust of the Blood,”
https://www.peterguralnick.com/post/43480661142/jerry-lee-lewis-lust-of-
the-blood.
105 “We didn’t rehearse it”: Randy Lewis, “Looking Back at the 1968 TV Special
That Made Elvis Presley Matter Again,” Los Angeles Times, November 21,
2018.
106 “We talked”: Guralnick, Careless Love, 341.
106 “It might have taken”: Jones and Carter, I Lived to Tell It All, 112.
106 “Because I love her”: ibid., 125.
106 “When I came to Nashville”: Patoski, Willie Nelson, 220.
107 “I was always sick”: D’Ambrosio, Heartbeat and a Guitar, 205.
107 “That very night”: George-Warren, Janis, 277.
107–8 “I had the sound”: Nelson and Ritz, It’s a Long Story, 186.
108 “The turning point”: Griffin, Million Dollar Bash, 55.
266 Notes

109 “With the covers”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 274.

109 “[He’d] pull out some”: ibid.
109 “Bob would”: Marcus, Invisible Republic, 235.
109 “We played”: Griffin, Million Dollar Bash, 153.
110 “You know”: Heylin, Recording Sessions, 57.
110 “It amazed me”: Griffin, Million Dollar Bash, 150.
110 “Bob just made me think”: Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide, 120.
110 “It was the Summer of Love”: Steve Thomas, “Bob Dylan Talks Basement
Tapes,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuCRNNo8wBc.
111 “Listening back”: Griffin, Million Dollar Bash, 308.
111 “There was something”: ibid., 284.
111 “Every artist in the world”: Sounes, Down the Highway, 226.
111 “The songs were written”: Jim Beviglia, “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas
Priest,” American Songwriter, May 2012.
112 “Some of it”: “John Wesley Harding,” http://www.bobdylancommentaries.com/
in-progress/.
112 “I realized quickly”: Simon, Truth, Lies and Hearsay, 126.
112 “These guys were accustomed”: ibid., 129.

Chapter 8. Sweetheart of the Rodeo

113 “I asked Gram”: Geoff Edgers, “It Was the Byrds Album Everyone Hated in
1968. Now, ‘Sweetheart of the Rodeo’ Is a Classic.” Washington Post, August
16, 2018.
113 “He started singing”: Einarson and Hillman, Hot Burritos, 59.
114 “I wanted to crawl”: Meyer, Twenty Thousand Roads, 236.
115 “[When recording] with Buck Owens”: ibid., 238.
115 “I learned something”: ibid.
115 “McGuinn was reluctant”: Hjort, So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star, 174.
115 “Wandering around”: Hillman, Time Between, 110.
115 “He couldn’t have things”: Fong-Torres, Hickory Wind, 96.
117 “He taught me”: Bockris, Keith Richards, 147.
117 “Clarence White’s brother”: Randy Lewis, “Two Original Byrds Salute the
Band’s Country-Rock Classic ‘Sweetheart of the Rodeo’ 50 Years Later,” Los
Angeles Times, July 20, 2018.
117 “I remember buying Sweetheart”: ibid.
117 “It was my gateway record”: ibid.
118 “I wanted to discover”: liner notes, Music from Big Pink, Capitol Records,
2000.
118 “I didn’t want”: ibid.
118 “Many levels above”: Simon, Truth, Lies and Hearsay, 125.
118 “You make the drum”: Helm and Davis, This Wheel’s on Fire, 166.
118 “Robbie had obviously learned”: Simon: Truth, Lies and Hearsay, 126.
 Notes 267

118 “Gave Robbie”: ibid., 140.

119 “The characters”: Helm and Davis, This Wheel’s on Fire, 166.
119 “They were seasoned”: Simon, Truth, Lies and Hearsay, 174.
119 “When we were up”: liner notes, Music from Big Pink.
119 “There are people”: Al Kooper, review of Music from Big Pink, Rolling Stone,
August 10, 1968.
119 “These guys were”: Hjort, Stranger Brew, 202.
119–20 “When ‘The Weight’ came on”: Robertson, Testimony, 310.
120 “He alone of them”: Helm and Davis, This Wheel’s on Fire, 183.
120 “Charming and attractive”: ibid., 184.
120–21 “[Gram] had this sort”: Einarson, Desperados, 138.
121 “We drove to a modern”: Fong-Torres, Hickory Wind, 103.
121 “They were harmonies”: Einarson, Desperados, 140.
121–22 “I was going through”: Fong-Torres, Hickory Wind, 105.
122 “We were consciously welding”: Einarson, Desperados, 141.
122 “The three-fingered dumb hum”: John Milward, “Old Souls: Dan Penn and
Spooner Oldham find sweet inspiration in country R&B,” No Depression,
January–February 2009.
122–23 “We were always wanting”: Gordon, It Came from Memphis, 162.
123 “I met Miss Audrey”: McDonough, Soul Survivor, 140.
123 “Every R&B record”: ibid., 141.
123 “I cannot recall”: Einarson, Desperados, 137.
123 “I was the taskmaster”: Einarson and Hillman, Hot Burritos, 141.
124 “We started listening”: “Turning Back the Clock—Mudcrutch Interview,”
posted May 29, 2009, mudcrutch.com.
124 “Glen Frey”: Einarson, Desperados, 163.
124 “I always thought”: ibid., 164.
124 “Gram was very”: Doggett: Are You Ready for the Country, 84.
124 “Gram was one of the few”: Meyer, Twenty Thousand Roads, 303.
124 “Gram was as knowledgeable”: ibid., 305.
125 “I think the Burritos” Einarson and Hillman, Hot Burritos, 179.
125 “Woodstock was”: Echols, Scars of Sweet Paradise, 264.
125 “When we went”: Jagger, Richards, Watts, and Lane, According to the Rolling
Stones, 146.
125 “Gram was there”: Meyer, Twenty Thousand Roads, 316.

Chapter 9. American Tune

126 “Soldiers started”: Martin Chilton, “Merle Haggard: ‘Sometimes I Wish I
Hadn’t Written Okie from Muskogee,’” Telegraph (UK), April 8, 2016.
126 “We wrote it”: ibid.
127 “Many Americans”: Malone and Neal, Country Music, U.S.A., 317.
127 “An in-depth study”: Guralnick, Careless Love, 416.
268 Notes

127 “I don’t know”: Bill Demain, “The Time Johnny Cash Met Richard Nixon,”
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/30142/when-johnny-cash-met-richard-
nixon.
128 “Some little woman”: Michael Kruse, “The TV Interview That Haunts Hill-
ary Clinton,” Politico, September 23, 2016.
129 “You can feel the wood”: liner notes, The Band, reissue, 2007.
129 “We took great care”: ibid.
129 “With ‘Rag Mama Rag’”: ibid.
129 “We called Garth ‘H. B.’”: Helm, This Wheel’s on Fire, 188.
129 “Everybody played”: Robertson, Testimony, 313.
129–30 “Mostly [Richard] would”: liner notes, The Band.
130 “I could relate”: Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide, 194.
130 “Make General Robert E. Lee”: Helm, This Wheel’s on Fire, 188.
130 “Instead of keeping”: ibid., 188.
130 “It was like”: liner notes, The Band.
130 “High-school fat girl”: Helm, This Wheel’s on Fire, 186.
130 “The, tall, silver-haired hypnotist”: ibid., 191.
130 “The hypnotist”: “‘He really couldn’t play’: Elliott Landy remembers hypno-
tizing night for the Band’s Robbie Robertson,” https://somethingelsereviews
.com/2014/01/24/he-really-couldnt-play-elliott-landy-remembers-robbie
-robertsons-hypnotizing-night/.
130–32 “My drums”: Helm, This Wheel’s on Fire, 193.
132 “Me and a bunch”: Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide, 186.
132 “Fairport had been”: ibid., 281.
132 “The Band had”: Griffin, Million Dollar Bash, 311.
132 “Bob Dylan, a Jewish bloke”: ibid., 311.
132 “It was very family oriented”: Hoskyns, Small Town Talk, 91.
133 “He was hiding”: Campbell Stevenson, “Frozen in Time: Bob Dylan at Home
with His Son,” Guardian, May 15, 2016.
133 “I used to think”: Mikal Gilmore, “Bob Dylan’s Lost Years,” Rolling Stone,
September 2013.
133 “Now there’s no way”: ibid.
133 “He hardly said”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 295.
134 “No one ever counted off”: Gilmore, “Bob Dylan’s Lost Years.”
134 “The songs reflect”: Doggett, Are You Ready for the Country, 14.
134 “We started playing”: Heylin, Recording Sessions, 75.
135 “They looked”: Hilburn, Johnny Cash: The Life, 350.
135 “Nashville Skyline achieves”: Paul Nelson, “Nashville Skyline,” Rolling Stone,
May 31, 1969.
135 “It’s cast”: Doggett, Are You Ready for the Country, 15.
135 “An enthusiastic Nixon supporter”: ibid.
135–36 “When I told”: Marshall Chapman, They Came to Nashville, 24.
136 “Joni Mitchell sang”: “Johnny Cash’s ‘Million Dollar Songwriter Circle,’”
SavingCountryMusic.com, July 28, 2013.
 Notes 269

136 “I couldn’t justify”: Edward Morris, “Buck Owens’ Autobiography Is Unspar-

ingly Candid,” CMT News, January 2014.

Chapter 10. Troubadours

137 “The Troubadour”: Eliot, To the Limit, 40.
137 “The first day”: Einarson, Desperados, 164.
137 “Had this legendary”: Hoskyns, Hotel California, 17.
137 “Linda Ronstadt cheered”: Boyd, White Bicycles, 228.
138 “The beginnings”: Hoskyns, Hotel California, 49.
138 “Joni writes”: ibid., 122.
140 “My style at that time”: Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun, 205.
140–41 “I was at my most defenseless”: Hoskyns, Hotel California, 125.
141 “The ultimate irony”: ibid.
141 “My production values”: ibid., 111.
141 “One night”: Doggett, Are You Ready for the Country, 140.
142 “When Steve brought Kris”: Eals, Steve Goodman, 216.
142 “I started shuffling”: Huffman, John Prine, 39.
142–43 “We had an early wake-up”: liner notes, John Prine, Atlantic, 1971.
143 “It must’ve been”: ibid.
143 “He offered me”: Huffman, John Prine, 14.
143 “In my songs”: ibid., 45.
143 “He [Berry] told a story”: Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting, 435.
143 “So we come over”: ibid., 456.
143–44 “So he showed up”: ibid.
144 “[Willie] got on the stool”: Streisguth, Outlaw, 110.
144 “Your phrasing”: Nelson and Ritz, It’s a Long Story, 224.
144 “I witnessed”: Chet Flippo, “Nashville Skyline: Willie’s Outlaw Roots Shown in
Retrospective,” http://www.cmt.com/news/1531607/nashville-skyline-willies
-outlaw-roots-shown-in-retrospective/.
144–45 “If I’m going to look”: Chet Flippo, “The Rolling Stone Interview: Dolly
Parton,” Rolling Stone, August 1977.
145 “I said, ‘Well’”: Jim Jerome, “One Tough Dolly,” Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1995.
145 “I got turned on”: Doggett, Are You Ready for the Country, 113.
145 “Bluegrass bands”: ibid., 114.
147 “After hearing Dylan’s country”: ibid., 114.
147 “Crosby and those guys”: ibid., 115.
147 “We used to go see”: Shaugn O’Donnell, https://shaugn.com/workingmans
-dead.
147 “Bluegrass music”: David Grisman, http://www.chiefnoda.com/intvw/dgr
.html.
148 “There was definitely”: ibid., 103.
149 “Uh, well, it’s kind of Appalachian”: McEuen, Life I’ve Picked, 87.
149 “Hell! It ain’t nothing but country”: ibid., 87.
149 “Acuff made a couple”: Tosches, Living Legends, 145.
270 Notes

149 “You know, John”: ibid., 145.

149 “Well, I never knew,” “Would you boys”: McEuen, Life I Picked, 89.
149 “I said, ‘You’ll make millions’”: Eliot, To the Limit, 63.
150 “We did four sets”: Doggett, Are You Ready for the Country, 158.
150 “They were doing Chuck Berry stuff”: Eliot, To the Limit, 72.
150 “Somebody picked up”: ibid.
150 “Joni and Jackson”: Hoskyns, Hotel California, 229.
150–51 “We’d watched bands”: Hoskyns, Waiting for the Sun, 227.
151 “The Eagles were made”: ibid., 226.
151 “Another thing”: Robert Christgau, “Trying to Understand the Eagles,” News-
day, June 1972.
151 “It’s no accident”: ibid.
151 “I saw through”: Doggett, Are You Ready for the Country, 188.
152 “Asylum was”: Eliot, To the Limit, 91.
152 “I was saying, ‘OK’”: Hoskyns, Hotel California, 147.
152 “More than any artist”: McDonough, Shakey, 364.
152 “His rhythm playing”: ibid.
152 “We wound up”: ibid.
152–53 “I don’t think”: ibid.
153 “This song put me”: Neil Young, liner notes of Decade, 1977.
153 “The only time”: “Bob Dylan: Not Like a Rolling Stone Interview,” Spin,
December 1985.

Chapter 11. Grievous Angels

154 “Engineers and technicians”: “Keith Richards and Gram Parsons 1971: Sum-
mer in Exile,” https://selvedgeyard.com/2009/08/13/keith-richards-gram
-parsons-1971-summer-in-exile-villa-nellcote/.
154 “The three of us”: ibid.
155 “Mick, I think”: ibid.
155 “A lot of Exile”: from the film Stones in Exile, dir. Stephen Kijak, Eagle Rock
Entertainment, 2010.
155 “[Producer] Jimmy Miller was not”: Danny Dutch, “The Stones and the True
Story of Exile on Main St,” https://www.dannydutch.com/post/the-stones-
and-the-true-story-of-exile-on-main-st.
155 “I got this call”: Meyer, Twenty Thousand Roads, 357.
155 “We went down”: Doggett, Are You Ready for the Country, 149.
155 “I was the jaded”: Frank Thompson, “The Grievous Angel,” https://allthings
wildlyconsidered.blogspot.com/2009/10/grievous-angel-people-have-never
-heard.html.
156 “It really turned my head around”: Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 282.
156 “It’s always intriguing”: ibid., 279.
156 “I thought he was”: Fong-Torres, Hickory Wind, 169.
156 “One day his voice”: ibid., 173.
156 “When I looked”: from Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel, dir. Gandulf Hennig.
156 “I was the audience”: Meyer, Twenty Thousand Roads, 372.
 Notes 271

157 “When I heard GP”: Doggett, Are You Ready for the Country, 179.
157 “We had the most”: Hennig, Gram Parsons: Fallen Angel.
157 “After that we decided”: Einarson, Desperados, 244.
157 “Gram’s first solo record”: Meyer, Twenty Thousand Roads, 388.
157 “That was the first time”: Einarson, Desperados, 246.
158 “Planet Waves was”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 357.
158 “The tour was”: Helm and Davis, This Wheel’s on Fire, 241.
158 “[Joni] turned left”: Hoskyns, Hotel California, 243.
159 “The Byrds invented”: Einarson and Hillman, Hot Burritos, 277.
159 “The Eagles’ music”: Doggett, Are You Ready for the Country, 156.
159 “Lester Flatt had”: Einarson and Hillman, Hot Burritos, 311.
159 “They were the horniest”: Hoskyns, Hotel California, 225.
160 “Man, can you change”: The Big Lebowski, dir. Joel Coen, Working Title
Productions, 1998.
160 “I was raised”: Patoski, Willie Nelson, 217.
160 “I knew I only had”: Streissguth, Outlaw, 106.
161 “You’d look out there”: ibid., 135.
161 “I also took Guy Clark”: Clifford and Hillis, Pickers and Poets, 27.
161–63 “Some people don’t know”: ibid., 29.
163 “Townes is the first”: ibid., 43.
163 “I see myself”: ibid., 48.
163 “It was about four”: ibid., 41.
163 “In the early years”: Doug Freeman, “We Were from Texas,” Austin Chronicle,
July 19, 2013.
163 “I went to bed”: Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting, 446.
163–64 “It was fucking Nashville”: Freeman, “We Were from Texas.”
164 “I finally had”: McGee, Steve Earle, 35.
164 “Skinny kid”: ibid., 54.
164 “Townes Van Zandt”: ibid., 56.
164 “It all revolved around Guy”: ibid.
165 “Phil, if this happens”: Fong-Torres, Hickory Wind, 191.
165 “G.P. was a struggle”: Meyer, Twenty Thousand Roads, 413.
165 “Our singing came together”: ibid., 414.
165–66 “The things I like”: Hoskyns, Hotel California, 208.
166 “They had one song”: Meyer, Twenty Thousand Roads, 419.
166 “They had a band”: ibid., 419.
167 “I have a feeling”: ibid., 438.

Chapter 12. The Red-Headed Icon

168 “A little shy”: Patoski, Willie Nelson, 224.
168 “Willie ended up”: ibid., 224.
169 “Texans have known”: Joe Nick Patoski, “Redneck Rock in Austin,” Mother
Jones, June 1976.
169 “To us”: Jennings and Kay, Waylon, 223.
169–70 “Waylon was selling”: Streissguth, Outlaw, 189.
272 Notes

170 “You couldn’t find”: ibid., 192.

170 “He taught you”: Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America, 139.
170 “Tangled up in blue”: ibid.
170–71 “I was just trying”: ibid., 140.
171 “I went home”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 368.
171 “He was at his best”: ibid., 371.
171 “He knew as soon as he heard”: Heylin, Recording Sessions, 105.
173 “We were all”: Shelton, No Direction Home, 450.
173 “The filming happened”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 425.
173 “Naturally, I was playing”: ibid.
174 “From a myth-making”: Jon Landau, “Dylan the Mythmaker Makes It Real,”
Rolling Stone, January 15, 1976.
174 “Hey, I hear”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 336.
174 “When Gram died”: Meyer, Twenty Thousand Roads, 440.
174–75 “The first time”: Fiona Sturges, “How We Met: Emmylou Harris and Rodney
Crowell,” New York Times, February 24, 2013.
175 “It was great”: ibid.
175 “After Gram died”: Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 289.
175 “It wasn’t my musicianship”: Streissguth, Outlaw, 177.
175 “I’m influenced”: Nash, Behind Closed Doors, 207.
176 “I’d never heard”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 402.
176 “Those first royalty checks”: John Milward, “Levon Helm: Midnight Ram-
bler,” No Depression, November–December 2007.
176 “After The Band”: Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide, 399.
176 “Levon was influenced”: Simon, Truth, Lies and Hearsay, 250.
177 “I was determined”: Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide, 264.
177 “We were drifting”: ibid., 258.
177 “I walked out”: ibid., 325.
177 “That was the first”: ibid.
177–78 “Rick’s bass was”: Simon, Truth, Lies and Hearsay, 247.
178 “I remember the first night”: Streissguth, Outlaw, 235.
178 “We had a lot”: Patoski, Willie Nelson, 337.
179 “These tunes”: Ariel Swartley, Stardust album review, Rolling Stone, June 29,
1978.
179 “I’m a melody man”: Nelson and Ritz, It’s a Long Story, 323.
179 “He’s more special”: Patoski, Willie Nelson, 464.
179 “I wasn’t trying”: Nelson and Ritz, It’s a Long Story, 252.
179 “All the artists”: ibid., 327.

Chapter 13. Punks, God, and Urbane Cowboys

180 “He was out”: “Jerry Lee Lewis, Arrested at the Gates of Graceland,” https://www
.elvis.com.au/presley/jerry-lee-lewis-arrested-at-the-gates-of-graceland
.shtml.
180 “Tell ’em to lock”: ibid.
 Notes 273

181 “I went over my whole life”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 456.
181 “Looked to me”: Streissguth, Outlaws, 218.
181 “I missed more personal engagements”: ibid., 177.
181–82 “Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three”: Hilburn, Johnny Cash, 478.
182 “I felt he was a little”: ibid., 478.
182 “Every December”: Editors of Rolling Stone, Cash, 211.
182 “I was influenced”: Doggett, Are You Ready for the Country,197.
182–83 “I was stunned”: Cash, Composed, 70.
183 “When I was having”: Editors of Rolling Stone, Cash, 163.
183 “I couldn’t believe”: Chapman, They Came to Nashville, 260.
183 “Rodney and Rose had moved”: ibid., 75.
183–84 “There was a little”: ibid., 78.
184 “Sid [Vicious] got hit”: St. John, Hardcore Troubadour, 83.
184 “We didn’t think”: Joe Ely and Alex Rawls, “Texas Calling,” Oxford American,
Winter 2004.
184 “Some of the places”: ibid.
184 “It was such a full onslaught”: ibid.
185 “I look to John”: Lynne Margolis, “Dwight Yoakam: Outlier Country,” Ameri-
can Songwriter, March–April 2017.
185 “It was shocking”: McLeese, Dwight Yoakam, 14.
185 “There were maybe thirty”: ibid., 60.
185 “There was a period”: Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide, 359.
186 “T-Bone was the first”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 405.
186 “I had no idea”: ibid., 502.
186–87 “I told you”: Wilentz, Bob Dylan in America, 178.
187 “I had been waiting”: Tim Adams, “Why Richard Thompson Is Keeping the
Faith,” Guardian, April 10, 2010.
187 “To stop using [his] brain”: ibid.
187 “At some point”: Zollo, More Songwriters on Songwriting, 604.
187 “In his playing”: Boyd, White Bicycles, 167.
188 “Those were the best”: Darcy Frey, “Lucinda Williams Is in Pain,” New York
Times Magazine, September 14, 1997.
189 “It’s American roots music”: Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 286.
189 “When we met”: Andy Langer, “A Long Way from Church Street but Still
in Sync,” New York Times, May 25, 2013.
190 “We had some quality”: Huffman, John Prine, 125.
192 “At the time”: author interview, Woodstock, NY, August 22, 2007.
192 “Since we loved that music”: Barry Mazor, “Where the Twang Finally Met:
How New York’s Short-Lived Country Craze Spawned the Stars of Ameri-
cana,” Journal of Country Music 24, 2004.
192 “Doc Pomus lived”: author interview, New York, NY, August 21, 1999.
192 “In the same way”: Mazor, “Where the Twang Finally Met.”
192 “Like many people”: ibid.
192 “We got out of the Lone Star”: author interview, Woodstock, NY, July 21, 2007.
274 Notes

193 “Her heart”: ibid.

193 “Yeah, you might say”: John Milward, “Free and Kindred Spirits,” Los Angeles
Times, March 31, 2000.
193 “I liked Buddy”: Mazor, “Where the Twang Finally Met.”
193 “It was weird enough”: Milward, “Free and Kindred Spirits.”

Chapter 14. Hard-Core Troubadours

194 “Hey, go to the jukebox”: Kienzle, Grand Tour, 186.
194 “He was Elvis”: McGee, Steve Earle, 73.
194 “These people”: ibid., 73.
195 “I was way into Creedence”: John Milward, “As in His Song, He’s Been to
Hell and Back,” New York Times, April 14, 1996.
195 “The turning point”: Holly Gleason, “Paying Tribute to His Mentors, Steve
Earle Still Stands Tall,” Vineyard Gazette, July 4, 2019.
195 “I thought Steve”: St. John, Hardcore Troubadour, 124.
196 “I wanted to write”: Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 311.
196 “These instruments”: author telephone interview, New York, NY, June 22,
1987.
197 “My role models”: Michael Hall, “You Can’t Go Home Again,” Texas Monthly,
January 1999.
197 “Artists who are”: McGee, Steve Earle, 88.
198 “I was around”: McLeese, Dwight Yoakam, 63.
198 “We were definitely”: ibid., 46.
198 “We made our records”: ibid., 186.
198 “I was really inspired”: ibid., 33.
198 “I didn’t know”: Craig Shelburne, “Dwight Yoakam Shares Stories of Buck
Owens,” CMT News, October 2007.
199 “You’re always a little nervous”: author interview, New York, NY, April 22,
1996.
199 “John was the most”: Adrian Deevoy, “Whitney Houston Made Me a Mil-
lion,” Mail Online (UK), May 18, 2019.
199 “We used to get sloshed together”: ibid.
199 “I’d get up in the morning”: Jem Asway, “Nick Lowe on ‘Peace, Love and
Understanding,’ His Former Father-in-Law Johnny Cash, and Being an Indie
Icon,” Variety, June 28, 2017.
199 “During one show”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 588.
199 “We’d all been”: Paul Zollo, “From the Archives: Tom Petty on Bob Dylan,”
American Songwriter, October 2017.
199 “The times I remember”: ibid.
199 “He knows a million songs”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 583.
200 “It was one of those things”: ibid., 612.
200 “We talked about people”: ibid.
200 “I didn’t know anybody”: Harris, Bluegrass, Newgrass, 323.
201 “We phoned up Bob”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 625.
 Notes 275

201 “We’d go to Bob’s house”: ibid., 626.

201 “I had never”: Mat Snow, “The Mojo Interview,” Mojo, January 2010.
201 “The recording studio”: Heylin, Behind the Shades, 629.
201–2
“So I come to Nashville”: Chapman, They Came to Nashville, 72.
202 “I jumped in my car”: Holly George-Warren, liner notes to Complete Trio
Sessions, Rhino, 2016.
202 “We wanted to bring”: Sisters in Country: Dolly, Linda and Emmylou, BBC
Four, 2016.
202 “Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou”: ibid.
202 “[Trio] hit Nashville like a bomb”: ibid.
202 “It got into a power play”: Chet Flippo, “The Unsinkable Dolly Parton,”
Rolling Stone, December 1980.
204 “I remember the first time”: McDonough, Shakey, 586.
204 “Back off”: ibid., 292.
204 “The real sense of the album”: ibid., 662.
204 “Guitar Town made us”: McGee, Steve Earle, 106.
205 “He described”: Cash, Composed, 105.
205 “He said the album”: McGee, Steve Earle, 145.
207 “I started traveling”: ibid., 119.
207 “We’re just musicians”: John Milward, “Midnight Rambler,” No Depression,
November–December 2007.
208 “You don’t have to”: St. John, Hardcore Troubadour, 180.
208 “For me, going to see Dr. Nick”: ibid., 200.
208 “I felt like [Steve] was lost”: McGee, Steve Earle, 121.
208 “I remember being”: ibid.
208 “Their songwriting craft”: Robert Palmer, “A Hard Road, Seldom Taken,”
New York Times, June 7, 1987.
208 “Towards the end”: John Milward, “As in His Song, He’s Been to Hell and
Back,” New York Times, April 14, 1996.
208 “I must be bad”: St. John, Hardcore Troubadour, 285.
209 “There’s probably women”: ibid., 312.
209 “I said, ‘Do not make’”: Ben Sisario, “The Album Steve Earle Never Wanted
to Make: A Tribute to His Son,” New York Times, December 29, 2020.

Chapter 15. The “Birth” of Americana

210 “My grandmother”: Paul Sexton, “Alison Krauss Interview for the Release
of Essential Alison Krauss,” Telegraph (London), July 22, 2009.
210 “I was really”: ibid.
210–11 “At one point”: Rooney, In It for the Long Run, 166.
211 “I discovered bluegrass”: Alec Wilkinson, “The Ghostly One: How Gillian
Welch and David Rawlings Rediscovered Country Music,” New Yorker, Sep-
tember 12, 2004.
211 “I looked at my record collection”: ibid.
276 Notes

212 “Do you want”: Zack Harold, “How Gillian Welch Created an Americana
Touchstone in ‘Revival,’” Rolling Stone, November 9, 2016.
212 “Had a deep”: Billy Altman, “A Music Maker Happy to Be Just a Conduit,”
New York Times, February 24, 2002.
212 “Settings that could”: Powers quoted in Harold, “How Gillian Welch Created.”
212 “Concentrate only”: ibid.
212 “One of the things”: Wilkinson, “Ghostly One.”
212 “We’d all been involved”: Kot, Wilco, 48.
212–13 “Most of these bands”: ibid., 99.
213 “We were conscious”: ibid., 45.
213 “It just seemed like”: Lee Zimmerman, “Interview with Jay Farrar,” No De-
pression, January 2017.
213 “It wasn’t like”: Jason Fine, “Heart of the Country,” Option, November–De-
cember 1993.
213 “If there was a class”: Jim Beaugez, “Uncle Tupelo’s ‘Anodyne’ at 25: An Oral
History,” Rolling Stone, October 5, 2018.
213 “I don’t remember”: Tweedy, Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back), 261.
214 “A small, little”: Beaugez, “Uncle Tupelo’s ‘Anodyne.’”
214 “A friend of mine”: ibid.
214 “Uncle Tupelo’s influence”: Kot, Wilco, 102.
214 “They were the right band”: ibid., 100.
215 “I started”: Ryan Adams, “Faithless Street,” on Faithless Street, Outpost, 1998.
215 “By listening”: O’Keefe and Oestreich, Waiting to Derail, 126.
215 “We ended up playing”: Menconi, Ryan Adams, 124.
216 “Everyone’s sort of”: Jim Ridley, “Brothers in Arms: Talking with Joel and
Ethan Coen About ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?,’” Nashville Scene, May 22,
2000.
216 “Your voice”: Daniel Menaker, “Arts in America: A Film Score Odyssey Down
a Quirky Country Road,” New York Times, November 30, 2000.
216 “It was much more terrifying”: interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, NPR,
January 13, 2010.
216 “[Burnett] said he understood”: Sachs, T Bone Burnett, 133.
216 “To me it just sounded”: Altman, “Music Maker.”
216 “Johnny was one”: Editors of Rolling Stone, Cash, 215.
216 “I probably would have died”: author interview, New York, NY, March 20,
1996.
217 “We were all”: McGee, Steve Earle, 180.
217 “Everybody can hear”: ibid., 179.
217 “Out of the corner”: St. John, Hardcore Troubadour, 308.
217 “It’s a modern”: John Milward, “As in His Song, He’s Been to Hell and Back,”
New York Times, Aril 14, 1996.
217–18 “You’re kind of a new person”: ibid.
 Notes 277

218 “When I got to the studio”: Editors of Rolling Stone, Cash, 215.
218 “Steve Earle and I”: Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 285.
218 “The album turns”: Gavin Martin, review of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,
New Musical Express, November 2011.
219 “I want to be successful”: Geoffrey Himes, “Lyle Lovett, Feel Like Going
Home,” No Depression, September 2003.
219 “He started doing”: Hardy, Deeper Blue, 249.
219 “He hadn’t shaved”: Matt Hanks, “Townes Van Zandt—A Gentleman and a
Shaman,” No Depression, January 1999.
220 “I booked this gig”: Hardy, Deeper Blue, 266.
220 “What records”: “The Bono Vox Interview,” Hot Press, July 8, 1984.
220 “There was a lot”: Damien Love, “Bob Dylan Special: The Complete Tell Tale
Signs,” https://www.uncut.co.uk/features/bob-dylan-tell-tale-signs-special-
mark-howard-37964/.
220 “My years with Eno”: Lanois, Soul Mining, 159.
221 “Robbie and the Band”: ibid., 86.
221 “The simplicity”: ibid., 133.
221 “The multiple strings”: ibid., 136.
221 “These great Canadian singers”: ibid., 138.
221 “The first thing”: John Milward, “Free and Kindred Spirits,” Los Angeles
Times, March 31, 2000.
223 “There is a similarity”: Lanois, Soul Mining, 198.
223 “Bob considers”: Maymudes and Maymudes, Another Side of Bob Dylan, 220.
223 “I had just had”: Chuck Reece, “Rosanne Cash: The Bitter Southerner In-
terview,” Bitter Southerner, November 2018.
223 “Somebody wrote a review”: ibid.
224 “It was different”: Michael Roberts, “Vintage Q&A with Rodney Crowell,”
Westword, March 4, 2008.
224 “As a songwriter”: ibid.
224 “John would give me”: Colvin, Diamond in the Rough, 101.
224 “For about a year”: author interview, New York, NY, August 21, 1999.
224 “Emmylou was like the Queen”: Milward, “Free and Kindred Spirits.”
224 “I think nine out of ten”: author interview, New York, NY, August 21, 1999.
225 “It wasn’t a slow decline”: McLeese, Dwight Yoakam, 149.
225 “It was a matter”: Reece, “Rosanne Cash.”
225 “There was this whole”: Colvin, Diamond in the Rough, 139.
226 “You’ll come to my house”: Editors of Rolling Stone, Cash, 47.
226 “I can’t see nothing”: Hilburn, Johnny Cash, 550.
227 “Rick came along”: ibid., 555.
227 “He was laughing”: Editors of Rolling Stone, Cash, 216.
227 “I told him”: Hilburn, Johnny Cash, 603.
227 “As we sang”: Cash, Composed, 29.
278 Notes

Chapter 16. Across the Great Divide

228 “We do not want”: “The Dixie Chicks Backlash Begins,” https://www.history
.com/this-day-in-history/the-dixie-chicks-backlash-begins.
230 “Summerteeth was”: Tweedy, Let’s Go, 160.
230 “It was a great record”: Kot, Wilco, 164.
231 “I was completely”: “Sir Elton Meets Ryan Adams at the ‘Crossroads,” http://
www.mtv.com/news/1453256/sir-elton-meets-ryan-adams-at-the-crossroads/.
231 “The kid’s so prolific”: Neil Strauss, “A Future So Bright, He’s Already Seen
It,” New York Times, June 17, 2001.
231 “My behavior”: Anthony DeCurtis, “Ryan Adams Didn’t Die. Now the Work
Begins,” New York Times, June 17, 2007.
232 “The part of me”: Dave Simpson, “Ryan Adams: Things Got Broken and I
Couldn’t Fix Them,” Guardian, September 22, 2011.
232 “For years we were”: liner notes, It’s Great to Be Alive by Drive-By Truckers,
ATO Records, 2015.
232 “I would hear”: Monica Collier, “David and Patterson Hood: Something
Special,” Times Daily (Florence, AL), June 18, 2017.
232 “This chubby kid”: Dwight Garner, “Jason Isbell, Unloaded,” New York Times
Magazine, May 31, 2013.
234 “Some people get drunk”: ibid.
234 “That isn’t going to work”: ibid.
234 “It was nice”: Jason P. Woodbury, “Jason Isbell on His ‘Bromance’ with Ryan
Adams and Powerful Recovery Album, Southeastern,” Phoenix New Times,
September 18, 2013.
234 “I don’t remember”: Garner, “Jason Isbell, Unloaded.”
234 “‘Is there any chance’”: Martin Kielty, “How Robert Plant Won a Grammy in
the ‘Alison Krauss Category,’” https://ultimateclassicrock.com/robert-plant-
alison-krauss-grammy/.
234 “[T-Bone] knows”: Blair Jackson, “Robert Plant and Alison Krauss: An Un-
likely But Fruitful Musical Union,” Mix, December 1, 2007.
235 “It was very scary”: Piers Hernu, “The World According to Alison Krauss,”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1378857/Alison-Krauss-
Robert-Plant-asked-wrong-him.html.
235 “We toured a little”: John Milward, “Free and Kindred Spirits,” Los Angeles
Times, March 31, 2000.
235 “There was a small”: ibid.
235 “It wasn’t like anything”: Hight, Right by Her Roots, 50.
235 “If I’m working”: Milward, “Free and Kindred Spirits.”
235 “I didn’t have enough songs”: ibid.
236 “Buddy Miller”: Brian Mansfield, “Robert Plant Loves to Dig in America’s
Rich Musical Soil,” USA Today, September 14, 2010.
236 “Robert was one”: Andy Langer, “The Patty Griffin Effect,” Texas Monthly,
April 2013.
 Notes 279

236 “Any way you slice it”: ibid.

236 “The hospitality”: Jonathan Ringen, “Robert Plant, Party of One (With
Friends, Too),” New York Times, October 11, 2017.
236 “It was my own inability”: ibid.
236–37 “It was one of the most rewarding”: ibid.
237 “There are times”: Jeff Giles, “Larry Campbell Shares Memories of Bob
Dylan, Phil Lesh, Hot Tuna, Paul Simon and More,” Ultimate Classic Rock,
May 14, 2015.
237 “At the end of the show”: ibid.
237 “It was a very amorphous”: author interview, Woodstock, NY, July 21, 2007.
238 “When he got sick”: author telephone interview, Woodstock, NY, July 29,
2007.
238 “He and I started”: John Milward, “Midnight Rambler,” No Depression, No-
vember–December 2007.
238 “I remember early on”: author interview, Woodstock, NY, July 21, 2007.
238 “Levon is ground zero”: ibid.
239 “Playing the Ryman”: Milward, “Midnight Rambler.”
239 “It was like I had died”: author telephone interview, Woodstock, NY, July 25,
2007.
239 “We were still playing”: Giles, “Larry Campbell Shares Memories.”
239 “I got a message”: from the film Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The
Band, dir. Daniel Roher, Magnolia, 2020.

Chapter 17. Yesterday and Today

240 “When I first arrived”: “The Marty Stuart Collection,” http://www.martystuart
.com/Collection.htm.
241 “My father was”: Chuck Dauphin, “Mavis Staples Talks Las Vegas Shooting
& Reasserting Herself as a Voice for Change,” Billboard, October 10, 2017.
241 “She said, ‘That’s’”: “The Marty Stuart Collection.”
241 “I said, ‘Susie’”: ibid.
241 “We had this”: Steven Hyden, “Drive-By Truckers Carry On,” Grantland,
March 4, 2014.
241 “If we want”: Patterson Hood, “The South’s Heritage Is So Much More Than
a Flag,” New York Times, July 9, 2015.
242 “I have a feeling”: Tyler Coates, “How Drive-By Truckers’ American Band
Reclaimed Rock for the Anti-Trump South,” Esquire, September 2016.
242 “I definitely don’t”: Rachel Bailey, “Jason Isbell: That New Southern Style,”
Flagpole, November 2012.
242–43 “If I picture”: Chuck Klosterman, “Wilco: Interview with Jeff Tweedy,” Spin,
July 2004.
243 “At the beginning”: Lindsay Zoladz, “The Playlist: Jeff Tweedy, ‘Gwendolyn,’”
New York Times, October 9, 2020.
243 “I have a great life”: ibid.
280 Notes

243 “As they got to our door”: Tweedy, Let’s Go, 263.
243 “Tell Mavis”: ibid.
245 “Yeah”: ibid.
245 “I felt like”: Dauphin, “Mavis Staples Talks Las Vegas.”
245 “I offered a few ideas”: Jeff Tamarkin, “Cash and Cooder on Cash,” Carnegie
Hall Playbill, 2019–2020 season.
245 “He took our confidence”: Aaron Aye, “The Story,” Harp, June 2007.
245 “After years of trying”: Nick Duerden, “Close-up: Singer Brandi Carlile,”
Independent, April 20, 2008.
246–47 “I grew up appreciating”: Andy Langer, “Singer, Songwriter, Prodigy, All at
19,” New York Times, May 7, 2001.
247 “It all came from”: Harris, Bluegrass, Newgrass. 320.
247 “I just want”: ibid., 321.
247 “My existence is political”: Natalie Weiner, “Country Music Is a Man’s World.
The Highwomen Want to Change That,” New York Times, September 3, 2019.
248 “In many ways I don’t”: Colvin, Diamond in the Rough, 173.
248 “When we played Town Hall”: ibid., 188.
248 “I knew when Guy”: Amanda Petrusich, “Steve Earle’s Winsome Tribute to
Guy Clark,” New Yorker, March 25, 2019.
249 “We have a rich”: Fiona Sturges, “How We Met: Emmylou & Rodney Crow-
ell,” New York Times, February 24, 2013.
249 “Our conversation hasn’t changed”: ibid.
249 “I had my 15 minutes”: Henry Carrigan, “Sharing the Stage: Rodney Crowell
and Vince Gill on Four Decades of Friendship,” No Depression, August 2019.
249 “She told the most”: Crowell, Chinaberry Sidewalks, 259.
249 “Country music”: Dawidoff, In the Country of Country, 287.
249 “I had to get”: D. Jones, Wichita Lineman, 195.
250 “Ragtime blues”: Bob Dylan, Nobel Lecture, https://www.nobelprize.org/
prizes/literature/2016/dylan/lecture/.
250 “‘Ebb Tide’ has”: Dylan, Chronicles: Volume 1, 81.
251 “Sometime after dinner”: Melinda Newman, “10 Revelations from Bruce
Springsteen’s New Memoir,” New Jersey Monthly, October 2016.
251 “You and me, pal”: Bob Dylan interview by Bill Flanagan, https://www.bob
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 INDEX

9 to 5 (film), 188 Ackerman, Paul, 44

“9 to 5” (song), 188 Acomba, David, 29
“16 Days,” 215 Acony, 232
33⅓ rpm long-playing albums, 18 “Act Naturally,” 61, 90, 92
40 Watt, 241 Acuff, Roy, 35, 47, 164; music career, 11, 23,
45 rpm records, 18 148–149, 161, 249; music publishing , 22,
78 rpm records, 18 26, 46, 58, 249; on Hank Williams, 21, 31
400 Unit, 234, 242 Acuff-Rose Publishing, 22, 26, 46, 58
“$1,000 Wedding,” 166 Adam’s House Cat, 214, 232
1989, 242 Adams, Ryan, 192, 215, 231–232, 234, 242
Addington, Sara. See Carter, Maybelle
A&M Records, 59, 121, 123 After the Goldrush, 152
A&R director, 26 “After the Goldrush,” 202
A.M., 230 Agee, James, 212
Abbey Road, 79 Ahearn, Brian, 178, 183
ABC (TV network), 135 “Ain’t Living Long Like This,” 183
ABC Records, 65 Alabama (band), 195
“Above and Beyond,” 61, 205 Alabama Rhythm Boys, 20
“Absolutely Sweet Marie,” 185 Alden, Grant, 214
AC/DC, 225 Alderson, Dick, 95
Academy of Country Music, 202 Alexander, Arthur, 76, 122, 220
Academy of Music, 176 Alger, Pat, 190
290 Index
Alison Krauss and Union Station, 214 “Angels Rejoiced Last Night,” 165
“All Along the Watchtower,” 112, 133–134, 199 Animals, 78, 80
All Fall Down, 248 Anka, Paul, 142–143
“All I Have to Do Is Dream,” 46 “Anna (Go to Him),” 76
“All I Really Want to Do,” 77, 80, 88 Anodyne, 214
“All I Want,” 140 Another Side of Bob Dylan, 77, 80
“All My Tears,” 221, 235 “Another Time, Another Place,” 105
“All Shook Up,” 50 Anthology of American Folk Music, 18–19, 109,
All Things Considered (radio show), 247 212
All Things Must Pass, 115, 133 Anti (record label), 226
Allen, Steve, 49 Apple (record label), 140
Allen, Terry, 249 “Are There Any More Real Cowboys,” 204
Allman Brothers Band, 242 “Are You Tired of Me, Darling?,” 218
Almanac House, 15 Ariola, 183
Almanac Singers, 15 Arkansas Traveler, 214
Almost Blue, 198 Armadillo World Headquarters, 175
“Alone and Forsaken,” 29 Armadillo, 160
Alpha Band, 174 Armstrong, Louis, 13, 135, 179
“Already Gone,” 159 Arnold, Eddy, 65, 161, 169
Altamont Speedway, 125 Arnold, James, 85
alt-country, 1, 187, 213–214, 230–231, 243 Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts (TV show), 62
Altman, Robert, 219 Arts and Crafts (house), 108
Alvin, Dave, 4, 185 Asch, Moses, 19
“Always Late with Your Kisses,” 28 Ash Grove, 59–60, 68
“Amarillo,” 175 Asher, Peter, 140, 151
American Aquarium, 213 “Ashes & Fire,” 231
American Band, 241 Ashley, Clarence, 19
American Beauty, 147 Asleep at the Wheel, 192
“American Folk Records” (Billboard chart), Asylum Records, 149–152, 157–158
17 At My Window, 190
“American Pie,” 53, 150 At San Quentin, 136
American Recording, 226 At the Ryman, 128
American Sound Studios, 122 Atkins, Chet, 30, 45–46, 59, 62, 144, 168; gui-
Americana Awards, 5, 235 tar playing, 18–19, 47, 76
Americana Grammy, 114 Atlanta Pop Fest, 160
Americana Music Association, 1, 4–5, 215, Atlantic Records, 26, 138, 143–144, 149, 152,
235 168
Americana Music Honours, 5 Austin City Limits (TV show), 4
Americanafest, 4–5 Austin Opera House, 178
Americanrama Festival of Music, 243 Autry, Gene, 13, 22, 73, 114
Amherst College, 67, 189 Avett Brothers, 246
Anderson Fair Retail Restaurant, 219 Avin, David, 4
Anderson, Liz, 90 Axton, Mae, 62
Anderson, Pete, 185, 195, 198, 225
Anderson, Roberta Joan. See Mitchell, Joni Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (book), 190
Andy Griffith Show, The (TV show), 79 “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” (song), 70
“Angel of Montgomery,” 143 “Baby Let’s Play House,” 92
Angel with a Lariat, 197 “Back in the U.S.A.,” 151
 Index 291
Back Where I Came From (radio show), 15 Bennett, Richard, 194–195, 205, 217
Baez, Joan, 16; and Bob Dylan, 71–72, 77, 84, Bennett, Tony, 26–27, 31, 198
173; music career, 57, 68, 84, 173, 189, 229, Bentley, Bill, 198
248 Bergen Pines (hospital), 192
Bailesses, 25 Berklee College of Music, 211
Bakersfield style, 117, 198, 225 Berle, Milton, 49
Ball, Earl, 115 Berlin, Irving, 15, 179
“Ballad of a Thin Man,” 98 Berline, Byron, 147, 165
Ballad of Buster Scruggs, The (film), 250 Bernall, Carlos, 115
“Ballad of Easy Rider, The,” 164 Bernstein, Ellen, 171
“Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest,” 111 Bernstein, Joel, 204
“Ballad of Ira Hayes, The,” 127 Berry, Chuck, 52, 83, 143, 184, 187; music
Balladeers, 56 career, 41, 43–44, 46, 50–51; others adopt
“Bamba, La,” 84, 185 songs of, 32, 54, 61, 76, 145, 150–151
Band, The (album), 129–130, 176 “Best of My Love,” 159
Band, The (band), 170, 173, 185, 234, 237; Beverly Hillbillies, The (TV show), 136
music career, 108–112, 117–120, 129–130, Bible in the Lyrics of Bob Dylan (book), 112
132–133, 158, 176–178, 207; music careers Big Bopper, 54
after breakup, 207, 214, 221, 238–239 Big House (venue), 47, 49
Band of Joy, 236 Big Lebowski, The (film), 160
“Banks of the Royal Canal,” 109 Big Pink, 109–111, 118, 129, 132, 173, 177
Barham, BJ, 213 “Big River,” 135, 252
Bartley, Jack, 157 Big Sky Music, 133
Barton, Dorothy, 47 Big Star, 214
Basement Tapes, The, 111, 114, 173 Bikel, Theodore, 72, 84
Basie, Count, 68 Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, 14,
Bays, Coy, 16 67, 147, 234
Beach Boys, 80, 101 Bill Woods and the Orange Blossom Play-
Bearsville (music operation), 133, 190, 207 boys, 60
“Beast in Me, The,” 199, 226 Billboard (magazine), 17, 22, 26–27, 44, 200
Beastie Boys, 226 Binder, Steve, 105
Beatles, the, 58, 80, 95, 98–99, 104, 127, 140, Biograph, 199
182, 194–195; country influences on, 2, 73, “Bird on a Wire,” 226
90; music career, 74, 76–79, 87–88, 97, 110, Bishop’s Pub, 164
138; others adopt songs of, 92, 150, 175, Bittan, Roy, 218
217, 238 Bitter End (venue), 143–144
Beaulieu, Priscilla, 51 Black, Bill, 36
Beck, Jim, 28 Black, Norman, 217
Beckett, Barry, 186, 205 “Black Dog,” 236
Bee Gees, 123, 188 Black Lives Matter, 252
Being There, 230 Blackboard (club), 89
Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, 200 Blackstock, Peter, 214
Belafonte, Harry, 57 Blackwell, Otis, 50
Bell, William, 114 Blade, Brian, 220
“Bells of Rhymney, The,” 82, 87 Blake, Norman, 134, 148, 214, 216
Belmont Church, 219 Blasters, 185, 198
“Belshazzar,” 109 Bleetstein, Rob, 1
Bennett, Jay, 230 Blonde on Blonde, 2, 4, 95–96, 111
292 Index
Blood, Sweat, and Tears, 138 Bowen, Jimmy, 195, 205
Blood on the Tracks, 170–171, 173, 175, 187 Bowery Ballroom (venue), 237
Bloodshot Records, 212–213, 231 Bowie, David, 173
Bloomfield, Mike, 84–86, 93, 171 Box Tops, the, 122
“Blowin’ in the Wind,” 70–72, 83, 186–187, “Boy Named Sue, A,” 136
237 Boyd, Joe, 84, 111, 132, 137, 187
Blue, 140–141, 158, 246 Boyd, Pattie, 133
“Blue Canadian Rockies,” 114 Bradley, Jerry, 170
“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” 169 Bradley, Owen, 43, 63, 92, 197
Blue Grass Boys, 13–14, 67–68, 148, 234 Bragg, Billy, 111, 230
“Blue Moon of Kentucky,” 2, 36–37 Bramlett, Bonnie, 120
Blue Pony, 235 Brand, Oscar, 72
Blue Ridge Rangers, The, 148 “Branded Man,” 90
“Blue Skies,” 179 “Brass Buttons,” 166, 174
Blue Sky Boys, 45 Brass Ring (club), 125
“Blue Suede Shoes,” 32, 37, 39, 46, 50, 79 Brecht, Bertolt, 70
Blue Velvet (film), 201 Brenston, Jackie, 34
Blue Velvet Band, 189 Brian Auger and the Trinity with Julie
“Blue Yodel,” 10–11 Driscoll, 111
“Blue Yodel No. 4 (California Blues),” 11, 135 Bridges, Jeff, 160
“Blue Yodel No. 8 (Muleskinner Blues),” 11 Briggs, Gary, 230
“Blueberry Wine,” 174 Brill Building, 141
Bluebird Café, 184 Bring the Family, 204
“Blues: Origins and Offshoots” (workshop), Bringing It All Back Home (album), 83
84 Bringing It All Back Home (film), 250
Blues Brothers, The (film), 128 Brinkley, John Romulus, 16
BoDeans (band), 212 Brinsley, Schwarz, 132
Bo Diddley (Ellas McDaniel), 41, 43, 147 Bristol sessions, 7–8, 10, 52, 148
Bo Diddley beat, 43 Broadside (magazine), 77
Bob Dylan, 68 “Broken Things,” 235
Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, 14, 41 Broken Things, 235
Bodyguard, The (film), 145 Brooklyn Paramount (venue), 50
Boggs, Doc, 19 Brooks, Garth, 190, 225
Bonham, John, 236 Brooks, Harvey, 94
Bono, 201, 220 Broonzy, Big Bill, 35, 37, 57
Bonoff, Karla, 151 “Brown Sugar,” 117
Booker T. and the MGs, 178 Brown, Charles, 47
Boone Creek, 182 Brown, J. W., 47, 50
“Boots of Spanish Leather,” 77 Brown, Myra. See Lewis, Myra
Born in the U.S.A., 195–196 Brown, Roy, 36
Born to Run, 174, 196 Brown, Tom, 166
“Born Under a Bad Sign,” 114 Brown, Tony, 194–197, 205, 207
Bossmen (book), 189 Browne, Jackson, 137; on Joni Mitchell, 104,
Boston College, 57 138; recording career, 149–150, 157, 159, 165;
“Both Sides Now,” 101, 103, 135–136 songwriting, 103, 142
“Bottle Let Me Down, The,” 174 “Brown-Eyed Girl,” 217
Bourgeois, Dominique (later Robertson), “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man,” 32, 54
108, 158 Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry, 57
 Index 293
Bruised Orange, 190 Cactus Garden (venue), 28
Brunswick Records, 43 Cadence Records, 46
Bryant, Boudleaux, 46, 58, 166 Café Au Go Go, 103
Bryant, Felice, 46, 58, 166 Café Wha, 66
Buchanan High School, 249 Cahoots, 176
Buck, Peter, 214 Cale, J. J., 120
Buckaroos, 60, 92, 136 “California Dreaming,” 82
Buckley, Tim, 195 “California Stars,” 230
Buddha Records, 143 “Calling You,” 22
Buddy and Jim Show, The (radio show), 4, Calvin, Jim, 219
248 Camp Copperhead, 248
Buddy and Julie Miller, 235 Campbell, Bonnie (later Owens), 60, 90
Buddy Holly and the Crickets, 43, 46, 54, 74 Campbell, Glen, 105, 136, 250
Buddy Miller Band, 4, 190, 192, 225 Campbell, Larry, 4, 190, 192–193, 225, 235,
Buena Vista Social Club, The, 117 237–239, 248
Buffalo Springfield, 82, 101, 120, 138 Campbell, Mike, 199, 237
Bukowski, Charles, 188 “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” 87
Burke, Solomon, 63, 83, 161, 236 “Candy Man,” 95
Burnett, Chester. See Howlin’ Wolf Cannery Ballroom, 5
Burnett, T-Bone: performing career, 173–174, Cannon, Gus, 41, 56, 200
186; record producing career , 212, 215– Cannon’s Jug Stompers, 41
216, 234–236, 245, 247–248 Cantwell, David, 89
“Burning Love,” 105 Cap Rock, Joshua Tree National Park, 167
Burns, Ken, 249 Capitol Records, 61, 89, 118, 170
Burns, Malcolm, 221 Captain, The, 5
Burrell, Gretchen. See Parsons, Gretchen Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, 218
Burris, Roy Edward, 126 “Caravan,” 5
Burrito Brothers. See Flying Burrito Broth- Cardinals (country rock group), 231
ers Careless Love (book), 53
Burrito Deluxe, 125 “Carey,” 140
Burritos. See Flying Burrito Brothers Carlile, Brandi, 245–247
Burton, James, 90, 93, 106, 137, 156, 175, 182, Carmichael, Hoagy, 178–179
187, 194, 212 Carnegie Hall, 56, 70, 170, 227, 237, 242, 245
“Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow,” 7, Carol Burnett Show, The (TV show), 211
202 Carolina Chocolate Drops, 236, 247
Bush, George W., 229 Carpenter, Mary Chapin, 204
Bush, Sam, 147, 210 Carr, Charles, 31
Butterfield, Paul, 84–85, 93, 133, 177 Carr, James, 123
Buttrey, Kenneth, 95–96, 111, 134, 152 Carson, Fiddlin’ John, 8
“By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” 105 Carter, A. P. (Alvin Pleasant), 7–10, 11–12, 16,
By the Way I Forgive You, 246 17, 189, 213, 241
“Bye Bye Love,” 46, 65 Carter, Anita, 17, 27, 36–37, 59
Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, 108 Carter, Carlene, 199
Byrds, the, 90, 97, 121, 125–126, 133, 143, 149, Carter, Chip, 128
173, 235, 240–241; music career, 56, 79–80, Carter, Eck, 10, 27, 107
82, 88, 90, 100–101, 111, 113–115, 117, 120, Carter, Helen, 17, 36
164–165; musical influence of, 2, 84, 87, 94, Carter, Hurricane, 176
124, 159, 198–199, 213 Carter, Jimmy, 128
294 Index
Carter, June, 29–30, 106, 213; music career, Cayamo Cruise (sea music festival), 248
17, 25, 59, 78, 135; relationships with hus- CBS (TV network), 136
band and children, 52, 98, 107, 136, 182, Chad Mitchell Trio, 56
199, 216, 218, 227 Chambers, Kasey, 5
Carter, Maybelle, 17, 149; Bristol sessions, “Change Is Gonna Come, A,” 83
7–10; and Carter scratch, 8; guitar play- “Chantilly Lace,” 54
ing style, 60, 67; life after original Carter Chapman, Marshall, 251
Family, 18, 19, 29, 36, 59, 107, 135, 148; Charles, Bobby, 109, 133
performing with daughters, 16; songwrit- Charles, Ray, 47, 57, 63, 65, 76, 144 , 178, 179
ing, 11 Charlie Daniels Band, 229
Carter, Rubin “Hurricane,” 176 Charlie McCoy and the Escorts, 95
Carter, Sara, 12; affair with Coy Bays, 16–17; “Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy,” 25
Bristol sessions, 7–10; life after original Cheek to Cheek Lounge, 207
Carter Family, 17 Chepel, Don, 106
Carter Family, 2, 12–13, 19, 37, 39, 57, 67, 83, Cher, 88
124, 227, 246, 252; Bristol sessions, 7–10, Cherokee Cowboys, 44
31; dissolution, 17; others adopt songs of, Cherry Bombs, 194
15–16, 70, 109, 202, 213, 216, 218, 239, 246; Chesney, Kenny, 2
radio broadcasting, 16, 18; songwriting, 11 Chess, Leonard, 41
Carter scratch, 8, 18 Chess Records, 34, 41
Carter Sisters, 17–19, 27, 36 “Chest Fever,” 112, 118
Carter Sisters, The, and Mother Maybelle Chicago (band), 151
and Chet Atkins and His Famous Guitar, Chicks, the (formerly Dixie Chicks),
18 228–229
Cartwright, Ben, 112 Chiffons, 141
Caruso, Enrico, 11 “Chimes of Freedom,” 80, 243
“Case of You, A,” 140, 246 Chris Barber Jazz Band, 74
“Casey Jones,” 147 Christgau, Robert, 135, 151
Cash, Cindy, 182 “Christian Life, The,” 114
Cash, Jack, 39 Christian, Charlie, 68
Cash, Johnny (J. R.), 13, 22, 25, 51, 161, 163, 210, “Christine’s Song,” 121
216, 240–241, 247, 249; American Record- Chronicles: Volume One (book), 250
ings, 226–227, 246; domestic life, 183, 199; “Chug-a-Lug,” 90
and Bob Dylan, 71, 78, 86–87, 98–99, 109, “Cinnamon Girl,” 140
134–135; early life, 16–17, 39; and Merle “Circle Game, The,” 103
Haggard, 60, 89; music career at Co- Circle Game, The, 103
lumbia, 59–60, 106–107, 135–136, 181, 218; Ciro’s (venue), 82
music career at Sun, 32, 37, 41, 49–50, 190; City Limits (venue), 192
others adopt songs of, 205, 213–214, 245, “City of New Orleans,” 143
252; romances, 52; White House visit, 127 City Winery (venue), 5
Cash, June Carter. See Carter, June Clapton, Eric, 34, 74, 84, 119, 135, 177
Cash, Rosanne, 59, 183, 194, 204–205, 208, Clark, Brandy, 5
223–225, 227, 245 Clark, Gene, 56, 79–80, 82, 100, 235
Cashdollar, Cindy, 192, 220, 231 Clark, Guy, 2, 175, 179, 183, 190, 195, 205, 250;
“cat music,” 17 music career, 161, 163–164, 197, 219–220,
Catch My Soul (stage play), 104 248–249
“Cathy’s Clown,” 58 Clark, Roy, 136
Cavern Club, 76 Clark, Susanna, 163–164, 179, 183
 Index 295
Clash, 184, 188 Colvin & Earle, 248
clave rhythm, 43 Comes a Time, 187
Clearwater Concert, 229 Conan O’Brien Show, The (TV show), 238
Clement, Jack “Cowboy,” 32, 47, 49, 53, 59, conjunto, 223
161, 190, 210 “Constant Craving,” 198
Clement, Peter, 130 Continental Club, 236
Clements, Vasser, 147–148 Contraband Love, 5
Clinch Mountain Boys, 182 Cooder, Ry, 68, 117, 204, 230, 245
Cline, Nels, 243 Cooke, Sam, 83
Cline, Patsy, 59, 62–63, 65, 93, 175, 197, 247 Cooley, Mike, 232, 234
Clinton, Hillary, 128 Copacabana (club), 27–28
Clooney, George, 216 Copperhead Road, 205, 207–208
Clooney, Rosemary, 27 Corazon, El, 217
“Clothes Line Saga,” 110 “Cosmic American Music,” Gram Parsons
Cloud Nine, 200 and, 122
Club 47, 56–57, 189 Costello, Elvis, 212, 238
Clyde’s, 155 Cotton, Elizabeth, 142, 200
Coal Miner’s Daughter (film), 207 Cotton Boll (tavern), 37
Coasters (band), 76 Counting Crows, 212
“Coat of Many Colors,” 145, 174 “Country Blues,” 12
Cobain, Kurt, 234 “Country Honk,” 124
“Cocaine,” 160 Country Music, U.S.A. (book), 127
Cochran, Eddie, 62, 76, 184 Country Music Association, 107, 127
Cochran, Hank, 62–63 Country Music Hall of Fame, 121
Coconut Grove, FL, 101 “Country Pie,” 134
Coe, David Allan, 143 country rock, 137, 142, 151, 185, 198, 215, 231,
Coen, Ethan, 215–216 251, 235; and the Byrds, 2, 111, 159, 240; and
Coen, Joel, 215 Gram Parsons, 120, 122–123, 156, 194
Coen Brothers, 160, 215, 250 Country Store, Laurel Canyon, 137
“Coffee Blues,” 82 Court and Spark, 158
Coffee Creek (band), 214 “Courtesy of the Red, White, & Blue (the
Cohen, John, 60 Angry American),” 229
Cohen, Leonard, 103–104, 112, 158–159, 226, Covid-19 pandemic, 242–243, 247, 250
242–243 “Cowgirl in the Sand,” 140
“Cold Cold Heart,” 26–28, 31 “Coyote,” 246
“Cold Irons Bound,” 220 “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood),”
Cole, Nat King, 17 110
Colley, Mike, 214 “Crazy,” 62–63, 93, 151, 160
Collins, Judy, 66, 82, 88, 103, 118, 138, 155, 197 “Crazy Arms,” 44, 47, 49
Collins, Tommy, 60 “Crazy Blues,” 8
Colter, Jessi, 169–170 Crazy Horse, 140
Coltrane, John, 87, 100, 113 Cream, 119
Columbia Records, 26, 28, 46, 50, 83, 168– Creedence Clearwater Revival, 148, 160, 195,
169, 179, 204, 224; and the Byrds, 80, 114– 198, 215, 229
115; and Bob Dylan, 68, 71, 95, 112, 171, 173; “Crescent City Blues,” 41
Nashville Division, 183; studios, 95, 106 Crickets. See Buddy Holly and the Crickets
Columbine Music, 161 Crooked Still (band), 246
Colvin, Shawn, 6, 193, 223, 225, 236, 248 Crosby, Bing, 26
296 Index
Crosby, David, 56, 104, 137–138, 147; and the Deep Are the Roots, 148
Byrds, 56, 79–80, 100–101, 113, 165 Def Jam Records, 226
Crosby, Stills & Nash, 104, 138 Def Leppard, 225
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, 138, 144–145, Delany and Bonnie, 120
152 Delhart, Vernon, 11
Crowe, J. D., 200 “Delia’s Gone,” 226
Crowell, J. W., 164 Deliverance (band), 171
Crowell, Rodney, 2, 202, 225; music career, Delmore Brothers, 45, 182
164, 174–175, 181–183, 194, 204–205, 224, DeMent, Iris, 4, 218–219
248–249 Democratic Convention, 132
Crudup, Arthur “Big Boy,” 2, 35–36, 135 Denny, Sandy, 111
“Cry Like a Baby,” 122 Densen, Jesse Lee, 35
“Crying,” 197 Derek and the Dominos, 135
“Crying in the Chapel,” 87 Derry Down, 114
“Crystal Palace,” 61 Des Barres, Pamela, 121, 125
CS&N (Crosby, Stills & Nash), 104, 138 Desire, 175–176
CSN&Y (Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young), 138, “Desolation Row,” 87, 94–95
144–145, 152 Desperado, 151
Cuban Missile Crisis, 70 “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” 164
Cunningham, Fay, 58 “Devil’s Right Hand, The,” 184, 208
Curtis, Sonny, 184 Diamond, Neil, 205
“Diamond in the Rough,” 224
Dan Penn and the Pallbearers, 122 Diamonds and Dirt, 205, 224
“Dang Me,” 44, 90 “Diamonds and Rust,” 173
Daniels, Charlie, 134, 229 Dick, Charlie, 63
Danko, Rick, 232, 234; in The Band, 112, Dickey, James, 188
119–120, 129, 131–132, 176–177, 207; in the Dickinson, Jim, 220
Hawks, 94, 97, 108, 110 Dickson, Jim, 79–80, 125
“Danko/Manual,” 232 Diddley, Bo (Ellas McDaniel), 41, 43, 147
Darin, Bobby, 56, 79 “Different Drum,” 141
“Dark End of the Street,” 122–123 Dill, Danny, 119
Darkness on the Edge of Town, 196 Dillard, Douglas, 79
Darlings, The, 79 Dillard & Clark, 79, 124
Dartmouth College, 189 Dillards, 79
David Rawlings Machine, 232 Dillon, Bobby. See Dylan, Bob
Davis, Jimmie, 26, 127 Dils, the, 185
Davis, Sammy, Jr., 129 Dion and the Belmonts, 54
Day, Doris, 72, 80 Dire Straits, 186
Day After Tomorrow, 248 Dirt Farmer, 238
“Daydream,” 82 Dirty South, The, 232
dBpm Records, 232 Disneyland, 142
DEA, 170 Divine Miss M, The, 143
Dead Man Walking (film), 217 “Dixie Chicken,” 228
Dean, Jimmy, 62 Dixie Chicks (now the Chicks), 228–229
“Dear Landlord,” 112 Dixie Hummingbirds, 239
“Death of Jimmie Rodgers, The,” 13 “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” 122–123
Decca Records, 43, 63, 92 “Do You Believe in Magic?,” 82
Decoration Day, 232 “Doctor My Eyes,” 150
 Index 297
Dodger Stadium, 158 70–72, 76–80, 82–87; the Hawks as back-
Doghouse Roses, 248 ing band, 94, 96–97, 108; on Buddy Holly,
Dolly! (TV show), 202 43; Nobel Prize, 43, 250; others adopt
Domino, Fats, 47, 49–50, 80 songs of, 71, 78, 80, 82, 88, 110–111, 114, 119,
Don Quixote (book), 250 133, 144, 164, 185, 218, 221; rock era period,
“Don’t Be Cruel,” 50, 105 93–99, 108–111, 117–118, 134, 171, 173–176,
“Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With 186–187, 199–201, 220, 223, 237, 250–251;
Lovin’ on Your Mind),” 93 on Frank Sinatra, 250; singers/musicians
“Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” 178 influenced by, 2, 103–104, 143, 147, 153, 188,
Don’t Look Back (film), 83–84 196, 205; on Mavis Staples, 243, 245; on
“Donald and Lydia,” 143–144 Hank Williams, 26
Donegan, Lonnie, 74 Dylan, Jesse, 99
Donovan, 84 Dylan, Sara (née Lownds), 98, 108, 173, 186
Doobie Brothers, 165
Doors, 114 E Street Band, 218, 229
Doug Sahm and Band, 144 Eagles, 124, 149–152, 157, 159–160, 183–184,
Dougherty, Sara. See Carter, Sara 188, 231, 251
Douglas, Jerry, 182, 210, 214 Earl of Old Town (saloon), 142
“Down Along the Cove,” 112 Earle, Justin Towne, 209
“Down by the River,” 140 Earle, Steve, 1–2, 8, 97, 161, 181, 189, 197–198,
“Down from the Mountain” (tour), 236 204, 214–215, 218, 220–221, 235–236, 239–
“Down to You,” 246 240; music career, 164, 184, 195–196, 205,
Downtown Church, 236 207–209, 216–217, 229, 248–249; on Gram
Downtown Presbyterian Church, 5 Parsons, 157; on Jimmie Rodgers, 11
Dr. John (Malcolm John Rebennack Jr.), 177, Earth Opera (band), 147
192, 238 Eat the Document (film), 108
Dr. Nick. See Nichopoulos, Dr. George Eaton, J. M. Van, 41
Drake, Guy, 127 “Ebb Tide,” 250
Drake, Pete, 112, 115, 134 Ed Sullivan Show, The (TV show), 76, 161
Drifters, 46, 141 Egan, Walter, 124
“Drifter’s Escape, The,” 111 “Eight Miles High,” 100
Drifting Cowboys, 20, 22, 29 El Corazon, 217
Dripping Springs Reunion, 161 Electric, 236
Drive-By Truckers, 4–5, 214, 232, 234, 238, Electric Dirt, 239
241–242, 250 Electric Light Orchestra, 200
Drummond, Tim, 152 Elektra, 103
“Dueling Banjos,” 171 Elektra/Asylum Records, 152
Duluth National Guard Armory, 54 Elite Hotel, 175
“Dumb Blonde,” 144 Ellington, Duke, 5, 23, 118, 178
Duncan, Tommy, 14 Elliot, Cass, 104
Dust Bowl Ballads, 15 Elliot, Ramblin’ Jack, 173
Dwarf Music, 110, 120, 133 “Ellis Unit One,” 217–218
Dylan, Bob (Bobby Zimmerman), 4, 8, 16, Ely, Joe, 161, 184, 249
90, 100, 107, 123, 156–157, 175, 181, 211–212, Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band, 181
216, 225, 232; The Band as backing band, Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers,
112, 117–118, 120, 130, 132–133, 158, 170, 173, 128
177–178, 207; on the Beatles, 77; early life, “Enemy Fire,” 231
54–55, 57; folk music period, 65–66, 68, Eno, Brian, 220
298 Index
Entertainment Weekly, 229 “Fever,” 50
Epic Records, 195 Few Small Repairs, A, 225, 248
Epitaph Records, 226 Fifth Dimension, 105, 138
Eraserhead (film), 197 Fifth Peg (venue), 142
Ertegun, Ahmet, 144, 149 “Fightin’ Side of Me, The,” 128
Escovado, Alejandro, 185 Fillmore (venue), 126
Estes, Sleepy John, 12, 19 Fillmore East (venue), 236
Ethridge, Chris, 120–124, 156, 165, 178 “Fire and Rain,” 107, 140
“Evangeline,” 178, 202 Fisher, Margaret, 166
Evans, Jim, 18 Five Easy Pieces (film), 128
“Eve of Destruction,” 82 Flack, Roberta, 123
Even Dozen Jazz Band, 82, 147 Flatt, Lester, 14, 117, 147, 159, 181, 210, 240–241
Everly, Ike, 46 Flatt & Scruggs, 147
Everly, Margaret, 46 Fleck, Bela, 67, 147, 190, 200, 210
Everly, Phil, 46, 182 Fleetwood Mac, 184
Everly Brothers, 92, 121, 156, 165, 184, 235; Fletcher, Bobbi, 14
music career, 45–46, 52, 58, 182, 221; others Fletcher, Bud, 14
adopt songs of, 5, 65, 71, 166, 221 Flight of the Cosmic Hippo, 200
“Every Grain of Sand,” 221 Flint, Hughie, 84
“Every Little Thing,” 78 Flippo, Chet, 144
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, 140 Fly, 228
Everybody’s Rockin’, 204 “Flyin’ Shoes,” 163
“Everybody’s Talking,” 66 Flying Burrito Brothers, 142, 150, 155–156,
“Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby,” 79 179, 213, 230; music career, 121–126, 159,
“Everyday,” 43 165–166
“Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Flying Machine (band), 140
Tonight,” 215 Fogarty, John, 148, 198, 215
Exile on Main Street, 154 Foley, Blaze, 225
Exit 0, 207 Foley, Red, 17, 31
folk rock, 92, 104, 111, 132, 214, 230; and the
Fab Faux, 238 Byrds, 2, 80, 82, 88, 97, 101, 198, 215; and
Fabulous Superlatives, 4, 208, 226, 240 Bob Dylan, 86
Fairport Convention, 111, 132, 137, 187 Folk Songs of the Hills, 17
Faithfull, Marianne, 97 Folklore Center, 66
Faithless Street, 215 Folkways Records, 19, 189, 212
“Fallen Angel,” 221 Folsom Prison, Folsom, CA, 182
Fallen Angels, 157 “Folsom Prison Blues,” 41, 59–60, 134, 245
“Far from Me,” 144 Fonda, Jane, 188
Farm Aid (benefit concert), 196 Fontana, D. J., 105
Farrar, Jay, 213–214 “Foolin’ Around,” 61
“Farther Along,” 165 “For Everyman,” 159
Fast Folk scene, 224 “For the Good Times,” 123
Fat City, 225 For the Roses, 141, 150, 157–158
FBI, 55 “For What It’s Worth,” 82, 101
“Fearless Heart,” 195 Forbet, Steve, 143
“Feelin’ Good,” 239 Ford, Tennessee Ernie, 17
Feels Like Home, 202 Foreigner, 212
Felder, Don, 159 Forerunner Music, 190
Fender, Freddie, 223 Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, 94
 Index 299
“Forever Young,” 158, 238 “Gentle on My Mind,” 105
Fort Bragg, NC, 126 Gentry, Bobbie, 110
“Four Strong Winds,” 109 George, Lowell, 151
“Four Walls,” 62 George Jones Rhythm Ranch, 181
“Fourth Time Around,” 96 “Georgia on My Mind,” 179
“Frankie and Albert,” 220 Gerde’s Folk City (club), 68, 77
Franklin, Aretha, 123, 141 Gershwin, George, 87, 178
Franklin, Paul, 205 Gershwin, Ira, 178
“Free Man in Paris,” 158 “Get Back,” 76
Free Trade Hall, 98 “Getting Acquainted Waltz, The,” 45
Freed, Allen, 50 Gibson, Bob, 57
Freedom, 204 Gibson, Don, 65
Freewheeling Bob Dylan, The, 70, 77 Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers, 11
“Freight Train,” 142 Giddens, Rhiannon, 247
FreshGrass LLC, 215 Gilded Palace of Sin, The, 122–123, 136, 156, 166
Frey, Glenn, 124, 137, 141–142, 150, 159, 183, 251 Gill, Vince, 194–195, 197, 205, 251
“Friend of the Devil,” 147 Gilley, Mickey, 47, 181–188
Fritts, Donnie, 161 Gilley’s (honky-tonk), 188
Frizzell, Lefty, 13, 28, 45, 89, 119, 142 Gilmore, Jimmy Dale, 236
“From a Distance,” 197 Ginsberg, Allen, 109, 173
From Elvis in Memphis, 122 “Girl from the North Country,” 70, 135
Frost, Robert, 163 Girl Happy (film), 87
“Fugitive, The,” 90 Give Up the Ghost, 246
Full Moon Resort, 248 Gladwell, Malcolm, 74
Fuller, Blind Boy, 70, 220 Glaser, Tompall, 169
Fuller, Jesse, 57, 68 Gleason, Ralph, 27–28
“Funny How Time Slips Away,” 62, 123, 160 Glover, Tony, 86–87
Furay, Ritchie, 120 “God Bless America,” 15, 128
Fusco, Vinny, 71 Goffin, Gerry, 73, 101, 141
Fusion (magazine), 135 “Goin’ Back,” 101
“Goin’ Back to Harlem,” 221
Gabor, Zsa Zsa, 87 “Goin’ Down the Road,” 109
Gabriel, Peter, 221 “Goin’ to Acapulca,” 110
Gallo, Joey, 176 “Going to California,” 236
“Galveston,” 105 Gold, 231
Galvin, Bill, 1 Gold, Julie, 197
“Games People Play,” 95 “Gold Watch and Chain,” 16
Garcia, David, 56 Goldberg, Barry, 85
Garcia, Jerry, 145, 147, 200 Golden Chords, 55
Gaslight Café (venue), 66, 71, 82, 220 “Good as I Have Been to You,” 220
Gaslight South (club), 101 “Good Neighbor Get-Together,” 16
Gaslighter, 229 “Good Ol’ Boy,” 195
Gate of Horn (venue), 56–57 “Good Rockin’ Tonight,” 17, 36
“Gates of Eden,” 83 “Good Year for the Roses, A,” 106
Gavin Report (radio tip sheet), 1 “Goodbye,” 209, 217, 221
“Gee Whiz,” 122 “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” 250
Geffen, David, 138, 149–150, 152, 157–158, 204 Goodman, Steve, 142–143, 190
Geffen Records, 202, 219 “Goodnight Irene,” 55
Geller, Larry, 87 Gordon, Robert, 219
300 Index
Gordy, Emory, Jr., 195 Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., 198
Gorme, Edie, 251 Gumby Show, The (TV show), 121
“Got Me a Woman,” 239 Gunn, Elston. See Dylan, Bob
Goth rock, 211 Gunsmoke (TV show), 55
GP, 156–157, 165–166 Guralnick, Peter, 53
Graceland, 180, 208 Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers, 12
Graham, Bill, 177 Guthrie, Arlo, 143, 173
Grammy Awards, 1–2 Guthrie, Marjorie, 15
Grand Ole Opry (stage/radio/TV show), 16, Guthrie, Woody, 8, 127, 143, 252; and Bob
18, 29, 37, 39, 52, 62, 65, 92, 145; backstage Dylan, 57, 66, 68, 70, 83, 87, 111–112, 114,
jam sessions, 68; history, 23, 25; Nixon 117–118, 174, 229–230, 237; music career,
visit, 127; singers/musicians on, 14, 19, 25, 14–16, 83, 87, 143; others adopt songs of,
27, 45, 92, 114 133, 148, 196
Grand Theft Parsons (film), 240 Guy, 248
Grant, Marshall, 41
Grappelli, Stephane, 147 Haggard, Merle, 92, 105, 117, 124, 156, 163, 192;
Grateful Dawg (film), 200 on Lefty Frizzell, 28; music career, 60,
Grateful Dead, 4, 145, 147, 151, 200, 231 89–90, 126–128, 135–136, 226; others adopt
Great American Songbook, 178, 250 songs of, 107, 114, 147–148, 174, 214; on
“Great Balls of Fire,” 50 Gram Parsons, 156
“Great Speckled Bird, The,” 11 “Hail to the Chief,” 128
Great White Wonder, 132–133 “Half as Much,” 27, 29, 65
Green, Al, 123 Hammerstein, Oscar, 87
Green, Debbie, 56–57 Hammond, John, 68, 70
Green, Lloyd, 114, 190 Hammond, John, Jr., 82, 93
Green, Peter, 34 Hancock, Herbie, 158
Green Acres (TV show), 136 “Handle with Care,” 201
Green on Red (band), 185 Haney, Will, 47
“Green Onions,” 178 Hank Williams: The Show He Never Gave
Greenbriar Boys, 67–68, 192 (film), 29
Greene, Richard, 147, 165, 189 Hank Williams Museum, 31
Greenfield, Manny, 57 Hank Wilson’s Back, 147
Grey’s Anatomy (TV show), 245 Hanna, Jeff, 149
Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, 66 Hanseroth, Phil, 245
Grievous Angel, 166, 174 Hanseroth, Tim, 245
Griffin, Julie. See Miller, Julie Happy Woman Blues, 189
Griffin, Patty, 228, 235–236 Hard Day’s Night, A (film), 78, 80
Griffin, Sid, 156–157, 185 “Hard Day’s Night, A” (song), 78, 80
Griffith, Nanci, 161, 189–190, 195–197, 205, “Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall, A,” 70–71, 77, 86
218, 220 Hardcore Troubadour (radio show), 248
Grimson, Jon, 1 “Hard-Core Troubadour” (song), 209, 217
Grisman, David, 56, 82, 147, 165, 200 Hardin, Glen D., 156
Grossman, Albert, 57, 107, 207; as manager Hardin, Tim, 195
of Bob Dylan, 71, 84–85, 93–94, 98, 107– Harris, Emmylou, 5, 205, 215, 220, 224–225,
112, 119–120, 133, 190 229, 236, 238–239, 245; background and
Grossman, Stefan, 82 harmonized singing, 164, 176, 178, 217–218,
GTOs (Girls Together Outrageously), 121 231, 235, 248; collaboration with Gram
Guitar Town, 195–196, 204–205, 207, 217, 240 Parsons, 155–157, 159, 165–166, 174, 240; on
 Index 301
her music career, 2, 16; solo music career, Herald, John, 67, 190, 192
128, 175, 181–184, 194–195, 212, 221, 249; Trio “Here, There, and Everywhere,” 175
membership, 201–202 “Here Comes the Rain Baby,” 161, 223
Harris, Richard, 105 “Here You Come Again,” 188
Harrison, George, 73–74, 76, 78, 79–80, 87, Herman, Vince, 200
115, 133, 200–201 Hester, Carolyn, 68, 71
Hart, Lorenz, 87 “Hey, Good Lookin’,” 27–29, 65
Hartford, John, 105 “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” 103
Harum Scarum (film), 87 “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” 187
Harvard University, 84, 114, 189 “Hey Jude,” 140
Harvest, 153 “Hey Mr. Spaceman,” 101
Harvest Moon, 204 “Hey Porter,” 41
Hawkins, Dale, 90, 108 “Hey Schoolgirl,” 104
Hawkins, Ronnie, 93–94, 119, 130, 176–177 Hiatt, John, 183, 204–205
Hawks, the, 93, 96–97, 108, 112, 158 “Hickory Wind,” 114–115
Hays, Lee, 55 Hidalgo, David, 237
Hazelwood, Lee, 114–115 High Desert Memorial Hospital, 166
“He Stopped Loving Her Today,” 181, 194 Highway 61 Revisited, 86–87, 93, 95, 171
“He Was a Friend of Mine,” 101 Highwaymen (country group), 247
“Heart Like a Wheel,” 151 Highwaymen (folk group), 56
“Heart of Gold,” 152–153 Highwomen, 247
“Heartaches by the Number,” 26, 61 “Hillbilly Highway,” 195
“Heartbreak Hotel,” 32, 44, 62 “Hillbilly Records” (Billboard chart), 17
Heartbreaker, 231 Hillman, Chris, 56, 215; in the Byrds, 79, 101,
Heartbreakers, 237 113, 115, 240; and Gram Parsons, 120–125,
Heartstrings (TV show), 249 155, 159
Heathens Homecoming (concert), 241 Hi-Lo-Ha, 108, 133
Heatworn Highways (film), 250 Hissing of Summer Lawn, The, 158
Hee Haw (TV show), 136 Holiday, Billie, 68
Hee Haw Honeys, 136 Holiday Inn, 53
Hejira, 158 Holley, Charles Harden. See Holly, Buddy
“Hello in There,” 143 Hollies, 104
“Hello Walls,” 93, 160 Holly, Buddy, 50, 65, 78, 85, 252; inspiration
Hell’s Angels, 125 on later recording artists, 73–74, 134, 184,
Helm, Amy, 237–239 250; music career, 43–44, 46, 52–54; others
Helm, Levon: in the Hawks , 83, 93–94, 97, adopt songs of, 76, 147, 151
110; in The Band, 112, 118–120, 129–130, 132, Hollywood Bowl, 94
158, 176, 178, 207; music career after The Home, 228
Band breakup , 214, 237–239 Homer, 215
Helms, Don, 20, 25, 31, 62 “Homeward Bound,” 95
Help! (film), 87, 90 “Honey Don’t,” 79
“Help Me,” 158 Honeysuckle Rose (film), 169
“Help Me Make It Through the Night,” 106 Honky Tonk Heroes, 169
Henby, Natalie, 247 “Honky Tonk Man,” 198
Hendrix, Jimi, 133, 221 “Honky Tonk Women,” 117, 124
Henley, Don, 137, 141–142, 150, 152, 159 “Honky Tonkin’,” 22
Henry, Joe, 5, 212 Hood, David, 232, 238, 241
Hentoff, Nat, 77 Hood, Patterson, 214, 232, 238, 241–242
302 Index
Hooker, John Lee, 55, 109, 220 “I Fought the Law,” 184
Hopkins, Lightnin’, 66–67, 161, 163 “I Got You Babe,” 82
Horton, Billie Jean (née Jones), 30, 52 “I Have a Dream,” 72
Horton, Johnny, 52, 198 “I Laid My Mother Away,” 23
Hot Band, 175, 181–182, 194–195 “I Love You a Thousand Ways,” 28
“Hot Burrito #1,” 122 “I Never Cared for You,” 223
“Hot Burrito #2,” 122 “I Saw the Light,” 22, 31
Hotel California, 159 “I Shall Be Released,” 110, 207
“Hound Dog,” 32 “I Shall Sing No Song That Is Not a Coun-
House, Son, 12, 84 try Song,” 92
“House of the Rising Sun,” 78, 80 “I Still Miss Someone,” 227
House Un-American Activities Commit- “I Threw It All Away,” 133–135
tee, 55 “I Walk the Line,” 41, 71, 109, 135, 245
Houston, Whitney, 145 “I Want to Be with You Always,” 28
How to Play the 5-String Banjo (book), 56, 67 “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” 77, 79
Howard, Harland, 26, 61–63, 144 “I Want You,” 96
“Howlin’ at the Moon,” 251 “I Will Always Love You,” 145, 151
Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Burnett), 11, 34–35, “I Wonder If You Feel the Way I Do,” 14
41, 55, 220 “I Wonder Why,” 54
Hudson, Garth: in The Band, 112, 118–120, “I’d Have You Anytime,” 133
129–130, 132, 177–178, 207; in the Hawks, Iggy Pop, 213
94, 108–110, 214 “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” 112
Hunter, Ivory Joe, 66 “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better,” 82
Hunter, Meredith, 125 I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive (album),
Hunter, Robert, 4, 145 248
Huntington’s Disease, 66 I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive (book),
“Hurricane,” 176 248
“Hurt,” 227 “I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive”
Hurt, Mississippi John, 12, 19, 82, 142 (song), 30–31, 248
Husky, Roy, Jr., 217 “I’ll Take You There,” 232, 238
Hymns of the 49th Parallel, 198 “I’m a Honky Tonky Girl,” 92
“I’m a Man,” 43
“I Am a Pilgrim,” 114, 148 “I’m in the Mood,” 109
“I Am a Rock,” 95 “I’m Looking Through You,” 217
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (film), 250 “I’m Not Lisa,” 170
“I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.,” 184
You,” 27, 151 “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” 98, 123
“I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You,” 65 I’m With Her, 246–247
“I Couldn’t Believe It Was True,” 169 “I’m Your Puppet,” 122
“I Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried,” 205 “I’m Your Toy” (“Hot Burrito #1”), 122
“I Don’t Care,” 61 I’ve Got That Old Feeling, 211
“I Don’t Care If the Sun Don’t Shine,” 36 Ian and Sylvia, 111
“I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party,” 78 “Ida Red,” 41
“I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” 111 “Idiot Wind,” 171
“I Fall to Pieces,” 26, 63, 155 “If I Could Only Fly,” 226
I Feel Alright, 217 “If I Could Only Win Your Love,” 45, 174
“I Feel Fine,” 87–88 “If I Needed Someone,” 87
“I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” 109 “If I Needed You,” 163, 219
 Index 303
“If We Make It Through December,” 90 Jagger, Mick, 115, 124–125, 154–155
“If We Were Vampires,” 4 “Jailhouse Rock,” 105
“If You Gotta Go, Go Now,” 84 “Jamaica, Say You Will,” 103, 150, 159
“If You’ve Got the Money (I’ve Got the “Jambalaya (On the Bayou),” 30, 175, 189
Time),” 28 James, Etta, 208
Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm, 34 James, Skip, 12
“In Dreams,” 201 James and Bobby Purify, 122
“In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” 242 Jan and Dean, 150
“In My Hour of Darkness,” 166 Jarosz, Sarah, 246
In Spite of Ourselves (album), 219 Jason and the Scorchers, 185
“In Spite of Ourselves” (song), 4, 219 Jayhawks (band), 1, 212–213
“In the Ghetto,” 105 Jefferson, Blind Lemon, 19, 32, 68
“In the Jailhouse Now,” 18, 216 Jefferson Airplane, 101, 125
“In the Pines,” 234 Jenkins, Gordon, 40
Infamous Angel, 219 Jennings, Waylon, 62, 161, 182; music career,
Ingénue, 197–198 54, 59, 144, 161, 168–170, 183, 208, 247
Inside Llewyn Davis (film), 250 Jennings, Will, 205
Interiors, 223–224 “Jenny Jenny,” 55
International Hotel, Las Vegas, 106 Jester Lounge, 161
International Submarine Band, 113–115 “Jesus Is Just Alright,” 165
Into the Purple Valley, 117 Jet Set. See Byrds, the
“Invitation to the Blues,” 44 Jim Kweskin Jug Band, 68, 85, 92
Irwin, Ken, 211 Jimenez, Flaco, 223
Isbell, Jason, 4, 232, 234, 241–242 Jimmie Rodgers Entertainers, 10
“Isis,” 174 Jimmy Dean and His Texas Wildcats, 62
“Islands in the Stream,” 188 “Joey,” 176
“It Ain’t Me Babe,” 78, 82 John, Elton, 158, 231, 245–246
“It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That “John Hardy Was a Desperate Man,” 15,
Swing),” 23 200
“It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, 84
Cry,” 86–87 “John Walker’s Blues,” 229
“It Was a Very Good Year,” 179 John Wesley Harding, 2, 111–112, 118, 132–133,
“It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk 186
Angels,” 12 Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three, 181
“It’ll Be Me,” 49 Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two, 41
“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” 86 Johnny Cash Show, The (TV show), 135–136,
“It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” 70, 152
83, 199 Johns, Ethan, 231
“It’s So Easy,” 43 Johns, Glyn, 150–151, 231
“It’s Such a Small World,” 205 Johnson, Blind Willie, 19
Ives, Burl, 15 Johnson, Bob, 36
Johnson, Robert, 11, 12, 53, 70, 117, 189, 220
J. D. Crowe and the New South, 200 Johnson, Tommy, 12
J. W. Crowell and the Rhythmaires, 164 Johnston, Bob, 86, 95, 111–112, 134–135
Jack of Diamonds, 165 “Joke, The,” 246
“Jack-A-Roe,” 200 “Jolene,” 145
Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, 34 Jones, Billie Jean. See Williams, Billie Jean
Jackson, Wanda, 61 Jones, Booker T., 178–179
304 Index
Jones, George, 54, 59, 105, 117, 124, 175, 192, KFVD, 14
194, 199, 202; George Jones Rhythm Kiah, Amythyst, 247
Ranch, 181; music career, 44–45, 93, 106, Kilgore, Merle, 23, 25
128, 181; others adopt songs of, 114, 121, King, Albert, 114, 186
148, 215 King, B. B., 11, 34, 62, 84, 187
Jones, Kennedy, 46 King, Carole, 73, 101, 141
Jones, Mickey, 97 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 72
Jones, Nora, 158 “King Harvest (Has Surely Come),” 130
Jones, Shirley, 106 King of America, 212
Joni 75: A Birthday Celebration (TV show), 246 “King of Broken Hearts,” 224
Joplin, Janis, 107, 123, 133, 160 King of Comedy, The (film), 186
Jordan, Louis, 17 King of the Delta Blues Singers, 70
“Joshua Gone Barbados,” 109 “King of the Road,” 44, 62
Joshua Tree, 221 Kings of Rhythm, 34
Joshua Tree National Park, 166–167, 240 King’s Record Shop, 205, 223
Joshua Tree State Park, 124 Kingston Trio, 56–57, 71
Judd, Wynonna, 197 Kizart, Willie, 34
“Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” 135 Klein, Larry, 225
“Just Dropped In (To See What Condition Kleinow, “Sneaky” Pete, 121, 123
My Condition Was In),” 161 Knitters, 185
“Just Out of Reach,” 63 “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” 168
Knopfler, Mark, 186, 205
“Kaddish” (poem), 173 Knox, Buddy, 43
Kaiserkeller (venue), 74 Knox Berry Farm, 182
Kate Smith Show (radio show), 27 Koerner, John, 55
“Kathleen,” 163 Kooper, Al, 84–86, 94–96, 103, 119
Kaufman, Phil, 157, 165–167, 207 Kortchmar, Danny, 140–141
“Kaw-Liga,” 22 Krauss, Alison, 210–212, 214, 216, 234–235, 237
Keen, Robert Earl, 189 Kreutmann, Bill, 145
“Keep on the Sunny Side,” 15–16, 148, 216, Kristofferson, Kris, 168; discovers Steve
246 Goodman and John Prine, 142–143; on
Keillor, Garrison, 128, 246 Bob Dylan, 96; music career, 106–107, 123,
Keister, Marion, 35 134–136, 141, 161, 238, 246–247;
Keith, Ben, 152 Kunkel, Russ, 141
Keith, Bill, 92, 165, 174; music career , 67–68, KWKH, 23
147, 189–190, 251
Keith, Toby, 229 L. A. Express (ensemble), 158
Keltner, Jim, 204, 212, 220 “L. A. Freeway,” 163–164
Kennedy, John F., 101, 250 “La Bamba,” 84, 185
Kennerly, Paul, 184, 238 “La Cienega Just Smiled,” 231
Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, 161 La Traviata (opera), 177
Kent State University, 152 Ladies of the Canyon, 138
Kentucky Colonels, 101, 165 Laine, Frankie, 27
Kerouac, Jack, 173 Landau, Jon, 174
Kerrville Folk Festival, 189 Landy, Elliot, 130, 133
Kesey, Ken, 145 lang, k.d. (Kathryn Dawn Lang), 197–198
Kessel, Barney, 187 Lange, Mutt, 225
Keys, Bobby, 155 Langhorne, Bruce, 83
 Index 305
Lanois, Daniel, 201, 220–221, 223 Levy, Jacques, 176
Lansky Bros., 35, 37 Lewis, Elmo, 46, 47
Last of the True Believers, The, 190 Lewis, Elmo, Jr., 47
“Last Thing on My Mind, The,” 145 Lewis, Furry, 12, 19
Last Train to Memphis (book), 53 Lewis, Jerry Lee, 76, 106, 181, 187–188, 190,
Last Waltz, The (film), 177–78, 185, 239 249; country music resurgence, 104–105;
Late for the Sky, 159 on Elvis Presley, 51–52, 180; rock ’n’ roll
Late Night with David Letterman (TV show), music career, 32, 46–47, 49–52, 57–58
246 Lewis, Luke, 231
Latin Americana, 223 Lewis, Myra, 47, 50–51, 57–58
Lauderdale, Jim, 4–5, 192, 215, 218, 223, 228, Lewis, Steve Allen, 58
235 Liberto, Vivian, 39
Lauderdale Courts (housing complex), 35 Library of Congress, 12, 85
“Laugh at Me,” 82 “Life in Prison,” 90, 114
Laugh-In (TV show), 136 Liggins, Joe, 17
Laurel Canyon, 104, 107, 111, 137, 165 Lightfoot, Gordon, 107, 173, 218
Law, Don, 28 “Like a Rolling Stone,” 84, 86, 94, 98, 171
Lawrence, Steve, 251 Limelighters, 56, 88
Lay, Sam, 85 Lindley, David, 159
“Lay Lady Lay,” 133–134, 136 Lipscomb, Mance, 84
Le noise, 221 List, The, 245
Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter), 12, 15, 55, 74, Little Donnie and Baby Boy Phil. See Everly
234, 250 Brothers
Leadon, Bernie, 124–125, 142, 159, 165, 214 Little Eva, 141
Leadon, Tom, 124 Little Feat, 151, 228
Leaving Eden, 236 “Little Old Cabin in the Lane, The,” 8
“Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight,” Little Richard (Richard Wayne Penniman),
182 49, 53, 55, 73, 76
Led Zeppelin, 144, 234, 236 Little Sandy Review (magazine), 55
Ledbetter, Huddie. See Lead Belly “Little Sister,” 87
Lee, Albert, 182, 195 Little Walter, 220
Lee, Brenda, 92 Live Aid (benefit concert), 196
Lee, Johnny, 188 Live at Folsom Prison, 41
Lee, Peggy, 27 Live at the Star-Club, Hamburg, 58
Lee, Robert E., 130 Live from Here (radio show), 246–247
Leeds Music, 71 LL Cool J, 226
Leftover Salmon, 200 “Locomotion, The,” 141
Lennon, John, 6, 73–74, 76, 78–79, 82, 87–88, Lomax, Alan, 12, 15, 84–85
92, 98 Lomax, John, 12
Lennon-McCartney, 140, 175 London Calling, 188
Lenoir, J. B., 239 Lone Star Café, 190, 192
“Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat,” 96 “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, The,”
Let It Bleed, 124 143
“Letter, The,” 122 “Lonesome Jubilee, The,” 196
Leventhal, John, 192–193, 223, 225, 227, 245, “Lonesome Valley,” 15, 119
247–248 “Long Black Veil,” 119, 135, 211
Levon and the Hawks, 83, 94 Long Riders of the Purple Sage, 156–157
Levy, Howard, 200 Long Ryders, 185
306 Index
Longbranch Pennywhistle (duo), 124, 142 Ma, Yo-Yo, 246
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 178 MacArthur Fellowship, 246–247
“Lookin’ for Love,” 88 “MacArthur Park,” 105
“Lookin’ Out My Backdoor,” 148 Mac’s Skillet Lickers, 60
Los Lobos, 185, 212, 223, 236–237 Macy, Robin Lynn, 228
Lost, 225 Maddox, Rose, 14
Lost Highway (record label), 231 Maddox Brothers and Rose, 14
“Lost Highway” (song), 185 Madison Square Garden, 93, 229
Louisiana Hayride (stage/radio/TV show), “Maggie’s Farm,” 83, 86
23, 25, 90 Maines, Natalie, 228–229
Louisiana State Prison, 12 Malo, Raul, 223
Louris, Gary, 212 Malone, Bill, 127
Louvin, Charlie, 45, 58, 156 “Mama, You Been on My Mind,” 78
Louvin, Ira, 45, 58, 156 “Mama Tried,” 90
Louvin Brothers, 36, 156, 182, 220; music Mamas and the Papas, 82, 101, 104
career, 36, 45, 58; others adopt songs of, “Man of Constant Sorrow,” 216
114, 121, 124, 174–175 “Man Who Couldn’t Cry, The,” 226
Love (band), 114 Maness, Jay Dee, 115
Love and Theft, 237 Manfred Mann, 111, 133
“Love at the Five and Dime,” 190, 197 Mansfield, David, 174, 186
“Love Hurts,” 46, 166, 221 “Mansinneedof,” 246
“Love in Vain,” 117 Manuel, Richard, 221, 232, 234; in The Band,
“Love Is the King,” 243 112, 119–120, 129–130, 132, 176–178, 207; in
Love Me Tender (film), 32 the Hawks, 94, 108–110
“Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” 83 March 16–20, 1992, 214
“Love Sick,” 220, 225 Marcus, Greil, 18
Loveless, Patty, 197 Mardin, Arif, 143
“Lovesick Blues,” 2, 23, 25, 39, 220 “Marrakesh Express,” 104, 136
Lovett, Lyle, 161, 189–190, 195–197, 205, Martin, Dean, 36
218–220, 249 Martin, Gavin, 218
“Lovin’ Spoonful,” 82 Martin, George, 82
Lowe, Nick, 132, 198–199, 204, 226 Martin, Jimmy, 148
Lownds, Sara. See Dylan, Sara Martin, Mary, 93
Loyd, Harold, 180 Martin, Steve, 149
“Lucille,” 53 Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Superla-
Lucky Spot, 89 tives, 4, 208, 240
“Luka,” 224 Marty Stuart and His Fabulous Thunder-
Luke the Drifter. See under Williams, Hiram birds, 208
“Hank” Masenburg, George, 202
Lumineers, 5 MASS MoCA (museum), 243
“Lyin’ Eyes,” 159 “Masters of War,” 70
Lynch, David, 197, 201 “Match Box Blues,” 32
Lynch, Laura, 228 “Matchbox,” 32, 79, 135
Lynn, Loretta, 61, 92–93, 135, 145, 161, 207, 226 Matheny, Pat, 158
Lynn, Oliver “Doolittle,” 92 Mattea, Kathy, 197
Lynne, Jeff, 200 Mavericks, 223
Lynne, Shelby, 5 “May This Be Love,” 221
Lynyrd Skynyrd, 232 “Maybe Baby,” 43
 Index 307
“Maybelline,” 43, 61 Midnight Cowboy (film), 133
Mayfield, Curtis, 118 Midnight Rambles, 237–239
Maymudes, Victor, 77, 223 “Midnight Special, The,” 55
Mayor of McDougal Street. See under Van Mid-South Coliseum, 181
Ronk, Dave “Mighty Quinn, The,” 111, 133
Mazer, Elliott, 152 Milk Carton Kids, 5
MCA (record label), 190, 195, 205, 224 Miller, Buddy: as leader of the Buddy
McCalla, Leyla, 247 Miller Band, 4–5, 190, 192–193, 225; later
McCarthy, Cormac, 164 music career, 215, 217–218, 221, 224, 228,
McCartney, Paul, 73–74, 76, 78–79, 82, 87–88, 235–237, 239, 248
97, 129; others adopt songs of, 92, 140, 175 Miller, Emmett, 23
McCoury, Del, 147 Miller, J. D., 11
McCoy, Charlie, 87, 95–97, 111, 134 Miller, Jimmy, 155
McDaniel, Ellas. See Bo Diddley Miller, Julie, 5, 190, 192–193, 217, 224, 235–237;
McEntire, Reba, 195 others adopt songs of, 221, 239
McEuen, John, 148–149 Miller, Mitch, 26–27
McGarrigle, Anna, 151, 221 Miller, Rob, 212
McGarrigle, Kate, 221 Miller, Roger, 44, 62, 65, 90, 107, 161
McGhee, Brownie, 16, 57 Miller, Steve, 150
McGraw, Tim, 231 “Million Dollar Bash,” 110–111
McGuinn, Roger (previously Jim), 84, 143, Million Dollar Quartet, 32, 35, 51, 180
173, 229, 240; early music career, 56, 79; Mills, Irving, 23
music career in the Byrds, 80, 82, 88, “Mind Your Own Business,” 30
100–101, 113–115, 117, 164–165 Mingus, Charles, 158
McGuire, Barry, 82 Mississippi Sheiks, 200
McKernan, Ron “Pigpen,” 145 “Mister Sandman,” 202
McLean, Don, 53 Mitchell, Chuck, 103
“Me and Bobby McGee,” 107, 136 Mitchell, Joni (Roberta Joan Anderson),
“Me and My Chauffeur,” 189 135–136, 138, 152, 155, 171, 173, 177, 225; music
Mean Streets (film), 177 career, 101, 103–104, 140–141, 150, 157–159,
Mehldau, Brad, 223, 226 246
Meisner, Randy, 142, 150 Modern Sounds in Country and Western Mu-
Melcher, Terry, 80 sic, 63, 65, 179
Mellencamp, John, 196, 229 Modern Time, 237
Memphis Minnie, 189 “Mohair Sam,” 87
Memphis Press-Scimitar (newspaper), 32, 36 Moman, Lincoln Wayne “Chips,” 122–123
Memphis Recording Service, 34 “Mona,” 43
“Mendocino,” 144 Monk, Thelonious, 66
Meniere’s disease, 231–232 Monkeys, 141
Merle Haggard and the Strangers, 136 Monroe, Bill, 93, 145, 147, 182, 189; as the fa-
Merlefest, 211 ther of bluegrass, 14; music career, 13–14,
Mermaid Avenue, 230 18, 46, 67–68, 148, 200, 211; others adopt
Messina, Jim, 120 songs of, 2, 36–37, 234
Meyers, Augie, 220, 223 Monroe, Charlie, 13–14
MGA (film studio), 27 Monroe Brothers, 13, 182
“Michael from Mountains,” 101, 103 Monterey Pop Festival, 101
Midler, Bette, 143, 197 Montgomery, Melba, 106
“Midnight,” 31 Montgomery Advisor (newspaper), 21
308 Index
Moon, Keith, 177 Nash, Graham, 4–5, 104, 136–138
Moondog Matinee, 177 Nashville (album), 236
“Moonlight in Vermont,” 178 Nashville (TV show), 236, 247
Moore, Scotty, 35–36, 105 “Nashville Cats,” 82
Moorer, Allison, 5 Nashville Skyline, 2, 134–136, 147
Morganfield, McKinley. See Muddy Waters Nashville sound, 62–63, 117
Morlix, Gurf, 218 Nashville Sound, The (album), 242
Morris, Maren, 247 Nashville tuning, 117
Morrison, Van, 4, 177, 192, 217 National Academy of Recording Arts and
Moss, Wayne, 95–96 Sciences, 227
Mother Earth (band), 148 National Barn Dance (radio show), 16
Mother Earth Presents Tracy Nelson Country, National Public Radio, 246
148 NBC (radio network), 23
Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Band, 145 Nebraska, 196
Mothers of Invention (band), 150 Neil, Fred, 66, 114
Motown, 87 Neil Young, 140
“Mountain, The,” 239 Nelson, Bobbie, 178, 223, 251
“Move It On Over,” 22, 25, 231 Nelson, Lukas, 251
“Mr. Bojangles,” 148 Nelson, Paul, 55, 135
“Mr. Mudd and Mr. Gold,” 164 Nelson, Ricky, 90, 142
“Mr. Tambourine Man,” 70, 77, 80, 83, 84, 86 Nelson, Tracy, 148
MTV Unplugged in New York, 234 Nelson, Willie, 2, 106, 151, 163, 181, 196, 204,
Mudcrutch, 124 231, 247; music career, 62–63, 93, 107–108,
Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield), 12, 123, 144, 160–161, 168–170, 173, 178–179, 221,
18, 41, 55, 85, 173, 177, 189, 192, 220 223, 251; on Ray Price, 44–45; on Frank
Mudslide Slim and Blue Horizon, 140–141 Sinatra, 251; White House visit, 128; on
Muldaur, Maria, 82, 85, 147 Hank Williams, 26; on Bob Wills, 14
“Mule Skinner Blues,” 14, 145 Nesmith, Michael, 141
Muleskinners, 165 Netflix, 249
Mullen, Larry, 221 Neuwirth, Bob, 107, 173
Mumford and Sons, 2 Never-Ending Tour, 237
“Murder Most Foul,” 250 New Christy Minstrels, 56, 79
Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, 186, 232 New England Conservatory of Music, 246
Musgraves, Kasey, 2 New Grass Revival, 147, 200
Music City News (magazine), 92 New Lost City Ramblers, 59–60, 66, 103
Music from Big Pink, 110, 119, 133 New Morning, 158
“My Back Pages,” 78 “New Mule Skinner Blues,” 14
“My Black Mama,” 12 New Music Express (magazine), 218
“My Blue Tears,” 202 New Riders of the Purple Sage, 147
“My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” 109 “New York, New York,” 231
“(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers,” 90 New York Fast Folk scene, 224
“My God Is Real,” 47 New York Times (newspaper), 68, 93, 208,
“My Happiness,” 35 241–242
“My Heart Skips a Beat,” 61 New York University, 226
My Morning Jacket (band), 243 New Yorker (magazine), 77
“My Old Friend the Blues,” 195 Newbury, Mickey, 135, 161
“My Tennessee Mountain Home,” 145 Newman, Randy, 151, 230
My Way, 251 Newport Folk Festival, 57, 60, 72, 84–86, 97,
“Mystery Train,” 252 111, 189
 Index 309
Newsweek (magazine), 72, 174 O’Connor, Mark, 205, 214
Nichopoulos, Dr. George, 180, 208 O’Day, Molly, 22
Nickel Creek, 211, 246 “Ode to Billy Joe,” 110
Nico, 104 Odetta, 55, 57
Nicol, Simon, 137 O’Donovan, Aoife, 246
“Night Life,” 44, 62, 160 O’Keefe, Danny, 160
Night Moves (film), 167 O’Keefe, Thomas, 215
Night Owl Café, 82 Odyssey (poem), 215, 250
“Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The,” Oh! Calcutta (play), 176
130 “Oh, Pretty Woman,” 95, 201, 220
Nine Inch Nails, 227 Oh Boy! (record label), 190, 232
Nirvana, 213, 234 “Oh Boy!” (song), 43
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, 104, 148–149 Oh Mercy, 201
Nixon, Pat, 128 “Oh My Sweet Carolina,” 231
Nixon, Richard, 127–128, 135 “Ohio,” 152
No Depression (album), 213 OKeh Records, 8, 12
No Depression (magazine), 213–215, 232 “Okie from Muskogee,” 126–128, 136, 166
No Depression (music style), 230 Ol’ Dirty Bastard, 225
“No Depression” (song), 213 Olabelle, 237
“No Money in This Deal,” 45 Old & In the Way, 147, 200
No Name Jive (radio show), 55 Old Crow Medicine Show (band), 4
“Nobody Knows When You Are Down and “Old Friends,” 248
Out,” 66 “Old Man,” 152
noise, Le, 221 Old No. 1, 164
Nonesuch, 230 Old Quarter, 161, 163
North Louisiana Sanitarium, 30 Old Time Fiddlers’ Convention, 67
“North to Alaska,” 52 Old Town School of Folk Music, 142
Northern Lights—Southern Cross, 177 Old Ways, 204
“Norwegian Wood,” 78 Old Yellow Moon, 259
Not Dark Yet, 5, 220 Oldham, Lindon “Spooner,” 122, 234
“Not Fade Away,” 43, 252 Oliver’s (venue), 157
“Not Ready to Make Nice,” 229 Olympic Studio, 150
“Nothing Was Delivered,” 110–111, 114 On the Border, 151, 159
“Now She’s Gone,” 217 On the River, 196
“Nuages,” 251 “On the Road Again,” 169
Nudie suit, 31, 113, 121, 241; fashion inspired Once in a Very Blue Moon, 190
by, 4 One Endless Night, 236
Nuns, the, 185 “One Fine Day,” 141
Nyro, Laura, 138, 149 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (film), 192
“One Hundred Years from Now,” 114
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (film), 215 One of These Nights (album), 159
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (soundtrack), “One of These Nights” (song), 159
216, 234, 236 “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later),”
“O Death,” 216 95
Oasis, 242 “One Too Many Mornings,” 77
Obama, Barack, 229 “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” 72, 77
Oberlin Conservatory, 247 “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” 138
“Obviously Five Believers,” 96 “Only the Lonely,” 201
O’Connor, Flannery, 188 “Ooby Dooby,” 51
310 Index
“Ooh Las Vegas,” 175 Patton, Charlie, 220
O-oo Ernest (stage play), 23 Patty Duke Syndrome (band), 215
Opryland, 128 Paul Butterfield Blues Band, 84–85, 93
Orbison, Roy, 51, 95, 197, 201 Pax Americana (record label), 232
“Orphan Girl,” 212, 221 Paxton, Tom, 145
Othello (stage play), 104 Payne, Rufus (Tee-Tot), 21, 28
Other Voices, Other Rooms, 218 “Pazz and Jop” (Village Voice poll), 218
“Ou Es-Tu, Mon Amour?,” 223 PBS, 246
outlaw country, 169–170 “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” 151, 160
“Outlaw Country” (radio channel), 248 Pearl Jam, 213
Outlaw Country Cruise (sea music festival), Peckinpah, Sam, 168
248 Pederson, Herb, 174
Outliers (book), 74 Peer, Ralph, 7–8, 10–12, 54
Owens, Alvis Edgar “Buck,” 2, 115, 124, 147– Peer-Southern Publishing, 54
148, 192; music career, 60–61, 90, 92–93, “Peggy Day,” 134
136, 185, 198; others adopt songs of, 90, 113, “Peggy Sue,” 43
175, 205, 214 Penn, Arthur, 167
Owens, Bonnie, 60, 90 Penn, Dan, 122–123
Owens, Fuzzy, 89 Pennebaker, D. A., 83, 97–98
Ozzie and Harriet Show, The (TV show), 106 Penniman, Richard Wayne. See Little Rich-
ard
Page, Jimmy, 74 People’s World (newspaper), 15
Page, Patti, 26, 36 Pérez-Mora Macías, Bianca, 155
Pagliacci (opera), 11 Perkins, Carl, 2, 46, 51–52, 76, 78, 135; early
Paley, Tom, 66 blues influence on, 34; early music ca-
Pallenberg, Anita, 154 reer, 32, 37, 39, 44, 49; later music career,
Palmer, Robert, 208 49, 58–59, 79
Palomino (venue), 185 Perkins, Clay, 37
Pamper Music, 62 Perkins, Jay, 37, 39
“Pancho and Lefty,” 163 Perkins, Luther, 41, 60, 182, 245
“Paradise,” 185 Perkins Brothers Band, 39
Paradise and Lunch, 117 Perry Como Show (TV show), 39
Paramount Records, 12 Peter, Paul, and Mary, 71, 76, 85, 111
Parker, Colonel Tom, 36, 46, 50, 53, 87–88, 105 Peter and Gordon, 140
Parsons, Gram, 20, 159, 185, 189, 194, 213, 224; Peters, Mercy, 121
music career, 113–115, 117, 120–125, 154–157, Petty, Norman, 43, 54
165–167, 174; others adopt songs of, 175, Petty, Tom, 124, 199, 201, 215, 226–227
215, 240 “Phantom Engineer,” 86
Parsons, Gretchen, 155, 157, 165 Phases and Stages, 144
Parton, Dolly, 144; songwriting, 93, 145, Phillips, Judd, 49
151, 174, 188, 247, 249; Trio membership, Phillips, Sam, 32, 34–37, 41, 46–47, 49, 51, 53
201–202 Pickett, Wilson, 122
“Party Doll,” 43 Pieces of the Sky, 174
“Passionate Kisses,” 204 Pierce, Webb, 18, 175
Pastorious, Jaco, 158 Piersante, Mike, 234
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (film), 168 “Pink Champaign,” 17
Patoski, Joe Nick, 169 “Pirate Jenny,” 70
Pattison, Pat, 212 Planet of Love, 224
 Index 311
Planet Waves, 158 “Race Records” (Billboard chart), 17
Plant, Robert, 234–236 Radiohead, 230
Player, The (film), 219 Raeben, Norman, 170–171
Pleasant, Henry, 23 “Rag Mama Rag,” 129
“Please Crawl out Your Window,” 95 Raging Bull (film), 186
Poco (band), 120, 124, 150 Rainbow Gardens, 89
Pomus, Doc, 192 “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” 4, 96, 100
“Poor, Poor Pitiful Me,” 151 “Raised on Robbers,” 158
Pop, Iggy, 213 Raising Sand, 235–236
Porter, Cole, 87 Raitt, Bonnie, 143, 188, 204
“Positively 4th Street,” 103 Ramblin’, 189
Powers, Ann, 212 Randy’s Rodeo, 184
Prairie Home Companion, A (radio show), Rank and File, 185, 198
128, 246 Raphael, Mickey, 160, 169, 178, 223
Presley, Elvis, 2, 17, 27, 43–44, 51–52, 55, 62, 73, “Raunchy,” 74
76, 105–106, 109, 114, 122, 124, 135, 145, 156, Rawlings, David, 211–212, 215, 231–232, 250
180, 194, 212, 252; band, 106, 156, 165, 174; “Ray Price Shuffle” (song rhythm), 44
and the Beatles, 87–88, 92; and Louvin RCA Victor, 8, 13, 18, 32, 46, 59, 62, 107, 144,
Brothers, 45; RCA recording career, 32, 168–170
46, 50, 87, 105; Sun recording career, 23, Rebennack, Malcolm “Dr. John,” 132
35–37, 39; White House visit, 127 Red Clay Ramblers, 214
Presley, Gladys, 35 Red Headed Stranger, 169–170, 173, 178
Presley, Jesse Aaron, 35 Red Hot Chili Peppers, 226
Presley, Vernon, 35 Redding, Otis, 123
Preston, Billy, 76 Reed, Jerry, 164
“Pretender, The,” 159 Reed, Jimmy, 55
“Pretty Boy Floyd,” 66, 114 Reinhardt, Django, 147, 179, 223, 251
“Pretty Woman.” See “Oh, Pretty Woman” R.E.M. (band), 214
Price, Ray, 29–30, 47, 61, 192; recording ca- Renaldo and Clare (film), 173
reer, 44–45, 62 Reprise (record label), 104, 204
Primitives, 213 Reshen, Neil, 168, 170
Prince, 158 Return of the Grievous Angel (album), 240
Prine, John, 142–144, 185, 197, 218–219, 242 “Return of the Grievous Angel” (poem), 157
“Prisoner’s Song, The,” 11 “Return of the Grievous Angel” (song), 166,
Promise of the Real, 251 215
Prophet, Chuck, 185 Reunions, 242
Puckett, Riley, 11 Revival, 212
Punch Brothers, 246 Revolution Starts Now, The, 229
punk rock, 184–187, 212, 215, 226 Reznor, Trent, 227
Purple Onion (venue), 56 “Rhythm & Blues” (Billboard chart), 17
Rhythm and Romance, 204–205
Quarrymen, 74 Rice, Tony, 200
Quiet Knight (venue), 142 Rich, Charlie, 87
“Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn),” Rich, Don, 61, 115, 147, 185, 198
111, 133 Richard Thompson’s Frets & Refrains (mu-
sic camp), 248
R.E.M. (band), 214 Richards, Keith, 74, 115, 117, 124–125, 154–156,
“Race Is On, The,” 106 196
312 Index
Richardson, J. P. (Big Bopper), 54 Rolling Thunder Revue (film), 250
Richmond Times-Dispatch (newspaper), 30 Rolling Thunder Revue (tour), 173–174, 186
Riddle, Lesley, 16 Ronson, Mick, 173
Right or Wrong, 183 Ronstadt, Linda, 123, 135, 152, 165, 188; music
Right Stuff, The (film), 207 career, 137, 141–142, 151, 157, 159, 165, 188,
“Ring of Fire,” 25, 59 201–202
Rinzler, Ralph, 67 Rooftop Singers, 41, 56
River, 140 Rooney, Jim, 189, 197, 210, 218, 251
River: The Joni Letters, 158 Rooney’s Irregulars, 251
River and the Thread, The, 245 “Rooty-Tooty,” 29
Rivera, Scarlet, 173 Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, 74
Rivers, Johnny, 97 “Rosalita,” 217
“Road, The,” 160 Rose, Fred, 22–23, 25–26, 46, 169
Robbins, Hargus “Kid,” 95 Rose, Wesley, 46
Robbins, Tim, 217 Roses in the Snow, 182
Roberts, Elliot, 103, 138, 149, 151, 152 Rothbaum, Mark, 170
Roberts, Julia, 219 Rothchild, Paul, 85
Robertson, Dominique, 108, 158 Rotolo, Suze, 70–71, 171
Robertson, Robbie, 98; membership in The Rough and Rowdy Ways, 250
Band, 112, 118–120, 129–130, 132–133, 158, Rounder Records, 210–211, 219, 235
176–178, 185–186, 207; membership in the Rowan, Peter, 147, 165, 217
Hawks, 94, 96–97, 108–110; music and film Royal Albert Hall, 98, 115
career after The Band, 221, 239 rubato, 144
Robillard, Duke, 220 Rubber Soul, 92, 217
Robinson, Emily, 228 Rubin, Rick, 226–227, 229, 246
Robinson, Martie, 228 Rules of Travel, 227
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, 234 “Run for Your Life,” 92
Rock Boppers, 55 Running on Empty, 159
“Rock Island Line,” 74 Rush, Tom, 56, 84, 103, 149
“Rock Me on the Water,” 142, 150 Russell, Allison, 247
Rock of Ages, 176–177 Russell, Johnny, 90, 92
rockabilly, 30, 32, 39, 51, 58, 67, 78, 93, 122, 184 Russell, Leon, 120, 147, 160
“Rocket 88,” 34 Russell, Tom, 121
“Rockin’ in the Free World,” 204 Rust Never Sleeps, 187
Rodgers, Carrie, 13 Ryan Adams, 242
Rodgers, Jimmie, 2, 19, 47, 50, 73, 110, 148, 241; Ryman, Thomas, 23
Bristol sessions, 7–10, 31; death, 13; others Ryman Auditorium, 4, 23, 127–128, 135, 239,
adopt songs of, 6, 13–14, 18, 28–29, 35, 37, 242
39, 55, 135, 145, 206, 216; self-promotion,
12–13; songwriting, 11; yodeling, 11, 13, 23 Sacred Heart (hymnal), 45
Rodgers, Richard, 87 “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowland,” 95
Rogers, Kenny, 161, 188 “Safe at Home,” 114
Rogers, Roy, 107 “Saginaw, Michigan,” 29
Rogers, Will, 13 Sahm, Doug, 144, 193, 223
Rolling Stone, 27, 84, 119, 123, 135, 141, 144, 174, “Sailing Shoes,” 219
179, 181 “Sally Gal,” 77
Rolling Stones, 19, 78, 144, 150–151, 182, 184, “Sam Stone,” 142–143
195–196, 226; and Gram Parsons, 115, 117, San Francisco Chronicle (newspaper), 27
124–125, 154–157 San Francisco Opera, 177
 Index 313
San Quentin State Prison, 60, 89, 107 Shaver, Billy Joe, 169
Sand Ditch (venue), 37 Shawn Colvin Band, 193
Sandberg, Carl, 77 “She,” 156
Santiago, Maria Elena, 50, 54 Shelley, Steve, 219
Satherly, Art, 28 Shelton, Robert, 68, 93
“Satisfied Mind,” 101 Shepard, Sam, 173
Saturate Before Using, 150 Shepherd, Catherine, 246
“Save the Last Dance for Me,” 192 Sheppard, Audrey Mae. See Williams, Au-
Scaggs, Boz, 188 drey Mae
Scarecrow, 196 Sherrill, Billy, 128, 181, 198
Scene, The (venue), 123 “She’s About a Mover,” 144
Schultz, Arnold, 13, 18, 46 “She’s Crazy for Leaving,” 205
Scialfa, Patti, 192, 251 Shiloh (country-rock band), 137, 141
Scorsese, Martin, 177–178, 185–186, 250 Shilohs, the (rock band), 114
Scott, Jim, 215 Shindig! (TV show), 93
Scott, Tom, 158 Shires, Amanda, 4, 234, 242, 247
Scottsville Squirrel Barkers, 56 Shocked, Michelle, 214
Scotty and Bill, 105 Shoot Out the Lights, 187
Scruggs, Chris, 240 Short Cuts (film), 219
Scruggs, Earl, 14, 67–68, 147–149, 200, 205, Shorter, Wayne, 158
210, 240 “Shot-Gun Boogie,” 17
Sebastian, John, 66–67, 82, 147 Shotgun Willie, 144
“Second Fiddle,” 61 “Sign of the Cross,” 110
Secret to a Happy Ending, The (film), 250 Silber, Irwin, 78
“See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” 70, 109 “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” 137,
“See You Later, Alligator,” 109, 133 141
Seeger, Charles, 15, 142 Silverstein, Shelby, 136
Seeger, Mike, 8 Simon, Carly, 141, 143
Seeger, Pete, 16, 18, 57, 67, 72, 101, 118, 127, Simon, John, 112, 117–120, 129–130, 176, 178
136; music career, 15, 55–56, 84, 86, 142, Simon, Paul, 104, 232
229–230; others adopt songs of, 71, 82, 88, Simon and Garfunkel, 80, 95, 112
109, 229; Simone, Nina, 123, 247
Seger, Bob, 183 “Simple Twist of Fate,” 171, 173
“September Song,” 178 Simpson, Sturgill, 2
“September When It Comes,” 227 “Sin City,” 121, 167
Sessions at West 54th Street (TV show), 215 Sinatra, Frank, 17, 73, 144, 179, 250–251
Sessions Band, The, 229 Sinatra, Nancy, 114
“Settin’ the Woods on Fire,” 30 “Sing a Sad Song,” 89
“Seven Spanish Angels,” 179 “Sing Me Back Home,” 90, 114
“Seven Year Ache,” 183 Sing Out! (magazine), 78
Sex Pistols, 184 “Single Girl, Married Girl,” 7, 10, 19, 239
SFJAZZ (venue), 245 Sir Douglas Quintet, 144, 223
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 110–111, SiriusXM, 4, 248
129, 138 “Sisters of Mercy,” 103
Shadowland, 197 Skaggs, Ricky, 182, 195, 245
Shadows, the (band), 55 skiffle (music style), 74
“Shame on the Moon,” 183 Skyline Club, 52
Shangri-La (studio), 177 Sledge, Percy, 122
Shankar, Ravi, 87 “Sleep Baby Sleep,” 10–11
314 Index
“Sleepless Night,” 174 Spirituals to Swing (album), 68
“Slippin’ and Slidin’,” 53 “Spirituals to Swing” (concert), 70
Slow Train Coming, 186 Spotify, 242
“Small Town Talk,” 133 Springfield, Dusty, 141
Smith, Harry, 18–19, 109, 212 Springfields (trio), 141
Smith, Hazel, 169 Springsteen, Bruce, 97, 143, 149, 192, 217–218,
Smith, Mamie, 8 226; music career, 174, 195–196, 217, 226,
Smith, Patti, 173 229, 250–251
Smith, Steuart, 225 Stafford, Jo, 27, 30
Smithsonian, 19 Stage Fright, 176
“Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! That Cigarette,” 17 Stallings, Peggy, 141
Smothers Brothers, 136 Stampfel, Peter, 77
Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, The (TV “Stand By Your Man,” 128
show), 104, 136 Stanford University, 56
Smucker, Tom, 135 Stanley, Ralph, 4, 182, 210–211, 216, 235
Snow, Hank, 19, 31, 36, 39, 65 Stanley Brothers, 147, 182, 211, 216
Snow, Jimmie Rodgers, 19 Stan’s Rockin’ Record Shop, 55
So, 221 Staple Singers, 118, 178, 214, 232, 243
So Many Roads, 82 Staples, Mavis, 178, 232, 238, 241, 243, 245
“So Sad,” 5 Staples, Roebuck “Pops,” 178, 214, 241, 243
Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Stapleton, Chris, 2
Music, 210 Starday (record label), 45
“Soldier’s Sweetheart, The,” 10 Stardust, 178–179
Soles, Steven, 174, 186 Starr, Ringo, 73–74, 79, 88, 118
Solid Sound Festival, 243 “State Trooper,” 196
“Someone to Lay Down Beside Me,” 151 Station Inn (venue), 212
“Someone to Watch over Me,” 178 Stax Records, 122
“Something in the Way She Moves,” 103 Steady On, 223
“Something More Than Free,” 242 Steeldrivers, 2
Son Volt (band), 214 “Step Inside This House,” 161, 219
“Song for You, A,” 156 “Step It Up and Go,” 220
“Song to Woody,” 66, 68 Steve Allen Show, The (TV show), 49–50
Song Up in Her Head, 246 Steve Earle and the Dukes, 184
Songs of Our Native Daughters, 247 Steve Miller Band, 150
Sonic Youth, 219 Stevens, Ray, 106
Sonny and Cher, 82 Steward, Wynn, 89
“Sounds of Silence, The,” 80, 104 Stiff, Denise, 212
South, Joe, 95 Still, 243
Souther, J. D., 124, 142, 151 Stills, Stephen, 82, 101, 104, 114, 138
Southern Music Company, 10 Stinson, Harry, 195, 208, 240
Southern Rock Opera, 232 Stone, Ron, 158
Southwestern Bible Institute, 47 Stone Canyon Band, 142
Spacek, Sissy, 207 Stone Ponies, 141
“Spanish Harlem Incident,” 80 Stoner, Rob, 173
Specialty Records, 49 Stooges, Iggy and the, 213
Spector, Phil, 80, 202 Stookey, Noel Paul, 71. See also Peter, Paul,
Spiders from Mars (band), 173 and Mary
Spirit, 223 “Stormy Monday Blues,” 34
 Index 315
Story, The, 245 “Take Good Care of My Baby,” 55
Stovall Plantation, 12 “Take It Easy,” 150
Strait, George, 4, 195, 224 “Taking the Long Way,” 229
“Stranger in the House,” 199 “Tale of the Red Headed Stranger,” 169
Strangers, the (band), 90, 126 “Talkin’ New York,” 68
Strangers Almanac, 215 “Tangled Up in Blue,” 170
Street Language, 204 Tapestry, 141
Streetlights, 143 Taplin, Jonathan, 177, 185
“Streets of Bakersfield,” 198 “Tarantula” (prose poem), 108
Streisand, Barbra, 138 Tarle, Dominique, 154–155
Strummer, Joe, 184 Tarrant, Tarp, 58
Stuart, Marty, 6, 149, 208, 228; country music Tarrytown Music Hall, 239
collection, 240–241; music career, 4, 117, Tashian, Barry, 156, 174
149, 159, 181–182, 226 Taxi Driver (film), 177
“Stuck on You,” 87 Taylor, James, 103–104, 107, 140–141, 152
“Subterranean Homesick Blues,” 83 “Teach Your Children,” 147
Subud (spiritual movement), 101 “Tears of Rage,” 110–112, 118–119
Sufism, 187 Teatro, 221, 223
Sugar Hill (record label), 211 “Tecumseh Valley,” 163, 217
“Sugar Mountain,” 103 Teddy Bears, 202
“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” 138 Tee-Tot (Rufus Payne), 21, 28
Sukierae, 243 Telluride Bluegrass Festival, 211
“Summer in the City,” 82 Tench, Benmont, 199
Summerteeth, 230 “Tennessee Flat Top Box,” 205
“Summertime Blues,” 62 “Tennessee Saturday Night,” 17
Sun Records, 79, 87, 201; and Johnny Cash, Tennessee Three, 181, 245
41, 59, 161, 190; and Jerry Lee Lewis, 50–51, Tennessee Two, 41
57, 105; and Elvis Presley, 23, 35, 43, 46 “Tennessee Waltz,” 26
Sun Studio, 32, 35, 47, 51, 53 Tenneva Ramblers, 10
“Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” 106, 136 Ten-O’Clock Scholar (coffeehouse), 55
“Sunny Came Home,” 225, 248 Terry, Sonny, 16, 57
“Sunshine, Sunshine,” 103 Texas, 249
“Surf City,” 150 Texas A&M University, 189
“Susie Q,” 90 Texas Monthly (magazine), 236
“Suspicious Minds,” 105 Texas Tornados, 223
Swaggart, Jimmy, 47, 181 Tex-Mex (music style), 223
Swartley, Ariel, 179 Tharpe, Sister Rosetta, 247
Sweet Baby James, 140 “That Thing Called Love,” 204
“Sweet Dreams,” 175 “That’ll Be the Day,” 43, 151
Sweet Music of the Blue Velvet Band, 189 “That’s All It Took,” 155–156
“Sweet Old World,” 221 “That’s All Right,” 2, 23, 36, 105
Sweetheart of the Rodeo, 111, 114, 117, 133, 136, “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin,” 35
164, 166, 240 “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” 114
Swift, Taylor, 242 “These Days,” 103
“Swinging Doors,” 90 These Four Walls, 248
Szymczyk, Bill, 151, 159 Thigpen’s Log Cabin (venue), 20
Thile, Chris, 211, 246–247
“T for Texas” (“Blue Yodel”), 10–11 “Thirty Days,” 43
316 Index
“This Ain’t No Rag, It’s a Flag,” 229 Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge (venue), 62, 63
“This Boy,” 92 Tosches, Nick, 39
This Is Where I Live, 114 Toussaint, Allen, 176–177, 235, 238
“This Land Is Your Land,” 15, 174, 196, 229, 251 Town and Country Time (radio show), 62
This Time, 225 Town Hall (venue), 230, 248
“This Wheel’s on Fire,” 110–112, 118, 176 Townes, 248
Thomas, Carla, 122 Traffic (band), 241
Thompson, Hank, 11 Train a-Comin’, 217
Thompson, Linda, 187 Trans, 202
Thompson, Richard, 111, 137, 187, 224, 236, 243 Traum, Happy, 132, 190
“Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray,” 197 “Travelin’ Soldier,” 228
Three Dog Night, 150 Travelin’ Thru, 135
“Three Girls and Their Buddy” (tour), 236 Traveling King, The, 249
“Three O’Clock Blues,” 34 Traveling Wilburys, The (album), 201
Threepenny Opera (stage play), 70 Traveling Wilburys, the (band), 201
“Tiger by the Tail,” 61 Traveller, 2
“Till I Gain Control Again,” 175 Travers, Mary, 71. See also Peter, Paul, and
Time (magazine), 119, 174 Mary
“Time Between,” 101 Traviata, La (opera), 177
“Time Is a Thief,” 161 Travis, Merle, 17–18, 46, 67, 114, 148
Time Jumpers, 251 Travis picking, 17–18
“Time of the Preacher,” 169 Travolta, John, 188
Time Out of Mind, 201, 220, 225 Treme (TV show), 248
Times They Are A-Changin’, The (album), 77 “Triad,” 101
“Times They Are A-Changin’, The” (song), Trio, 201–202
referenced, 186 Trio II, 202
Tin Angel, 103 Trischka, Tony, 67, 210
Tin Pan Alley (music style), 65 Troubadour (venue), 79, 104, 124, 137–138,
Titus, Libby, 120 141–142, 158–159
“To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High),” Trump, Donald, 242
231 Tubb, Ernest, 13, 31, 35, 93, 179
“To Know Him Is to Love Him,” 202 Tucker, Shonna, 234
“To Love Somebody,” 123 “Tulsa Time,” 5
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, 118 Tumbleweed Connection, 158
“Today, I Started Loving You Again,” 90 “Tumbling Dice,” 151
“Together Again,” 175 Tuna Fish Music (record label), 138
Together Through Life, 237 “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” 88, 137
“Tom Dooley,” 56 “Turn Around,” 37, 215
“Tom Joad,” 15, 66 Turner, Ike, 34
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, 199, 227 Turner, Tina, 158
Tomlin, Lily, 188 Turtles, the (band), 82, 150
Tomorrow Is My Turn, 247 Tutt, Ronnie, 156, 194
“Tomorrow Never Knows,” 97 “Tutti Frutti,” 49
“Tonight I’ll Staying Here with You,” 134 Twain, Shania, 225
“Tonight the Bottle Let Me Down,” 90 Tweedy, Jeff, 187–188, 213–214, 230, 242–243,
“Too Much Monkey Business,” 83 245
“Too Much of Nothing,” 110–111 Tweedy, Spencer, 243
 Index 317
“Two Soldiers,” 200 Vicious, Sid, 184
Tyminki, Dan, 216 Victor Talking Machine Corporation. See
Tyner, McCoy, 113 RCA Victor
Tyrell, Soozie, 192, 229 Vietnam War, 132, 136, 142, 148, 188, 207
Tyson, Ian, 109 Village Voice (newspaper), 135, 218
Vincent, Gene, 122
U2 (band), 201, 220–221, 226 Vineyard Christian Fellowship, 186
UK Americana Awards, 5 Viper Room (venue), 226
Unchained, 227 “Visions of Johanna,” 96
“Uncle John’s Love,” 147 Vivino, Jimmy, 238–239
Uncle Tupelo (band), 187, 212–214, 230 Volman, Mark, 150
“Under My Thumb,” 125 Von Schmidt, Eric, 56, 70, 109, 189
“Under the Influence of Love,” 61
“Under Your Spell Again,” 61, 113 “Wabash Cannonball, The,” 164
Undercurrent, 247 Wagoner, Porter, 93, 101, 145, 226
Union Station (band), 210–211, 214, 216 Wagonmaster, 226
Universal Music Publishing Group, 251 Wainwright, Loudon, III, 143, 226
Universal Records, 231 “Waiting for the Train,” 11, 73
University of California, 211 “Waiting ’Round to Die,” 163
University of Colorado, 161 Waits, Tom, 235
University of Texas, 189 “Wake Up Little Susie,” 46
University of Wisconsin, 67 “Walk Right In,” 41, 56
Unraveling, The, 242 Walker, Cindy, 65
“Up, Up, and Away,” 105 Walker, Jerry Jeff, 148, 163, 197, 218, 248
“Up on the Roof,” 141 Walker, T-Bone, 34, 37
Urban Cowboy (film), 188 “Walkin’ After Midnight,” 62–63
“Urge for Going,” 103 “Walking Blues,” 12
Usher, Gary, 115 “Walking the Floor Over You,” 13
Wallace, George, 128
Valens, Richie, 54, 185 “Wallflower,” 144
Van Lear Rose, 226 Walsh, Joe, 159
Van Ronk, Dave, 19, 57, 66, 70–71, 78, 86, 114; Wanted! The Outlaws, 170
as Mayor of McDougal Street, 57 War and Treaty (duo), 5
Van Zandt, Jeanene, 219 Warner Brothers, 140, 155, 174, 177, 201, 204,
Van Zandt, Townes, 2, 20, 181, 189, 195, 197, 219, 230–231
205, 209, 250; music career, 161, 163–164, Warren Commission, 101
190, 208, 219; others adopt songs of, Washington Square, New York City, 54,
174–175, 217–219, 235–236 65–66
Vanderbilt Hospital, 209 “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights,” 223
Vanderbilt University, 148, 183, 249 Waters, Sneezy, 29
Vanguard (record label), 57, 68 Watkins, Sara, 211
Vapors (club), 180 Watkins, Sean, 211
Vaughan, Kenny, 240 Watson, Doc, 13, 92, 161, 181, 214; music ca-
Vee, Bobby, 55 reer, 67, 148, 161, 211, 214, 235
Vega, Suzanne, 224 Watson, Merle, 148
Velvet Underground, 104, 214 Watts, Charlie, 125, 155
“Vesti la Giubba,” 11 “Way We Make a Broken Heart, The,” 205
318 Index
WBT, 17 Whiskey-A-Go-Go, 123
WDIA, 34–35 Whiskeytown, 215
“We Can Talk About It Now,” 112 “Whispering Pines,” 129
“We Must Have Been out of Our Minds,” White, Clarence, 101, 117, 120, 164–166, 241
106 White, Jack, 226
“We Shall Overcome,” 72 White, Josh, 15, 57
We Shall Overcome: The Pete Seeger Sessions, White, Roland, 117, 159
229 White, Susie, 241
“Weary Blues from Waitin’,” 29 White, Tony Joe, 5
Weather Report, 200 “White Lighting,” 54
Weavers, the (band), 18, 55–56 White Stripes, 226
Webb, Jimmy, 105, 247, 250 Whitehead, Paul, 47
Wednesdays, 242 Who, the (band), 184
“Wee Wee Hours,” 43 “Who Do You Love?,” 43
“Weight, The,” 112, 118–119, 178, 238 “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On,” 47, 49–50
Weill, Kurt, 70, 178 “Why, Baby, Why,” 45
Wein, George, 189 “Wichita Lineman,” 105
Weissberg, Eric, 171, 189, 251 Wide Open Spaces, 228
Welch, Gillian, 16, 221, 236, 238; music ca- “Wide River to Cross,” 239
reer, 117, 211–212, 215–216, 221, 231–232, 250 Wier, Bob, 145
“Welfare Cadillac,” 127 Wilco (band), 1, 187, 214–215, 230–232, 243,
“We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morn- 250
ing,” 156 “Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky” (music festival), 243
Wells, Kitty, 12, 92 “Wild Horses,” 125
Westbrook, John, 37 Wildflowers, 103, 215
Western Skies, 250 “Wildwood Flower,” 15, 109
Wexler, Jerry, 26, 141, 143–144, 186 Wilkin, Marijohn, 119
“What a Crying Shame,” 223 Will Shade’s Memphis Jug Band, 12
“What Is Truth?,” 127 Will the Circle Be Unbroken, 148–149
“What It Means,” 4 “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” 15
“What’d I Say,” 57, 74 William Morris Agency, 103, 138
Wheel, The, 225 Williams, Alonzo, 21
“Wheels,” 121, 175 Williams, Audrey Mae, 21–22, 27, 29–31, 53,
“When a Cowboy Trades His Spurs for 123
Wings,” 250 Williams, Billie Jean (née Jones), 30, 52
“When a Man Loves a Woman,” 122 Williams, Don, 5
“When I Go Away,” 239 Williams, Hank, Jr., 25, 29, 31, 59
“When I Start Dreaming,” 45 Williams, Hiram “Hank,” 2, 8, 18, 45–46,
“When the Night Comes from Falling in 50–53, 73, 86, 124, 134, 144, 169, 179, 210,
the Sky,” 199 220, 241, 251; death, 30–31, 55, 59, 166, 219;
“When the Roses Bloom in Dixieland,” 13 and Lefty Frizzell, 28–29; as Luke the
“When the Stars Go Blue,” 231 Drifter, 25–26, 110; music career, 20–23,
“When the World’s on Fire,” 15, 251 25–30; others adopt songs of, 6, 27, 39, 65,
“When You Awake,” 129 84, 98, 107, 109, 121, 142, 148, 151, 154, 175,
“Where Did You Sleep Last Night?,” 234 185, 188–189, 215, 231, 248; and Ray Price,
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” 71 30, 44–45; songwriting craft, 26–27, 30,
“Where the Sidewalk Ends,” 224 112, 208
 Index 319
Williams, Irene, 21 Writings and Drawings (book), 205
Williams, Lillian, 21, 31 WSFA, 21–22
Williams, Lucinda, 1, 97, 214, 231, 240; on WSM, 16, 22–23, 25
Patsy Cline, 63; music career, 188–189, Wu-Tang Clan, 225
217–218, 221, 231, 240, 245; others adopt Wyman, Bill, 155
songs of, 204, 221, 236 Wynette, Tammy, 106, 128, 135, 181
Williams, Miller, 188 Wynne, Angus, 95
Williams, Paul, 98
Williams, Teresa, 5 X (band), 184–185
Willie and the Poor Boys, 148 XERA, 16
Wills, Bob, 44, 178
Wilson, Tom, 80, 83 Yankee Foxtrot Hotel, 230
Winchester, Jesse, 133 Yarrow, Peter, 71, 86. See also Peter, Paul, and
Winger, Debra, 188 Mary
“Winter Dance Party” (tour), 54 “Years Ago,” 13
Winterland Ballroom (venue), 130, 177 Yellow Moon, 201
Winwood, Stevie, 205 “Yes It Is,” 92
Wire, The (TV show), 248 “Yesterday,” 90
“Witchy Woman,” 151 Yoakum, Dwight, 185, 195, 198, 225
“With God on Our Side,” 71 yodeling, 2, 11, 23, 25, 251–252
Witmark and Sons, 71 Yodelingly Yours: A Memorial Album to a Great
WLS, 16 Entertainer, 18
WNOX, 18 Yonder Mountain String Band, 200
Wolfe, Tom, 207 “You Ain’t Enough Woman (To Take My
“Woman I Am, The,” 190 Man),” 93
“Wonderwall,” 242 “You Ain’t Going Nowhere,” 110–111, 114
Wood, Ronnie, 196 “You Are My Sunshine,” 26, 127
Woodstock (film), 138, 177 “You Better Move On,” 122
“Woodstock” (song), 138 “You Can’t Catch Me,” 43
Woodstock Festival, 125, 136, 138 “You Can’t Keep Me Here in Tennessee,”
Woodstock Mountain Revue, 190 164
Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert, 117, 133 “You Done Me Wrong,” 45
“Woody Sez” (newspaper column), 15 “You Don’t Know Me,” 65
Wooten, Roy, 200 “You Don’t Miss Your Water,” 114
Wooten, Victor, 200 “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Wom-
“Working Man Blues,” 90 an,” 141
Workingman’s Dead, 147 “You Never Even Call Me by My Name,” 143
World Gone Wrong, 220 “You Turn Me On, I’m a Radio,” 150
World on the Ground, 247 “You Win Again,” 65
World Pacific Records, 79 “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When
“World Without Love,” 140 You Go,” 171
“Worried Man,” 65 “You’re No Good,” 68
“Worried Man Blues,” 15 “You’re Running Wild,” 45, 175
Wrecking Ball (album), 212, 217, 221, 235 “You’re Still on My Mind,” 114
“Wrecking Ball” (song), 221 “You’re Still Standin’ There,” 217
Wrecking Crew (group of studio musi- “You’ve Got a Friend,” 141
cians), 80 “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” 78
320 Index
Young, Faron, 60–63, 93 Your Love and Other Lies, 235
Young, Izzy, 66, 78 Yo-Yo Ma, 246
Young, Neil, 82, 137, 157, 177, 211, 213, 221, 251;
band membership, 101, 138, 152; others Zappa, Frank, 121, 150
adopt songs of, 147, 150–151, 202; solo ca- Zevon, Warren, 151
reer, 103, 135, 137, 140–141, 153, 187, 204, 213 Zimmerman, Abe, 133
“Younger Than Yesterday,” 101 Zimmerman, Bobby. See Dylan, Bob
“Your Cheating Heart,” 29, 31 Zimmerman, David, 191
JOHN MILWARD has written about popular music for more
than forty years; he was the chief pop music critic for
the Chicago Daily News and USA Today and has written
for Rolling Stone, the New York Times, and No Depression.
He is the author of Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped
Rock ’n’ Roll (and Rock Saved the Blues).

MARGIE GREVE’s work has appeared in Rolling Stone and

the New Yorker and has been shown in galleries in New
York City and the Hudson Valley.
MUSIC IN AMERICAN LIFE

Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs  Archie Green

Great Day Coming: Folk Music and the American Left  R. Serge Denisoff
John Philip Sousa: A Descriptive Catalog of His Works  Paul E. Bierley
The Hell-Bound Train: A Cowboy Songbook  Glenn Ohrlin
Oh, Didn’t He Ramble: The Life Story of Lee Collins, as Told to Mary Collins 
Edited by Frank J. Gillis and John W. Miner
American Labor Songs of the Nineteenth Century  Philip S. Foner
Stars of Country Music: Uncle Dave Macon to Johnny Rodriguez 
Edited by Bill C. Malone and Judith McCulloh
Git Along, Little Dogies: Songs and Songmakers of the American West  John I. White
A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border  Américo Paredes
San Antonio Rose: The Life and Music of Bob Wills  Charles R. Townsend
Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis  Jeff Todd Titon
An Ives Celebration: Papers and Panels of the Charles Ives Centennial
Festival-Conference  Edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock and Vivian Perlis
Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War  Dena J. Epstein
Joe Scott, the Woodsman-Songmaker  Edward D. Ives
Jimmie Rodgers: The Life and Times of America’s Blue Yodeler  Nolan Porterfield
Early American Music Engraving and Printing: A History of Music Publishing
in America from 1787 to 1825, with Commentary on Earlier and Later
Practices  Richard J. Wolfe
Sing a Sad Song: The Life of Hank Williams  Roger M. Williams
Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong  Norm Cohen
Resources of American Music History: A Directory of Source Materials from Colonial
Times to World War II  D. W. Krummel, Jean Geil, Doris J. Dyen, and Deane L. Root
Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants  Mark Slobin
Ozark Folksongs  Vance Randolph; edited and abridged by Norm Cohen
Oscar Sonneck and American Music  Edited by William Lichtenwanger
Bluegrass Breakdown: The Making of the Old Southern Sound  Robert Cantwell
Bluegrass: A History  Neil V. Rosenberg
Music at the White House: A History of the American Spirit  Elise K. Kirk
Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast  Bruce Bastin
Good Friends and Bad Enemies: Robert Winslow Gordon and the Study of American
Folksong  Debora Kodish
Fiddlin’ Georgia Crazy: Fiddlin’ John Carson, His Real World, and the World of His
Songs  Gene Wiggins
America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present (rev. 3d ed.)  Gilbert Chase
Secular Music in Colonial Annapolis: The Tuesday Club, 1745–56  John Barry Talley
Bibliographical Handbook of American Music  D. W. Krummel
Goin’ to Kansas City  Nathan W. Pearson Jr.
“Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “The Old Folks at Home”: The Songs of Stephen C. Foster
from His Time to Ours (2d ed.)  William W. Austin
Songprints: The Musical Experience of Five Shoshone Women  Judith Vander
“Happy in the Service of the Lord”: Afro-American Gospel Quartets in Memphis 
Kip Lornell
Paul Hindemith in the United States  Luther Noss
“My Song Is My Weapon”: People’s Songs, American Communism, and the Politics of
Culture, 1930–50  Robbie Lieberman
Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate  Mark Slobin
Theodore Thomas: America’s Conductor and Builder of Orchestras, 1835–1905 
Ezra Schabas
“The Whorehouse Bells Were Ringing” and Other Songs Cowboys Sing 
Collected and Edited by Guy Logsdon
Crazeology: The Autobiography of a Chicago Jazzman  Bud Freeman,
as Told to Robert Wolf
Discoursing Sweet Music: Brass Bands and Community Life in Turn-of-the-Century
Pennsylvania  Kenneth Kreitner
Mormonism and Music: A History  Michael Hicks
Voices of the Jazz Age: Profiles of Eight Vintage Jazzmen  Chip Deffaa
Pickin’ on Peachtree: A History of Country Music in Atlanta, Georgia 
Wayne W. Daniel
Bitter Music: Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos  Harry Partch;
edited by Thomas McGeary
Ethnic Music on Records: A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the
United States, 1893 to 1942  Richard K. Spottswood
Downhome Blues Lyrics: An Anthology from the Post–World War II Era 
Jeff Todd Titon
Ellington: The Early Years  Mark Tucker
Chicago Soul  Robert Pruter
That Half-Barbaric Twang: The Banjo in American Popular Culture  Karen Linn
Hot Man: The Life of Art Hodes  Art Hodes and Chadwick Hansen
The Erotic Muse: American Bawdy Songs (2d ed.)  Ed Cray
Barrio Rhythm: Mexican American Music in Los Angeles  Steven Loza
The Creation of Jazz: Music, Race, and Culture in Urban America  Burton W. Peretti
Charles Martin Loeffler: A Life Apart in Music  Ellen Knight
Club Date Musicians: Playing the New York Party Circuit  Bruce A. MacLeod
Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825–60 
Katherine K. Preston
The Stonemans: An Appalachian Family and the Music That Shaped Their Lives 
Ivan M. Tribe
Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined  Edited by Neil V. Rosenberg
The Crooked Stovepipe: Athapaskan Fiddle Music and Square Dancing in Northeast
Alaska and Northwest Canada  Craig Mishler
Traveling the High Way Home: Ralph Stanley and the World of Traditional Bluegrass
Music  John Wright
Carl Ruggles: Composer, Painter, and Storyteller  Marilyn Ziffrin
Never without a Song: The Years and Songs of Jennie Devlin, 1865–1952 
Katharine D. Newman
The Hank Snow Story  Hank Snow, with Jack Ownbey and Bob Burris
Milton Brown and the Founding of Western Swing  Cary Ginell,
with special assistance from Roy Lee Brown
Santiago de Murcia’s “Códice Saldívar No. 4”: A Treasury of Secular Guitar Music
from Baroque Mexico  Craig H. Russell
The Sound of the Dove: Singing in Appalachian Primitive Baptist Churches 
Beverly Bush Patterson
Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music 
Bruno Nettl
Doowop: The Chicago Scene  Robert Pruter
Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues  Chip Deffaa
Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion: Poetry Songs and Great Basin Context 
Judith Vander
Go Cat Go! Rockabilly Music and Its Makers  Craig Morrison
’Twas Only an Irishman’s Dream: The Image of Ireland and the Irish in American
Popular Song Lyrics, 1800–1920  William H. A. Williams
Democracy at the Opera: Music, Theater, and Culture in New York City,
1815–60  Karen Ahlquist
Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians  Virginia Waring
Woody, Cisco, and Me: Seamen Three in the Merchant Marine  Jim Longhi
Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American
Popular Culture  William J. Mahar
Going to Cincinnati: A History of the Blues in the Queen City  Steven C. Tracy
Pistol Packin’ Mama: Aunt Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong  Shelly Romalis
Sixties Rock: Garage, Psychedelic, and Other Satisfactions  Michael Hicks
The Late Great Johnny Ace and the Transition from R&B to Rock ’n’ Roll 
James M. Salem
Tito Puente and the Making of Latin Music  Steven Loza
Juilliard: A History  Andrea Olmstead
Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology  Edited by Bell Yung
and Helen Rees
Mountains of Music: West Virginia Traditional Music from Goldenseal 
Edited by John Lilly
Alice Tully: An Intimate Portrait  Albert Fuller
A Blues Life  Henry Townsend, as told to Bill Greensmith
Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (2d ed.)  Norm Cohen
The Golden Age of Gospel  Text by Horace Clarence Boyer;
photography by Lloyd Yearwood
Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man  Howard Pollack
Louis Moreau Gottschalk  S. Frederick Starr
Race, Rock, and Elvis  Michael T. Bertrand
Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage  Albert Glinsky
Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico’s Costa Chica 
John H. McDowell
The Bill Monroe Reader  Edited by Tom Ewing
Music in Lubavitcher Life  Ellen Koskoff
Zarzuela: Spanish Operetta, American Stage  Janet L. Sturman
Bluegrass Odyssey: A Documentary in Pictures and Words, 1966–86 
Carl Fleischhauer and Neil V. Rosenberg
That Old-Time Rock & Roll: A Chronicle of an Era, 1954–63  Richard Aquila
Labor’s Troubadour  Joe Glazer
American Opera  Elise K. Kirk
Don’t Get above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working Class 
Bill C. Malone
John Alden Carpenter: A Chicago Composer  Howard Pollack
Heartbeat of the People: Music and Dance of the Northern Pow-wow  Tara Browner
My Lord, What a Morning: An Autobiography  Marian Anderson
Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey  Allan Keiler
Charles Ives Remembered: An Oral History  Vivian Perlis
Henry Cowell, Bohemian  Michael Hicks
Rap Music and Street Consciousness  Cheryl L. Keyes
Louis Prima  Garry Boulard
Marian McPartland’s Jazz World: All in Good Time  Marian McPartland
Robert Johnson: Lost and Found  Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch
Bound for America: Three British Composers  Nicholas Temperley
Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919  Tim Brooks
Burn, Baby! BURN! The Autobiography of Magnificent Montague 
Magnificent Montague with Bob Baker
Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family’s Claim to the Confederate Anthem 
Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks
The Bluegrass Reader  Edited by Thomas Goldsmith
Colin McPhee: Composer in Two Worlds  Carol J. Oja
Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture 
Patricia R. Schroeder
Composing a World: Lou Harrison, Musical Wayfarer  Leta E. Miller
and Fredric Lieberman
Fritz Reiner, Maestro and Martinet  Kenneth Morgan
That Toddlin’ Town: Chicago’s White Dance Bands and Orchestras,
1900–1950  Charles A. Sengstock Jr.
Dewey and Elvis: The Life and Times of a Rock ’n’ Roll Deejay  Louis Cantor
Come Hither to Go Yonder: Playing Bluegrass with Bill Monroe  Bob Black
Chicago Blues: Portraits and Stories  David Whiteis
The Incredible Band of John Philip Sousa  Paul E. Bierley
“Maximum Clarity” and Other Writings on Music  Ben Johnston, edited by Bob Gilmore
Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude Knott  Michael Ann Williams
Homegrown Music: Discovering Bluegrass  Stephanie P. Ledgin
Tales of a Theatrical Guru  Danny Newman
The Music of Bill Monroe  Neil V. Rosenberg and Charles K. Wolfe
Pressing On: The Roni Stoneman Story  Roni Stoneman, as told to Ellen Wright
Together Let Us Sweetly Live  Jonathan C. David,
with photographs by Richard Holloway
Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story  Diane Diekman
Air Castle of the South: WSM Radio and the Making of Music City 
Craig P. Havighurst
Traveling Home: Sacred Harp Singing and American Pluralism  Kiri Miller
Where Did Our Love Go? The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound  Nelson George
Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-Tonk Angels: The Women of Barn Dance
Radio  Kristine M. McCusker
California Polyphony: Ethnic Voices, Musical Crossroads  Mina Yang
The Never-Ending Revival: Rounder Records and the Folk Alliance 
Michael F. Scully
Sing It Pretty: A Memoir  Bess Lomax Hawes
Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens  Hazel Dickens
and Bill C. Malone
Charles Ives Reconsidered  Gayle Sherwood Magee
The Hayloft Gang: The Story of the National Barn Dance  Edited by Chad Berry
Country Music Humorists and Comedians  Loyal Jones
Record Makers and Breakers: Voices of the Independent Rock ’n’ Roll Pioneers 
John Broven
Music of the First Nations: Tradition and Innovation in Native North America 
Edited by Tara Browner
Cafe Society: The Wrong Place for the Right People  Barney Josephson,
with Terry Trilling-Josephson
George Gershwin: An Intimate Portrait  Walter Rimler
Life Flows On in Endless Song: Folk Songs and American History  Robert V. Wells
I Feel a Song Coming On: The Life of Jimmy McHugh  Alyn Shipton
King of the Queen City: The Story of King Records  Jon Hartley Fox
Long Lost Blues: Popular Blues in America, 1850–1920  Peter C. Muir
Hard Luck Blues: Roots Music Photographs from the Great Depression 
Rich Remsberg
Restless Giant: The Life and Times of Jean Aberbach and Hill and Range Songs 
Bar Biszick-Lockwood
Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima: Variety Theater in the Nineteenth
Century  Gillian M. Rodger
Sacred Steel: Inside an African American Steel Guitar Tradition  Robert L. Stone
Gone to the Country: The New Lost City Ramblers and the Folk Music Revival 
Ray Allen
The Makers of the Sacred Harp  David Warren Steel with Richard H. Hulan
Woody Guthrie, American Radical  Will Kaufman
George Szell: A Life of Music  Michael Charry
Bean Blossom: The Brown County Jamboree and Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass
Festivals  Thomas A. Adler
Crowe on the Banjo: The Music Life of J. D. Crowe  Marty Godbey
Twentieth Century Drifter: The Life of Marty Robbins  Diane Diekman
Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music  John Caps
The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American
Experience  Stephen Wade
Then Sings My Soul: The Culture of Southern Gospel Music  Douglas Harrison
The Accordion in the Americas: Klezmer, Polka, Tango, Zydeco, and More! 
Edited by Helena Simonett
Bluegrass Bluesman: A Memoir  Josh Graves, edited by Fred Bartenstein
One Woman in a Hundred: Edna Phillips and the Philadelphia Orchestra 
Mary Sue Welsh
The Great Orchestrator: Arthur Judson and American Arts Management 
James M. Doering
Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer  David C. Paul
Southern Soul-Blues  David Whiteis
Sweet Air: Modernism, Regionalism, and American Popular Song 
Edward P. Comentale
Pretty Good for a Girl: Women in Bluegrass  Murphy Hicks Henry
Sweet Dreams: The World of Patsy Cline  Warren R. Hofstra
William Sidney Mount and the Creolization of American Culture 
Christopher J. Smith
Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker  Chuck Haddix
Making the March King: John Philip Sousa’s Washington Years, 1854–1893 
Patrick Warfield
In It for the Long Run  Jim Rooney
Pioneers of the Blues Revival  Steve Cushing
Roots of the Revival: American and British Folk Music in the 1950s  Ronald D. Cohen
and Rachel Clare Donaldson
Blues All Day Long: The Jimmy Rogers Story  Wayne Everett Goins
Yankee Twang: Country and Western Music in New England  Clifford R. Murphy
The Music of the Stanley Brothers  Gary B. Reid
Hawaiian Music in Motion: Mariners, Missionaries, and Minstrels  James Revell Carr
Sounds of the New Deal: The Federal Music Project in the West  Peter Gough
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir: A Biography  Michael Hicks
The Man That Got Away: The Life and Songs of Harold Arlen  Walter Rimler
A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music  Robert M. Marovich
Blues Unlimited: Essential Interviews from the Original Blues Magazine 
Edited by Bill Greensmith, Mike Rowe, and Mark Camarigg
Hoedowns, Reels, and Frolics: Roots and Branches of Southern Appalachian
Dance  Phil Jamison
Fannie Bloomfield-Zeisler: The Life and Times of a Piano Virtuoso 
Beth Abelson Macleod
Cybersonic Arts: Adventures in American New Music  Gordon Mumma,
edited with commentary by Michelle Fillion
The Magic of Beverly Sills  Nancy Guy
Waiting for Buddy Guy  Alan Harper
Harry T. Burleigh: From the Spiritual to the Harlem Renaissance  Jean E. Snyder
Music in the Age of Anxiety: American Music in the Fifties  James Wierzbicki
Jazzing: New York City’s Unseen Scene  Thomas H. Greenland
A Cole Porter Companion  Edited by Don M. Randel, Matthew Shaftel,
and Susan Forscher Weiss
Foggy Mountain Troubadour: The Life and Music of Curly Seckler  Penny Parsons
Blue Rhythm Fantasy: Big Band Jazz Arranging in the Swing Era  John Wriggle
Bill Clifton: America’s Bluegrass Ambassador to the World  Bill C. Malone
Chinatown Opera Theater in North America  Nancy Yunhwa Rao
The Elocutionists: Women, Music, and the Spoken Word  Marian Wilson Kimber
May Irwin: Singing, Shouting, and the Shadow of Minstrelsy  Sharon Ammen
Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics  Jean R. Freedman
Charles Ives’s Concord: Essays after a Sonata  Kyle Gann
Don’t Give Your Heart to a Rambler: My Life with Jimmy Martin, the King
of Bluegrass  Barbara Martin Stephens
Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life  Denise Von Glahn
George Szell’s Reign: Behind the Scenes with the Cleveland Orchestra 
Marcia Hansen Kraus
Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety
Stage  Gillian M. Rodger
Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry  Sandra Jean Graham
Right to the Juke Joint: A Personal History of American Music  Patrick B. Mullen
Bluegrass Generation: A Memoir  Neil V. Rosenberg
Pioneers of the Blues Revival, Expanded Second Edition  Steve Cushing
Banjo Roots and Branches  Edited by Robert Winans
Bill Monroe: The Life and Music of the Blue Grass Man  Tom Ewing
Dixie Dewdrop: The Uncle Dave Macon Story  Michael D. Doubler
Los Romeros: Royal Family of the Spanish Guitar  Walter Aaron Clark
Transforming Women’s Education: Liberal Arts and Music in Female
Seminaries  Jewel A. Smith
Rethinking American Music  Edited by Tara Browner and Thomas L. Riis
Leonard Bernstein and the Language of Jazz  Katherine Baber
Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural
History  Christopher J. Smith
Peggy Glanville-Hicks: Composer and Critic  Suzanne Robinson
Mormons, Musical Theater, and Belonging in America  Jake Johnson
Blues Legacy: Tradition and Innovation in Chicago  David Whiteis
Blues Before Sunrise 2: Interviews from the Chicago Scene  Steve Cushing
The Cashaway Psalmody: Transatlantic Religion and Music in Colonial
Carolina  Stephen A. Marini
Earl Scruggs and Foggy Mountain Breakdown: The Making of an American
Classic  Thomas Goldsmith
A Guru’s Journey: Pandit Chitresh Das and Indian Classical Dance in
Diaspora  Sarah Morelli
Unsettled Scores: Politics, Hollywood, and the Film Music of Aaron Copland and
Hanns Eisler  Sally Bick
Hillbilly Maidens, Okies, and Cowgirls: Women’s Country Music,
1930–1960  Stephanie Vander Wel
Always the Queen: The Denise LaSalle Story  Denise LaSalle with David Whiteis
Artful Noise: Percussion Literature in the Twentieth Century  Thomas Siwe
The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price  Rae Linda Brown,
edited by Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.
When Sunday Comes: Gospel Music in the Soul and Hip-Hop Eras 
Claudrena N. Harold
The Lady Swings: Memoirs of a Jazz Drummer  Dottie Dodgion and Wayne Enstice
Industrial Strength Bluegrass: Southwestern Ohio’s Musical Legacy 
Edited by Fred Bartenstein and Curtis W. Ellison
Soul on Soul: The Life and Music of Mary Lou Williams  Tammy L. Kernodle
Unbinding Gentility: Women Making Music in the Nineteenth-Century
South  Candace Bailey
Punks in Peoria: Making a Scene in the American Heartland  Jonathan Wright
and Dawson Barrett
Homer Rodeheaver and the Rise of the Gospel Music Industry  Kevin Mungons
and Douglas Yeo
Americanaland: Where Country & Western Met Rock ’n’ Roll  John Milward,
with Portraits by Margie Greve
The University of Illinois Press
is a founding member of the
Association of University Presses.

University of Illinois Press

1325 South Oak Street
Champaign, IL 61820-6903
www.press.uillinois.edu
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