Blame It All on My Podcast!

When I heard sodden leaf blower, Frank Sinatra, performing one of my favorite Country songs on the overhead speakers at the restaurant where I work, I just about dropped my serving tray. I had never heard anything like it. It was wrong. It was slimy instead of sweet. It evoked none of the correct imagery. Or was it all that off, really? I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but it inspired me to start this podcast to try to find out! Your favorite blog about the problematic themes in Country music is coming for your podcatcher, but if you’re reading this, you probably already figured that out. Rememer, Mamas, don’t let ‘em grow up to be cowboys. Welcome to Blame It All on My Roots.

Today Is a Day of Reckoning

Last month, The Oxford American published the debut work of author Josie Tolin. It’s called “Freezer Songs” and it’s incredible.  It’s the story of a young songwriter navigating the end of her last summer vacation before her sister leaves for college. It is set during the summer that “Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert finalized their divorce,” Tolin writes in the voice of Rachael, the narrator. That’s 2015 for everyone who’s keeping score. 

Shelton, by the way, is responsible for birthing such horrors as “Boys ‘Round Here”, which obnoxiously combines elements of hiphop and swamp country with a boys-will-be-boys swagger that would make Louis CK blush, and “Gods Country”, an absolute Death Star of that brand of post-9/11 country music that assumes jingoism, “Christianity” and “conservative” beliefs about race are somehow synonymous and a given among the country music crowd. (He also did “Ol’ Red”, which knocks and is cute, to be fair.)

Lambert, on the other hand, made the absolute tragi-banger, “Gunpowder and Lead” about a woman waiting for her abusive partner to get out of jail. She’s expecting him to come right home seeking revenge, so she’s holed up with a shotgun. When he gets there, she fucking kills him. 

It’s a genius way for Tolin to set up the story. See, you find out in the first couple of paragraphs that Rachael has a stalker whom she refers to as Fedora Man. He looks for her at the Jimmy John’s where she’s working, but her considerate coworkers hide her in the freezer when they see him coming. I’m going to spoil some of this excellent story, so you should absolutely go read it.

The story takes place in Southern small town, so the sound track is country, or else we wouldn’t be talking about it, would we? Rachael gets to the point of this post when she acknowledges a perhaps troubling trend with women country artists:

“I twisted the dial on my clock until I found 95.5, the country station, which was doing some sort of early-morning women’s hour. I rolled myself in a gingham blanket and listened in the fetal position. The songs landed differently this time. WASP-y as they were, the women of country music were not the repressed type of angry. They slugged their cheating boyfriends’ headlights with baseball bats. Their abusive exes were stalking them, so they went home and loaded their shotguns.

After the hour had passed I was sure I knew these women. For one, I knew they were scared.”

— Josie Tolin, "Freezer Songs"

There are so many country songs by women where they exact revenge for being wronged by men or are forced to kill someone to protect themselves. That latter one referenced above is “Gunpowder and Lead”. Or is it “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia”? The Chicks use poison in “Goodbye, Earl” (a song with an interesting history, penned by Dennis Linde, who also wrote “Burning Love” for that guy who got famous for doing a spot-on Professor Longhair impersonation while jiggling his crotch at teenage girls). Carrie Underwood goes absolutely ham on a truck (the baseball bat/headlights reference in the quote) in “Before He Cheats”. She poisons another abuser in “Church Bells”, and commits one other murder in “Two Black Cadillacs”. Doesn’t say how in that one.

So, there is a theme: that women are strong, capable and willing to do whatever it takes if pushed to their limits. And that they must be, because no one else will protect them.

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I’ve heard these songs cited as examples of country music celebrating feminine power. (Kinda hard for me to find a good example right now, but I did turn up this article on feminist country songs that resonates better with what I’d say was really empowering. “Independence Day” is on it? Anyway.) It’s true, they call out the patriarchy for failing to protect women in the best of cases, and for being a threat in the worst. But, there’s something about this “Girl Power” sub-genre that keeps me from a full-throated endorsement of that interpretation. You very rarely find out what happens to the women after they’ve committed murder to save their own lives. It seems that in “Goodbye, Earl” and “Two Black Cadillacs” that maybe everybody just gets away with it and the dead shithead just rots. “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” sees a man take the fall for a crime that his sister committed, though he had wanted to do it himself. We don’t get much information about how she feels about that.

But, we get a little more info in what I’ll say is the most epic song in the sub-genre, Martina McBride’s “Independence Day”. This story is told from the point of view of a young girl whose mother sends her to a fair on Independence Day so that she can murder her abusive husband and burn down the house. It isn’t explicit, but the mother is maybe tried for crimes, but more likely dies in the flames herself. The narrator is sent to an orphanage. I don’t think this feels like female empowerment, but more like desperation and finally lashing out. Maybe the mom didn’t feel powerless, but she felt hopeless. They all, to me, have a slight vibe of… that. Maybe this one is just much more on the nose.

“Now, I ain’t saying it’s right or it’s wrong,” McBride sings, “But maybe it’s the only way.”

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By the end of “Freezer Songs”, Rachael’s sister packs up and is driven off to Ball State by their dad. Her boyfriend at work, Benji, has moved on to a different kind of part-time job. As the summer comes to a close, all of her coworkers are replaced at the Jimmy John’s because they go back to school or whatever. So, when the Fedora Man comes in while Rachael is working the till, nobody recognizes the threat. She does not get put in the freezer for her safety.

““Where have they been hiding you, beautiful?” He leaned in like he thought he might find the answer in the details of my face, and as he ordered I felt every warm syllable of tomato against my nose. Then he pulled a pink handkerchief from his pocket and ran it along my sweaty forehead—slowly, which was the worst part I think, the imagined romance of it all. I considered swiping his fedora. Without it he might have been just a man, a man with an aversion to tomatoes. But I didn’t have a baseball bat, much less a shotgun. No one was going to save me.”

— Josie Tolin, "Freezer Songs"

After this, she goes to the freezer and feebly tries to destroy some frozen bread, then quits and leaves. No one chases her out or yells. 

Loretta Lynn’s song, “Rated X” isn’t about a crime committed to protect herself or in revenge, it’s just about what can happen to a woman’s reputation when she chooses to free herself from an unhappy marriage through divorce. The last verse is sort of spoken as the song fades out. She says, “Why, us women don’t have a chance… No matter what you do they’re gonna talk about you. Look down their noses. I, I don’t know what to think about it. Just give ‘em something to talk about, I guess.”

I guess…

Gentle on My Manhattan

Head Rat, Frank Sinatra. Image by Jim_Moriarty, Goodfon.com

I’m a waiter. I work in a “fine dining” establishment. The work of the scare quotes employed there cannot be overstated, but, whatever other flaws there might be, there are crisp, black napkins at each place setting. And Frank Sinatra is the soundtrack. I’d say that’s pretty typical of a restaurant somehow perpetually trapped in the first decade of the 21st century that unashamedly caters to Boomers and doesn’t allow their waiters to have visible tattoos. Of course I am not surprised that the accompaniment to my own Sisyphean nightmare is a man with a voice like a leaf blower. Exclusively that voice. But I was surprised one day by a rendition of the Glenn Campbell hit, “Gentle on My Mind”.

It’s a song about being a happy hobo, made famous by Campbell in 1967, but written by the relative unknown, John Hartford. Though it would not make him a star, penning the tune would be a career defining moment for Hartford as it would go on to be covered by legends like Waylon Jennings, Roger Miller and Tammy Wynette (an especially interesting rendition sung to the original protagonist, but we’ll have to save that for later).

And head rat, Frank Sinatra.

The song in a nutshell tells the story of a man burdened with wanderlust (or perhaps forced to wander for work) who finds the memory of a long ago lover (that he sometimes still visits, we could assume) a comfort for him in his vagabond life. It’s sweet, especially sung by Hartford with his gentle, smooth baritone. It’s easy to imagine that the lovers, the singer and the one gentle upon his mind, are star-crossed. If her father hadn’t forbid the union, if the bank hadn’t taken his farm, they’d be together, and he’d no longer wander. Alas, he cups a tin can of soup, pulls down a dirty hat in a train yard. He is fondly remembering.

But when sung by the somehow eternally 43-year-old, faded and twitterpated Sinatra, it takes on a misogynistic sneer that’s otherwise missed. The signature absurd grandiosity of Sinatra and his full pop orchestra not only makes it difficult to imagine a roughening coal-pile beard and tin cans of soup in train yards. To me, and in the context of the rest of his oeuvre, Sinatra conjures images of a Peter Pan playboy tipping his cigarette into a brass ashtray in a smoky hotel lobby, jingling a rocks glass of whiskey. He is leering.

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Last year, I was a bartender in a bowling alley in a tiny town called Fairfield Bay sat upon the bucolic shores of Greers Ferry Lake in central Arkansas. There are only about 2,100 residents there, and they make up perhaps a fifth of the combined population of all the small nodes of civilization around the lake. The Greers Ferry community is rural. It is remote. And it is home to a fascinating phenomenon: uniformly, in every single restaurant and bar (excluding The Dock in Fairfield Bay where there would be bands about once a week), they don’t have any music playing at all. Imagine that. Eating in silence. Nothing but the scraping of flatware on plates. And everywhere. As if that was… normal?

It was while I was working at the bowling alley that I started to notice. In fact, they didn’t play music at the bowling alley until I demanded it. And stranger still, no one seemed concerned about it. It wasn’t as if budget constraints prohibited them from buying a stereo system, as was the case for so many other anomalies there (the barstools were too short, we didn’t always have shot glasses). They just didn’t turn it on. I didn’t ask at every restaurant and bar that I went to while I lived there, but they probably also had unused stereos, not budget constraints.

So why? Why would anyone choose to wait tables or tend bar in silence? Well, I’m not a scientist, but I have a theory: the reason is misogyny.

As it happens among service industry colleagues, the women that I worked with were all pretty open about the psychological torment that they were forced to endure at the hands of the men in their lives. They were cheated on, lied to, physically and emotionally abused. They were left. And they were begged by these men to forgive and to take them back. And they did. Again and again, sometimes. Sounds a lot like a country song, doesn’t it? And to them, this was… normal.

By the way, when we started playing music at the bowling alley, it was country music. This shouldn’t be surprising to anyone familiar with rural life. Most of the time, when music is playing in rural places, it is country music. It is generally family friendly. It doesn’t call out the names of colonizers’ ships or say that George Bush is an idiot. We mainly played it because it was the only universally palatable genre. All the same, my coworkers were anxious to turn it off every night along with the Open sign.

It’s probably time for me to say that among all the front of house workers in all of the Greers Ferry Lake communities, I was (as far as I could tell) unique as the only male identifying person. This, too, shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who is familiar with  rural life. Waiting tables (and to a lesser extent tending bar, but still) is huswifery, and while it is tolerated as essential by rural people, it is not respectable work. And women are the only kind of people suited for it. Because, you see, women are not respected.

And maybe they don’t really like to listen to artists that wear this disrespect on their sleeves. So, they just don’t turn on the stereo. Until someone like me comes meddling.

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When I first started to conceive of this blog, I thought I had a pretty solid premise: that this would be an examination of country music and the ways that it represents or even exalts a rural America that has likely never existed. Even worse, sometimes it celebrates as virtuous things that should well be thought of as villainous. It will be. But as I started going down rabbit holes, I started to discover that many of the things I thought were problematic about country music often just boiled down to misogyny. 

See, maybe I didn’t give a fair shake to Frat Snackpack or whatever his stupid fucking name is. Because that description of him from earlier? Playboy Peter Pan, whiskey and cigarettes? It’s as accurate a description of any of the Hank Wiliamses. It perfectly describes Garth Brooks when he sings “Rodeo” or Toby Keith when he sings “How Do You Like Me Now”. Toby Keith also sounds like a leaf blower. 

Perpetually faded and twitterpated, these men and so many more sing countless songs (and I do mean both country and “mainstream” as people tend to label Snackpack’s genre) about being left by a woman. There is occasionally, as in “Gentle on My Mind” or “Rodeo”, some woman left crying as the male protagonist goes on about doing man stuff. She is acknowledged. She doesn’t get her own song. But, there is always a man, broken hearted, scorned. Alone. He very often doesn’t even understand why, and there is rarely lyrical context for the listener to parse a reason. I think that very lack of context suggests, boys, that it’s time you look within.

So, that’s what we’re here to do. 

Roll up your sleeping bags, babies. Welcome to Blame it All on My Roots.