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.
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.
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.