Country: Portraits of an American Sound
Group Exhibition
Annenberg Space for Photography
2000 Avenue of the Stars, Century Plaza, Los Angeles, CA
90067
May 31, 2014 - September 28, 2014
(My blog is evolving. I still want to offer commentary on visual art, but, to be honest, my interests run deeper and, more often than not, visual art only speaks of certain and often limited parts of your psyche and soul. I love country music, for instance, and it can do things that visual art and even writing cannot. I noticed today that I never re-printed a recent essay I wrote on country -- a response to a show at the Annenberg Space for Photography -- and am delighted to so now.)
Reprinted from Art Slant: http://www.artslant.com/la/articles/show/40154
I only need one song to explain how I feel about country
music: George Strait’s So Much Like My Dad. A modest hit in 1992, the tune’s
not nearly as recognizable as Strait’s other classics. You’ll likely run into
All My Exes Live in Texas, but probably not So Much Like My Dad.
A few keys of the piano walk you into the song’s weather:
the first few drops of an icy rain, a first snowfall. A brush hits the drumhead
and somehow it’s cold. It hits a few more times and it’s been cold a long time.
The guitar picks up, string by string. Seasons, days, minutes, and seconds
spring to life and then pass away. The singer’s returned home to his mother,
but it’s “not his usual time of year.” He has a problem and is seeking an
answer.
The music brightens like a mother’s smile. I can’t help but
think that his mother blushes with the flattery of being sought out by her boy.
The son goes one better; he is ready to reminisce and begins recalling memories
of his father and the mutual things that mother and son could share about the
man, the good times so to speak.
We are hearing, through the son’s words, the story the
mother tells herself to live; we see through her rose colored glasses, the song
letting all the sentiment in with reckless abandon: “Remember when I was dad’s
pride and joy, and your little man?” The son then uses the mother’s own words,
“Boy, you’re getting more like him, each and every day.”
We are lulled into this story, we move to the one-two,
one-two of the beat, which makes the song great for two-step. The conversation
is also a bit like a dance, form and content perfectly united. We feel like the
son is glancing over to his mother after each phrase and it is almost as though
she is nodding in agreement.
Then Strait takes a big breath. The son, in fact, is not at
ease talking to his mother. The breath is important. He needs to courage to
launch into what all of this is really about, and what it is really about is
that he actually is like his dad, not the dad they’ve enjoyed recalling, but
what his dad was really like:
“She’s says she gonna leave me, Momma, and nothing on God’s
green earth can make her stay. I can’t live without her, Momma, but this time
you can’t kiss the hurt away, but if I am so much like my Dad, there must have
been times you felt her way. So tell me word for word, what he said, that
always made you stay.”
Her son has become the monster. Though they talk
pleasantries about the past, the real father returns like a ghost. The son not
only knew about his father’s sins, but also, despite the mother’s efforts at
protection, has re-created them. The sentimentality early in the song only
serves as a way of making this generational pain a sharper twist of the knife.
No, the past wasn’t better. People weren’t stronger. For each of those years
together that was hard fought, there is a clear argument that perhaps they
shouldn’t have fought at all.
The complicated humanity of this song, in my opinion, rivals
Robert Frost’s Home Burial, the stories of Alice Munro or William Trevor, or
even Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters. There is deep mystery at the heart of
it, and the mystery comes from a verifiable lineage of individual choices.
We stand, along with the son, awaiting the answer. The
answer never comes.
Earl Scruggs and June Carter on the set of the Flatt & Scruggs Grand Ole Opry Show, 1961, Paul Warren (in background), fiddler, Foggy Mountain Boys; © Les Leverett; Courtesy Annenberg Space for Photography, LA
I’ve always wanted to express my admiration for that song,
for country music in general, and there has never been a good moment. Now,
having seen the Annenberg Space for Photography’s exhibition of country music
portrait photography, it is as good a time as any, though in this impressive
collection of photos you won’t find a single snap of George Strait.
What you do find is an attempt to present the idea of
country music through images, and, surprisingly, this works like a charm up to
a point. Henry Diltz, Henry Horenstein, Les Leverett, David McClister, Raeanne
Rubenstein, Leigh Wiener and Michael Wilson are among the photographers
presented and they are all quite good. They build the stories of their
musicians, all while being on the fabled quest of every portrait photographer,
that legendary journey into the reality of their subject. Country music takes
the same road; musicians, songwriters, singers, and record companies create
themselves in the image of what sells and what sells in country music is
authenticity. It is a fascinating paradox.
The photos come across loud and clear. Basically as soon as
the African banjo met the American fiddle, country music was popular and sold
well. It exploded in the 1930s, and quickly becomes the story of people
changing out of suits into overalls and back into suits. When Hollywood sold
cowboys, country singers put on hats and starred in Westerns. When the sixties
wanted long hair and artists on the fringe, country music revived the outlaw
(look to Willie Nelson in the RCA years for proof and subsequently later, when,
by his own admission, he was more like himself). In the eighties, country stars
aligned themselves with high fashion, brought in synthesizers, and laid it on
as thick as hair metal and glam (Tanya Tucker’s album cover for TNT is all you
need to see). In the late eighties and nineties, the cowboy hat returned. There
is even a moment in the Annenberg’s film on country music where a country
record producer jokes that Keith Urban looks like the guy that comes with the
picture frame.
At the same time, the truisms about country music are
present as well. “Three chords and the truth,” said Harlan Howard, a sentiment
along the lines of “Country people talking about country things.” There is
country music as the “cry of the heart.” There is the common advice to budding
musicians is to “hang onto your roots and branch out.” And let’s not forget the
decree of the stage manager at the Grand Ole Opry for singers to keep it to
“One song per hillbilly.” However, my favorite quote remains Johnny Cash’s
description of Merle Haggard: “Merle Haggard is the man you think I am.” What
better way to show the tension between the expectations for country music to be
authentic and the reality of the situation?
And what are some of those expectations? Well, the photos in
the installation again tell the story. Leigh Weiner has some very expressive,
almost campy, photos of Cash in a confederate uniform or underneath the
watchful eye of the cross while dressed in black. There are many superficial
markers of “country”: trucks, beer, sadness, loss, drunkenness, cheating,
forgiveness, and church. However, Weiner’s best one of Cash gets to the heart
of it: simply Cash with his guitar placed in front of him, as pensive as a boy
about to meet his girl’s parents or as someone who wants to be seen a simple
songsmith, nothing more nothing less. Michael Wilson’s portrait of Lyle Lovett
in the snow is posed in a similar manner, doused with a big dose of
lonesomeness, “a wanderer in the world” mystique. Country musicians must appear
simple; they must have an “aw shucks” gratefulness to their demeanor. There is
an air of perpetual nostalgia and gratitude, brokenness and redemption, and the
country music industry goes to great lengths to make sure the spell is not
broken.
Emmylou Harris, Sunday School Room, Nashville, 2000; ©
Michael Wilson; Courtesy Annenberg Space for Photography, LA
However, I am not even remotely cynical about this, though
this simplicity can often be right wing, hostile to any sort of intellectual
sophistication. The reason is that there is something deeply and intrinsically
true about Americans in this tension between self-creation and its paradoxical
taste for foundation values that may or may not exist. In country music the
rigidity of its image can often make the humanity of its content come forward
in surprising, even forceful, ways. Country music is like the neighbor that has
said hello to you a hundred times, even done you favors, only to hide real,
unbelievably intense trauma and suffering just under the surface.
Maybe that is what is lacking in the Annenberg show. We get
the image, we get the history, but, unfortunately, it is hard to get to the
mystery of country music, difficult to dive into the real meat of country,
which are the songs themselves and their ability to speak to individuals.
To make an attempt at what I mean, perhaps we should return
to So Much like My Dad. After all, I just described the beginning of the song,
and for a while, I thought the ending was boring, just George Strait repeating
the earned chorus, “If I’m so much like my dad,” after a long solo on piano and
guitar.
Strait did not write So Much like My Dad. Strait has never
written any song. You should also know that Strait’s career has made most of
its hay by selling authenticity. In a world of stadium shows and massive bands,
the introduction of synthesizers and new levels of production value, Strait
came out on the stage alone in jeans and a white hat. On his farewell tour this
year, thirty-three years later, Strait continued to come out on the stage in
jeans and white hat. That’s what it always is with Strait: he’s just a simple
man with a good voice. He can’t write but is very happy that others can. Even
though he is not a singer/songwriter, he is as authentic as it gets. He loves
his fans, he loves his job, he loves America.
But then there is the song, with that chorus, repeating over
and over, asking the mother for advice that she doesn’t have. Strait even
pauses once between the chorus to make the silence between the narrator and the
mother more punishing and more present. Strait’s song, as mirror for life,
begins to fracture into mirrors: some show us personally, others attempt
universals. Is the mother quiet because the memory of her horrible husband is too
much? Is she in denial about the truth of the past? Is she disinclined to offer
because she knows the consequences? Does the fact that the chorus goes on and
on allude to the chain of this pain, that sons will be fathers and fathers will
be sons and there is no answer?
Gram Parsons (standing), adopting the rhinestone look of his
country music heroes, in a personalized suit designed by Nashville’s favorite
tailor, Nudie Cohn (seated), at Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors shop, Los Angeles, 1968;
© Raeanne Rubenstein; Courtesy Annenberg Space for Photography, LA
George Strait is not Gram Parsons, he doesn’t have any indie
credibility or Nudie suits. He is not Loretta Lynn, made solid by a
well-publicized and painful past. Nor is he Buck Owens, who came to embody the
Bakersfield sound and therefore is seen as a trailblazer. He is not Taylor
Swift, the newest in a long line of singers who brilliantly bridge the trickle
between country and pop. All told, Strait is boring, boring enough to have more
number one country hits than anyone else in history.
However, that is the mystery of country music. Its images
fracture into pie pieces and the assemblage of the pieces is our broken,
collective selves, which, in turn, are also made from pieces. Through the
cracks, we find haunting stories and it can be scary if we listen closely. It
deals with nothing less than the silence of things we don’t know. Country music
knows that each of us speaks with a thousand voices. It is never surprised when
it recognizes one of them.