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It was December of 1973 and New York still had an AM country music station and I was writing about the Long Island suburbs but thinking about Appalachia, where I used to work.
Three years earlier, I had been at the Hyden mine disaster, Dec, 30, 1970, when 38 men were blown to Kingdom Come, which remains just about the saddest event I ever covered. Now, back home in New York, I was still thinking about Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia, and the country station was playing a lot of Merle Haggard, singing “If We Make It Through December.” One of his lines is: “Just got laid off down at the factory,” which means he cannot afford presents for his little girl. Sure, it's a tear-jerker, but that's what country is, or should be. The song hits a universal theme -- parents wanting to provide for their children; in Appalachia I saw a lot of people living at the margins, and the song cut deep. That’s my major impression of Merle Haggard, who died Wednesday on his 79th birthday, a balladeer of the working class and hard-living men and long-suffering women. He was what country used to be, before it turned slick and uptown on us. I never met Haggard when I was privileged enough to wander around backstage at the Ryman Auditorium in funky downtown Nashville and chat casually with Johnny Cash and June Carter and Bobby Bare and Roy Acuff and Minnie Pearl. Haggard was probably out on the road, living up to the label of outlaw, and doing a good job of it. As Don Cusic notes in his fine book, “Discovering Country Music," Haggard was a symbol of the outsider, the working class, an American type, then and now, writing “Okie From Muskogee,” a defiant celebration of otherness. When I helped Barbara Mandrell write her book, "Get to the Heart," she noted that she did not cover Dolly Parton or Loretta Lynn or Tammy Wynette's "Stand By Your Man," but that she loved performing Haggard's "Okie From Muskogee." (Mandrell noted that Haggard and other men got away with romanticizing the double standard in cheatin' songs.) In this primary season, politicians exploit resentments galore but don't talk often enough about the economic inequities, the stacked deck, the rich getting richer, the great people who pay off politicians and park much of their money offshore, so it cannot possibly trickle down to people who just got laid off down at the factory.
Greg Amante
4/7/2016 11:43:17 am
Nice memoriam George. Enjoyed reading it. Hope all is well.
George Vecsey
4/7/2016 12:16:58 pm
Greg, great to hear from you. Hadn't thought about that song in years, but as soon as I heard his name I flashed back to 1973.
Elliott Kolker
4/8/2016 12:40:34 am
Has there ever been a more parodied song than Merle's Iconic Classic, "Okie from Muskogee?" Two of my favorites;
George Vecsey
4/8/2016 11:55:29 am
Elliott: I once knew a rabbi who issued a newsletter called Sh'ma. 4/9/2016 07:11:47 am
George
George Vecsey
4/9/2016 08:39:22 am
Alan, thanks for the comment. I've been a fan of country since my father had some Gene Autry records -- 78s -- mixed in with the Pastoral and Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson records. 4/9/2016 02:14:34 pm
George
George Vecsey
4/9/2016 04:29:26 pm
Alan, never went to Gerdes. My loss.
bruce
4/10/2016 12:05:20 pm
George,
George Vecsey
4/10/2016 02:39:29 pm
Bruce, I returned to Sports in March of 1980...Isles promising but no Cups. Potvin, Gary Howatt, Wayne Merrick, Lorne Henning, didn't go the 4-cup length. Jean Potvin very nice guy, defender, not the size or skill of Denis. It was always a good locker room, and Jean was one of those guys who would talk about the game....
bruce
4/10/2016 02:57:31 pm
george,
Ed Martin
4/10/2016 06:39:09 pm
Would it make me the Country equivalent of Donald Trump if I passed along a story about Big Band Drummer, Buddy Rich, being rushed into an emergency room and being asked if he was allergic to anything. He answered, "Country Music."
Brian Savin
4/10/2016 09:20:28 pm
Ed, another, slightly more dramatic version of your post is this:
Ed Martin
4/10/2016 10:17:19 pm
Brian, perhaps Bernie is a better analogy--we may be fomenting a revolution here on GV's page. 4/10/2016 09:27:42 pm
You cannot blame the ills of American Idlol on country misic. I put it in the same over the top category as Dancing With the Stars.
bruce
4/10/2016 09:30:08 pm
brian, 4/10/2016 09:53:42 pm
Bruce--another interesting title:
bruce
4/10/2016 10:03:57 pm
alan,
George Vecsey
4/11/2016 09:21:40 am
You guys are breakin' my heart.
bruce
4/11/2016 10:03:44 am
george,
George Vecsey
4/11/2016 01:17:13 pm
"I Threw it All Away" -- Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash, Nashville Skyline.
Brian Savin
4/11/2016 03:28:47 pm
Ed, if Bernie wrote country music, I wonder what he'd write? Something like, "The Honey Likes the Money so She Kisses Goldin' Sacks"?
Ed Martin
4/11/2016 11:30:25 pm
Do you remember when people turned the Beatles album backwards and heard a secret message. When they did that with a country record, the dog came home, your wife stopped drinking, and the skies were not cloudy all day.
bruce
4/11/2016 11:36:16 pm
ed,
Elliott Kolker
4/11/2016 04:03:38 pm
My favorite country singer is the late Gary Stewart. His cover of Wayne Carson's "She's Acting Single, I'm Drinking Doubles," is the best.
George Vecsey
4/12/2016 08:51:17 am
Ed, the record spins backwards, in a way, on Johnny Cash's classic,
Ed Martin
4/12/2016 11:07:40 am
"Poor George, he's lost the Faith,
Brian Savin
4/12/2016 08:53:54 pm
Ed, honest to goodness I was in an Under Armour store today in Lee, MA and the blue patterned shirt Spieth was wearing Sunday was on sale for half price. I wonder what George was wearing?
George Vecsey
4/13/2016 08:16:54 am
Not a golf shirt. Comments are closed.
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QUOTES
Measuring Covid Deaths, by David Leonhardt. July 17, 2023. NYT online. The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal…. After three horrific years, in which Covid has killed more than one million Americans and transformed parts of daily life, the virus has turned into an ordinary illness. The progress stems mostly from three factors: First, about three-quarters of U.S. adults have received at least one vaccine shot. Second, more than three-quarters of Americans have been infected with Covid, providing natural immunity from future symptoms. (About 97 percent of adults fall into at least one of those first two categories.) Third, post-infection treatments like Paxlovid, which can reduce the severity of symptoms, became widely available last year. “Nearly every death is preventable,” Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser, told me. “We are at a point where almost everybody who’s up to date on their vaccines and gets treated if they have Covid, they rarely end up in the hospital, they almost never die.” That is also true for most high-risk people, Jha pointed out, including older adults — like his parents, who are in their 80s — and people whose immune systems are compromised. “Even for most — not all but most —immuno-compromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” he said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immuno-compromised that vaccines don’t work.” That excess deaths have fallen close to zero helps make this point: If Covid were still a dire threat to large numbers of people, that would show up in the data. One point of confusion, I think, has been the way that many Americans — including we in the media — have talked about the immuno-compromised. They are a more diverse group than casual discussion often imagines. Most immuno-compromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers. A much smaller group, such as people who have received kidney transplants or are undergoing active chemotherapy, face higher risks. Covid’s toll, to be clear, has not fallen to zero. The C.D.C.’s main Covid webpage estimates that about 80 people per day have been dying from the virus in recent weeks, which is equal to about 1 percent of overall daily deaths. The official number is probably an exaggeration because it includes some people who had virus when they died even though it was not the underlying cause of death. Other C.D.C. data suggests that almost one-third of official recent Covid deaths have fallen into this category. A study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases came to similar conclusions. Dr. Shira Doron, the chief infection control officer at Tufts Medicine in Massachusetts, told me that “age is clearly the most substantial risk factor.” Covid’s victims are both older and disproportionately unvaccinated. Given the politics of vaccination, the recent victims are also disproportionately Republican and white. Each of these deaths is a tragedy. The deaths that were preventable — because somebody had not received available vaccines and treatments — seem particularly tragic. (Here’s a Times guide to help you think about when to get your next booster shot.) *** From the great Maureen Dowd: As I write this, I’m in a deserted newsroom in The Times’s D.C. office. After working at home for two years during Covid, I was elated to get back, so I could wander around and pick up the latest scoop. But in the last year, there has been only a smattering of people whenever I’m here, with row upon row of empty desks. Sometimes a larger group gets lured in for a meeting with a platter of bagels." --- Dowd writes about the lost world of journalists clustered in newsrooms at all hours, smoking, drinking, gossipping, making phone calls, typing, editing. *** "Putting out the paper," we called it. Much more than nostalgia. ---https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/29/opinion/journalism-newsroom.html |
