PBS Series: A Diner, A Jukebox, Those Voices

9/18/2019

Hank Williams

Kitty Wells

This was the summer of 1954, and Hank Williams had been dead for a year and a half – dying in a moving car in a snowstorm in West Virginia on New Year’s Eve. But we didn’t necessarily know that. We just knew he was a voice, a plaintive voice, on the jukebox.

The diner was in a hamlet called North Creek in upstate New York. I was staying a month with people who were (are) like family to me. Many evenings after supper, Jimmy, who was six days younger than me (that’s how our mothers met) and I would hitch-hike the 7.7 miles to the Red Diner. We were 15.

The diner had a corner with, as I recall, a pinball machine, and guys could drink a beer and play the jukebox. I was a city kid – no doubt made that point way too often – and my main connection with “country” or “western” or “hillbilly” music was from Gene Autry records and seeing him in the rodeo in Madison Square Garden.

Hank Williams was no Gene Autry. He was a phenomenon unto himself – wailing and courting, letting it all out, six plays for a quarter, as I recall. “Hey, Good Lookin’,” “Jambalaya,” “Cold, Cold Heart,” “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

It was an education for this city kid, and the education goes on, in the PBS series that is pulling me to the tube, two hours every night, all this week. It is about America – hard times, nasty times, lynchings and injustices but also the contribution of African-Americans to the swath of American music. I learn something every minute – the old icons I saw at the Ryman in the 70’s and 80’s, long after they were young and hungry and immensely creative.

I heard them first on the jukebox in the Red Diner in North Creek – Webb Pierce, Hank Thompson, Eddie Arnold, Pee Wee King (later my Louisville neighbor), Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb.

There was also a woman’s voice, as piercing as Hank Williams’, cutting into the noise in the Red Diner. Her song was a reply to Hank Thompson’s “Wild Side of Life,” which blames women for leading us poor men astray. Miss Kitty Wells was having none of it. She, too, borrowed an old Carter Family tune, and she lectured the men: “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels.”

In the smoky, noisy corner of the Red Diner, we were getting a dose of feminism, although we hardly knew that.
Her song had been banned on some chicken networks, fearful of offending (male) listeners and (male) sponsors, but I never heard any of the farmhands in their clean boots and jeans, or the townies, or teen-agers like me, debate Miss Kitty’s point. Lady had a point.

After our hour or two in the Red Diner, we got out into the cool night air, crossed the street into the woods to pee into the Hudson River and then point our thumbs homeward.

The PBS series makes me think about the jukebox in the Red Diner. As of Tuesday, the series was up to 1953.
No Patsy Cline, no Loretta Lynn, no Dolly Parton, no Emmylou Harris, no Lucinda Williams, no Iris DeMent. Not yet. Kitty Wells passed in 2012, at the age of 91. She was there first.
* * *
Bio of Kitty Wells:
https://americansongwriter.com/2019/03/kitty-wells-it-wasnt-god-who-made-honky-tonk-angels/

Alan Rubin link

9/18/2019 05:55:27 pm

George—I’m a few taped shows behind you do to other commitments, but I’m looking forward to seeing them all.

Again it is memories, memories and more memories.

Hitch-hiking at a young age with no fear, classic NJ type diners eating up our coins and talking to strangers who liked the same music.

A NPR story many years ago about a young African-American woman who realized that many of the folk singers and musicians from the Mississippi Delta were dying out. I wish I could have recorded the interviews, but my favorite was the old-timer who said that “if you ain’t lived it, you can’t sing it.”

Sandi and I went to Elizabeth Cotton’s 70th and 90th farewell concerts in Greenwich Village, where else? She was left handed and could not afford to buy a proper guitar, so she played her brother’s upside down. She is famous for writing and singing “Freight Train”.

Years ago before we moved to the Berkshires in Western MA, we used to go to a seedy place called Jack’s. They always had great folk singers on weekends, who would often have fellow singers appear with them for no charge. Jack’s made their money on the smoke filled tavern adjacent to the music hall. We could never figure out where they came from, but there was always a group who came to line dance with the boots and western outfits.

Alan Lomax and his father John Lomax were world renowned ethnomusicologist who traveled through the south with heavy machinery recording folk songs. I believe that they discovered Leadbelly.

I got to know Alan as he had a large apartment across the street from my store on 98th and Broadway. He used it to store all his recordings and every room required air conditioning. He needed to upgrade the electrical wiring since a fuse would blow if every room was on at the same time.

He could not go to the landlord, the same one as mine, since he wanted Alan out and could not say that the apartment was being used for a commercial purpose. The only solution was to cool all the rooms but one and keep rotating which one was off.

Alan had to move his collection to Columbia University when the building went coop and he could not prove he was living there.

Alan was a bigger than life character who was happy to spend time in the store talking about his adventures.

There were many headaches in running a retail appliance business, but it was customers like Alan who made it so enjoyable.

Malachy McCourt, younger brother of author Frank McCourt, was another favorite. He was always good for a great Irish story and had a bar on 79th called Malachy’s. He had run for governor, but lost to Eliot Spitzer. Too bad, he would have probably been more interesting.

Best of all, he was a frequent reader at Symphony Spaces Selected Shorts series. His reading the story of an Irish elevator operator working on Christmas Eve was a gem.

George Vecsey

9/19/2019 10:11:33 am

Alan, I'm sure you read the obit of John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/arts/music/john-cohen-dead.html

I have a recording of Elizabeth Cotton on a folk CD. Classic.
The PBS series points out the overlaps of genres. I know when I worked with Loretta Lynn, she had strong judgments about some new sounds on the "country" circuit:
"Now, THAT ain't country!" she would pronounce. (No names mentioned.)
I feel that way about much of what I have heard in my occasional forays back into country in the past two decades. Country was great at the Ryman -- when Tootsie Bess was sticking troublemakers with her formidable hatpin at her joint just down the alley from the back door of the Ryman.
I think when country moved to a theme park, it lost its way.
GV

Alan Rubin link

9/19/2019 10:43:24 am

George-It is hard to pick a favorite when so many would qualify. However, the Lost City Rambles were very high on my list. John Cohen, Mike Seeger and Tracy Schwarz had an authentic sound.

The Burns series shows how many excellent country music stars were not natives of what is considered the heart of country music.

Sandi and I went to a bluegrass completion on Pier 17 just after the South Street Seaport had opened. The bands were from all over and sounded great, but the winners were from Brooklyn.

I do not subscribe now to this after almost 58 years of marriage, but the Ramblers had a great song, “The Man Who Wrote Home Sweet Home Must Have Been a Single Man”.

Another PBS comment from many years ago; “Country music lyrics are about seven months ahead of public opinion.”

Peter Kennedy link

9/19/2019 09:15:41 am

Great thoughts, memories and observations, George (and Alan!). I haven't heard North Creek, NY mentioned in decades. I camped out there many years ago. Beautiful country.

The Burns series is, predictably, wonderful, and an insightful window into our national character, for good and bad. I hate to break this news, George, but I read in one review that Iris DeMent receives no (or minimal) coverage. I think editing one of these Burns series down to allowable hours must be a terribly unsatisfying undertaking -- someone/something important always ends up on the cutting room floor, as we recall with "Jazz."

GEorge

9/19/2019 10:17:51 am

Peter, thank you. I haven't been back to North Creek in a decade or two, but the Red Diner was nowhere to be seen. Now that we have family upstate, I plan an expedition to the area just above North Creek. I am told the place hasn't changed -- lovely little lake, walking distance from our old friends, where they had community picnics one Sunday in August, when my friends and I were put in charge of guarding the beer overnight (!) and we listened to WWVA, straight from Wheeling.
As for The Prophet Iris, hers is a voice echoing in the wilderness. She wrote her song, "Living in the Wasteland of the Free" before the current abomination, but it had its share of smug preachers and avaricious politicians. Her sound is an acquired taste -- but it hits my nerve endings just the right way, GV

Altenir Silva

9/19/2019 05:01:53 pm

Dear George,

I never had listened to a Kitty Wells song. Thanks for sharing this subject. I would love to watch this PBS series, but it doesn't broadcast in Europe. I hope when we come back to America, maybe, I can watch this series at The Paley Center for Media in New York.

I took a look on YouTube and found out this video with her. Great lyric.

'It's a shame that all the blame is on us women
It's not true that only you men feel the same
From the start most ev'ry heart that's ever broken
Was because there always was a man to blame'

LINK;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKleTa94dC8

Best/Altenir (from Lisbon)

George Vecsey

9/21/2019 11:45:05 am

Dear Altenir: My guess is that the series will be available on CD after it runs -- also, through the mysteries of the web, catalogued and available directly from Lisbon. I'll keep an eye out for you.
You as a writer of movie scripts can appreciate great lines, and country singers do it every day. Iris DeMent writes wonderfully. So does Tom T Hall, a Kentuckian, now 83. He once made a trip to a town where the first coal-mine disaster I covered had taken place. He produced a song called "Trip to Hyden," that described the same sights and people I had seen, and he included these lines:

"Every hundred yards a sign proclaimed that Christ was coming soon
And I thought, "well, man, he'd sure be disappointed if he did."

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/tomthall/triptohyden.html

Dolly Parton's "Shattered Image," has an Elizabethan sound and Shakespearean lyrics -- with contemporary message. She comes from 400 years ago.
Best to you three, GV

Altenir Silva

9/21/2019 02:01:11 pm

Dear George,

Wow! What fantastic line from Shattered Image (Dolly Parton).
"When I shattered my image with the stones I'd throw”

And this stanza from "Trip To Hyden” is perfect in its building words, poetry and drama.
"They took us to the scene of that disaster
I was so surprised to not find any sign of death at all
Just another country hillside with some mudholes and some junk
The mines were deadly silent like a rathole in the wall”

Thanks for giving me this tip. I will look more closely at the country music.

Best/Altenir

Randolph

9/19/2019 09:15:50 pm

George,

You mentioned Iris Dement;
“Her sound is an acquired taste -- but it hits my nerve endings just the right way,”
Yes, you say it well.

A great Mountain singer who influenced Iris, Emmylou, The Judds and many more sings in the movie, Matewan. Her name is Hazel Dickens. She is also an acquired taste, but she wears the suffering of hard times and hard country in the fabric of her voice. If their was ever a voice that carried the pain of the people in the mountains of Appalachia it is Hazel Dickens.
Randolph

PS Your buddy Kathy Mattea has recorded a number of Hazel Dicken’s songs.

Randolph

9/22/2019 09:03:25 pm

George,

Ken Burns documentary did a good job tonight on Loretta Lynn.

It made me think of you, the book you wrote for her and how interesting that experience must have been.

Thanks,

Randolph

Comments are closed.

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

PBS Series: A Diner, A Jukebox, Those Voices

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