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April 8, 2002
Edward
Said
The
Future of Palestine
April 7, 2002
Beth Daoud
Accompanying Ambulances
in Bethlehem
Nancy
Stohlman
After
the Invasion:
The Search for Bread
Among the Ruins
Thomas Mountain
"Yellow Peril" In Hawai'i:
Judge Orders Chains and Shackles for Chinese Witnesses
Tariq
Ali
Who
Killed Daniel Pearl?
April 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
War, Snake Oil and Circuses
Viktor
Litovkin
Russian
Generals Raise Questions About Pentagon Victories in Afghanistan
Patrick Cockburn
CIA Survey of Iraqi Airfields
May Herald Attack
Walt Brasch
Oil
Slick George:
Bush-whacking the Environment
Ralph Nader
Campaign Finance Sham
Sam Bahour
The
Blind Leading the Criminal
Bill Christison:
A Former CIA Official on
Oil and the Middle East
April 5, 2002
Charmaine
Seitz
In
Ramallah: The Grueling Reoccupation Grinds On
Nancy Stohlman
The Invasion of Bethlehem
and Our Tax Dollars at Work
Beth Daoud
The
Siege of Bethlehem:
"What Do You Mean God Is Punishing Me?"
Fareed Marjaee:
Demonizing Iran
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Philip
Morris to Canada:
"Drop Dead"
Alex Lynch
Tampa Campus Mirrors
Middle East Strife
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon's
Wars: How the
News Gets Through
April 4, 2002
Ray Hanania
Sharon's Latest Lie About the Church
of the Nativity
Mike Leon
Rightwing
Assault on Madison Progressives Misfires
Tom Turnipseed
Stop the Killing Now!
Nancy
Stohlman
An
American Under Siege in a West Bank Refugee Camp
Christopher Reilly
Kissinger, Chile and Justice
at Long Last?
M. Shahid
Alam
The
Lies of Thomas Friedman
April 3, 2002
Don Henley
Dear Loathsome Trade Hacks
Bernard
Weiner
An
American Jew Talks
About His Shame
David Vest
Sting of Stings
Tzaporah
Ryter
Under
Fire: an American Student in Ramallah
Gabriel Ash
America's Bravest
John Chuckman
Of
War, Islam and Israel
Robert Fisk
The Siege of Bethlehem
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Sins of the Church
April 2, 2002
Uri Avnery
Murdering Arafat?
Jeff Chang
Is
Protest Music Dead?
Lev Grinberg
Israel's State Terrorism
Norman
Madarasz
Bullying
Brazil
Robert Fisk
Farce and Terror
in Ramallah
Steve
Perry
Let's
Roll! ®:
The Marketing of Lisa Beamer
April 1, 2002
Stanton / Madsen
America's War Inc.
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Peace
and Nuclear Disarmament: a Call to Action
Bahour / Dahan
Bloodshed in Palestine:
A Way Out
Molly
Secours
Tennessee's
Kangaroo Court
Phyllis Pollack
The Making of Exile
on Main Street
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's
Top 10 CDs
Francis Boyle
The Big Lie:
Palestine, Palestinians
and International Law
March 31, 2002
Jordan
Flaherty
Last
Night the Israeli
Military Tried to Kill Me
Kristen Schurr
Live from Bethlehem
Maha Sbitani
The
Israeli Army Took Over My House
Robert Fisk
Lies Leaders Tell When
They Want to Go to War
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
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Cockburn
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The New Crusade:
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The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
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A Pocket Guide to
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April 8, 2002
From
Birmingham to Nashville
The Making of Tammy Wynette
By David Vest
I first encountered the legend known as Tammy
Wynette on my car radio one afternoon in 1966. I had just come
from my steady gig at Ireland's Pub in Nashville, across the
street from Vanderbilt University. As I started my yellow Corvair,
unsafe at any speed but fun to drive if you didn't know that,
I heard the opening lines of "Apartment
Number 9," her first released recording.
I recognized the voice at once. I'd have
known it anywhere. It was my old friend, Wynette Byrd, born
Virginia Wynette Pugh, with whom I had worked and played and
recorded in Birmingham for the past few years. She had not long
ago kissed me goodbye outside the Pussycat-a-Go-Go club down
under the viaduct, where we had gone to hear some blues. I
turned the radio up in my Monza as loud as it could go. Damn,
she sounded good! And the material was right for her.
When the song ended, I was surprised
to hear the singer identified not as Wynette Byrd but as a "new"
artist named Tammy Wynette. I can still remember how strange
that felt.
God knows, playing piano at Ireland's
was already weird enough. Half the audience were musicians,
many of them well-known artists unwinding after sessions on
Music Row a few blocks away. As I discovered during my standing
gig, an unknown musician performing for a famous audience is
usually way too innocent for his own good.
Joan Baez was there one night. She walked
out after complaining to the management that I was playing too
loud when she was trying to have a conversation (thanks, Joan).
On another day I looked up to see three of The Byrds staring
across the piano at me as I played "Hickory
Wind." I pretended not to recognize them.
Charlie McCoy sat at the bar and told
me of a Bob Dylan session he'd been called in to play bass on.
It was for the album John
Wesley Harding.
"I can't figure it out. So far it's
just drums, bass and Bob's acoustic guitar. I reckon they'll
overdub the rest of the stuff later." he said, "unless
it's just a demo."
A couple of the Foggy Mountain Boys told
wonderful Lester
Flatt stories and talked about playing for college audiences.
"Man, them hippies loved Earl Scruggs," they said.
So I was used to strange. Learning that
yet another favorite cowboy singer was gay ("Why do you
think he likes all them sparkly suits and everything?")
would no longer have shocked me.
But hearing this familiar voice on my
radio attributed to a "Tammy" was something else.
"I can't feature that," we'd have said in the musician's
parlance of the day.
So I sat in my car and speculated to
myself about what "they" had done to her. I imagined
her sitting on a sofa with her hands folded above her knees
while "they" paced around an office.
"What's your name again? Wynette?
What kind of a name is that? Is that even a name, Bob? What
do you think? Am I right? It's more like a last name. You need
a first name." And then somebody who had probably seen
a Debbie Reynolds movie would have suggested Tammy. "But
you don't look like a Tammy. No problem, we can fix that. We'll
have to do something with your hair."
In truth, there has never been a reason
to suggest she was less than a willing accomplice. Self-creation
is the great American dream. We long to shed the ordinary like
a husk. Remember when you could "drink milk for a new you"?
Perhaps to her it was an attempt at self-transformation,
not a corporate make-over. It had elements of both. Shedding
the last name of an ex-husband cannot have been entirely unattractive.
Maybe by renaming herself, or allowing herself to be renamed,
she was declaring herself her own woman, willing to carry no
man's name from this point onward.
Anyway, what choice did she have, unless
she wanted to go back and work in a beauty shop the rest of
her life?
For the Wynette I had known in Birmingham,
country music was about telling the truth, not keeping facts
straight. I had been in the car with her when she had furiously
changed the radio dial to avoid hearing "crap" on
country stations. Around her, conversation stopped cold when
Charlie
Louvin or Melba
Montgomery were on the juke box. To watch her listen
to great music was an intense experience.
I had played with her maybe a hundred
times, and I had never seen her do anything to "sell"
a song. She stood there, she went into it, and she sang it from
deep inside. Sometimes a line from a song got past her inner
defenses and she broke down, unable to continue. Usually, she
fought it off and went on, singing in a harder tone. She did
nothing out of the ordinary to call attention to herself, but
if you didn't drop whatever you were doing when she sang, if
time didn't stand still in your world as well as hers, you weren't
human. She was that powerful.
But then, I knew her when all she ever
sang were the greatest songs in the country and western repertoire,
songs like "She's
Got You," "Let's Go All the Way" and "Don't
Touch Me." Her taste was infallible. With rare
exceptions, and never by choice, she sang nothing she didn't
believe in. She knew exactly where the center of the great tradition
lay. She lived in it.
If it felt strange to hear her voice
associated with a new name, that was nothing compared to the
strange power of "Stand By Your Man," one of the greatest
vocal performances (and still the best-selling single) in the
history of country music.
Today we know it was the voice of a battered
woman, a wife who stood by men who came home too drunk to stand
up by themselves, a little girl whose father died and left her.
It was the voice of courage and longing, not submissiveness,
that we were hearing.
If the song's lyrics seemed to be lifted
from an official document of the patriarchy, she managed somehow
to get a message past the words, speaking to us like a political
hostage blinking out the truth in code while reading a statement
written by her captors. She connected on a fundamental level
as only a few have done. Thousands, even millions of women identified
with her, wanted to be her, felt she spoke to and for them.
It had nothing to do with playing a supporting
role or being true to anyone other than oneself. For one thing,
the song ignored men altogether and spoke directly to women.
Significantly, women also identified with "You and Me,"
in which she sang about lying in bed with her husband, who has
just made love to her, and fantasizing about being with another
man.
I have read that she started singing,
early on, as a way to support her children. That's not entirely
true. I'm sure she did use the money she earned to support them,
because she lived (and dressed) very simply in those days. But
the reason she sang was because she was a singer. She always
knew what she wanted. The only doubt in her mind was about
how to get there.
She also knew exactly how good she was,
that her voice entitled her to a place among the best in her
field, that her peers were people like Patsy Cline, Loretta
Lynn and George Jones.
I know that she was offered and refused
gigs for good money, turning them down because they had nothing
to do with getting her where she wanted to go. Indeed, she left
steady work behind in Birmingham to stage her assault on Nashville.
When she arrived there, she was a hard-core
country singer trying to break into an industry that believed
hard-core country was over. A town that was attracting Dylan,
Baez and The Byrds because of its roots connection was moving
to the suburbs as quickly as possible. Dylan might be stripping
the music to its bare essentials and trying to sing like young
Eddie Arnold, but old Eddie Arnold was trying to sound like
Perry Como with fifty Italian strings. Flatt and Scruggs were
covering Lovin' Spoonful songs. Willie Nelson was singing "Norwegian
Wood."
But Nashville had also discovered women
and their issues. Loretta Lynn was singing about "the pill."
Women were also becoming more openly assertive about their sexuality,
as in Lynn's amazing "Somebody,
Somewhere (Don't Know What He's Missing Tonight)."
"Apartment Number 9" and "Your
Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad" were early attempts to work this
vein, before Wynette and producer Billy Sherrill found the motherlode
with "Stand By Your Man."
She had an incredible run. Her vocals
on "You and Me" and "Till I Can Make It On My
Own," songs worthy of her talent, were as good as anything
ever recorded by a country artist.
By the end of it all, the industry that
had taken everything she had to offer for as long as she could
give it wouldn't play her music on the radio anymore, and she
was never really invited to the video revolution.
Along with all the number one hits had
come drug addiction and the usual attendant insanity. (The music
biz corporate bio-flicks about country music entertainers with
drug problems usually have a sentence beginning something like
this: "To cope with the increasing pressure of his career
and the loneliness of life of the road, Cowboy B needed help,
so he turned to " In other words, you'd take dope, too,
if you had all the problems of a superstar entertainer in a
luxury custom bus.)
Tammy Wynette, we are told, was addicted
to pain relief medication. That she suffered real pain seems
not to be in doubt. There were thirty-five surgeries, some of
them rumored to have been badly botched. I have written elsewhere
that she once told me she had often fantasized about having
her fears surgically removed.
There was also at least one attempt at
detox at the Betty Ford Clinic (by one published account she
left there in an ambulance to go someplace where they'd give
her pain medication). After selling millions and millions of
records she was forced to file for personal bankruptcy.
Stories too incredible to be believed
but too bizarre not to have some basis in fact kept coming out.
She had been kidnapped, beaten, and abandoned eighty miles from
Nashville. No, wait, she had kidnapped herself for "publicity."
In yet another version, she had been battered by one of her
husbands and was so terrified of him that she faked the kidnapping
to cover for him.
The last time I saw her on television,
she appeared nervous and desperately uncomfortable, afraid to
answer even the simplest questions.
After her death there were public disagreements
between her fifth husband and her children, who demanded an
autopsy. Her corpse was exhumed. Dueling memoirs were published.
You can't argue with success, but you
can damn sure argue with death.
Tammy Wynette had a full measure of both
success and misery. Will her music outlast everything it was
supposed to "symbolize"? I hope that it will, but
it's way too soon to know. Country music has forsworn memory,
and music store bins now typically carry just her greatest hits.
Most of her recordings don't sound "rootsy" enough
to be retro, yet. And it's been a while since I heard a young
female country singer do any of Tammy Wynette's material.
But that doesn't mean they don't want
to be her.
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He is a poet
and piano-player for the Pacific Northwest's hottest blues band,
The Cannonballs.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
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