| Bring Back The Twang' written by Lane Hudson |
| Most of today's country music leaves me flat as a three-day old Pabst Blue Ribbon. Country music singers today are too young, too beautiful, and too rich to have enough heartaches to understand, much less sing real country music. Sure, I know that Hank Williams was only 28 when he died, but he had enough heartaches for several lifetimes. But those Brittney Spears wannabes, like Shania Twain, and all those "hunks in hats" are going after the stardom without living the heartaches. Willie Nelson calls them "flat bellies" - because they haven't sat on their bar stools long enough and cried in their beers long enough. Sure their pop country music is pretty to listen to, but the unspoken raw truth that the soul can only hear in the spaces between the words and notes is missing. A country music announcer explained the difference between rock and roll and real country music this way: " Rock and roll is about love to be, and country music, real country music, is about love that was. And if you ain't lived the pain," he told me, "you can't sing about it." The pretty faces of today’s stars lack the wrinkles and bloodshot eyes to know the hurt of living. So why are today’s young people buying the young country singers’ music? "Only the sincere can recognize the sincere," goes a proverb. Maybe this is why young country music fans buy the new country; they are too young to know real heartache, and so they don't know what's missing in the new country music. But now Paycheck, Haggard, and Rich knew, and they sang from a place where the heart of real country resides. I remember hearing in 1963, "Talk Back Trembling Lips," by Ernie Ashworth. Blaring late into the night, filtered by the tall pines, the tinny outside speakers at Seago’s drive-in diner across the road from my house was my nighttime serenade.. At 10 however, I was too young to understand the depth of pain behind Ashworth’s high voice. But it always elicited a comment from my mother who would say, "Some lonely soul has dropped another dime into that jukebox" and then she'd settle into our wooden porch swing and drift away to some place she never told me about. I believe true country music fans know something very important about life. Something reflected in what a bartender once told me: “It ain’t no use in taking life seriously, because you ain’t gonna get out of it alive anyway!” Because country music fans know this, we even poke fun at ourselves. Take David Allan Coe's classic "The Perfect Country Western Song"..."I was drunk the day my mama got out of prison, and I went to pick her up in the rain, but before I could get her in the pickup truck, she got runned over by a damned old train." Now, that's a song to sing out loud with a chorus of fellow beer bellies and true country fans. However, once in a while, a new country singer does gets it right. Take the chorus of Tim McGraw’s tribute to his deceased father Tug -- “Live like you were dying…” McGraw has nailed this one. Why? Because we are. |
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