The Clean-Cut Creep of Country Music

The fascinating contradictions of Porter Wagoner in the late sixties

Welcome music lovers once again!

This edition’s essay is one that I have wanted to write for a long time. Country-music singer Porter Wagoner has long been a fascination of mine, particularly the quietly subversive nature of the recordings he made in Nashville in the late sixties. These records are full of strange morality tales, explorations on the sin of drinking to excess and they often recount murder…lots of murder. They also sound quite pretty: about as countrified as the Nashville Sound got. And then there’s the disaffected way Wagoner sang these songs. I love this kind of strange music. How about you? Let me know by dropping a comment.

There’s been a lot of great writing on Substack in April. Here are the some of the pieces that I especially enjoyed reading this month.

Richard Elliott of Songs and Objects writes perceptively on Frank Sinatra, focusing on his 1955 ballad album, In the Wee Small Hours.

Mary R has something very interesting to say about classical music as an antidote to this age of distraction.

Ethan Iverson of Transitional Technology shares illuminating excerpts of Blindfold Tests from the Downbeat archive (here is a link to his own recent Blindfold Test for the magazine) and Lee Mergner of Mergner He Wrote adds context by sharing some impressions of Leonard Feather, the writer, critic and composer who founded the test.

Kevin Alexander of On Repeat Records reviews Elton John’s new album, a collaboration with Brandi Carlile, which I, like Kevin, liked a lot.

Of the various pieces celebrating the centennial of The Great Gatsby, I especially loved how Emma B Heath in The Metropolitan Review zeroed in on the joy of going through Fitzgerald’s classic line by line.

Vinnie Sperrazza of Chronicles writes of a rarely seen documentary from the early seventies of Tony Williams in Africa.

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The Clean-Cut Creep of Country Music
By: Robert C. Gilbert

The Nashville Sound gets a bad rap. I get the idea that its emphasis on the bottom—the bass line often doubled by guitar—electric instruments and four-part harmony background singers, and its banishment of the fiddle, steel guitar and the two step was ultimately a dilution of what would hitherto been thought to be country music. But I can’t say I feel that was such a bad thing.

To be sure, Jim Reeves’ ‘Four Walls,’ the recording largely cited as codifying the Nashville Sound, doesn’t emerge from the country purity test anywhere close as well as anything by, say, Hank Williams Sr. The music that come out afterwards however, largely under the imprimatur of either Owen Bradley for Decca or Chet Atkins for RCA, served both to broaden country music’s appeal and persuasively argue its place as a foundation of American music.

The polished touches that were applied were often what turned good recordings into great ones. Think of how Millie Kirkham layered her keening soprano underneath Brenda Lee’s recitation on ‘I’m Sorry’ or how the bass of Jordanaire Ray Walker pushed through to further the languid blues of Patsy Cline’s ‘Crazy’ or the martial pulse of Buddy Harman’s beat on the opening section of the verses of the Everly Brothers’ ‘Cathy’s Clown’ or the elegant jazz phrasing of Hank Garland on Elvis Presley’s transformation of ‘(Now and Then There’s) A Fool Such I.’ Delicacy and power were equal strengths of the A Team, the name given to the session musicians and singers of the Nashville studios of the fifties, sixties and seventies.

They were also adaptable, lifting up the Irish tenor of Hank Locklin, the twang of Kitty Wells, the urbane croon of Don Gibson, the precision of Ray Price and the pre-Outlaw days of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. And that’s just for starters. What of, say, Porter Wagoner? Well, what about him?

Wagoner embodied, in a sense, that country music and hipness can seem mutually exclusive. He was lanky and gawky, dressed garishly in Nudie suits—a startling combination—destined to be cuckolded by singing partner Dolly Parton who left his employ to fully go solo. Here’s how he was described in a piece in The Tyee in 2007, four months before his passing: “Porter Wagoner is a weirdo, even by country music standards. Looking like a Swedish Fred Gwynne with all the air sucked out, Wagoner was so long and tall that he probably had to climb on a stool just to fix his hair (with Testor’s non-toxic plastic cement, by the looks of things).”

Country music’s iconography often seems at odds to its music. Take the association of Roy Clark with Hee Haw and all its good-old-boy clichés, and how it can dilute his status as a magician on the fretboard who could also play some mean rock and roll (for that, check out his work on Wanda Jackson’s There’s a Party Goin’ On).

With Wagoner, I suppose his look signified squareness. The kind of school pal who tries to look like the cool kids but is only kept around for laughs, usually at his or her own expense. But the music he made, especially in the late sixties, signified something far different at work. Take, for example, a selection from the third of a series of albums he made with the Blackwood Brothers Quartet, Southern gospel royalty.

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‘Pastor’s Absent on Vacation,’ written by Mel Tillis, argues of the importance of the preacher to tend to his flock and to be open for spiritual business, as they say, 24/7. This is something the average person may agree with in principle while still conceding that a person of the cloth is deserving of keeping some sort of a sabbath. Wagoner is having none of that as he relates the tale of an elderly, frail gentlemen feeling the call to go to service—or, to be precise, meetin’—only to discover after the long, hot walk a notice on the church door: “Pastor on vacation, church closed ’til his return.”

He then relates the man’s anguished reaction, working himself up to observe, in part: “did you know it ever happen or hear anybody tell Satan takin’ a vacation shuttin’ up the doors of Hell. Oh tell me, when I reach that city over on the other shore, would I find a little notice tacked upon the golden door, telling me in dreadful silent written words that cut and burn, “Jesus absent, on vacation, Heaven closed ’til his return.””

Wagoner relates it all with solemnity and a slight drawl. No arched eyebrows or wry smile betraying the unyielding nature of the deeply dogmatic argument offered here. A recording like this may lead one to dismiss Wagoner as a religious nut—after all, he is saying all this in 1968 of all years—but I see things a little differently. There is almost something subversive here, a slight suggestion that after the old man in the song finishes his jeremiad, he takes up a stone, chucks it through one of church’s window, lights a match and tosses it inside, letting the wrath of God almighty take the wheel. Think this is a ridiculous flight of fancy? Consider Wagoner’s recording of ‘Banks of the Ohio,’ an old murder ballad, in 1969.

It starts amiably with a light country-folk gait as Wagoner relates a walk with his hopefully soon-to-be fiancée about whom he learns doesn’t feel the same way as him. The music then stops and picks up at a swaying clip. Wagoner then sings this: “I placed a knife against her breast / as into my arm, she pressed / she said, “oh please, don’t murder me / I’m not prepared for eternity.”” That is followed with a threat sung in four-part harmony that offers the woman a choice: his hand in marriage or burial in the Ohio.

While Wagoner didn’t go all in on the Nashville Sound as others, his version of ‘Banks of the Ohio’ has its fingerprint. The fiddle and steel guitar are lightly applied. There’s a firm backbeat. There are background vocalists. It’s a pretty sounding record of a song that is anything but. This mismatch is not the result of the lack of taste. It’s just what Porter Wagoner often did.

On the album on which the recording occurs, The Carroll County Accident, it is preceded by ‘The World Needs a Washin’,’ from the pens of Hank Cochran and Buck Trent. Over a gospel beat, Wagoner a choir of background vocalists sing, “oh the world needs a washin’ so why shouldn’t it rain / maybe the rain will wash away the pain.” It sure will do that and pretty much everyone burdened with that hurt. Yet, it takes a moment for that to register as everyone sings joyously of a second great deluge. Even stranger is the cover of The Carroll Country Accident. Sweat drips off of Wagoner, his tie is undone and he looks haggard, haunted or perhaps even high.

His albums were like that in the late sixties. Confessions of a Broken Man pictured Wagoner as a vagrant, Skid Row Joe, on the cover (it won a Grammy). “Songs of A Convict” And Other Great Prison Songs depicted him singing a ballad dressed in stripes behind bars. The Battle of the Bottle showed Wagoner on the left gazing intently at a bottle with him as Skid Row Joe inside.

The morality lessons contained herein could be even more intense. On ‘Mommy, Ain’t That Daddy?,’ from his first album of duets with Parton, he delivers a lengthy monologue on the devastation wrecked upon a family when one member places the bottle above them. ‘The Party,’ for their follow-up duet record, tells of a couple who prioritize parties over their children and how at one such fete on a Saturday night—Wagoner tells us the partygoing was centred on “drinkin’, laughin’, tellin’ dirty jokes, nobody thinkin’ of home”—the husband has a premonition that he and his wife must leave to tend to home. As they drive, Wagoner recounts how the husband rebuffed his children who hoped to go to church the next morning, saying that he and his wife would be probably too tried from partying to go. He then hears sirens whirling in the air and they arrive home to see their abode burned to the ground. He and his wife do end up going to church the next day…for their children’s funeral.

Wagoner recites the denouement plainly, almost passively, allowing the horror to unfold without an ounce of drama or obscuring the implication that the parents brought the death of their children upon themselves through their immorality.

He is like an Old Testament prophet, preaching hard lessons against soft music. The apex of this side of Wagoner is undoubtedly The Cold Hard Facts of Life, released in 1967.

The cover is another pictorial wonder. Wagoner is on the left and he has just opened the door to the apartment he shares with his wife. His fact is slightly creased by a look of expectant anger. That’s because on the couch on the right is a man with a combover looking unimpressed by the intrusion. His left arm is draped over his mistress—Wagoner’s wife—whose eyes give off annoyance and a slightly registered fear.

The picture is a restrained representation of the album’s title track. It details how the protagonist enters his home brandishing a knife and that he and the man with whom his wife is cheating on him crossed paths in a wine shop earlier in the day. Soon, the site of the album’s photo will become a crime scene. ‘The Cold Hard Facts of Life’ is one of four songs on the album that recount murder.

They are placed symmetrically on the LP. One opens it, another closes it. One is third in the program, another is the third last. Surrounding them are songs that tell of the yearning for relief from depression (‘Sleep’), an elderly man who has wandered from a senior’s residence or a sanitarium for a moment of gaiety (‘Words and Music’) and the toll that finances can take on a marriage (‘I’ll Get Ahead Someday’).

The music is only occasionally somber, such as on the parable ‘Shopworn,’ and it has Nashville Sound polish while still being undoubtedly country. The burnish primarily comes from the use of a female chorus. They add a sophisticated pop sound. It’s almost angelic on Wagoner’s version of Willie Nelson’s ‘I Just Can’t Let You Say Goodbye,’ a grisly song about possessiveness in a relationship.

When Nelson recorded it in 1966 for Live Country Music Concert, there is malevolence as he first tells his beloved to “please have no fear, you’re in no harm,” and then asks of her, “what force behind your evil mind / can let your lips speak so unkind” and proceeds to strangle her to death, finally observing, “death is a friend to love.”

Wagoner’s version is jauntier, select phrases are punctuated by the chorus and at the start, it feels like a love song even as fury takes over. The female voices come in for the verse that recounts the strangulation. It ends with Wagoner, with the chorus, proclaiming the song’s title in triumph. Here, there is no room for mourning.

Neither is there on ‘Julie,’ written by Waylon Jennings, which ends the album. The female singers are seductive here, making it the LP’s most countrypolitan sounding track. Their backgrounds mark the trajectory of the tale Wagoner sings, of a woman who won’t by tamed by domestic life (“Julie went wild”), the husband inflamed by his inability to control her (“he loved her more”) and wordlessly cushioning the resolution after Julie comes home one night with another man. After the husband hears them plotting to go away together, he takes his revenge, grabbing a pistol. He only has three bullets. Three are all he needs (“one for the stranger, Julie and me”). All this is told in waltz time, with romantic obbligatos on guitar and the female singers echoing Wagoner like the Blossoms did with Johnny Rivers on his ‘Poor Side of Town.’

The collision of pop filigree, dreamy vocals and the directness of Wagoner’s delivery is even more pronounced at the start of The Cold Hard Facts of Life. ‘The First Mrs. Jones’ begins with a charming fiddle-driven beat. Wagoner recounts a brief marriage—just two months—that hits the skids when the wife leaves. The husband tracks her from Savannah to New Orleans to Atlanta. Liquor turns the husband’s yearning to something way darker.

Wagoner recites what happens next. The husband goes from drunkenly waving a pistol outside the home where his wife is staying to wandering in an alcohol haze and then digging a makeshift grave for her. As if that all isn’t creepy enough, there is a twist that upends everything heard before that has to be listened to cold in order to feel the shudder of how Wagoner takes perverse joy in revealing what is actually taking place. If you have heard it, you know what I’m writing about here.

As always, Wagoner plays it straight. ‘The First Mrs. Jones’ was written by Bill Anderson, a Nashville figure who, like Wagoner, was steeped in amiability and neighborliness. That image undercuts his version of the song. Wagoner’s doesn’t. It boils with suggestion of the potential for evil within us all and that it can often be shielded by a clean-cut exterior that would seem to preclude a far darker interior. No one quite explored that duality like Porter Wagoner did within the confines of the politeness of the Nashville Sound.

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