Search Results for: Rob Walker

If the Rich Really Want To ‘Do Good,’ They Should Become Class Traitors Like FDR

FPG / Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Will Meyer | Longreads | October 2018 | 11 minutes (2,846 words)

In July of 2015, writer and ex-McKinsey consultant Anand Giridharadas addressed a room full of elites and their good company in Aspen, Colorado. He was a fellow with The Aspen Institute, a centrist think-tank, which was hosting an “ideas festival.” Giridharadas’ talk took aim at what he dubbed the “Aspen Consensus,” an ideological paradigm in which elites “talk a lot about giving more” and not “about taking less.” He earnestly questioned the social change efforts and “win-win” do-goodery promulgated at the business-friendly get-together. In the speech, Giridharadas walked a thin line: both praising the Aspen community which “meant so much” to him and his wife while also laying into its culture and commandments. He dropped the mic: “We know that enlightened capital didn’t get rid of the slave trade,” and suggested that the “rich fought for policies that helped them stack up, protect and bequeath [their] money: resisting taxes on inheritances and financial transactions, fighting for carried interest to be taxed differently from income, insisting on a sacred right to conceal money in trusts, shell companies and weird islands.”

The talk received a standing ovation, though certainly ruffled some feathers as well. An attendee confided in Giridharadas that he was speaking to their central struggle in life and others gave him icy glares and called him an “asshole” at the bar. The conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about the speech — which had hardly prescribed any policies — and clearly felt so threatened by it that his resulting column was titled “Two Cheers for Capitalism,” and attempted, albeit poorly, to nip any systemic critique of his favored economic system in the bud. But Brooks too realized that there would be a “coming debate about capitalism,” and his column prompted Giridharadas to post his talk online, stirring lots of debate — not quelching it. Read more…

Trouble

Illustration by Stephanie Kubo

Jill Talbot | Marcia Aldrich | Longreads | October 2018 | 15 minutes (4,207 words)

Sixteen

We met at gas stations. At the water tower. Under a street lamp in a new subdivision off Cartwright Road called Indian Trails, its curved streets and empty lots, its darkness and our darings. We met at Brian Walker’s house. Or Denise Simpson’s. But most of the time at Lisa Harrison’s, because her father always poured his fourth highball early enough to be out by nine. We met at the playground behind Shaw Elementary. The banks of Lake Ray Hubbard. One night, we met in the police station parking lot and waited for Bobby Ryan to walk out, holding our breath ’til he did. We were 16, 17, searching. Back then our town was a dry city, so we’d drive the 10 miles to Buckeye Liquor off Dolphin Road, the first liquor store inside the Dallas city limits. And we waited in our cars for the blonde, big-smiled Michael Nelson to emerge with our wine coolers (Matilda Bay), our cases of beer (Bud Light), and our smokes (Camel Unfiltereds). Michael wasn’t older than any of us, just cocky enough to walk into a liquor store in a shaky part of town wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a purple lei, for a reason I don’t remember. On school day mornings, we met on the marble steps of Mesquite High, planning our next party and laughing about the last close call.

I was known for two things: being the drunkest at every party and having the earliest curfew, 11:30. My father liked to remind me that nothing good happened after midnight, so my after-midnight had to come early. I’d drink two to everyone’s one and wander off to backseats, to backrooms, to the back of a pickup with one boy or another, worried I’d run out of time to be ready enough to call it a night.

We were 16, 17, searching.

I found trouble early. Maybe it began with the beer I drank in my closet one morning before 8th grade English, a lukewarm Bud Karen Miller stole from her dad’s stash in the crisper of their refrigerator. Maybe it was earlier, second grade, when I snuck off to tow-headed Bobby Rich’s house, the one with his father’s Harley parked out front. Bobby and I would kiss on his back porch until we’d hear his father’s coughs through the screen door, and I’d hop on my bike and pedal back home. Or maybe it was those years of parking lots and pickup trucks and that one night when I learned what trouble my trouble could call forth. And how I ran toward it still.

Laugh

It happened early, still it is a story I would tell if I was dying. I’d tell it because that’s when I learned there’s what happens and then there’s the aftermath. What happened took maybe five minutes, I don’t know exactly, but the aftermath, well, it’s still with me. I learned that trouble happens, and I can’t tell my mother about it. How did I know that?

It was a normal day in the fall of second grade at Union Terrace. I was walking home with Mike after school. Often, we went to his house after school, up the block from my house on 22nd Street. A stone house with a Great Dane. His older brother and sister were usually out of the house. His mother was often lying down in her room and wasn’t to be disturbed. My mother preferred that I went elsewhere after school and only cared that I showed up for dinner. Neither of our mothers paid much attention to what we did.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


On that day Mike and I went into the basement and listened to West Side Story. We sometimes listened to Broadway musicals and sang and danced along with the songs. On this day his older brother was in the house. As if timed, Mike went upstairs to see his mother, and his older brother dragged me into the basement bathroom where he made me touch his penis. Did I rub it, did he put into my mouth, did he masturbate? I’m not sure. I know he showed me a small black and white photo of a nude woman with large breasts and pubic hair which frightened me. I remember that. When he was done with me, he unlocked the door and pushed me out, spinning me back into the basement. And he laughed.

I learned that trouble happens, and I can’t tell my mother about it. How did I know that?

Did I tell Mike? No, I did not, though I wondered later if he planned his absence with his brother. I didn’t go upstairs into his mother’s darkened room where she was lying down and tell her. I did go home. But I didn’t tell my mother. I came home and sat down to whatever dinner we were having, probably some overcooked piece of meat, boiled vegetables, and hard rolls, and I picked at the food on my plate, stared at the tall glass of milk, and then excused myself and went to my room where I lay on my bed and turned my face to the wall.

Everything changed that day and yet I told no one, said not a word. My mother did not share cautionary tales or give advice about dangers I might encounter. I don’t think her silence was born out of a trust she felt in the world. It was her fatalism, not her faith that explained why she didn’t even try to protect me.

I wondered what my mother would have thought of his laugh as he pushed me out the door. She would have known what it meant, that he laughed because he knew I wouldn’t tell anyone about what happened, that he would get away with what he had done. Which he did. His laugh: I hear it still.

Threat

Two boys carried me to the car after the concert because I was too drunk to walk, not even 16. I remember I wasn’t 16 because I was always getting rides to school with friends or friends’ older brothers and for about a week, a strawberry-blonde boy who pulled up to my house, always a few minutes before the bell. He bounced on his toes when he walked through the hallways, laughing. And he had an alliterative name, two hard Gs, first name and last. Everyone called him by both, whether he knew them or not. On Friday nights, he ran into the end zone more than anyone else. Number 40, a favorite, a star. And in Texas, that means more than it should. He was only two years older, but he seemed to me like a grown man, devastatingly boyish and dangerously developed.

My father was his football coach. That is to say, my father was the football coach at my high school, so I was known to everyone, that is to say, visible, whether I wanted to be or not, which is why, I’m sure, I eventually leaned fast and far toward edges of nothing good so that I could let go for a few hours of who I was to everyone in that town. To forget. It was never rebellion as much as it was escape.

On Friday nights, he ran into the end zone more than anyone else. Number 40, a favorite, a star. And in Texas, that means more than it should.

I remember he drove a long car, something old that would have been uncool had anyone else been driving it. I remember he drove so fast I stared at the needle of the odometer, willing it to roll back to the left. My body tense, one clenched fist around the door handle. Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” so loud the windows shook. I only rode with him a few days — the threat of being in the car with him stronger than my silent desire.

A few months later, that desire still shook through me like those car windows when I ended up standing next to him at a sold-out concert in Dallas. I remember he ran down to the concessions and came back with two beers. And I remember being more confused at how he got the beer than anything else, but I drank it. And then another and another and I don’t remember how many anothers. I don’t even remember the concert, but there’s this flash, a brief scene of him asking a guy from school, the guy who sat in front of me in English, to help carry me to his car.

And then, he was pulling into the school parking lot for some reason and it was dark and he was on me and then in me and then driving me home. Hazy street lights overhead. I was suddenly alert and awake in a way I had never been, as if I had learned something about the world and my life and myself, and I had. When I asked him why he did it, he laughed before saying this: “I had to do something to sober you up.”

And I did what I did for years, I walked up the long sidewalk to the front door of my house and shimmied the key into the lock as quietly as I could and I tiptoed to my parents’ door and whispered “I’m home.”

Then I went to the bathroom, where I remember being afraid of all the blood. I can still see it.

Then I went to the bathroom, where I remember being afraid of all the blood. I can still see it.

Child’s Pose

Would anything have prepared me, would anything my mother could have said made a difference in what happened? I ask myself this now, so many years later. So many years later I think I have inherited my mother’s fatalism, the belief that no matter what I did, no matter what she did or didn’t do, trouble would find me. I did not rush toward trouble but when it came, when it arrived, it seemed as if there was no other destination possible, as if my mother had given me up, promised me at birth to trouble incarnate.

Even at the age of sixteen, an age when many no longer assume the child’s pose, I was innocent, innocent the way some animals never learn to growl or bite. Plenty had happened to me that should have made me wary, stand-offish. That came later but at this time I was remarkably open-hearted.

It’s funny what I remember. I remember that I was wearing my mother’s cast-off heavy-woven, long green skirt, that fell to my ankles. I wore tights underneath and boots, the long dangling earrings my mother had brought back from Mexico for me, and her old buckskin coat with the fringe on the arms. An outlandish outfit furnished from her castaways. It was a Saturday night in March during spring break and I was going to a party with a friend from school. I didn’t know any details. I’m sure I lied to my parents about where I was going and what I was doing. My friend’s older brother was driving us to the party. He would pick us up later to bring us home.

About this older brother. He was famous around town, thought to be the most handsome guy anyone had ever seen, a gifted tennis player, smart, attending an ivy league college, and trouble, complete and utter trouble. A guy who could get any girl he wanted but who just as easily dumped them when he was done. I had watched him from afar, listened to his sister talk about his misadventures with a long list of girls. In the fall of our senior year, he had seen my senior photo, you know the small versions we give to all our friends. He saw the little black and white photo of me standing by one of the heritage trees on campus and he became obsessed with me, well, not me so much as the girl in the photo. I knew this because his sister told me. He even asked me out to a party on New Year’s Eve. What I remember about that evening was that he was indeed handsome, but he was also dull. He relied on his looks so thoroughly that he neglected anything else or maybe there was some justice in the world and he didn’t get everything when the gods were divvying out the prizes. It was a boring night. I was the youngest, a stranger among the older crowd and I remember feeling his friends were baffled by my inclusion. After that, we didn’t see each other until he drove his sister and I to this party. During the drive he acted as if he didn’t know me and that was ok with me.

At the party I drank with abandon. I took tequila shots with some guy while playing darts. I remember having a wonderful time, laughing my head off, without a care in the world. Not a trace of caution or concern. I remember this because the feeling sometimes comes back to me along with the realization that I’ll never feel quite that way again. I felt safe and happy, completely in the moment. I didn’t think about my parents or older brothers or what might happen to me. And then my friend’s older brother arrived to take us home and suddenly I was so drunk I couldn’t make it down the stairs. The guy I was playing darts with and my friend’s older brother had to carry me down both flights and put me in the car. I don’t remember whether they put me in the back seat or the front seat, but I do remember the hostile look exchanged between the older brother and the guy who I played darts with. I think the dart guy was a good guy and he didn’t like the way the older brother took possession of me. I have no idea what happened to my friend from school.

I was taken to yet another house, whose I don’t know, and the older brother took me into a bedroom and placed me on the bed. I was in and out of consciousness, mostly out, with brief spells when I opened my eyes. I opened my eyes when the older brother pulled down my tights and got on top of me. I have no idea how long he was on me, whether I opened my eyes repeatedly or only when he was finishing, and his groans woke me.

At some point he hauled me to my feet and got me back in the car and drove me to my house. I don’t remember any words between us. He didn’t get out of the car and help me to the door. He leaned across me, opened the car door and looked at me as if to say get out. Which I did. Somehow. And I walked up the flagstone path to the back porch, stumbled around looking for the key, and finally opened the door. It was way past my curfew and my father had been listening for my return. I can’t remember if he saw me or just spoke to me from behind his bedroom door. It’s hard to believe he could have set eyes on me and not known something wrong had happened.

And it’s hard to fathom what he made of my running a bath at 2:30 in the morning. But that’s what I did.

My mother never stirred.

The next morning my father told me my grandmother, his mother, had died last night. A massive heart attack. He never asked why I was so late that night.

After

I’m going back for a moment to Before. Before all the trouble and distrust, before my eyes darted across rooms with concern.

My father had a rule: When a boy walked me to the door at the end of the night, I was not to go beyond the door frame. I was not to linger at the boy’s car or on the walkway or in the shadows of the porch. But the boys did. Nights, they’d knock quietly on my bedroom window, huddle under the street light out front, or call me on the phone and ask me to meet them outside in 10 minutes. The lust in their voices, husky tremors, made me nervous. I ignored them. I hung up. I kept the blinds closed. Once, Brian Walker passed me in the hallway at school, a nervous laugh: “Your dad sure is fast.” The night before, my father had caught five or six of them on the side of the house outside my bedroom window. He chased them for blocks, barefoot, nearly catching them before they hopped the fence to Randy Becker’s house. My father never said a word.

But for all his rules and curfews and threats shouted on dark streets to boys, he couldn’t protect me, not then, and not years later, once I stepped beyond that door frame.

So much of my trouble happened in hotel rooms. Here’s one: A hotel suite in Dallas my junior year, a haze of bodies aglow (blue shadows) in the glare from the TV in the next room. A boy beside me in bed. I’d only had two beers, so he must have slipped me something. My body heavy, boulder-like. I struggled against his hands, the ones that pressed my wrists above my head while he kneed my legs apart. I had never been with a boy (this months before the concert, the truck, the parking lot), so I fought to close my body, my legs, to cover myself as much as I could. After a while, he hopped up from the bed, laughing: “You’re strong.” I watched his shadow blend into the blue shapes beyond the door, and I got home, but I don’t remember how. My parents were out of town that weekend, and when they came home the next morning, they found me sleeping on the couch, my mauve comforter pulled around me. After that, they never left me alone at home, and I will always wonder if they saw the panic in my face, the kind that comes after scrambling back from a ledge.

Thinking back on all this, I can’t remember my mother ever reacting or warning or being aware. Of course I always had cover stories, reasons and explanations I came up with on the drive home, and if she didn’t believe them, she never said.

Years later, in my late 20s, I sat in my apartment living room late into a night, drinking and talking with two other women, friends. After enough wine, we began alternating stories of hotel rooms, of backseats, of back bedrooms. One of the women, tall and tough, described the hours she hid under her bed to avoid a half-brother’s repeated attempts and advances. But we all had something more in common, a siren-like sexual aggression, a craving for conquests, a need for nights to end with a man in our bed, in our mouths, in us.

There’s a difference between being out of control and not being in control, and that night, through our shared histories, our adopted proclivities, we realized we had chosen, somewhere along the way, to be predatory and promiscuous so that no man could ever have the advantage again.

Lost Corridor

The winter of my senior year of high school, my parents shipped me off to board at Moravian Seminary for Girls, the school I had been attending since 9th grade as a day student. They had come to the end of dealing with me after a tumultuous fall. My mother especially was done with me, she said. Done with the trouble I was, the trouble I had always been. She wanted me locked up far away from boys.

I was installed on the top floor of Main, on one of its narrow corridors that held four small rooms and a set of back stairs. The corridor was known as the Lost Corridor because the girls living there had been sent away by their parents and were no longer wanted at home. Maybe they were never wanted. This is where I landed that winter.

Done with the trouble I was, the trouble I had always been. She wanted me locked up far away from boys.

On this corridor, three doors down, at the very end lived Linna. Linna was tall and willowy, with thin brown hair that she wore parted in the middle and fanned both sides of her face in peek-a-boo fashion. She outlined her eyes with black kohl, top lids and bottoms which made her look paler than she already was. I liked this Linna. She moved quietly with long strides and she often smiled at me when our paths crossed. I didn’t know her story though I was sure she had one. We all did. No one came to live on The Lost Corridor without a story. Her chosen quote for the year book was playfully dark from Richard Farina: “Call me inert and featureless but Beware, I am the shadow, free to cloud men’s minds.” Mine was painfully sincere, from Theodore Roethke: “Leaves, leaves, turn and tell me what I am.”

Sometime that spring when I thought nothing more could happen to me, I had a dream. One thing I knew about Linna was that like me she had spent her youth with horses. In the dream Linna and I taught little girls how to ride. We led the horses out of their stalls to the mounting block where we hoisted the girls into the saddle, putting their feet in the stirrups, tightening girths. Then they walked their horses to the riding ring. We both stood in the middle of the ring like my first riding teacher Miss Reba. I faced one side, and Linna faced the other. We were teaching them the voice that horses listen to, the touch that horses feel. I used to wonder if Miss Reba knew which girls would learn and which would not. Linna and I had our hunches. Then we got on our own horses and led our charges down to the water. We told them they were to follow us, to hold on and let their horses swim. Hold on but not too tightly, we said. Don’t be scared. But, of course, some of the little girls held on too tightly and their horses bucked them into the water. Linna and I pulled the fallen girls out of the water and carried them in the saddle before us. We told the girls who didn’t fall off that they had passed the test, a test they didn’t know they were taking, and as a prize they could keep their horses. The last image of the dream was a line of horses with their small riders walking into the woods.

When I woke, I wondered which Linna and I were. Were we the girls who held on too tightly and had to be pulled from the water or did we learn the voice that horses listen to and take our horses into the woods?

Sharp Edges

I think women look at each other and think what we see either resembles our own reflections or something we’d rather not know in ourselves. I know I do this. It’s been 30 years, and every time I put on mascara, I think of Denise Simpson, the way she put on coat after coat of thick black, the way she put mine on when we’d get ready together in her room, the way I couldn’t (still can’t) get my lashes as pronounced as hers. A silly example, but I think it may be a metaphor, like your dream.

One night, a few months into my senior year, I took my father’s car across town without permission to borrow some of Denise’s clothes and forgot to put the seat back. I see myself perched on the fireplace hearth while my father paces the middle of the living room, yelling, “When you leave this house, you’re going to go wild. Wild!” At that crescendo of his second wild, he raises his arms in frustration and fury, and for a split second, I see it: the flash of futility in his attempts to get me safely across the churning waters, to keep me from running as fast as I can toward my own woods.

I already had wildness. I didn’t need to leave home to find it, but wildness begs another trouble, an expectation that the paths we’ve tread will be the ones we take again.

We had all gone to different colleges in Texas and we met at Brian Walker’s house over winter break that first year and we played some drinking game at a table in the garage and Brian brought his roommate home with him, and the roommate had heard enough stories about me that he had a plan, to get me drunk enough for them all to watch. More shadows in the doorframe, more struggling, this time futile.

That night became a different kind of door frame, a different kind of chasing away, one that kept me voiceless in my dorm room for the most of that year. I remember volunteering to repaint the hallway that spring — a mosaic that ran the walls in different directions, a pattern that took patience and my attention for months. Each shape and sharp edge a re-mapping, and I wondered with each brushstroke if I would like this new hallway. I did for a while.

But eventually, I left those walls.

I transferred to a different school.

And I found the woods again.

***

Jill Talbot is the author of The Way We Weren’t: A Memoir and Loaded: Women and Addiction, the co-editor of The Art of Friction: Where (Non)Fictions Come Together, and the editor of Metawritings: Toward a Theory of Nonfiction. Her writing has been named Notable in Best American Essays for the past four years in a row and has appeared in journals such as AGNI, Brevity, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, Fourth Genre, The Normal School, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and Slice Magazine. She teaches in the creative writing program at University of North Texas.

Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton. She has been the editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction. Companion to an Untold Story won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women published by The University of Georgia Press. Waveformessays.wordpress.com. Her email is aldrich@msu.edu.

***

Editor: Krista Stevens

Hiking With Nietzsche

AP Photo/Keystone/Desair

John Kaag | Hiking with Nietzsche | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | September 2018 | 30 minutes (6,007 words)

 

I often tell my students that philosophy saved my life. And it’s true. But on that first trip to Sils-Maria—on my way to Piz Corvatsch—it nearly killed me. It was 1999, and I was in the process of writing a thesis about genius, insanity, and aesthetic experience in the writings of Nietzsche and his American contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson. On the sheltered brink of my twenties, I’d rarely ventured beyond the invisible walls of central Pennsylvania, so my adviser pulled some administrative strings and found a way for me to escape. At the end of my junior­ year he handed me an unmarked envelope—inside was a check for three thousand dollars. “You should go to Basel,” he suggested, probably knowing full well that I wouldn’t stay there.

Basel was a turning point, a pivot between Nietzsche’s early conventional life as a scholar and his increasingly erratic existence as Europe’s philosopher-poet. He had come to the city in 1869 as the youngest tenured faculty member at the University of Basel. In the ensuing years he would write his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in which he argued that the allure of tragedy was its ability to harmonize the two competing urges of being human: the desire for order and the strange but undeniable longing for chaos. When I arrived in Basel, still a teenager, I couldn’t help thinking that the first of these drives—an obsessive craving for stability and reason that Nietzsche termed “the Apollonian”—had gotten the better of modern society.

The train station in Basel is a model of Swiss precision—beautiful people in beautiful clothes glide through a grand­ atrium to meet trains that never fail to run on time. Across the street stands a massive cylindrical skyscraper, home to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the most powerful financial institution in the world. I exited the station and ate my breakfast outside the bank as a throng of well-suited Apollos vanished inside on their way to work. “The educated classes,” Nietzsche explained, “are being swept along by a hugely contemptible money economy.” The prospects for life in modern capitalist society were lucrative but nonetheless bleak: “The world has never been so worldly, never poorer in love and goodness.”

According to Nietzsche, love and goodness were not realized in lockstep order but embodied its opposite: Dionysian revelry. His life in Basel was supposed to be happy and well-ordered, the life of the mind and of high society, but upon arriving, he fell into a fast friendship with the Romantic composer Richard Wagner, and that life was quickly brought to an end. He’d come to Basel to teach classical philology, the study of language and original meanings, which seems harmless enough, but Nietzsche, unlike many of his more conservative colleagues, understood how radical this sort of theoretical excavating could be. In The Birth of Tragedy, he claims that Western culture, in all of its grand refinement, is built upon a deep and subterranean structure that was laid out ages ago by Dionysus himself. And, in the early years of their friendship, Nietzsche and Wagner aimed to dig it up.

Read more…

Let Them Eat Pancakes

a stack of four pancakes. there is a pat of butter on the top and maple syrup dripping down the side.
Photo by Michelle W. (CC BY 2.0)

At the Chicago Tribune, Christopher Borrelli introduces us to busboy Othea Loggan. Othea Loggan started working as a busboy at Walker Bros. Original Pancake House in 1964, and he works there as a busboy still — the most senior employee at a restaurant with an unusual number of long-term staff. In ’64, he made minimum wage; now he makes slightly more, with no benefits. Management is loyal to its bussers, but you can’t actually pay bills with job security.

Winston Brown, another busser (for the past 38 years), taps his chest and a red light glows through his white coat — “I’m on dialysis,” he says. “Medicare only. We make just enough to pay bills — sometimes. When I started here, there was one Walker Bros., this place, and now there are seven of them. And what do we get? We get to pay our rents.”

Any savings?

He laughs sardonically.

Loggan doesn’t complain.

Rumbult, similarly, says management “does a lot, but we could always use help.” In a sense, their major benefit is a feeling of job security. With new hires today increasingly less likely to stay at a pancake house long, Ray Walker says his loyalty to his aging bussing staff has only deepened. His father, Victor, who started Walker Bros. with his uncle Everett in 1960 (franchising the business from an Oregon pancake house chain), hired Loggan. He says he probably treats Loggan a little better than the rest of the staff, but hesitated to go into detail: “Others would want to know what they’re not getting.” For instance, the company took out life insurance on Loggan (payable to his wife); Ray says that for years he’s set aside about $50 a month for Loggan, as an informal retirement fund (subject to a 30 percent penalty for early withdrawal).

Read the story

O, Small-bany! Part 2: Winter

Illustration by Senne Trip

Elisa Albert | Longreads | August 2018 | 24 minutes (5,940 words)

 

Her name was Sally. Sally-bo-bally. The Salster. Sometimes we called her Butt-Wiggle, for the way she shook it when she saw us. Or butt-wig, for short. You know how it is with nicknames, the language of love. We found her on a rescue organization’s website. Sally! She was bright-eyed and smiling. Hi! Someone had tied a bandana around her neck. I adored her on sight. She was up for adoption the following Saturday in a parking lot behind a warehouse in Schenectady.

I’d never had a dog. My mother said it was dirty to have animals in the house.

We resolved to keep open minds and meet all the dogs, let the right one find us, not force anything, but it was always going to be Sal. She stood on her hind legs and wagged her whole ass at us. She was practically dancing. Sally-Sal! Jet black, with a short, shiny coat. Pit/lab mix? Pit/lab/hound? Pit/whippet/lab? Who knew. Who cared. The chemistry was perfect. Love at first lick. Not like poor little Buddy, over in the corner with a bad case of worms, or pretty retriever Julius, who wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. It was always going to be Sal. Four months old, spayed and vaccinated. No one else showed the slightest interest in her. She was ours. We filled out the paperwork and took her home.

***

Her eyes! The way she looked at you, and didn’t look away. So present and soulful, a real lover. She was like a person, if we’re talking about the most honest loving open deep good authentic funny sort of person, and how many of those have you ever met? She’d curl herself up next to you, close as she could get. She wanted to crawl under the sheets next to you. She wasn’t satisfied unless she had her body in the sweetest possible proximity to yours. She was like one of those rare massage therapists whose touch feels psychic: exactly where you want it, exactly how you want it. Magic.

I was never into dog memoirs or whatever, never understood that mad devotion to pets. Seemed weird to be that into an animal. It seemed fairly sad to be that into an animal. Like, why don’t you find yourself some more people to love? I didn’t get it. Now I got it. People are way overrated.

How creepy it is when people talk of “completing” their families, as though a family is a construction project or a vocational course, a finite thing, a theoretical ideal. How moronic and hubristic I find that attitude. It’s like the ugliest kind of nationalism, on a microcosmic scale. And yet. And yet. Sally gave us something new to love, and in so doing gave our family a new dimension, this whole new love to share between us. I felt a weird, delicious sense of… completeness. I was past having babies, but Sal was my sweet darling beloved lil’ boo. We were in love with her and in love with each other and in love with the way she loved us back and generally high off our own abundance of love and good fortune. There was this warmth in my chest. We redrew our goofy family crest to include her. We sang ridiculous songs to and with and about her. We spoke to her in a silly dialect. Dare I say it? We were happy.
Read more…

Lyrical Ladies, Writing Women, and the Legend of Lauryn Hill

Paul Warner / AP

 Michael Gonzales | Longreads | August 2018 | 21 minutes (5,551 words)

Back in the early 1980s, rap was primarily a boys club, but a few girls still managed to sneak in and do their thing. Although uptown girls Sha-Rock from the Funky Four + 1 and the Mercedes Ladies were pioneers of the genre, it was a teenager from Queens named Roxanne Shante who gets credit for laying down a verbal foundation for other fem rhyme slayers to follow for decades. As seen in the gritty Netflix biopic Roxanne Roxanne, which details the rapper’s humble beginnings and hard knock life, Shante was just another around-the-way girl with an attitude living in Queensbridge Projects when she was discovered by record producer Marley Marl, who lived and worked in the same public housing sprawl. Marley’s rap posse the Juice Crew featuring Big Daddy Kane, Biz Markie and MC Shan were some of the best rappers in the city and being down with them meant something special.

Going by her government name Lolita Shanté Gooden, she began rapping at ten years old and was known within those brick buildings to be the best at freestyling and battling alongside the boys. Unlike a decade later when the scantily clad Foxy Brown and Lil’ Kim became the most popular female rappers, in the ‘80s it wasn’t about sex appeal (often “lady rappers,” with the exception of The Sequence, dressed like the boys), but simply skills. “Shante was a gem,” Marley told me in 2008. “All her songs were made up on the the spot. All you had to do was give her a subject and she would run with it.”

Recruited to bring her dis-heavy rhymes to a record designed to answer back to U.T.F.O.’s popular 1984 jam “Roxanne Roxanne,” a somewhat sexist song featuring Brooklyn rappers Kangol Kid, Educated Rapper and Doctor Ice (Mix Master Ice was their DJ) that steadily insults a “stuck up” young woman who was new to their block, Shante adopted a new first name and brought the pain. “Roxanne Roxanne” might’ve been a sensation and a best-seller for U.T.F.O., but when Shante’s squeaky yet powerful response “Roxanne’s Revenge” was released a few months later, U.T.F.O., as well as the rest of the world, were caught off-guard. Rox called them out individually, verbally taking down the entire crew as she delivered the goods and changed hip-hop history.

The rap sisterhood soon included Sparky D, MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, LA Star, Monie Love, Lauryn Hill, Lil Kim, Foxy Brown, Nicki Minaj and countless others. For many of the women rappers who’ve succeeded throughout the years, as former Def Jam artist Nikki D says in the 2010 documentary My Mic Sounds Nice: The Truth About Women And Hip Hop directed by Ava DuVernay, “They were doing double of what a dude could do.”

While Roxanne was an obvious inspiration to her fellow female MCs for decades to come, her voice and lyrics also inspired many young women who never touched a mic to pursue their path regardless of any barriers the boys might put in their way.

‘She Begat This’ is a celebration of the Bad Boy boom bap Wu Tang neo-soul Missy Elliott roaring 1990s, an end-of-the-century era that was an important period in black popular culture.

Like hip-hop itself, writing about rap music was mostly the beat of male (the main quartet being Nelson George, Greg Tate, Barry Michael Cooper and Harry Allen) music journalists in the the early years, but by the mid-’80s, that too would change. There were the Village Voice scribes Carol Cooper and Lisa Jones, though neither wrote that much about the genre. Additionally, there were also the often overlooked women from the glossy teen zines: Cynthia Horner (Right On!), Gerrie Summers (Word Up), Kate Ferguson, Yvette Noel-Schure (who today is Beyonce’s publicist), Marcia Cole and Belinda Trotter. However, progressing into the ‘90s, the textual landscape began to change as women who came of age within the culture — whether hanging at park jams, clubbing with the b-boys or simply enthralled by the booming beat underground sounds that were slowly becoming mainstream — decided that they too had something to say about the scene. The shortlist of then young scribes includes future powerhouse writers/editors Kierna Mayo, dream hampton, Mimi Valdes, who produced the movie Roxanne Roxanne, and Danyel Smith, but it was the writings of Joan Morgan, author of the recently released She Begat This: 20 Years of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, that I remember reading first.

For me, Joan was the hip-hop writer version of Roxanne Shante. Certainly, she wasn’t the first woman hip-hop writer on the scene, but from jump she was one of the best. While She Begat This, which includes a forward by Mayo, is a tribute to Hill’s masterful album that was released 20 years ago this past weekend, on August 25th, 1998, it’s also a celebration of the Bad Boy boom bap Wu Tang neo-soul Missy Elliott roaring 1990s, an end-of-the-century era that was an important period in black popular culture as well as in the professional and personal lives of those who were there as participants and witnesses, writing from the frontlines with Afro abandon. Back then, besides our personal stereos and radios, The Miseducation could be heard blaring from house parties, spoken word readings, cool clothing stores, restaurants, cars parked on the street and bubbling brown sugar bars everywhere.

These days Joan Morgan, between raising her son as a single mother, teaching at various universities and working on her Ph.D. dissertation, hardly ever writes about hip-hop culture, but when the publisher 37 INK offered her the project to riff on Hill’s landmark disc she felt it was her responsibility to do the right thing. Still, anyone anticipating a 33 1/3-type book filled with nerdy details describing recording sessions, Hill’s writing process, a close reading analysis of the lyrics or an interview with the featured artist, or at least with some of the musicians and collaborators, will be sorely disappointed. Morgan, whose book When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down (1999) is as influential a text amongst a certain sector of the literary hip-hop audience as Hill’s music, chose instead to write “a cultural history of the album.”

In addition to her personal observations and opinions of Lauryn as seen (heard) through a womanist lens, Morgan also interviews her girlfriends, fellow writers and thinkers who were also a part of the New York City (and Brooklyn) scene when Miseducation was first released. Serving as an intellectual Greek chorus throughout the book, they share their thoughts on Hill in relation to colorism, mental health, style, relationships and black genius.

However, considering all the interviews Hill did when the album was released, it’s striking that not one was quoted in She Begat This. Morgan talks about the beauty of the Harper’s Bazaar cover Lauryn appeared on, as well as the “lily-whiteness” of that magazine, which usually kept black faces regulated to the interior pages, but never once mentions what Hill said inside that issue . The only person Morgan spoke with who was actually connected to The Miseducation was Lauryn’s former personal manager Jayson Jackson, who gave the writer some juicy tidbits, including the fact that the record company was unhappy with the project when it was first presented to them.

“Truthfully, when I thought about it I knew that no one would be able to write the book the way I would,” says Morgan via cellphone from an Amtrak train leaving Martha’s Vineyard back to New York City. “But, I only had four months to complete the book and I didn’t have time to chase Lauryn down for an interview, so I interviewed other people (including dream hampton, Michaela Angela Davis, Dr. Yaba Blay, Karen Goode Marable, Akiba Solomon and former Honey magazine editor Joicelyn Dingle) to get their take on what made the project iconic.”

*

Twenty years later The Miseducation is still relevant and winning honors; most recently it was voted #2 on NPR’s list of The 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women, sandwiched between #1 Joni Mitchell (Blue) and Lauryn’s spiritual godmother Nina Simone (I Put a Spell On You) at #3. As writer Paula Mejia stated in her essay on The Miseducation, “The album, rife with Hill’s biting rhymes and sharp turns of phrase, is a wonder from start to finish.” With lyrics that were as piercing and probing as an Alice Walker novel (“…blessed with a broad literary arsenal that… reflected her dexterity as a wordsmith,” Morgan writes) and as musically lush as a seventies Ann Peebles song produced by Willie Mitchell, the album was obviously brilliant, but for Lauryn Hill it would be both a gift and a curse.

The curse came later that year when the production team New-Ark, who helped Hill with producing and songwriting but never signed any contracts, sued for more money (they were originally paid $100,000) and for writing credits. Hill eventually settled with the musicians, and it’s hard for observers not to speculate that the suit embarrassed Lauryn or even scarred her emotionally — a narrative passively reinforced not least by her inability to create a follow-up studio album.

Morgan’s writings helped many rap-loving women navigate through the gray areas of the music that they might’ve loved dearly, but didn’t always love them back.

Hill’s strange behavior both onstage and off has been documented heavily, including in a recent interview with respected jazz pianist Robert Glasper detailing his bad experiences working with her in 2008. Appearing on Houston, Texas, radio station 97.9 The Box, Glasper told tales: from being instructed to address her as Ms. Hill (something that everyone is supposed to do) to never looking her in the eye to her habit of firing her touring bands no matter how good they might be. Addressing Hill directly on the show, Glasper said, “You haven’t done enough to be the way you are…the one thing you did that was great, you didn’t do…” In a recent Medium essay, “Addressing Robert Glasper and other common misconceptions about me (in no particular order)” Ms. Hill responded to the criticism.

Film producer/director Lisa Cortes (Precious), who is currently directing the documentary The Remix: Hip Hop x. Fashion, says, “I don’t think that [sharing credits with New-Ark] should’ve made people look at her negatively.” As a former record executive, Cortes worked closely with R&B and hip-hop producers in the late ’80s/early ’90s. “Plenty of music men have used ghostwriters or other producers to help them finish tracks, but they’ve never been dragged the way Lauryn was. The writing and producing she has done with others (Aretha Franklin, Carlos Santana, Whitney Houston) speaks for her talents and The Miseducation remains a remarkable achievement.”

The controversy of creation never deterred me from listening to The Miseducation and continually embracing its brilliance, but I’ve always been upset that Hill never released another full-length project. With the exception of the much maligned MTV Unplugged project (Village Voice critic Miles Marshall Lewis was the only writer I know who liked that album, calling the 2002 project “the most powerful artistic document to emerge from hip-hop America post-9/11”) and a single with the Fugees (“Take It Easy”), there has been nothing. “From what I understand, Lauryn never stopped recording,” says Morgan, “she just hasn’t put anything out. Who knows, maybe she’ll put out some new music in time for the anniversary.”

Though Lauryn still tours, often showing up hours late and performing her songs in a variety of different arrangements that sometimes angers the audience, The Miseducation remains Hill’s only solo album. After announcing an anniversary tour in April, by July most of the dates were postponed or canceled. “This album chronicled an intimate piece of my young existence,” Hill said in a statement released when the tour was announced. “It was the summation of most, if not all, of my most hopeful and positive emotions experienced to that date.”

*

Interviewing Morgan on her book’s publication date, we reminisce about those early days when she was a young writer at the Village Voice, hanging out in the lounge where she befriended writers and editors including Joe Levy, who suggested she cover the Mike Tyson rap trial in 1992. “I was completely untrained,” she says. “People were telling me that they liked my voice (in print), but I really didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t breaking the rules, I just didn’t know what they were.” My introduction to Morgan’s work was her 1990 review of former N.W.A. member Ice Cube’s solo debut AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted (Priority), which was also published in the Village Voice.

Living in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn with my buddy Havelock Nelson while we worked on our book Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture, I sat in the CD-cluttered kitchen and read the piece twice, loving every word of it. Morgan’s writing was powerful, poetic and bold, with the review itself written in the style of a short story involving her girlfriends in Martha’s Vineyard and the Cube cassette. Balancing Cube’s angry Black man stance (his post-Panther arguments with the government and the police) and his sexism, Morgan was split between loving the album and throwing the record into a bonfire. “I think of that review as the first in hip-hop feminism,” she says.

Filmmaker Syreeta Gates, who is currently working on Write On! The Legend of Hip-Hop’s Ink Slingers, a documentary about hip-hop writers from the ‘90s, says, “Straight out the gate her Ice Cube piece had us reimagine our relationships not only with the culture but with the artists in relation to their lyrics…For me, she gave space to play in the grays that I never thought was possible in the realm of hip-hop culture. Her ideology around hip-hop feminism gave a generation of young women a [language for] something that I think for the most part we made a distinct choice to participate in.”

A self-proclaimed “cultural chameleon,” Morgan was a Bronx-bred homegirl who was part prep school (she’d attended the prestigious Fieldston School), part Phillies blunt; an Ivy League graduate who was reared by strict Jamaican parents, but still managed to get her party on. “I can still remember lying to my mother about what block I was on, so I could go with my friends to the park jams,” Morgan laughs. “I listened to what my peers listened to with curiosity and fascination, but I never thought of it as a career.” Still, just because she could recite the raunchiest rap stanzas didn’t mean she wasn’t going to challenge sexism, classism and stereotypes. Her writings helped many rap-loving women navigate through the gray areas of the music that they might’ve loved dearly, but didn’t always love them back.

Regina R. Robertson, west coast editor of Essence and editor of the essay collection He Never Come Home says, “I recently pulled When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost from my bookshelf and started flipping through it again. That book had such an impact on me. I was struck by Joan’s honesty. That book also made me take a step back and reexamine the roles that we all play. Although it’s almost twenty years since it came out, it has stood the test of time.”

Joan Morgan never planned on becoming a music critic, let alone a “hip-hop writer.” In 2006 she explained to interviewer Faedra Chatard Carpenter, “When I started writing, there was no such thing as ‘hip-hop journalism.’ I am part of that generation of writers that, for better or worse, created that as a genre and it really was a term that other people applied to our writings.” Within months of the Cube review, I began seeing her name regularly in the Voice and Spin, and began looking forward to her take on a culture that she obviously cherished.

This was another golden era of black writing, and Morgan’s work at ‘Vibe’ was at the forefront of a literary movement that would inspire a generation.

During that early ‘90s period, Joan was a teacher at the Fieldston School, but that was simply a stopover until the universe expanded and so-called “urban” magazines (most noticeably The Source, Vibe and RapPages) exploded on the scene. “Funny enough, I had very little respect for music journalism,” Morgan tells me, “because I didn’t really understand it. My thinking was, ‘Who needs a review to figure out what they wanted to hear.’ My real dream was to become an actor.”

In 1993, although The Source was already a heavy newsstand presence in the hip-hop mag department, the Time Inc./Quincy Jones-owned Vibe was promoted as bigger and deffer, as though it was the Esquire of urban magazines. With its larger size, better graphics, more experienced editorial direction and a writing staff that included Kevin Powell, Scott Poulson-Bryant and Joan Morgan, the magazine was an instant success. Coming at a time when most mainstream music/lifestyle publications, namely Rolling Stone, had no “writers of color” composing funky fresh features or reviews, The Source and Vibe was where more than a few African-American writers honed their craft, sharpened their skills and were allowed to have their words read by thousands of readers across the world.

This was, as writer Dean Van Nguyen recently documented in the Pitchfork piece “How a Group of Journalists Turned Hip-Hop Into a Literary Movement,” another golden era of black (Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts Movement) writing, and Morgan’s work at Vibe was at the forefront of a literary movement that would inspire a generation. Teenagers read the rap mags on the subway and buses, college students studied them in their dorms, with some hanging favorite articles pin-up style on the wall, and the mostly white world of New York City magazine journalism was forced to pay attention to the new kids in town. Morgan would go on to write several wonderful stories for Vibe including a controversial one on alleged homophobic Jamaican singer Buju Banton and, in 1994, a memorable cover story on TLC (The Fire This Time) that centered on the group’s rebellious rapper Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, who had, several months before, accidentally burned down her professional football player boyfriend’s Atlanta mansion after setting his sneakers on fire.

West coast entertainment journalist Ronke Reeves was an editorial assistant at Vibe during those formative years, and remembers well Morgan’s contributions. “In that male dominated world, Joan had a bold, prominent voice that broke new ground and inspired a generation of young writers. Even after she left Vibe and went to work at Essence and ultimately finish her book, I still followed her work, because, from a female perspective, there was nobody writing like that.”


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


A few months before the house burning in Atlanta, writers from the hip-hop magazines were introduced to a new rap trio calling themselves the Fugees. The music on their debut Blunted on Reality was a fusion of streetwise rap and soul mixed with swaggering dancehall riddims. Assigned by RapPages editor-in-chief Sheena Lester, the first woman editor of a national hip-hop publication, I went to the midtown Manhattan offices of their label Sony Music and was introduced to the group, which consisted of Wyclef Jean, a rapper and multi-instrumentalist, his cousin and group founder Pras Michel, and Lauryn Hill, a singer and rapper who was as beautiful as she was talented.

With the exception of a rapper/singer named Smooth, whose album You’ve Been Played was released the year before, no other artists were displaying those dual talents on disc. Lauryn, then all of 19 years old, was an English major at Columbia University who, the year before, had appeared alongside Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act 2. It wasn’t uncommon for Hill to be seen doing homework in the conference room between interviews or in the dressing room when the group did shows. Tonya Pendleton, a former editor at the BET-owned YSB magazine, remembers being impressed. “Lauryn was so incredibly talented as an equally dope singer and rapper,” she says. “Although she had an incredible singing voice, Lauryn is, in my view, the greatest female rap artist of our time, if only because she’s a beast lyrically. The only thing making that arguable is that there are less albums to debate with.”

Hailing from Northern New Jersey, the guys lived in the Newark area while Hill came from South Orange. In author Brian Coleman’s essential text Check the Technique: Liner Notes for Hip-Hop Junkies (2007), Pras explained, “Our strength was in being three individuals who blended together perfectly. Clef brought the musicality, Lauryn brought the soulfulness and I brought the roughness and flash.” From the first time I’d listened to an advance cassette, hearing Hill’s dope lyrics on “Some Seek Stardom,” a track she recorded alone, I remember I could tell there was something special about her. Lauryn was a teenager who could hold her own as a rapper, but she also threw in a little jazzy soul singing to keep us on our toes. In a New York Times piece penned by Amy Linden, Hill described the Fugees’ sound as “a little rice and peas mixed with a little collard greens, a little mango with watermelon.”

While Blunted on Reality had followers, the sales were low and The Fugees were almost dropped from the label because of it. According to Jayson Jackson, a former Sony Music Group product manager who later became Hill’s manager, it would have happened if it wasn’t for him conning the publicity department for a few grand to get Caribbean-American producer Salaam Remi to do a remix of their singles “Nappy Heads” and “Vocabs.” In She Begat This, the producer tells Morgan, “They sent me the Fugees because they were Haitian, and they needed that bridge to get them to the mainstream. They had talent. They just haven’t figured out how to channel it.”

The Fugees’ careers were up in the air for awhile until they were given another chance by Sony that led to their critically acclaimed sophomore album The Score in 1996. “It (Blunted on Reality) wasn’t successful,” Pras told writer Brian Coleman, “but it was part of us feeling our way, figuring ourselves out as artists. It had to be what it was in order for us to evolve into The Score.” With their advance money, the group bought equipment and instruments, and constructed their own studio which they dubbed the Booga Basement. Alongside bassist Jerry “Wonda” Duplessis, another of Clef’s cousins, the Fugees recorded their follow-up in a mere six months.

With Clef and Lauryn also contributing to the production, the trio tightened up their style and raised the bar for themselves and rap records in general. The Score’s first single “Fu-Gee-La” was cool, but it was their second joint, a hip-hop remake of Roberta Flack’s classic “Killing Me Softly” sung by Lauryn, that became an unexpected hit and helped them cross over. The third single “Ready or Not” became known as the first time Hill revealed her love for singer Nina Simone and, by merely mentioning the legend’s name, introduced a generation of rap listeners to the activist blues singer. “As far as I know, no one in hip-hop had ever tossed out a Nina Simone reference before, so that was a big deal,” poet LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs says. “Nina represented so much to Lauryn, but later she seemed to also adapt Simone’s radicalness, rage and unpredictability.”

Years later, in light of the shift that Lauryn’s life took, I’d think back to that afternoon we spent together and Lauryn’s pre-release giddiness. Truthfully, after the release of ‘The Miseducation’ and shame of the lawsuit, her public persona would never be so joyful again.

At the 2018 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, when Simone was posthumously inducted, Hill performed “Ne Me Quitte Pas,” “Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair,” and “Feeling Good” as part of a tribute to the late artist. In her lifetime, Nina with her smooth dark skin represented blackness, as in Black is beautiful, which was also a message that Lauryn was communicating. Indeed, in She Begat This there is much conversation (with Yaba Blay and Tarana Burke) about Lauryn’s “deep chocolate brown skin” inspiring other dark girls who felt rejected by both hip-hop culture and their own communities.

“Witnessing Lauryn and her dark skin and natural hair shine brightly on magazine covers was affirming for Black girls to see,” says Newark-based arts writer fayemi shakur. “But, there was something deeper underneath her beauty to celebrate. She embodied a unique blend of style, Black cultural and political consciousness, with serious divine feminine energy. Any Black girl beginning to loc their hair back then could smile with pride in the mirror because Lauryn’s beauty reflected our own. It wasn’t always a popular thing to have natural hair.”

By the end of ‘96, The Score had sold six million units and won two Grammys including one (Best R&B Performance) for “Killing Him Softly.” Writer/filmmaker (Fresh Dressed) Sacha Jenkins, who in 1996 wrote a cover story on the group for Vibe, says, “As someone with Haitian blood dancing through his veins, that Fugees record meant a lot. They made Haitians cool — or rather, they helped a broad range of folks to better appreciate our talents, and recognize the uniqueness of our identity… That record also helped to expand what was acceptable in hip hop, as in, you don’t always have to spit the bars that you ripped out of your Rikers Island prison cell. You can sing, play guitar — scat even. Hip-hop had a lot of rules and the Fugees pissed on all of them. Hip-hop finally had a leading lady. Lauryn isn’t Haitian but, on that album, she’s honorary for sure.”

Of course, Hill too was a cultural chameleon, adopting a bit of Haitian music, jazzy vibes, southern soul and Jamaican yardie in her music. In 1996, the new and improved Lauryn was full of confidence and moxy, but, unknown to the general public, she and Wyclef had become lovers although he was already married. Their relationship became quite messy a year later when Lauryn had a baby, her pop-song-celebrated son Zion, with Rohan Marley, himself the son of reggae legend Bob Marley. Wyclef, whose own solo album The Carnival was a critical and sales success , kept telling the press that he would be producing and writing Lauryn’s album. “You would think after co-producing an album that sold millions that I’d be able to produce and write my own project, but it was a battle,” Lauryn told me the day I spent with her in June of 1998, two months before the albums release. And then she laughed.

On that afternoon I had set out to South Orange, New Jersey to interview Hill for a Source magazine cover story. Forty-five minutes away from Manhattan, the Lincoln Town Car pulled in front of the house where Hill was raised. Having moved a few years before to a different dwelling a few miles away, the old home had since been transformed into a recording studio, one of the many where The Miseducation was made. Earlier in the day, I’d met her mom and young son Zion and learned that she was also pregnant with her second child Selah Louise Marley, who would be born in November. Even at her then young age, motherhood was important to Lauryn.

“What bugs me is the fact that men never have to defend having children,” she’d tell me later. “Women are the ones who are asked, ‘How is this going to affect your career?’ If anything, having a growing family will make me even more motivated to create good music. My grandmother had 13 children and 32 grandchildren. Looking at her life has made me realize what a blessing it is to have family around.” Today Lauryn has six children.

We’d hung out together most of the day and I had gone with her into New York to meet with director Joel Schumacher about starring in the film version of Dreamgirls that he was supposed to make. After lunch at the Tribeca Grill, we returned to Jersey so Lauryn could play the complete album for me. An hour later, I made no secret to her that I was blown away, but also surprised by how much soul music, including wondrous collaborations with D’Angelo (“Nothing Even Matters”) and Mary J. Blige (“I Used to Love Him”), was the bedrock of the project. “What does it say about hip-hop when one of the better hip-hop records of the year contains little actual rapping?” Amy Linden wrote in a review.

Of course there were brilliant rap tracks including the opening song “Lost Ones” and the awesome “Doo Wop (That Thing),” whose split screen/time travel video was one of the most innovative of 1998, but the majority of the album had more in common with the then new neo-soul (D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, Maxwell) than it did with hardrock hip-hop. “When I was six-years-old, I found boxes of old school 45s in the basement,” Lauryn told me, explaining the origins of her soul music love. “The first record I discovered was ‘If I Should Lose You’ by the Dream Ups. Next, I found a bunch of boxes and there were about 500 to 600 records from ‘I Wish It Would Rain’ to Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Super Fly.’ The boxes were overflowing with Motown, Stax, Philadelphia International and a bunch of others. While other kids in the neighborhood were rapping about New Edition, I was trying to school them on Roberta Flack and Marvin Gaye. Those old records had become a significant part of my life.”

In She Begat This writer/filmmaker dream hampton argues that The Miseducation, which she hated, sounded under-produced, but for me the music took me back to coming of age in the days of Soul Train on television, slow grindin’ at basement parties and live bands with real instruments jamming in smoke-filled venues. As Lester Bangs once said of Patti Smith, “her sound is (was) new-old.” Songs like “Ex-Factor” and “When It Hurts So Bad” were reminiscent of Willie Mitchell’s golden touch on Ann Pebble’s tracks, especially “Trouble Heartaches & Sadness,” or channeling Etta James at her most heartbroken. “I feel like the blueprint of this record has been in my head for years,” Hill said. “Although I rarely discussed my ideas with anyone before I started working, it was all in my mind.”

At the time I didn’t know that the label had originally rejected her masterwork, but perhaps I should’ve picked up on that when she said, “When Marvin Gaye created What’s Going On, even Berry Gordy thought he was crazy and trying to ruin his own career. It’s that kind of risk-taking that is sorely missing in music, be it rap or rhythm & blues.” Of course, the label turned out to be wrong; The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill sold millions, topped year-end best-of charts and propelled the then 23-year-old to superstar status. No one could’ve predicted that the album would’ve been as successful as it was.

Years later, in light of the shift that Lauryn’s life took, I’d think back to that afternoon we spent together and Lauryn’s pre-release giddiness. Truthfully, after the release of The Miseducation and shame of the lawsuit, her public persona would never be so joyful again.

“That album is a tour de force from a Black woman’s specific view with lyrics that speak to personal heartbreak as well as public, cultural issues,” Tonya Pendleton explains. “Whether she’s wondering why a lover can’t give more or why an artist can’t say more, she’s using her distinct voice and point of view to serve the music. There is so much richness to this album that’s it’s hard to believe it’s as old as it is. It seems as though she presciently covered all of the hot-button issues to come, from fuckbois to cold corporate rap to both the fear and anticipatory joy of becoming a working mother captured so beautifully on ‘Zion.’ It would difficult for me to chose a favorite song, but the opening track ‘Lost Ones’ may be one of the most lyrically potent fuck-you songs ever created.”

Within months of its release, Lauryn had become an even bigger star than she was during the Fugees reign, appearing on numerous magazine covers, including the beautiful Jonty Davis pic that graced the September, 1998 issue of The Source where my interview appeared. “That same year, a few months after The Miseducation came out, I saw her perform at my school at the University of Virginia,” journalist Tomika Anderson remembers. “Afterward, a few of us met her and shook her hand. She was so accessible and classy and beautiful, we were just blown away by her. She was just such a wonderful role model.”

Twenty years later, we’re still talking and writing about The Miseducation, but, as Hill would discover, with great genius often comes great consequences. Her post-millennium breakdown (or crack-up, in the Fitzgeraldian sense of the word) hasn’t always been easy to watch, especially for those who believed that she was a goddess hovering over us mere mortals. “[Hill] became a figurehead and touchstone and it was easy to forget how young she was,” Amy Linden says. “Being the Voice of a Generation has to be difficult, especially when you are dealing with personal drama that her fans and label might not have been privy to.”

Although She Begat This isn’t the music geek examination of that classic album that I was expecting, Joan Morgan succeeds at revealing other layers of our Lauryn love, while also humanizing a woman who many tried to transform into a deity two decades ago. As Roxanne Shante, never one to dish out compliments, said in 2010, “Lauryn Hill is in a category of her own.”

* * *

Harlem native Michael A. Gonzales writes The Blacklist book column for Catapult. He has written for The Paris Review, The Village Voice, Pitchfork, New York magazine and the upcoming Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop edited by Vikki Tobak. A former hip-hop journalist, his articles, essays and reviews have appeared in The Source, RapPages, Vibe, Ego Trip, XXL, Complex and Mass Appeal. In addition, he is the co-author of Bring The Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture (1991). Currently he is working on a hip-hop novel.

Editor: Dana Snitzky

‘Country Music … Was Anything BUT Pure’: An Interview with Bill Malone and Tracey Laird

Carly Rae Hobbins / Unsplash, University of Texas Press; Anniversary edition (June 4, 2018)

Will Hermes | Longreads | August 2018 | 14 minutes (3,585 words)

Read an excerpt of Country Music USA.

First published in 1968, Country Music USA was basically a remix of the thesis Bill Malone submitted for his PhD at UT-Austin. It was, and remains, a staggering work of scholarship that became a cornerstone of American music history— anyone writing seriously about country must reckon with it.

Earlier this year, University of Texas Press issued an updated Fiftieth Anniversary edition, with additional material by scholar Tracey Laird. It includes a new chapter devoted in large part to country’s woman problem — from the excommunication of the Dixie Chicks from the mainstream after Natalie Maines’ 2003 dis of President Bush, through their controversial collaboration with Beyoncé on the 2016 CMA Awards and the rise of “bro country.” Laird writes about how country radio has been effectively black-balling women artists, a situation crystallized in the unfortunate words of a radio exec who described women artists as the “tomatoes of our salad.”

As a real and/or perceived banner of red-state, pink-skin culture, country music can seem purely that. But Malone and Laird document that, like most great things in America, it’s a melting pot of influences, attitudes and orientations, political and otherwise. And while the current landscape might not rival that of the Hank Williams-led halcyon days, artists like Sturgill Simpson, Margo Price, Jason Isbell, Kacey Musgraves, Brandy Clark, and others suggest we’re in a new golden era for the music, a renaissance Malone and Laird put in perspective.

We caught up with Malone in his longtime home of Madison, Wisconsin; Laird called in from Atlanta.

This book is an amazing achievement by 2018 standards — but Bill, you wrote the first edition a half a century ago in 1968! For the benefit of the youngsters, how do you go about researching a book like this without the Internet, let alone Spotify?

BM: Well, there were no repositories for country music either! In Nashville, the Country Music Foundation was just getting started; they didn’t have an archives yet. I just had to use whatever I could find, and that meant everything from Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs, where I read about instruments, to popular magazines, and interviews when I could get them — when a person came to town, or when I could get up enough resources and go and find somebody.

But indispensable were the record collectors. I would really have been lost had it not been for the work that they had done. That was a real starting point.

These were not academics, strictly speaking, but armchair academics, correct?

BM: Enthusiastic and very informed collectors.

Tracey, how did you approach this revised edition? What did you want to accomplish with it?

Tracey Laird: My main task was to take the story Bill has told and extend it into the 21st century. It was a little intimidating because, frankly, Bill is one of the heroes of my own scholarly story. But I decided early on that I couldn’t mirror his encyclopedic knowledge. And so what I tried to do was connect things going on in the 21st century with other, I think, significant dynamics — including new media that’s shaping the way people apprehend country music.

Read more…

The Cowboy Image and the Growth of Western Music

Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Bill C. Malone and Tracey Laird | Country Music USA | University of Texas Press | June 2018 | 25 minutes (6,531 words)

The emergence of the western image in country music was probably inevitable. Long before the process of commercialization began, the cowboy had been the object of unparalleled romantic adulation and interest. Given the pejorative connotations that clung to farming and rural life, the adoption of cowboy clothing and western themes was a logical step for the country singer.

The increased emphasis on western themes and attitudes appeared unsurprisingly in the westernmost southern states ─ Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas ─ and in California. In these areas, country music assumed forms differing from those in the more easterly southern states. Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Texas, although southern in traditional orientation, embodied significantly different elements. All three were touched by the oil boom of the early twentieth century, and each possessed population groups that stood apart culturally while simultaneously influencing the dominant “Anglo” element of the state. Oklahoma and Texas were settled, for the most part, by former residents of the older southern states, who had brought with them their values, traditions, and institutions. Louisiana, on the other hand, can be perceived as a land of at least three great cultures: a Roman Catholic, “Latin” culture in the South; an “Anglo,” Protestant culture in the north; and an African American culture whose influence could be felt throughout the state. Immigrants brought slaves and the cotton culture to all parts of the Southwest, making Texas and Louisiana parts of the southern economic and political orbit. They also transported their evangelical Protestantism to southwestern soil and brought with them many features of their folk heritage. Some of the old British ballads survived the westward migration, although they had lost many of their former characteristics. In some Texas communities, such as those found in the Big Thicket, a heavily forested area in the eastern part of the state, old ballads and old styles of singing endured well into the twentieth century. Many of the East Texas communities were, and remain, replicas of the older southern environment. And, in many of them, folk traditions died slowly.

Listen to music writer Will Hermes’ interview with Bill Malone and Tracey Laird on the Longreads Podcast here (read as transcript).

Texas folk music, then, was basically southern derived. Texas rural musicians used instruments common to the rest of the South, sang in styles similar to those of other rural southerners, frequently attended house parties where old-time fiddlers held sway, and learned to read music at the shape-note singing schools. But despite its close cultural affiliation with the South, Texas had a culture all its own ─ a culture produced by the mingling of diverse ethnic strains: southern “Anglo,” black, German and Central European (especially prevalent throughout the southern part of the state), Mexican, and Louisiana Cajun (in the area extending from Beaumont to Houston). A passion for dancing was common among all these groups, and in this heterogeneous society, musical styles and songs flowed freely from one group to another, modifying the old southern rural styles. While rural music was prevalent and pervasive, it differed substantially from that produced in the Southeast or in the Deep South.

The discovery of oil at Spindletop, near Beaumont, in 1901 was the first of a series of finds in southeastern Texas, southwestern Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas in the years extending up through World War I. The discovery of the great East Texas oil field in the early 1930s, along with the rapid industrialization that began during World War II, further set Texas apart from the other southern states. While these factors contributed to Texas’s uniqueness, they are probably less important than the fact that it was also part of the West. In fact, to most Americans, Texas was and is the West. And this West was a glorious land peopled by cowboys.

The romantic concept of the West, shared by most Americans, has a history virtually as old as the nation itself. James Fenimore Cooper’s early novels describing the restorative qualities of the frontier were not substantially different, nor less romantic, than the themes emphasized later in Bret Harte’s stories, in the western “dime novels,” or in such books as Owen Wister’s The Virginian. Thus, the cowboy and the West had been bathed in romance long before Hollywood and the television industry began their exploitations of the theme. The American people also had long demonstrated a general interest in the songs of the cowboy ─ beginning with Nathan Howard Thorp’s Songs of the Cowboys, 1908, and John A. Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, 1910 (as a matter of fact, as early as 1907, when “San Antonio” appeared, Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths had experimented with “cowboy” themes). Although a few concert-musicians such as Oscar Fox (from Burnet, Texas) and David Guion (from Ballinger, Texas) made classical arrangements of a few cowboy songs, the western theme did not make any significant impact on American music until the 1930s. Guion’s version of “Home on the Range,” first performed in 1930 in a New York play called “Prairie Echoes,” became the most popular arrangement of the song and was said, perhaps apocryphally, to be President Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite song. Such songs became so widely circulated in the 1930s that even Tin Pan Alley reverberated with the melodies of the range. The farther Americans became removed from the cowboy past, the more intense became their interest in cowboy songs and lore. Hillbilly singers and musicians did much to implant the romantic cowboy image in the minds of their American audiences.

Before the 1930s, a few musicians recorded songs that genuinely reflected the cowboy heritage. The concert singer Bentley Ball ─ who did many programs of patriotic and traditional songs, many of them in colleges ─ recorded “The Dying Cowboy” and “Jesse James” for Columbia in 1919. Charles Nabell, in November 1924, recorded some cowboy songs for Okeh, along with other types of traditional material. Several of the early cowboy singers came from Texas, and their songs, for the most part, reflected genuine cowboy experience. Carl Sprague, for example, may have done most to generate an immediate interest in the recorded songs of the cowboy. He grew up on a South Texas ranch near Alvin where he learned many of the songs (most of them from his cowboy uncle) that he later recorded for Victor. His 1925 recordings of cowboy songs — topped off by the immensely popular “When the Work’s All Done This Fall” — mark him as one of America’s first singing cowboys. While attending Texas A&M, Vernon Dalhart’s success as a singer of traditional songs convinced Sprague that a similar market for cowboy singers might exist. He traveled to New York and had a successful audition with Victor Records; his earliest recordings had a sound very similar to that of Dalhart, including guitar and studio violin. Singing, however, was never more than a hobby with Sprague, and aside from his recordings, he made few commercial appearances. For many years he was on the coaching staff at Texas A&M, and, in addition, he attained the rank of major in the United States Army.

The romantic concept of the West, shared by most Americans, has a history virtually as old as the nation itself.

Jules Verne Allen, on the other hand, had actually experienced the rugged life of a working cowboy before he embarked on his career as a radio singer. Born in Waxahachie, Texas, Allen began working cattle in Jack County, west of Fort Worth, at the age of ten. From 1893 to 1907 he worked as a rough string rider and bronco buster from the Rio Grande to the Montana line. Unlike Sprague, he used cowboy music as the basis for a professional career. During the 1920s and 1930s, Allen sang over numerous radio stations, including WOAI in San Antonio, where he performed as “Longhorn Luke.” Like most of the pioneer recording performers of the 1920s, Allen and Sprague drew most of their material from turn-of-the-century cowboy life, although some of their songs were learned directly from the Lomax collection.

Other cowboy singers of the early commercial period varied widely in the amount of actual range experience they possessed. The Cartwright Brothers (Bernard and Jack) grew up in Boerne, Texas, directly on the route of “the long drive” that proceeded on to Kansas. Essentially a fiddle band, the Cartwrights performed a variety of songs. Their version of “Texas Rangers,” however ─ marked by Bernard’s haunting fiddle ─ is one of the greatest performances of a cowboy song heard on early commercial records. Carmen William “Curley” Fletcher, from California, was a rodeo performer and itinerant hawker of songs long before he made any commercial recordings. His greatest claim to fame came through his writing in 1915 of the poem that became the basis for “The Strawberry Roan,” which he sold on broadside sheets. The song became one of the most popular western numbers, performed usually with a chorus added by the California radio singers Fred Howard and Nat Vincent. At least a couple of the pioneer cowboy singers, Goebel Reeves and Harry McClintock, were southerners whose wanderlust drew them west, where they worked at a wide variety of occupations. Both men, for example, spent some time in the famous radical labor union the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or Wobblies).

Our knowledge of the otherwise shadowy figure of Goebel Reeves comes from the pioneering research done by Fred Hoeptner. Known as “the Texas Drifter,” Reeves was born in Sherman, Texas, in 1899. Before his death in California in 1959, he had enjoyed a varied career that led him across the United States and around the world. Although he came from a respectable middle-class family (his father served in the Texas legislature), Reeves deliberately chose the life of a hobo. During the course of his wanderings, he enlisted in the army, saw front-line service in World War I, worked as a merchant seaman, became active in the IWW, toured the vaudeville circuit, performed on radio, and recorded under several names for such companies as Okeh and Brunswick. In his recording career as a singer and yodeler ─ he claimed to have taught Jimmie Rodgers the yodeling style in the early 1920s while living in New Orleans ─ Reeves introduced some of the most interesting examples of both cowboy and hobo songs found in American music. These included the well-known “Hobo’s Lullaby” (which he claimed to have written), “The Hobo and the Cop,” “Railroad Boomer,” and the cowboy songs “Bright Sherman Valley” and “The Cowboy’s Prayer.”

Harry McClintock was as well traveled as Reeves, having also been a merchant seaman, a soldier, and a hobo. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he roamed widely throughout the United States and became a member of the IWW in the early twentieth century. Because of his musical talents, McClintock was a welcome addition to the Wobblies, who had a well-known fondness for singing and whose Little Red Songbook became virtually the bible for labor/protest singers in America. McClintock’s claim that he wrote “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” two of the world’s most famous hobo songs, has never been seriously challenged. Once he settled down from his wanderings, McClintock began a career as a radio cowboy singer as early as 1925 on KFRC in San Francisco. “Haywire Mac,” as he was often called, also recorded for Victor from 1927 to 1931. Along with superbly performed cowboy songs such as “Sam Bass,” “Jesse James,” and “Texas Rangers,” McClintock’s labor songs make him one of the important progenitors of western music.

John White and Otto Gray contributed to the shaping of western music by presenting it widely to a national audience. White was an unlikely “westerner,” hailing from Washington, DC. However, he was the first person to introduce cowboy songs on radio to a New York audience (on NBC from 1927 to 1936). He also recorded cowboy songs, as well as hillbilly material, from 1929 to 1931, under several pseudonyms including “the Lonesome Cowboy.” White specialized in the history of cowboy songs, and over the years he did more than any other person to describe the origins of the ballads, and he dispelled much of the romantic claptrap that had gathered around them.

Otto Gray, a prosperous rancher from near Stillwater, Oklahoma, pioneered in the commercialization of cowboy music. In about 1923, he assumed the leadership of a string band that earlier had been composed of real cowboys ─ the McGinty Cowboys (named for Billy McGinty, an Oklahoma rodeo performer). Gray’s group had the distinction of being one of the few country groups publicized in Billboard, although Gray paid for most of the advertising. From 1928 to 1932, Gray and his Oklahoma Cowboys made a tour of radio stations throughout the country and performed on the northeastern RKO vaudeville circuit. Momie Gray (Otto’s wife) was the featured singer of the organization, specializing in sentimental songs. The Oklahoma Cowboys were a highly professional group that possessed most of the characteristics of slick show-business organizations. A special publicity man traveled in advance of the group, and appearances on radio stations provided further exposure. Two agencies, the Weber-Simon Agency in New York and the William Jacobs Agency in Chicago, handled the group’s RKO bookings. The Gray performers, dressed in plain, western-style clothing, traveled in Gray’s $20,000 custom-built automobile, which was wired for sound reproduction and had a radio receiver and transmitter.

If Otto Gray contributed significantly to the commercialization of “western” music, Jimmie Rodgers played an equally important role in fusing it with country music. As discussed earlier, Rodgers spent the last few years of his life in Texas and conducted many of his most successful tours there. He took great pride in the Texas heritage and the romantic cowboy past. The modern concepts of the “singing cowboy” and of “western” music may very well date back directly to Rodgers.

Scores of singers who modeled themselves after Jimmie Rodgers emerged in the 1930s, and most of them gave themselves “cowboy” titles and dressed in western attire. Young Hank Snow, for example, in far-off Nova Scotia, dressed in cowboy regalia and called himself “the Yodeling Ranger.” In even more remote Australia, Robert William Lane performed under the name of Tex Morton, described himself as “the Boundary Rider,” and sang cowboy songs with a bizarre, trilling yodel about both the Australian bush and the Texas Plains. Others, like Ernest Tubb, included few cowboy songs in their repertories but wore cowboy boots and ten-gallon hats. Since the western attraction was irresistible, even young hillbilly singers from the Deep South or from the southeastern mountains, whose associations with cowboys came only through story and song, embraced the western image and imagined themselves “way out west in Texas for the roundup in the spring.”

Perhaps because of Rodgers’s close association with Texas, many of the successful Texas hillbilly performers ─ Ernest Tubb, Lefty Frizzell, Floyd Tillman, Bob Wills, Tommy Duncan ─ credited Jimmie Rodgers as their inspiration. One of the most important of these individuals, and the one who completed the “romantic westernizing” process begun by Rodgers, was Orvon Gene Autry. Autry owed most of his initial success to the fact that he could perform Rodgers’s repertory in Rodgers’s yodeling style. Autry was born on a horse farm near Tioga, Texas, on September 29, 1907, but moved to Oklahoma with his parents while in his teens. Although his father was a horse trader, one finds that Gene experienced little of the cattle ranch life that his promotional material later stressed. At any rate, he left the “ranching” life as quickly as he could, working as a railroad telegrapher and singing at every opportunity.

According to a much-repeated story, confirmed by Autry himself, Will Rogers inspired his decision to become a professional musician. One day in 1927 the great humorist came to Chelsea, Oklahoma, where Autry was working as a telegrapher for the St. Louis and Frisco Railroad, heard the young man singing and strumming his guitar, and strongly encouraged him to go to New York and become a professional. Autry’s first trip to the big city in 1927 was unsuccessful, but he returned to Tulsa and got a job on KVOO as “the Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy.” Returning to New York in 1929, he made his first records for Victor, accompanied by the Marvin Brothers, Johnny and Frankie. In December of the same year, Autry began a crucial association with Arthur Satherley, who recorded him for the American Record Company (ARC), producer of records for chain stores and for Sears. It was through the association with the Sears Conqueror label that Autry made it to WLS and the National Barn Dance.

In Chicago after 1931, Autry was an immediate success. His appearances on the Barn Dance and on his own radio program, Conqueror Record Time, made him one of the most popular performers in WLS history. His records, released on Sears labels, were those most prominently displayed in the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. As a result of his growing popularity, a number of Gene Autry songbooks and guitar instruction books began to appear in the early 1930s. An ad for a Gene Autry “Roundup” Guitar, priced at $9.95, reminded the reader that Autry had become a famous performer “simply because he learned to play a guitar while on the ranch.” Autry’s promotional mentors, Art Satherley and Ann Williams of the WLS production staff, capitalized on the “western” motif and advertised him as a singing cowboy long before the bulk of his recorded repertory came to include western numbers.

With Autry ensconced as a singing movie cowboy, hillbilly music now had a new medium through which to popularize itself.

In his early years as a professional singer, and on through the WLS period from 1931 to 1934, Autry remained a hillbilly singer, only rarely singing anything of a western variety. In both song selection and in style of performance, he revealed his indebtedness to the southern rural tradition. His Jimmie Rodgers imitations were among the best in country music, and his own “compositions” (written or cowritten with people like Jimmie Long) included such songs as “A Gangster’s Warning,” “A Hillbilly Wedding in June,” “Gosh, I Miss You All the Time,” and “My Old Pal of Yesterday.” In 1931, he recorded one of the biggest-selling hits in hillbilly music’s then-short history, “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine,” recorded as a duet with the song’s co-composer, Jimmie Long. Autry’s many and varied recorded selections even included at least one labor song: “The Death of Mother Jones,” recorded on at least seven labels, which applauded the life of the famous and radical labor leader. While the song seemed rather remote from the type one would expect from a cowboy singer, it nevertheless reflected the passion for social and economic justice that many people felt during these Depression years.

Autry’s success on the Chicago radio stations and on record labels gained him in 1934 the position that made him the best-known cowboy in the United States and one of the most famous hillbilly singers. In that year, he arrived in Hollywood and began his career as the “Nation’s Number One Singing Cowboy.” Beginning with a small part in Ken Maynard’s In Old Santa Fe, he then starred for thirteen episodes in a strange cowboy/science-fiction serial called The Phantom Empire. Autry went on to a featured role in 1935 in Tumbling Tumbleweeds, a film that also included his old sidekick from Chicago days, Lester Alvin “Smiley” Burnette. In the following decades, he made more than ninety movies for Republic, Columbia, and Mascot, eighty-one of which included the multitalented Burnette, who usually played a bumbling character, Frog Millhouse. While becoming one of the most popular and wealthy actors in Hollywood, Autry also created the stereotype of the heroic cowboy who was equally adept with gun and guitar. Autry was not the first individual to sing in a western movie ─ Ken Maynard had done so as early as 1930 ─ but he was the first to institutionalize the phenomenon. With Autry ensconced as a singing movie cowboy, hillbilly music now had a new medium through which to popularize itself. The silver screen further romanticized the cowboy and helped shape the public idea of western music.

After signing his Hollywood contract, Autry made a radical shift in his repertory from “country” themes to “western” motifs. Instead of singing songs about the mountains, he came increasingly to perform songs with such titles as “Ridin’ Down the Canyon,” “The Round-up in Cheyenne,” and “Empty Cot in the Bunkhouse.” Both in Autry’s singing and in the instrumentation that accompanied him, one hears a distinctly measurable change in the records he made from 1929 to 1939. As the one-time hillbilly singer reached out to a larger audience, he smoothed out his presentation of material with a lower vocal pitch, well-rounded tones, and honey-coated articulation. Instrumentally, Autry’s sound exhibited a similar evolution, particularly after the violinist Carl Cotner became his musical director. Soft guitars, muted violins, a melodious but unobtrusive steel guitar, an accordion, and occasionally even horns could be heard as background instrumentation, as he and his directors sought a sound that would give no offense to America’s broad urban middle class. Whatever vocal sound was featured, however, Autry demonstrated a mastery of it. No country singer has ever shown more versatility.

Autry’s popularity inspired other movie companies to present their own versions of the singing cowboy. In searching for likely candidates, the companies usually delved into the ranks of country music, acquiring acts that had already established themselves on hillbilly radio shows or on record labels. Following Smiley Burnette, the Light Crust Doughboys became the first country group to join Autry in a movie (Oh, Susanna!). Some Autry sidemen went on to become important entertainment personalities in their own right. Johnny Bond, Jimmy Wakely, and Dick Reinhart, for example, came to Hollywood in 1940 (as the Jimmy Wakely Trio) and joined Autry’s Melody Ranch radio show in September of that year. Reinhart became one of the early exponents of the honky-tonk style, with songs like “Fort Worth Jail” and “Truck Driver’s Coffee Stop.” Wakely eventually starred in many movies of his own, became one of country music’s smoothest singers, and made several seminal recordings, such as “One Has My Name (The Other Has My Heart)” (one of the first successful “cheating” songs in country music). Bond remained on the Melody Ranch program until it ended in 1956, playing the role of a comic sidekick and opening the show each Sunday with the bass guitar run introduction to “Back in the Saddle Again.” Bond also became one of country music’s greatest songwriters, creating such songs as “Cimarron” (a song about a small river in Oklahoma, and performed by all western groups), “I’ll Step Aside,” “Old Love Letters,” and “I Wonder Where You Are Tonight” (now a standard in both bluegrass and mainstream country music).

A long line of hillbilly singers made only occasional appearances in western movies, usually as supporting actors for such leading cowboy stars as Charles Starrett and Johnny Mack Brown. The Sons of the Pioneers appeared in numerous movies, while Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were in about eight. A few singers, such as Ernest Tubb, Jimmie Davis, and Bill Callahan, made only rare appearances.

Other singers, however, became leading men and posed at least modest challenges to Autry’s dominance. Atlanta-born Ray Whitley, the writer of “Back in the Saddle Again” and the designer of one of country music’s most popular guitars, the Gibson SJ-200, became a movie star in 1936 after an earlier successful career in New York as a cowboy singer. Tex Ritter also began his movie career in 1936, and, in the fifty-six movies that he eventually made, he became the most believable of all the singing cowboys. The most successful challenge to Autry, though, came from Roy Rogers, who signed with Republic in 1937. His visibility in American public life would last, because of television, well into the 1960s. The singing cowboy genre also persisted in American movies on into the 1950s, with Arizona-born Rex Allen being its chief exponent after 1949. In many ways, this last singing cowboy was the best singer of them all. Allen’s rich voice ranged from a deep bass to a sweeping tenor ─ a sound that almost no other country singer could equal.

Largely as a result of Hollywood exploitation, the concept of “western music” became fixed in the public mind. After the heyday of Gene Autry, the term “western” came to be applied even to southern rural music by an increasing number of people, especially by those who were ashamed to use the pejorative term “hillbilly.” Not only did the public accept the projection, but even most hillbilly singers became fascinated with the western image and eventually came to believe their own symbols. Autry was the first of a long line of country singers who clothed themselves in tailored cowboy attire; in the following decades, the costuming became increasingly elaborate and gaudy, with the brightly colored, bespangled, and rhinestone-laden uniforms created by Nudie the Tailor (Nudie Cohn, born Nuta Kotlyarenko in the Ukraine in 1902) in Los Angeles being the most favored fare. Eventually, most country performers, whether they hailed from Virginia or Mississippi, adopted cowboy regalia–usually of the gaudy, dude cowboy variety.


Kickstart your weekend reading by getting the week’s best Longreads delivered to your inbox every Friday afternoon.

Sign up


Along with the clothing, country bands and singers ─ particularly in the Southwest and on the West Coast ─ adopted cowboy titles. Singers with names like Tex, Slim, Hank, Red River Dave, the Utah Cowboy, and Patsy Montana, and groups with such titles as the Cowboy Ramblers, Riders of the Purple Sage, Radio Cowboys, Swift Jewel Cowboys, Lone Star Cowboys, and Girls of the Golden West (Dolly and Millie Good) abounded on radio stations (and record labels) all over the nation. Radio and record promoters, of course, were very much alive to the appeal of the western myth, and they often encouraged musicians to adopt appropriate western monikers. Millie and Dolly Good, for example, were farm girls from Illinois who sang and yodeled in sweet, close harmony. Their agent advised them to dress like cowgirls, gave them the romantic title Girls of the Golden West, and then, after scanning the map of western Texas, attached to their promotional literature the statement that they were born in Muleshoe, Texas. The Girls very carefully preserved this fiction to the end of their performing career.

Patsy Montana’s career was similarly shaped by romantic conceptions of the West. She was a singer and a fiddler from Arkansas named Rubye Blevins, but on the West Coast in the early 1930s, Stuart Hamblen renamed her Patsy Montana, and she thereafter cultivated the performing image of the cowgirl. Although much of her career saw her appearing as a “girl singer” with such groups as the Prairie Ramblers, Patsy made dramatic history in 1935 when “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” became the first huge hit by a woman country singer and a virtuoso yodeling piece that still influences the style of women singers (Austin country-rock singer Marcia Ball, for example, made the song and yodel standard parts of her repertory in the late 1970s).

Many of the “western” entertainers performed cowboy songs, usually highly romanticized, but more often their titles and attire were the only ties they had with the “West.” Several musicians, however, stayed rather close to the cowboy repertory. Some of them had been performing long before Gene Autry achieved Hollywood fame, and many of them, such as “Haywire Mac” McClintock and the Crockett Family (John H. “Dad” Crockett and his five sons, originally from West Virginia), had performed on California radio stations since at least 1925. Other early California groups included Len Nash and his Original Country Boys, broadcasting from KFWB, Hollywood, as early as March 1926; Sheriff Loyal Underwood’s Arizona Wranglers; Charlie Marshall and his Mavericks; and perhaps the most important (and certainly the most interesting), the Beverly Hillbillies.

Largely as a result of Hollywood exploitation, the concept of “western music” became fixed in the public mind.

The Beverly Hillbillies were the brainchild of Glen Rice, station manager at KMPC in Los Angeles. Reversing the trend toward adoption of western names during the 1930s, Rice used the eastern moniker Hillbillies for the group of western musicians that he assembled around the accordion player Leo Mannes (renamed Zeke Manners) and conducted a ballyhoo campaign alleging that a group of strange and primitive musicians had been unearthed in the hills of Beverly. The band made its debut on KMPC on April 6, 1930, and remained a popular feature throughout the decade. Over the years the Hillbillies included several fine musicians, such as Manners, who had no background in country music but had been attracted to California because of the lure of Hollywood. A few Hillbillies were genuine country boys, such as the sky-high yodeler Elton Britt (James Britt Baker), who came from Arkansas in 1930, and Stuart Hamblen, who came from Texas in the same year. Britt went on to become one of country music’s most gifted yodelers (virtually the last of that once-hardy breed) and a leading soloist during the 1940s. Hamblen, the son of a Methodist minister in Abilene, Texas, was a fixture on West Coast radio from 1930 to the 1950s. He hosted his own shows in Hollywood after 1931, boosted the careers of other performers, wrote many of the most successful songs of the decade (including “My Mary,” “Texas Plains,” “Golden River,” and “My Brown-Eyed Texas Rose”), was the first country performer signed by Decca in 1934, and became sufficiently known to become a candidate for Congress in 1938.

The western group that ultimately became the most famous, and the most frequently emulated, was the Sons of the Pioneers. They sang virtually every type of country song and even ventured into popular music, but the majority of their melodies dealt with western themes. Perhaps more than any other group, they preserved a western repertory and exploited the romantic cowboy image. More “western” stylistically than any other group, they were among the least western in terms of origin. Bob Nolan (Robert Clarence Nobles) was born in New Brunswick, Canada, but he moved with his parents to Tucson at the age of fourteen. In Tucson he found himself fascinated with the desert, a feeling that never left him and eventually inspired some of country music’s greatest songs, such as “Cool Water,” “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” and “At the Rainbow’s End.” Tim Spencer, also an outstanding songwriter, was born in Missouri but grew up in Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Roy Rogers came from southern Ohio.

The three musicians came to California in the early 1930s and soon fell into a pattern common to most country singers during the decade, moving from group to group before they formed their own organization. Roy Rogers, the prime organizer of the trio, was born Leonard Slye in Cincinnati, on November 5, 1911, but grew up on a small farm near Portsmouth, in southern Ohio. Here he garnered his earliest musical training from his Kentucky-born mother and his mandolin-and-guitar-playing father. In 1931 he and his father moved to Tulare, California, and worked as migratory fruit pickers. In the following three years, beginning with a duo called the Slye Brothers (Leonard and a cousin), he worked with several western-style groups until the Pioneer Trio was formed in 1933. Renamed the Sons of the Pioneers the following year, the trio soon became noted for their smooth, inventive harmonies and yodeling, and for the finely crafted songs that Nolan and Spencer created. They became so famous for their harmony that their instrumental accompaniment is often forgotten. Two extraordinarily talented brothers from Llano, Texas, Hugh and Karl Farr, joined them in 1934 and 1935. The Farrs were jazz-influenced country musicians whose progressive styles were sometimes obscured by the vocal emphasis of the Pioneers. Hugh Farr, who also sang a low-down bass with the group, was one of the hottest fiddlers of the period, and his brother, Karl, was a master of both the rhythm and single-string styles of guitar.

The Pioneers won extensive popularity on the West Coast with an early-morning radio program on KFWB in Hollywood, but 1936 proved to be their banner year. By this time their radio transcriptions were being widely circulated, and the group became a featured act, along with Will Rogers, at the Texas Centennial in Dallas. Leonard Slye left the group in 1937 after signing a movie contract with Republic Studios. At this point he changed his name, first to Dick Weston, and later to Roy Rogers. His performances after this time were made on an individual basis, and he eventually rivaled Gene Autry as America’s most popular singing cowboy (Rogers was also one of country music’s finest yodelers). He was replaced in the Sons of the Pioneers by Lloyd Perryman from Ruth, Arkansas, whose natural tenor was the first the group had ever had, and who gave them an even closer harmony than they had earlier possessed. The Sons of the Pioneers underwent numerous personnel changes after 1937 but have never disbanded. Their songs moved into the repertories of country singers everywhere, and their style of harmony was widely copied, most effectively by Foy Willing (originally Willingham) and the Riders of the Purple Sage, who appeared with Monte Hale and Roy Rogers in Republic Pictures from 1942 to 1952.

The flourishing singing cowboy industry inspired the emergence of songwriters, including two of country music’s finest ─ Fred Rose and Cindy Walker ─ who made their debuts as country composers in the 1940s when they wrote songs for movies (Rose for Autry, Walker for Bob Wills). The interest in western music in the 1930s, however, was not confined to country performers and their supporters. Writers from Tin Pan Alley also reacted to the western craze, and the entire nation was soon humming western-style tunes such as “Gold Mine in the Sky,” “There’s a Home in Wyoming,” and “I’m an Old Cowhand.” Some of these tunes were written by easterners who had never been near a cow, but the Happy Chappies at least lived in California in the midst of the Hollywood industry. The Chappies were a pop-singing duo named Nat Vincent and Fred Howard who wrote or arranged such songs as “When the Bloom Is on the Sage,” “Mellow Mountain Moon,” “My Pretty Quadroon,” and “Strawberry Roan” (the last a musical adaptation of Curley Fletcher’s earlier poem). The most successful of the western-oriented popular songwriters was a Bostonian, William J. (Billy) Hill. Hill’s birth and musical training gave no indication of his future success as a western songwriter. Born in Boston in 1899, he studied violin at the New England Conservatory of Music and performed for a short time with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. In 1916 he traveled west, riding the rails and working at odd jobs until he had seen most of the western states. He returned to New York in the late 1920s after becoming thoroughly acquainted with western life ─ including everything from camp cooking to cowpunching. In New York he worked as a doorman at a fashionable hotel and composed songs occasionally. Over the years his compositions ranged from popular melodies like “The Glory of Love” to hillbilly songs like “They Cut Down the Old Pine Tree” and “The Old Spinning Wheel.” His chief success, however, came with western-style songs like “Call of the Canyon,” which were distinguished for their beautiful melodies and for rhythms that suggested the gait of a horse. He experienced his most spectacular success in 1933 with “The Last Roundup,” the song that really awakened the general public to the romantic West while becoming the most popular tune in the country. Performed by both hillbilly and popular groups, its appeal may have stimulated a greater interest in the more “authentic” country and western material and ensured a greater national following for country music.

Most of the western bands in California and the Southwest used Billy Hill’s material, but his New York songwriting ventures were directed primarily at big-city popular-music audiences. Although country music has always encountered its coolest reception in the Northeast, particularly in the city of New York, country-style entertainers have always achieved some prominence there on local radio stations. Ethel Park Richardson, for example, did much to educate New Yorkers about the beauties of folk culture between 1933 and 1935 with her weekly dramatizations on WOR and the NBC Network. Each week she was assisted by such singers as Frank Luther, Carson Robison, and Tex Ritter as she dramatized a famous folk song. Luther and Robison had been in New York since the 1920s, but Ritter was one of several cowboy singers who kept New Yorkers range conscious during the mid-1930s. Others included Texas Jim Robertson, a deep-bass singer from Batesville, Texas; Zeke Manners and Elton Britt, who had moved from California; Dwight Butcher, a Jimmie Rodgers disciple from Tennessee; Ray Whitley, who sang regularly at the Stork Club and on WMCA; and Wilf Carter, the Nova Scotia yodeler who performed over CBS as Montana Slim.

The most singular of all the cowboy singers in New York, however, was Woodward Maurice “Tex” Ritter. Born in Murvaul, in deep East Texas, January 12, 1905, Ritter grew up far removed from the scene of much cowboy activity. He attended the University of Texas for five years (singing in the university glee club under the direction of Oscar Fox) and then went to Northwestern Law School for one year. Throughout his youth he had collected western and mountain songs, and therefore had a storehouse of interesting songs when he began singing on KPRC in Houston in 1929. In 1930, he joined a musical troupe on a series of one-night stands through the South and Midwest. By 1931, he had gone to New York, where he joined the Theatre Guild and began his acting career with a featured role in Green Grow the Lilacs (a short-lived play that eventually became the basis for the musical Oklahoma). With his thick Texas accent and storehouse of cowboy lore, Ritter quickly emerged as a New York sensation. He became greatly in demand for lecture recitals in eastern colleges on the cowboy and his song. During the fall of 1932, he was the featured singer with the Madison Square Garden Rodeo and from there went on to a recording contract with ARC and a program slot on WOR entitled The Lone Star Rangers, one of the first western radio shows ever featured in New York City. From 1932 to 1936, he appeared on other New York stations, including the WHN Barn Dance, where he acted as cohost with Ray Whitley. Then, inevitably, in 1936, he made the first of several movies, Song of the Gringo. Ritter, however, was not a cowboy, but was instead a very believable interpreter of cowboy songs. Impressionable easterners were easily convinced that he came, not from a small East Texas community and a college background, but from a working cattle ranch. And Tex very skillfully lived up to the part.

Tex Ritter’s exploitation of the western theme was typical of what was happening all over the United States in the mid-1930s. From New York to California, individuals responded to the western myth, and “cowboy” singers and groups sprang up in all sorts of unusual places. “Western” became a rival and often preferred term to “hillbilly” as a proper appellation for country music. It is easy to understand, of course, why “western” would be preferred to the seemingly disreputable backwoods term. “Western,” specifically, suggested a music that had been developed by cowboys out on the Texas Plains or in the High Sierras; more generally, it suggested a context that was open, free, and expansive. In short, the term fit the American self-concept.

***

Listen to music writer Will Hermes’ interview with Bill Malone and Tracey Laird on the Longreads Podcast here (read as transcript).

Excerpted from Country Music USA. Copyright ©1968 by the American Folklore Society. Copyright © 1985, 2002, 2010, 2018 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.

Gone Gray

Pierre-Joseph Redouté via Rawpixel / CC, Andreas Kuehn via Getty, Photo illustration by Katie Kosma

Jessica Berger Gross | Longreads | July 2018 | 21 minutes (5,335 words)

 

We’re in London, somewhere between the British Museum and Piccadilly Circus. It’s Thanksgiving week, and my then 9-year-old and I have been winding our way through the late November afternoon on a marathon walking tour of the city. But now we’re lost. I stop a woman who looks to be in her mid-40s, about my age, to ask for directions, and I quickly realize that she’s one of them: attractive, fashionable in an appealingly unconventional way — and with completely, unabashedly gray hair. Forget the directions. I peel off my hat to show her what’s doing underneath, where I have three months’ worth of roots. “Brilliant. Keep going,” she says. “You won’t regret it.”

For years, and more and more in the past year or two, I’d see them on the street — the striking silver hair on an artist type in her 40s on the sidewalk in Brooklyn or the Lower East Side; the shock of a long gray braid down the back of a fiftysomething woman at a thermal spa in Iceland; the short, gray bangs and bob on my sixtysomething neighbors at the farmers market in rural Maine. The surprising beauty of a woman in her 30s with unexpected, natural gray. Not to mention all the millennials — and Kim Kardashian — dying their hair bottle gray.

Throughout my 30s I’d been a vigilant hair colorer, doing whatever it took to remedy and right the gray roots growing out from my middle part. I can’t remember exactly how old I was when coloring my hair went from an occasional, even enjoyable, splurge — an optional luxury — to a required part of regular beauty maintenance and of my looking professional and pretty. But as I entered my 40s, I found my feminist and aesthetic selves at war each month when I sat in the salon chair.

Then the world changed. The New York Times needle impossibly tipped the wrong way: Trump was elected. During that bleak late autumn and winter, after the fall foliage–filled weekends of knocking on doors for Hillary, I cried myself to sleep and woke up to the steady drum of anger and disbelief. Then, almost a year later, the Harvey Weinstein story broke, and I spent my evenings half ignoring laundry and bath time and bedtime, so that I could keep up with the #MeToo news cycle. Twitter went from a procrastination time suck to a daily engagement in feminist dialogue, with a fervor the likes of which I hadn’t felt since Women Studies 101. We’d entered a time of resistance against our abuser and pussy-grabber in chief and his cronies, and like so many women, I’d absolutely had it with the constraints of patriarchy.

Now more than ever, I resented — even hated — the dye. Having to dye my hair was one more patriarchal rule I didn’t have time or patience for. And Trump’s ridiculous orange dye job made me see the deceptive element in hair color and want to run even farther from the bottle. It’s not just that I didn’t want to keep up with the hassle and expense of coloring my roots a dark brown every four weeks and highlighting the rest of my hair every few months. I wanted to become the kind of woman who could give myself permission to go gray, who’d embrace authenticity and realness, and stop running from the reality of aging and mortality. But could I do it?

Read more…

Nurses, Unite!

Getty, Illustration by Katie Kosma

Livia Gershon | Longreads | June 2018 | 9 minutes (2,201 words)

Kate Phillips, a nurse who works in the intensive care unit at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, in Baltimore, is part of a group trying to form a union. “Every nurse here has talked about times where he or she felt unsafe because there was not enough staffing, not enough equipment, or medicines came late because there were not enough pharmacy techs,” she told The Sun. The administration, she went on, “can basically make all the decisions and they don’t look at things from the perspective of patient care like we do.” This past January in Virginia, Patty Nelson, a psychiatric nurse who is the chapter chair of her local union, called on the state’s general assembly to expand Medicaid as soon as possible, citing clients with mental illness and addiction who can’t get the treatment they need. And the California Nurses Association (CNA), the largest union of nurses in that state, has emerged as a champion of a single-payer health care system, fighting their way to their capitol. “We understand that these legislators are not going to do this on their own,” Bonnie Castillo, a registered nurse and executive director of the union, told California Healthline, a health care news site. “It’s going to take a movement of their constituents, nurses and other health care professionals. Legislators are going to need an intense amount of pressure, and that’s what we’re doing: We’re knocking on every door, we’re meeting and organizing.”

Nursing work, like most other health care jobs, is growing fast: the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that the United States will add 438,100 jobs in registered nursing by 2026. Their strength in numbers has also brought organizing power: while most of the labor movement has declined in the face of pressure from unfavorable laws and moneyed opposition, in the past decade, nurses’ unionization rates have been gaining momentum, with tens of thousands more members.

Read more…