Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain. Roy Acuff. 1947. Columbia/Legacy.

 Sometime in the late seventies I glanced up from my current musical interest, disco, and caught sight of the hirsute-faced Texan who wore his long hair parted down the center, in twin braids. He was Willie Nelson, sprung into national fame as though fully formed from the head of Roy Acuff.  A master of musical understatement, Nelson also synthesizes pop forms with the inspired fluency of a professional craftsman. After helping to establish Outlaw Country—the great synthesis of rock and roll and honky tonk—the man who wrote Crazy for one of the finest Pop sensibilities of the late twentieth century, Patsy Cline, Nelson began a progressive move towards commercial respectability for his first record on Columbia Records, the breakthrough Red Headed Stranger. His Blue Eyes, from that LP, shares with Acuff’s version a core of performative sadness as its foremost arresting quality. Both songs blow right past the limitations of genre conventions but only the Acuff version can make a discourse on human emotion and pop romanticism sound this strangely fragile, this mysteriously loaded with meaning about the feeling of loneliness in a postwar environment. Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain liberates us from our long running fantasy of the American mid century past as a landscape of GI heroism and the textbook eradication of morally unambiguous villainy. The power of its speech to reach us across a span of decades with a disruptive eloquence that, in contrast to Nelson’s, refuses to sentimentalize its poetic conceit of the eternal, and is instead on an equal footing with it, appeals to our modern susceptibility to accept all wildly improbable forms of gnostic wisdom. It dares to foresee a happiness of the grave.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ça Plane Pour Moi. Plastic Bertrand. 1978. Sire.

  According to internet data, the Lollapalooza tour, 1995, reached Dallas, Texas, on August 10, a Thursday. Five of us rode in one car that I drove from Fort Worth to the Starplex Amphitheater; my fellow passengers were Jo, Pat, Trina, and that woman who lived in Azle, whose name I no longer remember, and who used to come into the record store often, along with her boyfriend. Her musical tastes tended toward the abrasive, commercial metal so popular with the white suburban kids of privilege: Nine Inch Nails, Iron Maiden, Alice In Chains. Her personal style was not that of a typical metal fan, more like Ally Sheedy after her character’s disastrous Breakfast Club makeover. I admired her bright and casual style, her propensity to good humor and cheer, and for not succumbing to conformity and becoming a metal clone like so many of our peers. She rolled joints during the entire car trip to Lollapalooza with the hurried precision of an efficient professional working against a deadline, and c
Read more

Blues Is King. Marshall Crenshaw. 1985. Warner Bros.

  Certain recording artists—Lindsey Buckingham, Lucinda Williams, Sylvester Stewart all come to mind—share such a deep affinity with American music that it can seem as if they’ve walked into our  fantasies of democracy and produced their best work from inside that dream. So it is with Marshall Crenshaw. His eponymously titled debut record was released in 1982, when American artists were engaged in a Janus faced dialogue with their audience; on one side, artists like Talking Heads, Prince, and Laurie Anderson boldly envisioned pop song dynamics that bore the irreducible stamp of their respective personalities, while on the other side, Los Lobos, the Replacements, and the Cramps refashioned the face of rock and roll itself to accurately mirror the tastes of a young public growing increasingly hostile to, as well as alienated from, the social and fiscal policies of a federal government that was becoming less and less representative. Somewhere between the two norms fell the music of Marsha
Read more

Les Bon Temps Rouler Waltz. BeauSoleil. 1988. Arhoolie.

  A modicum of sadness is built into BeauSoleil’s rendition of the Lawrence Walker ballad Les Bon Temps Rouler Waltz. It’s the emotional center point around which the song revolves, illuminating the record’s good faith by fixing the listener’s attention on the band’s collaborative dynamic, the process by which they draw poignancy from each instrumental performance. Every pop record is an implied contractual agreement between artist and listener, with listener consenting to his role as subjective recipient of the commercial audio product. The basic nature of this role is subject to change over a period of time as the listener’s relationship with the record changes, given, but not limited, to issues of personality maturity. Typically, the consumer role will fall into one of two camps: either the faceless, one-of-millions mass audience whose pop experience is often social or the cogent individual whose expectations of the pop experience are more personal and long lasting. The most signifi
Read more