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.

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