Music Media Monthly

Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris and the Renegades of Nashville by Michael Streissguth

In 1980, Willie Nelson appeared at the Democratic National Convention in New York to support his friend, President Jimmy Carter. Willie ambled on stage and sang his own edited version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” leaving out some of the lyrics. It hardly mattered; Nelson was already a beloved public figure. Now, at 80, he is a living monument. (There is a bronze statue of him in Austin.) Kris Kristofferson will soon be 77.  Like Nelson, Kristofferson continues to tour and to record. Waylon Jennings died in 2002.

Four decades ago, these three Texas natives – with considerable help from Johnny Cash and a large supporting cast – forever changed country-western music with their “redneck” songs, nonconformist attitude, and shaggy locks. Their work freed country music from the hidebound, syrupy “Nashville Sound”.

Michael Streissguth’s spirited book describes the scene in the country-music capital as it gave birth to the “outlaw movement”.  There are plenty of books about country music in general, and many more about individual singer-songwriters. However, Streissguth synthesizes the impact of rebels who insisted on obeying their own muse, choosing their own producers and backup musicians, and dressing “like Jesse James”.

Streissguth frames the “outlaw” contribution within a larger political and social context. Nashville long was a segregated city. Its civil rights lunch-counter sit-in leaders were the original outlaws, the author suggests. But it took time to shake up the music establishment.

Kristofferson, who had been a Rhodes scholar, was still in his U.S. Army uniform when he arrived in 1965. A teaching assignment at West Point awaited him, but the music mecca exerted a stronger pull. He resigned his commission, rejected the teaching offer, and settled his family in Nashville.  The following year, as Bob Dylan was recording Blonde on Blonde in Nashville’s Columbia Records studio, Kristofferson worked there cleaning ashtrays and doing other menial tasks.

Nelson was a known quantity, having written such hits as “Crazy” and “Funny How Time Slips Away”. But his record sales were anemic and he chafed against the tight reins held by legendary guitarist Chet Atkins, who ruled RCA’s Nashville offices.

Jennings, a member of Buddy Holly’s band, famously gave up his seat to “The Big Bopper” (J.P. Richardson) on the plane that crashed and took Holly’s life.  He, too, butted heads with Atkins, even though several of his early Nashville recordings were hits.

The man Streissguth identifies as the outlaw “godfather”, Johnny Cash was the first to break away from Nashville’s “nursery-rhyme-simple verse”. Cash gave Kristofferson a huge boost when he put him on the bill at the 1969 Newport Folk Festival.  Kristofferson also got attention for the song “Me and Bobby McGee”, which was recorded that year by country star Roger Miller. The renegades were gaining strength.

Vietnam War protests contributed to Nashville’s ferment. In 1970, the National Guard shootings at Kent State University in Ohio triggered demonstrations at Nashville’s Vanderbilt University,  a generally conservative campus. The anti-establishment music contingent grew to include another pair of Texas songwriters: Guy Clark and Rodney Crowell.  The burgeoning movement helped make the city’s West End neighborhood “a bohemian enclave, a glint of San Francisco in the buckle of the Bible Belt”.  The Exit/In, a key music club, opened in 1971.

Even though Nelson returned home to Texas after his Nashville house burned down, his influence did not dim. He returned often to record and to perform in Nashville, symbolizing, in the author’s words, “the union of ‘hippie and hillbilly”.  Both Nelson, a connoisseur of weed, and Jennings, an amphetamine user, finally won creative control over their albums.

Streissguth names Waylon’s 1973 Honky-Tonk Heroes as the first album of the outlaw movement. Who coined the term “outlaw”? A staffer at one of the recording studios. Asked by a disc jockey what to call the music, she paged through a dictionary and found “outlaw” defined as “living on the outside of the written law”. That sounded right, she thought, and suggested that the DJ use it.

Anecdotes tell how Waylon and his posse liked to stay awake all night playing nonstop pinball at joints like Burger Boy. Once, when the Burger Boy manager asked to be reimbursed for the $4,000 he had advanced Jennings, the singer wrote him a check – on a paper bag. A local bank actually cashed it.

Nelson’s masterly Red Headed Stranger became the outlaws’ first blockbuster album, although record executives were so puzzled by its spare instrumentation that when they first heard it, they thought it was unfinished. The outlaw zenith came with the 1976 release of Wanted! The Outlaws. A compilation, it included Waylon and Willie dueting on “Good Hearted Woman,” along with performances by Jessi Colter (Waylon’s wife at the time) and Tompall Glaser. It became the first country music album to sell 1 million copies. Waylon’s band had been carrying gear from show to show in a station wagon; now they were booked in arenas, their equipment transported in a convoy of tractor-trailers.

Cocaine was among the problems that led to the movement’s demise. Jennings,  a major consumer, was arrested on conspiracy distribution charges; these were dropped, but an associate did plead guilty to distributing cocaine and served a short prison sentence. Jennings mistrusted many people and hated the media, “so it was Willie who became the darling”.  Meanwhile, Kristofferson became a movie star and left Nashville’s orbit.

Still, the nationwide popularity of pickup trucks and cowboy boots was a testament to the outlaw influence. Among the musicians who covered outlaw tunes or wrote their own were Billy Joe Shaver, Jerry Jeff Walker, Marshall Chapman, Emmylou Harris, Roseanne Cash, Kinky Friedman, John Hiatt and even Elvis Presley.

Ironically, it was Stardust, Willie Nelson’s 1978 album of American pop standards, that united fans young and old into a single massive audience, says Streissguth. Nelson surely is “the most significant musical and spiritual legacy” of the rebels.

Overall, Outlaw is an entertaining look at an important musical uprising of the 1970s.

Outlaw: Waylon, Willie, Kris and the Renegades of Nashville by Michael Streissguth. 2013. 304 pages. ISBN: 978-0062038180. It! Books.

– Grace Lichtenstein

Sounds of War:  Music in the United States during World War II by Annegret Fauser

Stories from the “good war” never cease to engage Americans. However, the music discussed in this fascinating and difficult book is not usually what comes to mind when we think of World War II: the Glenn Miller band, the Andrews Sisters, etc. Instead, this book bills itself as the first one to take an in-depth look at the role classical music and musicians played in the United States and abroad during the conflict.

What’s fascinating is how much ground Annegret Fauser covers — from the pop singalong Army Hit Kit to the treatment of luminaries like Béla Bartók as “enemy aliens,” from music as trauma therapy to the notion that “concert” music was a far more powerful force in the U.S. then than it is now. What’s difficult is Fauser’s style.  She can be ponderous, and uses words like “imaginary” (as a noun) and “performative” that make this reader wince.

The best parts deal with propaganda, a term which did not have negative connotations on the Allied side 70 years ago.  The list of those who worked for the Office of War Information (OWI), the leading propaganda agency, reads like a roll call of major figures:  Samuel Barber, Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Roy Harris, Colin McPhee, Daniel Saidenberg and Kurt Weill among them.  Carter produced the first recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto as an OWI specialist.

Performers who entertained the troops included Yehudi Menuhin, Lily Pons, Jascha Heifetz and Isaac Stern.  Pons and conductor Andre Kostelanetz were said to have appeared before more than 2 million troops on one  long 1944-5 tour, including some in occupied Germany. (A hilarious photo in the book shows Pons cozying up to a huge phallic brass artillery shell.)

Government officials and private citizens were responsible for making records and stocking foreign libraries with American classical music. A major military project involved creating and shipping to troops “V-Discs,” which Fauser, a professor of music and women’s studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, says constituted “a new medium – ‘12-inch practically unbreakable plastic platters.’” (V was for victory, not vinyl.)  The first ones were of popular music, but there were classical selections too.

Sounds of War is filled with wonderful facts and anecdotes about how orchestras and symphonic works supported the battle against the Axis powers. Both Barber and Blitzstein wrote symphonies dedicated to aviation. Soldiers and sailors formed bands, symphony orchestras and string quartets. The Marine Corps had a women’s reserve band. Given the millions who served in the U.S. military during the war, this shouldn’t be surprising, yet the sweep of the effort is remarkable.

Not only was there much more to wartime music-making than “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” there were reputations to be made on the wartime stage.  Pianist Eugene List was the “poster child” for classical music draftees. Fauser says his broadcasts and tours boosted his post-war career. Arturo Toscanini, already famous as a refugee from fascism, conducted his very first all-American concert in 1942. Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man was just one of the fanfares commissioned by conductor Eugene Goossens; others were by Harris, Walter Piston, Virgil Thomson, Darius Milhaud and Bohuslav Martinu.

Eleanor Roosevelt offered a ringing battle cry in the magazine Musical America: “Music should go on!” Meanwhile a seaman from the Bronx was earthier. Hearing Menuhin, he said: “Jeez, Dat guy c’n do more wit’ a G-string dan Gypsy Rose Lee!”

While there were issues about some programming of “enemy music,” particularly that of Richard Strauss (who was still alive and serving Hitler’s Germany with operas like Capriccio), American radio and live concerts did not avoid the dead German titans of the canon from Bach to Brahms; indeed, “entire concert series were dedicated to Beethoven.” On the Russian front, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony no. 7 (“Leningrad”) was played and discussed so much that it irked Americans like Virgil Thomson and Roy Harris, who wanted more “native” music to be publicized.

How important was “good music” (as it was sometimes referred to, during the “good war”) to the American public? It was huge.

The Army broadcast a show twice weekly for troops called “Soldiers’ Symphony.” Toscanini’s radio concerts were renowned, and OWI also oversaw regular broadcasts devoted to American contemporary music by such composers as Barber, Copland, Cowell, Robert Russell Bennett, George Chadwick, and Charles Ives, whose  seventieth birthday program was sent all over the world for radio use.

Here was “propaganda” of the most refined kind, played for armed forces whose white and almost entirely male troops loved classical music almost as much as swing and jazz, and much more than country and western, according to wartime surveys. As for African Americans, that was a different story. Operas were staged for “racial uplift” by the National Negro Opera Company, founded in 1941. Its first production: Aida, natch.

In her final chapter, Fauser asserts that the attempt to create an American “art music” identity led to “chauvinism,” “provincialism,” “Americanism,” the blurring of lines that separate patriotism from “blinkered jingoism,” and, in the case of Roy Harris, what she denigrates as “hooray patriotism.” Really? While many of her interpretations are nuanced, this is not. I wonder if her take on “cultural politics” isn’t creating controversy where none exists.

One wrong note: the author writes that Henry Cowell was “notorious for his conviction and imprisonment on a morals charge.” Cowell biographer Joel Sachs has pointed out that “conviction” is a mistake too often repeated; Cowell never appeared before a jury, instead pleading guilty without the advice of counsel because he distrusted lawyers. And Fauser should have made clear that the charge was having consensual sex with a young man, a crime applicable to anyone, gay or straight, in California in 1936.

Fauser’s turgid writing can make Sounds of War a tough slog in spots for non-academics. But the book covers a critical period in music history. It should be of interest to serious listeners both on and off campus.

Sounds of War:  Music in the United States during World War II by Annegret Fauser. 2013. 384 pages. ISBN: 9780199948031. Oxford University Press.

– Grace Lichtenstein