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Americaland: Town, Country, and Dusty Love Letters

Posted by MillyVicks on 10/10/2006

For a little while after my recent break-up, I couldn't listen to country music because it seemed to conjure everything I missed about the old days. Stripped of my agency, I would surrender under the spell of its strum. My stomach dropped with the bop of its base. I was mesmerized by the mellifluousness of melody. After a little time though, that twangy guitar didn't make me want to puke and then call him, and I remembered the part of me that always craved that unabashed resignation and dedication to emotional turmoil. It rolls through the best of music: country, folk, blues, and variations of such. Ain't that America.

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Tracks

1. Bob Dylan - Moonshiner

It's a Scottish or Irish bothy ballad. The bothy is the shed where the plowman slept. These plowmen would go to special fairs to find work. Like many songs from poor white Europe, it became a standard of the American South and Appalachia, where people drank it to get fucked up during Prohibition. Dylan lends his most expressive vocals here. I have tried a gadjillion times, but I cannot scale the progression of his notes in this song. "The whole world is a bottle/ and life, but a dram/ When the bottle gets empty/ It sure ain't worth a damn." A dram is a measurement of spirituous liquid, but it has also come to mean, from its Greek origin "drachma," a currency, something which contains value-- life is a finite, fixed value. When it's over, and the "bottle gets empty," it ain't worth a damn. Anyone who ever said Bob Dylan couldn't really sing, listen to the operatics in this song.

2. Woody Guthrie - Deportee

Immigration policy is a timeless issue for America. Calexico is our westernmost country, where Mexicans pick strawberries eventually sold at five bucks a box. Who enjoys the fruits of their labor? Ellos son Americanos, pero vienen del Mexico. Today, they are known only as "Del Monte."

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3. Lucinda Williams - Metal Firecracker

Nothing hurts more than when you tell someone all the things you're afraid of in yourself, your fears, your "secrets," and they use them against you in some other context. "You wanted to paint my picture/ You wanted to undress me/ You wanted to see me in your future." All promises lost, "all I ask/ don't tell anybody the secrets I told you." This song is what hooked me on Lucinda.

4. John Prine - The Late John Garfield Blues

My dad used to play Prine when we drove across country every summer when I was small. He howled and yodeled and rewinded good lyrics. "The horses screamed, the nightmares dreamed." That is a quintessential prine lyric-- a horse, a mare, a dream, a scare... you get me. It is a simple, beautiful, sad song. That the man who jumps off the bridge says "You lose!" as he falls, is an irony which evades us in our silent minds. We need John Prine's music.

5. Beck - I've Seen the Land Beyond

When I had a conversation with my recent ex-boyfriend about whether Jews believe in the afterlife, he brought to my attention that the concept is referred to in the Torah as "the land beyond." Beck is half-Jewish, and I think he gets it. "Through the troubles of the years/ the heavenly apparition appears/ We're haunted by our minds/ When the spirits calls in the sky." Not an afterlife, but a place which defies placement in our imagination, a time outside of our experience. I don't care what anyone says about Beck, and I know he gets silly, but he evokes a poetic emotion, which is a lot more than you can say for most.

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6. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - rich wife full of happiness

I'm sure by this point you can see I am stretching "country" to anything that has a tinge of twang or a bang of banjo, but this song exceeds genre and thus hearkens country. Oldham conjures America in some time between histories, personal stories lost in the drama of war or economic depression. Some very personal stories that will always be a secret - "A shark and a dog now you're laughing/ The dog licks the shark dry in your photographing/ I lick you dry until you're laughing/ My finger's in your behind." Any woman who has had hallucinations during cunnilingus knows: you leave your body and enter a surreal world of animals and images and textures. The orgasm occurs outside of time and space, and only the man (or woman, hey!) downstairs knows how many minutes have actually passed. This 'prince' has given some very good head.

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7. Tom Waits - Mockin' Bird

The whistle followed by a beautiful, sorrowful piano bridge is all I need to get by sometimes. Tom Waits works while he plays. Salt of the earth.

8. Band - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

It takes a ballsy Canadian to write a song of the south. Props to Robbie for aiming it straight at Levon. Northern urban white people pretend that they are better than southern whites because the south was full of slaveholders before the Civil War. But Malcolm X liked the southern white man better. Plus, history must be sung if we are to remember and learn. This song SINGS.

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9. The Band - Tears of Rage

About a hundred years after the Civil War, we are still crying "tears of rage." Me and my last boyfriend got together largely because we both loved this song, and he played it while I sang. We never got the lyrics right, and never got what they meant, except for the chorus. I think it's one of those Dylan gems that consists of many one-line poems of truth; when sung in progression, they all lead to: "Come to me now/ You know we're so lost/ And life is brief."

10. Kris Kristofferson - Sunday Morning Coming Down

Sundays have a bad rap for being lonely. And they are lonely. But that's what they're for. It's the haunting friend of the human condition. Though we might be able to stave it off six days a week, we gotta know what it feels like. Because essentially we are alone in our bodies. And that's a lonely, beautiful thing.

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11. John Prine - Fish and Whistle

The idea that we have something for forgive God for is utterly profound. It's funny, because it's true. It also pokes fun at Christianity: "We'll forgive each other 'til we both turn blue/ Then we'll go whistle and go fishing in heaven." It always uplifts me by making my heart laugh. It's a fade away, perfect for the last song.

12. Guy Clark - L.A. Freeway

I don't think I have ever driven to my destination in Los Angeles county without making getting so lost that, when I would call for help, the person on the phone would say, "How the f*&k did you get all the way out there?" It is such a cool song, kind of an original-- the endless freeways in L.A., the feeling of joy that accompanies making it out alive from the Car Kingdom. Where is the land in this lot? Where is the country in this county?

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