Dana Jennings: Behind The Music

Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music
Dana Jennings
(Faber and Faber, Inc.)

A handful of pages into Dana Jennings’ “Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music,” I began to wonder, as I usually do when reading about music, if the author would distinguish his work from the others I’ve read. If you read several books about one topic, after a while you’re going to require a fresh approach to hold your interest.

Jennings got my attention. He did it by challenging me.

“… Much writing on music spurns the listener’s half of the equation,” Jennings wrote. “It succumbs to musicological mumbo-jumbo or mere dirt-and-dreams biography, or to that obsessive-compulsive disorder of music writing, infatuated with discography and recording-session lineups. It leaves no room for the listener.”

The critic in me was determined to hear him out. Not only did Jennings touch on a weakness in my own writing, he pointed out a flaw found in the work of part-time bloggers and paid staffers at your big-time, glossy music magazines.

If you’re not a critic, or Jennings’ assertion doesn’t pique your interest, I defy you to read the sentence, “All Grammy Jennings ever wanted to do was to fuck and drink,” and put the book down. I guarantee you’re going to want to know more about Grammy Jennings. There’s plenty to know, about her and the rest of the clan.

Dana Jennings, an editor for The New York Times, tells you more about his granny, and many more of his relatives. He uses the stories about his family to illustrate themes from what he considers the golden age of country music: 1950-1970.

Think of any major theme in classic country, and Jennings touches on it. Poverty? Check. Prison? Check. Drinking? Check. Cheating hearts? Check.

In the process, Jennings also introduces many of the era’s major players: Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson, Roger Miller and Kitty Wells, among others, all appear in his pages.

But “Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music” isn’t a mere music history. It’s part memoir as well. Jennings, who grew up in a hardscrabble holler in Kingston, N.H., uses his family history to show that, despite its southern provenance, country music between 1950 and 1970 was the music of rural and working people from coast to coast.

“And for me, it’s impossible to tell where my family ends … and where country music begins. And vice versa,” Jennings writes. That’s for sure. For each theme presented in “Sing Me Back Home,” there’s a relevant story from the old home place. The pages are chock full of hard workers, honky-tonkers and hell-raisers. There are lost souls and wandering eyes. Needless to say, the beer flows freely from Saturday afternoon until Sunday night. In some cases, it flows all week long. Then there are the desperate drunks, cutting brake fluid with grapefruit juice.

It’s little wonder that the music’s story is so intertwined with Jennings’ own. When he was a small child, his parents had among their few possessions two long-playing albums: Fats Domino’s “Rock and Rollin’ with Fats” and “Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar.” He eventually rejected his roots, but now is reclaiming them. They are calling him home to tell his story and that of the music. The boy has been taken out of the country, but the country has not been taken out of the boy. Which leads to one minor complaint: Jennings often lapses into his native vernacular, peppered with double-negatives (“Don’t have no phone,” “Don’t know what real work is no more,” etc.). It’s almost as though Jennings is mindful not to “get above his raisin’.” Though his style is pleasantly conversational rather than scholarly, there really isn’t any need for such lapses in the language. He need not be ashamed of his kin or his upbringing, but being an editor at the Times isn’t too shabby, either.

Jennings does a good job of working his family stories around classic country songs such as “There Stands the Glass,” “Ring of Fire” and “Mama Tried.” At the same time, he puts the songs’ themes into historical and societal perspective. The discography in the end notes would be useful to a reader looking to expand their knowledge of country music. The list is CD-based, but readers who buy from the iTunes Music Store could easily look up the songs Jennings mentions in each chapter. Such a list would provide thoroughly adequate starting points for discovery of several artists.

Judging by the anecdotes, many of the classic cuts could have been written about Jennings’ relatives. And that’s just his point.

“Country music knows broader and deeper truths about the Twentieth-century American Dream, universal truths that resonate well beyond the music’s original audience,” Jennings writes.

Through his own observations, Jennings proves that country is music of the people, by the people and for the people.