If That Ain't Country

There were Cadillacs and Waffle Houses and signs for the best bar-b-q and folks walking arm in arm and ten-gallon hats and  buttery grits. Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, the heart of the blues and gospel music and country music began in the American South. Is Nashville the Vienna of the 20th century? In terms of musical production, the '50s and '60s, even the '70s, were the most prolific era of music in hundreds of years. Our grandkids will know about Michael Jackson and Elvis.

Was it the nostalgia for Civil War? The lead-up to the hundredth anniversary in everyone's unconscious triggered something - hey, look how far we've come, how American we are and look what we can produce. To draw on black music was to apologize and share culture in the same way the sesquicentennial anniversary of Civil War inaugurated the first black president. Little did they know how much more they had to apologize for.

Still there is pervasive hatred here. It fires in the eyes of bourbon drinkers and diesel-burning pickups and the pell-mell of a prison yard and the slow chuff of a locomotive hiking up a mountainside and a blonde blue-eyed honey leaving for another man and the slow-roasting smoky smell of mama's brisket. That's country. The adventurous Yankee yearns to see the sweet expanse of cotton fields and rosedale blue skies and know the slow malaise of sweet tea and aristocratic white country porches and the Southern Gulf and he wants to meld his hard-poached honk into the relaxed gentlemanly whiskey-red drawl of country.

On the Road Again

In that time the road smelled like gasoline and french fries at the gas stations and Circle K's. When you rolled your window down and stuck your head out beside the cars whooshed past, it was hard to get a whiff.  The speed made breathing difficult. Your nostrils couldn't accept all the air at once.

 Slower, on a scenic route, it smelled of heather and pine, trampled needles and early summer sun; open expanses and vast prairie, corn and that wide blue air scent unfound in metropolitan avenues; hot macadam and brown grasses, hay casks and descending evening. It smelled like youth, life and everything that mattered.

When you saw the green signs with white pimply lettering that read Sioux City 364 and you longed to be there already, find your room and settle down for the night, you tempered it by remembering that you still have to stop for lunch. Hundreds of miles of open grassland, red rim-rocks, striated purples, a propitious hawk overhead - so different from yesterday's scenery. What's next?

    The chickenscratchy sound of distance-drowned radio led to the seek button and when they heard a good classic country or rock'n'roll song, they'd press it again to let it stop and play. It was a good station and they'd sing along:
   
"On the road again
    Goin places that I've never been
    Seein' things that I may never see again
    And I can't wait to get on the road again"

Until it ended sadly and they hoped to recognize another. They kept it there until a commercial break, when they seeked again, and remembered that one, in case there were only three or four radio stations within a hundred square miles. If there were no other songs they recognized, they returned abashedly, and prayed for another good one.