The Poetry of Country Music, Part 2

Continuing our exploration of the poetry of country music, we turn from form to content. That is, we shift our focus from the way these lyricists express themselves with simile, metaphor, hyperbole, and the like to the messages they convey. These messages, as I hope you will see in this week's column, can be moving and even profound.

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"You don't know me, but you don't like me."

So sang country music great Buck Owens in his song "The Streets of Bakersfield."

The words are supposed to refer to a person, but they could apply to country music, as well.  We often disregard and even dislike people and things we don't know because, well, we don't know them.  We don't have enough experience with them to appreciate what makes other people love them.  Many — perhaps most — Americans, as well as people from other countries, think they don't like country music because they have not experienced the best of it.

Thanks to my parents, I grew up on country music.  I'm a Hoosier, born and raised in Indianapolis, but my dad, also a Hoosier, loved country music, and my mom, who grew up in Georgia and Alabama, was a fan, as well.  I feel blessed to have been exposed to the sounds of George Jones, Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette, Ray Price, and others.

After I grew up, I expanded my listening experience to include hundreds more songs by many other artists, including Hank Williams, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Buck Owens, Dolly Parton, Clint Black, Brooks & Dunn, Alan Jackson, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Brad Paisley, Wynonna Judd, Dwight Yoakam, and Shania Twain.

All of this listening — thousands of hours, surely — has led me to a conclusion.  Country music is more than an impressive and moving art form; it's a window into the lives and emotions of a large swath of the world's population.  An education in country music can help us understand our neighbors and ourselves.

Let me offer a few examples of what we can learn from country music by sharing a few highlights from some great country songs.

"Lost Highway"

I have to start with the greatest country artist of them all, Hank Williams, who, like Keats and Shelley and Poe, blazed brightly early in life and died far too young.  Williams was more than a brilliant songwriter.  He became a legend, and his name has become a byword for country greatness in countless songs by Brooks and Dunn, Alan Jackson, Kris Kristofferson, and, of course, his son, Hank Williams, Jr.  Kristofferson put it this way: "If you don't like Hank Williams, honey, you can kiss my . . ." Well, you get the idea.

Williams wrote dozens of classics, including "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and "Jambalaya," but I decided to focus here on a lesser-known song, "Lost Highway," because of its theme.  Whereas some of Williams's other songs — notably "Your Cheatin' Heart" — tell of heartbreak (a common theme in country music), "Lost Highway" captures a broader phenomenon.  Here are the first few lines:

I'm a rollin' stone, all alone and lost. For a life of sin, I have paid the cost. When I pass by, all the people say, "Just another guy on the lost highway."

On one level, the words are not particularly notable.  There's no creative word play, as we saw in my previous column on country music, and the syntax and diction are both unremarkable.  These lines, however, set up a theme with profound implications. For all of us, life begins with possibility. When we are young, life stretches out before us, and we have the opportunity to fill it with joy and service to our fellow human beings.  That potential makes it all the more tragic when life goes wrong, when — to borrow Hank's phrase — we stray and wind up on "the lost highway."

It might be easy to dismiss these lines as some hackneyed lament or even the words of some loser who deserves what he gets, but listen to what Williams says in this stanza:

I was just a lad, nearly 22. Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you. And now I'm lost, too late to pray. Lord, I take a cost on the lost highway.

When he refers to being merely "a kid like you," he implicitly asks us to reflect on our own youth, a time when we were "Neither good nor bad."  If we are at that stage of life or even just remember it, we probably agree with him that we ourselves were vulnerable, prone to bad decisions that could have put us on the same highway.  It's hard to dismiss the words when we know they could apply to us.

I don't know if Williams ever read it, but his song reminds me of one of my favorite poems, a short classic by A. E. Housman:

When I was one-and-twenty        I heard a wise man say, “Give crowns and pounds and guineas        But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies        But keep your fancy free.” But I was one-and-twenty,        No use to talk to me. When I was one-and-twenty        I heard him say again, “The heart out of the bosom        Was never given in vain; ’Tis paid with sighs a plenty        And sold for endless rue.” And I am two-and-twenty,        And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

He doesn't use the phrase, but perhaps the speaker of this poem also felt he was on "the lost highway."

By the way, Hank's son, who sometimes refers to his father in his songs, explicitly alludes to this song in "All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down."  He sings, "And I think I know what my father meant / When he sang about a 'Lost Highway.'"  Alas, Hank, Jr., is not alone.  Far too many people know what his father meant.  That's what gives "Lost Highway" universal significance.

"Strawberry Wine"

Loss is a pervasive theme in country music, but it's not always quite so grim.  Sometimes the loss is simply a normal fact of life, as in the case of this marvelous song, made famous by Deana Carter.

We sometimes use the word nostalgia for the kind of sentiment expressed in "Strawberry Wine," but I think the lyrics point to something deeper, just as nostalgia can be deeper than it might seem on the surface.  Carter sings of a youth that has passed, but the words express more than merely missing what is no longer present.  These are the words of one who is wiser than the young girl in the song.

He was working through college On my grandpa's farm. I was thirstin' for knowledge, And he had a car.

I love these lines.  The music is sweet and sad — you have to hear the steel guitar to appreciate it — but these words contain a little hint of humor.  We like to think of young love as pure and deeply emotional.  Often it is, and often it just feels that way.  We never hear much about the boy himself, but the car, well, that was an appealing means to an end.  That's not to say that the seventeen-year-old girl knew it at the time.  That's the thing about looking back: the more we live, the more we know, and the knowledge she was seeking back then now allows her to see things she couldn't see then. 

Knowledge comes with a price, though.  We say ignorance is bliss, and all of us can probably think of examples of knowledge we might prefer not to have.  (As another singer, Bob Seger, put it in his song "Against the Wind," "Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then.")  Carter recounts memory after memory of a "first taste of love" that was "bittersweet / But green on the vine / Like strawberry wine" — but then she sings, "Is it really him or the loss of my innocence / I've been missing so much?"  As she says elsewhere in the song, she was "caught somewhere between a woman and a child."  Now she's a woman, and she can see that stage of life differently, not just with nostalgia, but with wisdom.

"Sunday Morning Comin' Down"

First things first: if you think you know this song because you have heard Johnny Cash's version, I have to tell you that you don't know this song.  Sorry, Johnny, but Kris wrote the song, and he knows how it goes. 

Before or after you read this column, please, please go and listen to Kristofferson's version.  A greater songwriter than a singer, Kristofferson didn't have the velvet pipes of Ray Price or the lovely twang of his fellow Texan Willie Nelson, but he sang with an authenticity that makes songs such as this one and "For the Good Times" achingly beautiful.

Kristofferson was a mega-star in his own day, partly because of his success as an actor in movies such as A Star Is Born (in which he co-starred with Barbra Streisand).  Today, he is not as well known as he should be.  I had the good fortune to see him perform live in concert just a few years before his death in 2024.  If you need any further evidence of his preeminence as a songwriter, just consider the title of this album by the much better-known (and also brilliant) Willie Nelson: "Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson."  Willie wasn't alone.  So did Janis Joplin, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Ray Price, and more than 100 other singers.  Only two other songwriters, Fred Rose and the iconic Hank Williams, have had more artists cover their songs.

"Sunday Morning Comin' Down," one of my all-time favorite songs of any genre by anyone, begins with some humorous lines:

Well, I woke up Sunday morning With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt, And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad, So I had one more for dessert. Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes And found my cleanest dirty shirt.

With his music and delivery, however, Kristofferson manages that quintessentially country and western balance of the wry and the tragic.  Once he gets outside "to face the day," we gradually realize that there is something mournful, indeed profoundly disturbing in his life, an absence that becomes painfully obvious on a Sunday.  As he puts it in a later stanza,

Then I crossed the empty street And caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin' chicken, And it took me back to somethin' That I'd lost somehow, somewhere along the way.

Later, he sees and hears images of family and church, and it's clear that he recognizes something appealing there, but for him, there is only the hole left by their absence.  For him, "there's something in a Sunday / That makes a body feel alone."  It's no wonder that he wishes he was "stoned."  After a Saturday night of liquor, cigarettes, and music, he has to spend his Sunday morning "Comin' down."  In short, he is, in Hank's words, "Just another guy on the lost highway."

Poetry and Empathy

Kristofferson's brilliant portrait of loss exemplifies my point that country music can serve as a window to help us see others' lives.  That's poetry (and fiction and drama and more) at its best.  Understanding the sense of loss and hurt and failure and desire can help us to empathize with our fellow human beings, perhaps even give them some grace and some love, as we would hope for ourselves if we were in the same situation.

After all, there's room for all of us on the lost highway.