The Try-Works

Billy Joe Shaver is, in my opinion, the finest songwriter in country music, and I’ll put one of his albums up against any album ever made: The Earth Rolls On.  It was recorded shortly after Billy Joe Shaver’s wife died of cancer, and the lead guitarist was Shaver’s son, Eddy, who was rapidly losing a battle with heroin addiction, and who died of an overdose after the sessions had completed, but before the album was released.

Anyway, this is one of my favorite songs off the album: “I Don’t Seem To Fit Anywhere.”

And, as a bonus, two more from a set Billy Joe Shaver played in memory of his son: “You Are the Star in My Heart” and one of the best songs ever recorded by anyone in any genre, “Live Forever.”

And, lastly, one of the few songs I could find on You Tube played by Billy Joe Shaver and Eddy Shaver together: “Honky Tonk Heroes.”

Of course, if you know anything about country music, you know that “Honky Tonk Heroes” was the title song on the Waylon Jennings album that kicked off the outlaw country movement.  Nigh every song on that album was written by Billy Joe Shaver, in fact.  Lore has it that Jennings promised to record a whole album of Shaver songs after one too many drinks at a Willie Nelson picnic.  And, after a certain amount of time had passed and still no album had been released, Shaver hunted him down and threatened him with bodily harm if he didn’t get cracking.  Honky Tonk Heroes was the result.

One can’t be all Re-create 68 all the time. Now and then one must sit back, roll a cigarette, and smell the Evan Williams.

Than a country and western song about a rodeo clown done in by faithless love.  A song that includes lines like, “grease paint and tears don’t mix.”

If you don’t like Guy Clark, you can kiss my ass.

Thanks to a friend whose cats I occasionally feed — and whose album collection I’ve been ripping to my laptop — I’ve been sitting around listening to Townes Van Zandt in a big way. And by sitting around, I mean chugging Evan Williams and crawling around in the dog house, trying to close my eyes with an industrial-strength stapler.

I’d thought I knew something about Townes, but that turned out not to be the case.

This ain’t his best song, in my opinion, nor even his most hopeless, but it is his first.

(I’m assuming you know his famous song.)

These are the words engraved on Larry Brown’s tombstone. They come from a Robert Earl Keen song, which some of you savvier readers might also know was covered by the Highwaymen, a country music group made up of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson.

This is a fan video.

I have it on good authority that when making the Highwaymen albums with Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, Mr. Kristofferson would sing to a life size poster of Noam Chomsky in his recording booth.  I think we can also place him as the only Country & Western singer to reference Howard Zinn on an album.  (And no, it wasn’t on the wonderfully title Third World Warrior.)

A catchy little jingle for those among you with those magnetic abominations plastered all over your soccer-mobile.

And, yeah, it’s wholly derivative of John Prine’s classic anti-war jingle, as follows, but you won’t catch me complaining.

The always lovable souls over at Shubel Morgan and Monkey Smashes Heaven have posted a delightful country and western video of their own.

God bless, gentlemen. In the eternal words of Herman Melville: “Would that I could clear out Hampton Court and the Tuileries for ye! But gulp down your tears and hie aloft to the royal-mast with your hearts; for your friends who have gone before are clearing out the seven-storied heavens, and making refugees of long pampered Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, against your coming. Here ye strike but splintered hearts together — there, ye shall strike unsplinterable glasses!”

And, since we’re on the subject, I’ll direct you to an old post o’ mine on the subject of hard left politics and country and western music.

No video, but a few .mp3s. And a heartwarming picture of the youngest Iraqi victim of US aggression.

Update: Since I missed this the first time around: my favorite protest song of all time. He sings it for the first time at San Quentin, pisses off every guard in the joint, damn near starts a fucking riot, then what’s he do?

Sings it again.

Update II: And I have no idea what to do with this, but Johnny Cash touring Wounded Knee.

Update III: And, hell, since we’re on my favorite subject – the only man I care for with the initials JC — Johnny Cash’s take on Custer.

And, yeah, I know, I’ve posted it before. Every June 25th since this blog started, in fact.

Update IV: Apropos of nothing but JC, but this sends me crawling for a bullet with a bottle of Jim Beam in hand every time.

I’ve seen Hank III at least two times — I can’t remember exactly how many — and every fucking time it’s the table thumpin’ smash.

I don’t know who the hell put together the montage of pictures to make a video, but it sure as shit wasn’t Ray Wylie Hubbard. Regardless, this is one of of my favorite outlaw songs of all time.

Because you Try-Works readers need a little more Country & Western (and I don’t use that ampersand lightly) music in your lives.

So, most have you who ain’t in some way brain damaged have figured out that I’m a leftist. Well, I’m also a country music fan, which raises some eyebrows during dinner parties. It shouldn’t. As the Philadelphia Enquirer recently pointed out, leftists have a long history in country music, including the big guy, Johnny Cash. (Thanks to Brickburner.)

For, while country music today is often equated with pickup trucks, rebel flags, and men with mullets, it also has a brave and, dare I say, liberal streak in its closet.

Take Johnny Cash, for instance. Not only did many of his most famous lyrics center on “the poor and the beaten down,” including a poignant attack on this country’s treatment of American Indians, but also Cash was a vocal critic of the Vietnam War, as in his famous song “Man in Black”: “I wear the black in mourning for the lives that could have been/ Each week we lose a hundred fine young men.”

And then there is Willie Nelson, who on Valentine’s Day 2006 released a love song about gay cowboys, titled, “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond of Each Other).” Perhaps more seriously, he has been an avid supporter of presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich, who, while arguing for universal health care and a swift withdrawal from Iraq, is probably the furthest left of any Democratic candidate.

Keep reading.

I get the feeling, however, that the author ain’t real familiar with the genre. As leftists go, Cash and Nelson are small-fry compared to two of my personal favorites: Steve Earle and Kris Kristofferson. When recording the Highwayman albums, Kristofferson’s recording booth had a Noam Chomsky poster on the wall to which he sang every song — driving Waylon Jennings nuts. And Earle’s been quoted as putting his political bent somewhere to the left of Mao.

Anyway, for your listening pleasure, two of my favorites:

Steve Earle - Copperhead Road. An anti-government, anti-Vietnam, pro-drug dealing epic. What more could you ask for? (Buy the album here.)

Kris Kristofferson - Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down. Containing my favorite line from any protest song written anywhere by anyone. Hint: it’s also the title of this post. (Buy the album here.)

Update: Story on the above tyke:

On August the 10th, 2005, an innocent eight-month pregnant Iraqi woman fell victim to the ever so familiar barbaric indiscriminate shooting by the American forces in Mosul. She was shot several times in the stomach. The American soldiers who had shot this innocent woman did not appear to feel any remorse to what they had done. Instead of rushing to help her as she fell into a pool of her blood on the ground in front of her doorstep, they simply walked away.

It was down to the family of the shot woman to pick up the pieces and rush her to the nearest hospital, the Mosul Republican Hospital, for emergency treatment where a team of doctors immediately performed a caesarean in their attempt to save mother and baby. However, it soon became obvious to the medical team that the baby had died in his mother’s womb after a bullet had entered his chest and departed from his back.

As for the poor mother, she miraculously survived this crime. The doctors are of the opinion that the baby had acted as a ’shield’ which protected the mother from certain death. The mother has been moved to the Maternity hospital for post-operation care.

Keep reading.

Update II: My favorite Robert Service poem:

The Men That Don’t Fit In

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don’t know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;
But they’re always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.
They say: “Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make!”
So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,
It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones
Who win in the lifelong race.
And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,
Till he stands one day, with a hope that’s dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.
Life’s been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.
Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;
He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;
He’s a man who won’t fit in.

Update III: Since we’re on poetry, it’s Auden’s centennial. To be honest, I could give a shit about Auden, but I like this factotum from the Guardian (the “shady wet nun” part, that is):

Few writers mutilated their own work more often - for many years he deleted one of his most justly remembered lines, “We must love one another or die”, from the poem in which it occurs. Yet Wystan Hugh Auden (as he gleefully pointed out, his name was an anagram of “hug a shady wet nun”), who was born in York a century ago today, an anniversary scandalously under-recognised by a culture that thrives on less worthy commemorations, now stands as England’s greatest poet of the 20th century.

Keep reading.

Come to think, I also like that he knew the “We must love one another or die” line was horseshit. I’ve hated that poem since it started making the rounds after 9/11. There seemed something monumentally grotesque about its usage, something best summed up by the above picture.

Update IV: Charley Arthur reminded me of Country Joe MacDonald, and yeah, it’s obvious, but it sure is fun. Be the first one on your block to have your kid come back in a box. (Album here.)

Update V: Since we’re on obvious picks and were just telling Highwaymen stories, how could I forget their rendition of this Woody Guthrie ant-anti-immigration classic? This one’s for you, Peter Boyles. (Album here.)

Update VI: And since we’re talking Woody Guthrie, my personal favorite. You savvier readers (Charley Arthur, if nothing else) can probably guess what it is. (Album here.)

Update VII: And somebody smack me. I forgot the Flying Burrito Brothers? (Album here.)

Update VII: Now and then one of you emails or comments bitching about my posting pictures of dead Iraqi civilians. The reason I post ‘em is real easy: the media won’t. That we’re okay with killing kids but too squeamish to look at the bodies doesn’t even count as chickenhawk behavior, it’s just chickenshit. Anyway, a good video on the media’s cowardice can be found here. Thanks Leah.

Update VIII: Anybody notice that even John Martin’s followers are starting to figure him out for a bigot? Come to the dark side, dougie. And don’t sweat it, Mr. Martin, you’ll always have Snapple.