SUNDAY MORNING COMING DOWN
When I was growing up in the Nashville of the 1970s and 80s, we were alternately proud and embarrassed of the contribution we were making to American culture. (You may feel free to read that as ‘Murica, since part of our contribution may have actually been adding that pronunciation to the lexicon.) For every classic Owen Bradley engineered masterpiece, there was some young turk trying to make his name by flaunting the mores of the Bible Belt.
Even sainted Hank Williams’ son sang “all my rowdy friends are coming over tonight” as if he anticipated Brother Auggie walking through the door with bottles of illicit peach brandy. For some, this revelling in sin may have seemed shocking, but for my people -- the ones who would spend a perfectly good autumn afternoon sweating through a dress shirt and blazer while they watched Vanderbilt get pummeled by the University of Alabama -- it was just tacky. A particular act of sin wasn’t all that interesting.
But the very banality of sin, that could be an interesting topic. Nobody thinks their sin is ordinary, of course. We want to think the particular circumstances that surround our transgression are unique. But in many ways the story of any individual sin is as old as the first sin. Our own infidelity shows itself, “cause the whole naked truth / Was wearing only an infidels grin / And a proud school boy’s boast, for having left his post / For the most unoriginal sin” as Willie Nelson sings in a tune by John Hiatt.
Somehow Texas songwriters seem to have thought a little more deeply about sinning and its cunning, baffling nature than most of our’s in Tennessee. Dust, heat, and lots of empty space might contribute to a surprising humility in their songs that runs counter to common stereotypes. No less a Lutheran than Lyle Lovette recounts his failed attempt to sin boldly in “Her First Mistake” striking out three times with the object of his desire before she leaves and, inexplicably, returns. Yet in the end, he admits that he “keeps on running faster, chasing that happily I am ever after.”
There is humility in admitting that what we are reaching for will always exceed our grasp. The battered heroine of James McMurtry’s “The Lights of Cheyenne” seems to have just realized that the closest she will come to experiencing what was promised by the glitter in the distance is the shattered glass at her feet. What is there to be redeemed in a life lived in the span of a 15 minute cigarette break? Or in one where, in the words of Emmylou Harris, “the hardest part is knowing I’ll survive”?
“Well dang,” you might be thinking, “how about some happy songs?” Somebody once asked Townes Van Zandt to play some happy ones, to which he replied, “these are the happy ones.” It’s easy to imagine that Townes’ could have gotten even darker in his lyrics, but it’s also possible to see the hope that even his darkest songs offer. In “For the Sake of the Song” he paints a picture of a couple at the end of a relationship, one of whom wonders “Does she really believe / That some word of mine / Could relieve / All her pain?” He acknowledges that there is an essential brokeness in her, and in all of us, that no other person can ultimately heal.
In a sense, however, it’s not the truth of this brokeness that causes us problems but the denial of it. He goes on to sing “Can't she see that she grieves / Just because she's been blindly deceived / By her shame?” In another tune, Townes sings that “We all got holes to fill / Them holes are all that's real. / Some fall on you like a storm, / Sometimes you dig your own.” For Van Zandt, the one thing that we can really know about ourselves is what we are struggling with.
In a sense, that struggle is what we have to offer one another, whether it is joining together in a common effort, or, as we seem to be finding these days, to respect the times when we must struggle separately. There’s a reason why so many good country songs are about people leaving. While there’s sadness in realizing that a person can’t fix things by staying close, we acknowledge the dignity of another by letting them do the work only they can do. And, as Guy Clark so aptly illustrates in “Dublin Blues” distance doesn’t necessarily diminish the presence of another in our souls as he sings “I loved you from the get go and I’ll love you till I die / I loved you on the Spanish Steps the day you said goodbye.”
