Rich Hall's Countrier Than You

This programme contains some strong language.

"OK, Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Gram Parsons, blah blah blah..."

No! This is the story of how country music

constantly has to reinvent itself, to adapt to a changing culture.

The reason country music survives is because someone always comes along,

takes what's been done before and adds something original,

something unique. This is what it's all about,

the musicians who made a difference,

who gave us great songs that stand the test of time.

You see, people, if you're going to write a hit song,

you have to find your target audience.

Fortunately, I have found mine.

Am I right, ladies? Thanks for coming out tonight.

This one is just for you.

It's called The Border Collie Song. Are you ready?

Show's up here, ladies.

# I'm ready to work, I'm ready to work, I'm ready to work, let's go!

# What's the hold-up? I am ready to work, let's go

# I am ready to work, I'm ready to herd

# I'm ready to go, just say the word

# In case you dogs have not heard, I'm a working dog

# Now I've got issues, I'll admit, I basically don't know when to quit

# My one and only occupation, keep those herds in a tight formation

# Missing heifers, wayward strays, it tends to put a damper on my day

# It's in my blood, what can I say?

# I'm a goddamn working dog

# Boys, get out of my way

# I'm a goddamn working dog. #

# I've been drinking all day long, taking in the town

# I've done spent my whole pay cheque just a honky-tonkying round

# I don't have enough to pay my rent

# I ain't going to worry, though

# I got time for one more round

# And a six-pack to go... #

How could he not afford to pay his rent?

The guy's got a hit song on the radio.

You see, this is the glaring contradiction in country music -

a lot of rich guys and girls singing about how hard their lives are.

That's why a lot of people don't like country music.

They think it's phoney. But here's what you need to understand,

a country song is never about the singer, it's about the listener,

because a country song evokes the life of the blue-collar worker.

You know who I'm talking about, that heavy-equipment-lifting,

Dodge-Ram-2500-driving, beer-drinking, critter-hunting,

frustrated-with-the-government good old boy.

# Please, bartender, I want a six-pack to go

# I been drinking all day long... #

Country music is the music of working-class America.

Why? Because it speaks to the heart of rural existence,

and embraces a simpler life.

A good country song is only believable when it's authentic.

# One six-pack to go. #

Now, most folks will tell you that country music's origins consist of

ballads and dance tunes with very simple chord structures

played mostly by stringed instruments.

It's influenced by the Scots, the English, Irish,

Scandinavian and European immigrants who settled in the Appalachian parts

of Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky.

# Way down, way down... #

What you have in the Appalachian South

is a mixture of those ballad traditions.

You have fiddling traditions,

you've got the German influence of folks coming to Pennsylvania

and then migrating down.

You've got African-American influences in the region,

and you've got Native American influences. So the culture of that

was created from this interconnection of a lot of

different people, created music traditions that are a little bit

different from other parts of the country.

I think it's way too easy to assume that country music just trickled

down from the hills of Virginny, or came up from Deliverance country.

The music that Americans brought over from the old country was

incredibly diverse. There were gospel songs and parlour songs

and fiddle dance tunes

and minstrel songs, and even comedy novelty songs,

and every one of those styles had many, many variations.

Let's just take, for instance, one instrument - the fiddle.

Now, what is that?

Is that a French quadrille? Is that a German waltz?

Is that an Irish air, is that a Scottish reel?

Why, only an old-timer like Ivy could tell you.

Fiddle music essentially came from the Shetland Islands, or Norway,

where even today one in three schoolchildren plays one.

That music flowed south, through the British Isles,

across the ocean to Newfoundland,

and then drifted south through Dixie and into Texas,

so it stands to reason there must have been a lot of riverboat workers

playing the thing. It was portable and floatable,

and at every stop in the rivers, folks picked it up,

screeched the bow across the strings

and eventually managed to coax a tune out of it.

Fiddling was actually like a regional dialect. Heck, you could

tell where people were from by their style of fiddling.

That's why Appalachian fiddling

is different than Texas double stop fiddling.

I'd say you were from about 30 miles north of Nashville.

So, with all these fiddle tunes and blues ballads floating around

the South, what was needed was someone to record it.

A few rudimentary commercial recordings had been made

in the early 1900s, but in 1927 a record producer named Ralph Peer

arrived in a small town called Bristol

on the Tennessee-Virginia border. He set up his equipment

and the songs he recorded

became known as the big bang of country music.

That is the genesis of country music as we know it today.

Ralph Peer paid folks 50

a side for their recordings, plus royalties.

So, at the time, that was unprecedented.

It felt very lucrative for the people who came and made records,

especially the Carter family, and Jimmie Rodgers.

Jimmie Rodgers was known as The Singing Brakeman.

Ralph Peer saw the potential in his music, and later, in 1927,

invited him to make further recordings.

One of those recordings was called Blue Yodel,

and though the word "hit" wasn't really an applicable term to music

in those days, that's exactly what Blue Yodel was.

It made Jimmie Rodgers the first recognisable country star.

# T for Texas

# T for Tennessee-hee

# T for Texas, T for Tennessee... #

Rodgers' career was tragically short.

In 1933, at the age of 35, he died of respiratory failure,

but his legacy and his music would live on, cementing his importance

not only to country music but to the entire American song book.

# And T for Thelma

# The gal that made a wreck of me... #

HE YODELS

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

# T for Texas

# Gimme a T for Tennessee... #

Often a song will go through many reincarnations before it finds

its perfect musical bed. With my song Working Dog

I thought I'd give it the bluegrass spin,

because bluegrass is up-tempo and manic, just like a Border collie.

'So I rounded up a handful of the finest bluegrass musicians

'Nashville has to offer.'

Is this the essence of Bluegrass here, to play round one mic?

A lot of people do.

-Yep.

-I'll just play through my crap version of it,

and then you guys will make it sound stunning, all right?

So...

# I'm ready to work, I'm ready to work, I'm ready to work, let's go!

# What's the hold-up? I am ready to work, I'm ready to herd

# I am ready to go, just say the word

# In case you dogs have not heard, I'm a working dog... #

So if anybody has any arrangement ideas, feel free to throw them in.

But that's just... that's the crux of it.

You want to...

Maybe kind of like a swingy type of kick-off thing into it?

So let him do that, and then you come, like...da-ri-ri-ri-ri.

You know? Just follow.

Yeah. Does that sound... Is that bluegrass?

Bluegrassy, yes. Does it sound like what you want?

Is it encapsulating the thinking of a Border collie?

This is a manic, a manic, hyperactive Border collie.

-I guess...

-Over the same chord structure,

so you end up doing something like that.

HE RIFFS

# Ready to go, I'm ready to go, I'm ready to go, hey!

# What's the hold-up? I am ready to work, I'm ready to herd

# I'm ready to go, just say the word

# In case you dogs have not heard, I'm a working dog... #

Was that good? I think we got it, right?

The enthusiasm for bluegrass music often seems to rise and fall

on the release of Southern-themed films, like Deliverance,

or the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?

# I am a man of constant sorrow

# I've seen trouble all my days... #

Set in 1937 in rural Mississippi,

it features scenes where George Clooney

and his Soggy Bottom Boys play their requested hit on the radio.

The soundtrack from the film sold millions.

# The place where he

# Was born and raised... #

Scores of people suddenly rediscovered America's truest

and oldest form of country music.

The only problem is this is complete bullshit.

Bluegrass music hadn't even been invented in 1937.

It didn't come along until the early '40s,

when Bill Monroe joined the Grand Ole Opry and needed to create

a sound that would make acoustic instruments relevant,

because electric instruments were starting to take over.

Monroe borrowed from the endless catalogue of traditional folk

and gospel songs, songs about momma and the old country church,

and the watering hole and the one-room schoolhouse -

stock Americana images -

and he ramped them up to 4/4 time with a double stop fiddle

and a tub-thumping bassline.

No-one called it bluegrass.

That term didn't even come in until the 1950s.

It was just fast hillbilly music

designed to get people at the Grand Ole Opry to tap their feet.

So when somebody who's been newly slobbering over bluegrass' balls

because they watched a George Clooney film

sits down and tries to tell you it's America's truest and purest form

of music because it's always played clean and unamplified

and sung in a high,

lonesome hog-pitched voice...

punch that person in the epiglottis,

and the sound that comes out of their throat will be an authentic

hillbilly whine.

"Ahh."

One of the strange things about America in the '20s and '30s

was there was complete segregation of schools and churches

and restaurants and public transport, but music

was the one thing that flowed across cultural lines,

because both blacks and whites sang gospel in churches.

# Are you lonesome tonight?

# Do you miss me tonight?

# Are you sorry we drifted apart? #

Some of these songs would become future top 40 hits.

Are You Lonesome To-night? - 1960 Elvis Presley hit.

Well, grandma was singing it back in the '20s,

sitting on the front porch,

playing a little Martin parlor guitar, drinking mint juleps.

But when the mint juleps were done and the moonshine came out,

things got a lot darker.

There are a lot of different kinds of songs, you know, in these early

recordings, and if you really look at the content of them...

..you can see how people are singing about, you know,

things that are important to them or emotional to them or whatever.

But you also see a lot of songs that are about...

disasters and current events, and a lot of songs about betrayal,

and, yeah, murder ballads.

People were fascinated with any song that told a morbid tale,

and murder ballads made up a notable portion of traditional music.

One of the most famous was made popular by Fiddlin' John Carson.

Carson recorded a song called Little Mary Phagan,

about a girl killed in a pencil factory. The song was based on

a sensational murder trial taking place at the time in Georgia,

and the convicted killer was a Jewish man named Leo Frank.

In the song, Carson accuses the Governor of Georgia of taking

a million-dollar bribe from a New York bank

to have Frank's sentence commuted from life in prison to lynching.

So the Governor of Georgia had Carson thrown in jail for slander.

# Little Mary Phagan, she went to town one day

# She went to the pencil factory to get her little pay

# She left her home at seven

# She kissed her mother goodbye

# Not one time did the poor child think that she was going to die... #

This is the contradictory basis of all country music - good versus bad,

piety versus hedonism,

rambling versus home, family versus individuality.

# He sneaked along behind her till she reached the metal room

# He laughed and said, Little Mary, you've met your fatal doom... #

Every country song is a three-minute soap opera.

Oh, it might be sweet on the outside but it's bleeding on the inside.

So if you're a country artist

and you're trying to put out an album with 12 songs on it in a year,

you've got exactly one month to get drunk,

depressed or heartbroke to find your inspiration.

Leave me or I'll find someone who will.

That's the motto of country music.

# Oh, he taught me to love him and promised to love

# And he cherished me over all others above

# How my heart is now wondering no misery can tell

# He's left me no warning, no words of farewell... #

After recording for Ralph Peer at the Bristol sessions in 1927,

the Carter Family were an instant sensation.

They would go on to be the most influential group

in country music history.

# Oh, I long to see him and regret the dark hour

# He's gone and neglected this pale wildwood flower. #

The wholesome crinoline and orchids image of the Carter Family

belied the darkness of a lot of their music.

Wildwood Flower, the most enduring country song ever written,

was about waking up to find out you've been dumped.

If you know anything about country music,

you're aware that the Carter lineage stretches from old AP,

through Maybelle, Sara, June Carter, Johnny Cash, Nick Lowe,

Carlene Carter,

more probably being incubated somewhere in Tennessee right now.

The Carter family instilled all the virtues on the surface

of country music - purity, decency, domesticity and, most importantly,

they projected the idea that country music

is a family participation exercise.

And like so many musical families that would follow, you know,

the Jacksons, the Beach Boys,

perceived unity generally hides a nest of domestic abuse.

AP and Sara Carter pretended to be married,

even though they lived separately.

AP served as a kind of musical director, hand-picking the songs,

controlling their schedules, often taking credit for composing a song,

you know, generally inflating his own sense of self-importance.

But the real beauty of the Carters was in their music, their vocals,

their singing arrangements.

Oh, God, people love to hear about those green hills of Virginny,

and that little poplar log house,

and that big home in heaven waiting for them,

where there is always 50 miles of elbow room.

# I'm going where

# There's no depression

# To the lovely land

# That's free from cares... #

In the cities of America, the Great Depression had arrived,

suddenly and devastatingly. But country folks had been living out

the Great Depression for the last hundred years, and the music

of the Carter Family seemed to shield them

from the evils of the big bad world.

But for a big chunk of their career,

the Carters were singing those songs about the green hills of Virginny

while actually living in Del Rio, Texas,

broadcasting from a seedy border town radio station called XERA.

And it was stations like this that played a vital role in bringing

country music to a wider audience.

The music of Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family and Bradley Kincaid,

country music's pioneers, was very limited and very regional,

and it was broadcast over low watt stations

throughout the Appalachians.

How it earned a wider listenership is a very bizarre story,

but here it goes.

This guy, JR Brinkley,

a quack doctor from North Carolina

who had been systematically ran out of every state

he ever attempted to practise in.

He'd never earned a medical diploma, never been to medical school,

never owned a licence to practise.

He was a snake oil salesman.

Brinkley moved to a small town called Milford, Kansas,

and set up a practice with a phoney mail order diploma.

One day, a patient came in and complained that he was impotent.

Brinkley had a great idea. See, he'd been observing these goats

and noticed how randy they got when they were mating.

He suggested to the patient that if he had a goat's libido,

he could drive the ladies wild.

For some reason, the patient thought this was a stonking good idea,

and agreed to have Brinkley insert goat's testicles into his scrotum.

Brinkley performed the operation with home-made anaesthesia

and unsterilized equipment, and sure enough, two weeks later,

the guy came back to announce that he was now a bona fide stud.

Pretty soon, Brinkley was inserting goat testicles into dozens

of patients, claiming that it cured prostate cancer, flatulence,

catarrh, headaches, impotence,

and to broaden his appeal

he purchased a 50,000W radio station, KFKB,

and started advertising goat gland treatments on the radio.

-ON RADIO:

-You men, you're holding back, many of you, right now,

listening to me, and you know you're sick. You know your prostate's

infected and diseased, and you know that unless some relief comes to you

that you're going to be in the undertaker's parlour,

on the old cold slab, being embalmed for a funeral. Come at once to

the Brinkley Hospital before it's everlastingly too late.

In between infomercials he played country music,

both live and recorded.

Because of this frankly irresistible mix of country music and goat ball

testimony, KFKB soon became

the Midwest's most listened to radio station.

But then the Kansas State Medical Board decided to investigate

Brinkley, and soon discovered he wasn't remotely qualified

to be a doctor.

Then the Federal Radio Commission retracted his licence to broadcast.

Brinkley left Kansas and he moved to Del Rio, Texas.

Then he bought a 50,000W Mexican radio station

right across the border in a village called Villa Acuna,

and cos there were no regulations in Mexico about signal strength,

he upped the wattage to one million watts.

Then he invited the Carter Family down from Virginia and more or less

made them the house band.

To give you an idea of how powerful one million watts is,

birds were flying past the XERA transmission tower and exploding.

You didn't need a radio to listen to XERA,

you could hear it off an electric fence, or the head of a shovel.

People were walking around with metal fillings in their teeth

listening to the Carter Family

sing Wildwood Flower inside their craniums.

XERA and its line-up of Texas musicians could be heard throughout

a good portion of the United States,

and that is how regional country music spread through

this great country of ours. True story, hand to God.

# The sign says welcome to Nashville

# From whatever road you've been down... #

Nashville, Tennessee.

People call it the country music capital of the world.

Music City.

Home to the Country Music Hall of Fame,

annual Country Music Awards Festival, and, of course,

the Grand Ole Opry.

# Where idols and legends have stood... #

The greatest musicians, the greatest producers, the greatest studios,

the greatest songwriters are in Nashville, Tennessee, still today.

# Hollywood

# But it's lonely at sundown in Nashville... #

You can't get away from Nashville and country music. It's not just

where the business is, but it's where so many great players are.

# Each evening at sundown in Nashville

# They sweep broken dreams off the street... #

So how did Nashville become country music USA?

In 1932, it was just a sleepy

southern town with a church on every corner, and its biggest industry

was printing bibles and gospel sheet music, but it did have one thing

going for it - it was home to one of the largest radio stations in

America, one of the few that could compete with border blaster XERA -

WSM.

50,000W.

A month after it began broadcasting,

WSM ripped off a show outright from WLS in Chicago, called Barn Dance,

and aired it live on Saturday nights.

If you wanted to hear Patsy Montana, Red Foley, Hank Snow or Roy Rogers,

you tuned into Barn Dance,

and the WSM Barn Dance is the main reason that Nashville - not Atlanta,

not Bristol, not Shreveport - Nashville -

became the centre of commercial country music in America,

especially after the show changed its name to the Grand Ole Opry.

In 1940 the Opry was the only show in town,

and its biggest star was Mr Roy Acuff.

# From the great Atlantic Ocean to the wide Pacific shores

# From the queen of flowing mountains

# To the south belles by the shore... #

Champion fiddler with a big booming voice, he would stride out on

the Opry stage and sing about the Wabash Cannonball.

# As she rolled into the station

# You could hear all the people say

# There's a girl from Tennessee

# She's long and she's tall

# She came down from Birmingham

# On the Wabash Cannonball... #

At this point, there were more songs

about trains in America than actual trains.

The Wabash Cannonball invoked the Great Depression,

when destitute men rode the rails. That mythical Cannonball would

transport them to the land of milk and honey. Roy Acuff made a fortune

singing about poverty, and he was a very astute businessman.

I think the beginning of Nashville

as a true music recording centre

comes with the establishment of Acuff-Rose in 1942.

Roy Acuff went to Fred Rose and said something to the effect of,

"I've got some money that I've saved up that I want to invest,

"I want to start a publishing company and I'd like you to run it."

The Acuff-Rose partnership reinvented the publishing game.

Instead of just selling the sheet music songs were printed on,

Acuff and Rose sold the songs themselves - in other words,

they copyrighted their own music and chose who they wanted to record it.

They set up an office on 8th Ave South in Nashville.

One day Fred and his son Wesley

were engaged in a fierce game of ping-pong

when a gangly, near-sighted man from Montgomery, Alabama, walked in.

That man's name was Hiram King Williams,

or as he called himself, Hank.

# Say, hey, good lookin'

# What you got cookin'?

# How's about cookin' something up with me?

# Say, hey, sweet baby, don't you think maybe... #

Now, when I was a kid and would hear Hank on the radio,

I always thought I was listening to a 60-year-old man singing,

because his songs reeked of alienation, drifters, love,

the fear of God and sometimes just good-looking ladies.

But he sang hard, pushing the inherent limits of country music

as far as it would go.

# So if you want to have fun, come along with me

# Say, hey, good lookin'

# What you got cookin'?

# How's about cookin' something up with me? #

When Hank came along, that was a whole different story.

Hank was a tough character to deal with when he was drinking,

but he sold huge numbers of records.

# So how's about saving all your time for me? #

For all the mythology surrounding Hank Williams,

one crucial thing is often overlooked.

Up to this point, most artists did not write their own songs.

They had very little control over what they recorded,

pretty much up to the behest of the producers and the publishers,

but not Hank Williams. He was a true singer-songwriter.

That's why he had a very direct influence on his audiences.

It's hard to explain the sway

that Hank Williams held over his audience,

because, you know, the guy didn't sway.

He wasn't one of those hip-shakers like Elvis,

who would come along later.

He just stood there and sang.

# I try so hard, my dear

# To show that you're my every dream... #

Most of his songs were written in perfect metre.

In fact, they were so meticulously constructed that when one day,

out of the blue, he announced he wanted to record a song

called Lovesick Blues, Acuff and Rose were thrown for a loop.

Lovesick Blues was written by

a couple of Tin Pan Alley-type songwriters,

and Hank's singing that song as part of his repertoire,

and every time he'd do it, the crowd went wild.

I think they really just loved, you know...

# I got a feelin' called the blues... #

# I got a feeling called the blues

# Oh, Lord, since my baby said goodbye... #

Hank was determined to cut the song

because he thought this thing could be tremendous,

so they were cutting in Cincinnati.

They had about half an hour to go

and Hank says, "Let's cut that Lovesick Blues thing,"

and Fred was not interested in it, or Fred didn't like the song.

Fred said, you know, it's all out of metre,

and he and Fred really argued over it.

He said, "I get encore after encore down at the Hayride,

"they love this."

Fred finally gave in. I think Fred understood either he was going to

cut another song on this session or he was going to argue for

a half-hour with Hank for the rest of the session.

Lovesick Blues was the song that

made the first country superstar a superstar.

# I got the lovesick blues. #

See, when it comes to writing a hit song,

nobody knows a god dammed thing.

Lovesick Blues shot right to number one,

catapulted Hank Williams into the superstar strata,

and in his short career he had over 30 hit singles,

11 of which went to number one.

More importantly, a lot of them crossed over into other genres

when more mainstream artists recorded them.

# Hey, good lookin'

# What you got cookin'? #

Hey Good Lookin',

Cold Cold Heart,

Your Cheating Heart,

Jambalaya, all became hits for big-time top 40 artists.

They were all window dressed and slicker than snot on a door knob,

but they were originally written as a modest country ballad.

Now, not every country song can transcend to other genres,

but any song can be countrified.

# I think it's gonna be a long, long time

# Till touchdown brings me round again to find

# I'm not the man they think I am at home

# Oh, no, no, no

# I'm a rocket man

# Rocket man, burning out his fuse up here alone... #

The saddest thing about Hank Williams is how his tragic

lifestyle always seems to overshadow

his incredible contribution to music.

He is often cited as the first proto-rocker, because, you know,

he was a road warrior, and an adulterer,

and an alcoholic since teenage,

and because he suffered from spina bifida, often imbibed in a triple

cocktail of morphine, chloral hydrate and whisky.

He died on New Year's Eve 1953

at the age of 29 in the back seat of a Cadillac

on the way to a gig in Ohio.

On the floor, they found empty liquor bottles and some lyrics

to an unfinished song, and a strange bruise on his head

that no-one's ever been able to explain.

It was a stupid, mundane way to die,

no matter how you try to romanticise it.

In fact, in 2016, a British actor by the name of Tom Hiddleston

made the disastrous decision to try and portray Hank's life on screen,

somehow convincing himself that his astute RADA training could capture

the essence of a pain-wracked, hard-lived,

morally-ambiguous Alabama troubadour.

Oh, Hiddleston plumbed the depths

and nuances of Hank's life in a way not seen since Dick Van Dyke's

total immersion into Cockney culture in Mary Poppins.

The film was called I Saw The Light,

and indeed I did,

after five minutes, and the light read "exit".

# You killed all the love I ever had... #

When you're listening to those classic songs of early Nashville,

songs like Bye Bye Love by the Everly Bros,

or Oh, Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison,

chances are it was owned by Roy Acuff and Fred Rose.

They were the kingpins of Nashville publishing.

And because it always begins with a song,

the writers are the true spine of country music.

# Well, I've been hounding her for such a long time

# Trying to impress her with my hillbilly whine

# But she told me I was barking up the wrong tree

# She liked every kind of music but country... #

In Nashville, songwriting is built around the idea of a hit.

You want to have something that is compact, that is very succinct

and that has hooks in it.

Nashville songwriting tends to happen in teams.

You really can't get a hit in Nashville any more

unless you've co-written that song with somebody.

# She said listening to music was her favourite pastime

# But she told me I was trying to swim upstream

# She liked every kind of music but country... #

How many albums did you make in Nashville?

I guess two and a half.

And were you pressurised into, like, sitting down with other songwriters?

Totally. They introduce you to people

who are strangers, and you sit in a room, and one guy goes...

Like, one of the first guys I got paired up with took a copy

of Time magazine, and the cover said Flying Blind.

He said, "That's a good phrase, let's write Flying Blind today."

"And how does that relate to a relationship?"

"OK, she has, uh...

"She's strayed from the marriage and now he's flying blind,

"but he wants to fly back to the runway where..."

And you just, like, build on a metaphor,

a romantic metaphor, and it's,

I mean, it's an amusement, a bit like a crossword puzzle,

but, you know, as you can probably see from that illustration,

the authentic emotion is quickly drained from that exercise,

as you sit with a stranger and bounce words around.

Try to come up with a hook.

# She liked everything about me 'cept for one thing

# She liked every kind of music but country

# Yeah, she liked everything about me 'cept for one thing. #

-Do you have a dog?

-Yeah.

-What kind?

-It's a pit bull.

-OK, this is not a song about a pit bull.

It's a song about a Border collie.

# Fuck you, poodles, toys and schnauzers

# Round these parts I wear the trousers

# You want to fight me, get in line

# I'd kick your butt but I ain't got time

# Go fetch a stick and lick your balls

# I bet you squat to pee because you don't know what it's like at all

# To be a goddamn working dog

# Off my porch, get out of my way, I'm a goddamn working dog. #

That comes from experience, that tune.

I'm thinking of giving it to Ray Wylie Hubbard,

I think he would record.

I think you would have to throw some dirtier words into it

than simply "fuck", but, yes,

I think Ray would be interested in that.

And then there's...what's her name? Taylor Swift might, I can hear.

No, no, I'm thinking of country artists.

-Oh, God, country, you should have said!

-Yeah, yeah, yeah.

# I'm a goddamn working dog. #

# Crazy... #

"Everything is cyclical" has become a common refrain,

especially when referring to artists who believe in the traditions

of country music. Country music always wears its influences

on its sleeve, and it doesn't try to hide it.

When someone says, "Oh, that gal, that guy is an original,"

they probably haven't looked hard enough.

What a country artist does is finds

a wellspring and diverts it to his own backyard.

Hank Williams walked into that ping-pong match and he demanded

that Roy Acuff listen to his music

because Roy Acuff was his childhood hero.

He had the Roy Acuff syndrome,

and Roy was flattered and offered to record Hank Williams,

and then Hank took what Roy did and took it further.

He sang harder and he partied...

more darkly.

Now, somewhere that lineage is expanding -

a place called Littlefield, Texas,

a contemporary of the great Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings.

High school dropout, part-time juvenile delinquent is succumbing

to the Hank Williams syndrome.

You see how this all links together?

# Somebody told me

# When I first got to Nashville

# You've finally got it made

# Ol' Hank made it here

# We're all sure that you will

# But I don't think Hank done it this way

# I don't think Hank done it this way... #

Waylon was always going to have a major influence on country music.

He had the demeanour, he had the authenticity,

and as a kid he used to sneak into a black blues joint in Littlefield

called Jaybirds. Do drop in.

The man who called himself Chuck Berry Junior,

who wasn't Chuck Berry, taught Waylon how to play Lovesick Blues,

but with the emphasis on the blues part.

He told Waylon to replace the top E string of his guitar with a banjo

string to bend it easier,

and to shave down the frets on his guitar to get a lower action,

and that is where Waylon got his unique sound from.

Once he discovered the wonders of a phase shift and a drummer who played

slightly behind the beat, his style became even more pronounced,

but his lifestyle was channelling Hank,

right down to the drug addiction and the lonesome and mean persona.

# I've always been crazy

# And the trouble that it's put me through

# I've been busted for things that I didn't do... #

So, this lineage of influence just continues.

For instance, today a lot of people might say that a fellow named

Sturgill Simpson is a Waylon doppelganger.

# Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran

# North Korea, tell me where does it end?

# The bodies keep piling up with every day

# How many more are they gonna send... #

Sturgill has a very literate style,

and damn if he doesn't have that Waylon timbre in his voice.

# Well, son, I hope you don't grow up

# Believing that you've got to be a puppet to be a man... #

But he's not Waylon, he just sounds a bit like him,

and in country music, a little bit of connectivity goes a long way.

The secret is to replicate, not regurgitate.

Hey, I'm not going to lie to you, folks, there's a heck of a lot of

regurgitation going on in Nashville right now. This town goes through

phases of creativity and stagnation, and right now,

woo, it's stinkin'!

A lot of fake hillbillies singing about what they think country people

want to hear about.

# You can buy me a boat

# You can buy me a truck to pull it

# You can buy me a Yeti 110

# Iced down with some silver bullets... #

Pretty much the inspiration for any modern country song can be found at

your average dry goods store.

Come on, pick a row, any row.

# You turn me on

# Girl, you know you do

# But you tear me up

# Even better than the blues. #

# I ain't cut out to high line poles but

# I'm pretty good at drinking beer. #

# Just look for the girl in the blue bandana... #

A lot of the songs I hear on the radio, whether it's Texas

or Nashville today, I can't tell what artist it is.

When we were coming up, if Waylon came on the radio,

you didn't have to wait for the DJ to say that was Waylon Jennings,

you knew it was a Waylon song.

But nowadays, to me, the production is just so middle-of-the-road safe

that you can't always tell.

# Hey, get rhythm

# When you get the blues

# Come on, get rhythm

# When you get the blues... #

The current creative deficit in Nashville is nothing new.

Back in 1964, it was Johnny Cash and Buck Owens keeping this town alive,

that was it. There were no new Brenda Lees or Elvis Presleys

or Everly brothers coming along,

and worse, The Beatles had invaded. Yeah, The Beatles.

You'd probably imagine Nashville would consider four floppy-haired

Liverpudlians singing homolytic triads of "yeah yeah yeahs" to be

a bit of a joke, but by the end of the year, when The Beatles had

nine of the top 100 songs in America,

Nashville knew they needed someone to match The Beatles in terms of

musical articulation.

And that man, of course, was Roger Miller.

# Well, atta boy, girl

# Atta way to make me cry

# Atta boy, boy, you make me wish I could die... #

Roger Miller had been hanging around Nashville as a songwriter for years.

He'd scored some modest hits for Jim Reeves and Ray Price,

and he had a reputation in Nashville as a brilliant lyricist.

Often, songwriters would be in a bind, and they would call up

old Roger, and he would quote them a killer lyric right on the spot.

# All you do is make me sit around feelin' blue

# Atta boy, girl, atta way to hurt my pri-ide... #

The only thing was, he had no real passion for country music.

He wanted to move to California and be an actor.

He had a small recording contract with Mercury Records, and he asked

for an advance of 1,600 so he could move to Los Angeles.

The head of Mercury said,

"Yeah, I'll give you the money if you'll give me 16 songs."

So Miller went into a studio

and cranked out 16 songs that were primarily

syncopated gibberish, titles like Chug-a-Lug, Do-Wacka-Do and Dang Me.

# Dang me, dang me

# They oughta take a rope and hang me

# High from the highest tree

# Woman, would you weep for me? #

Dang Me shot to number one on the charts and stayed there

for six weeks. Later on, Chug-a-Lug became a massive hit,

not just on the country chart, on the pop charts as well.

# Bllll-bbbb, I done a double back flip

# Chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug

# Make you want to holler hi-de-ho

# Burns your tummy, don'tcha know

# Chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug

# Tacka-ticka-tacka-waaaah. #

See, one man had made Nashville relevant again,

and just to prove that he wasn't just a series of do-wacka-dos

and dippy-lippy-do-dos, a year later

he recorded the greatest drunk-proof karaoke song ever -

King Of The Road, a song that anyone can sing,

no matter how smashed they are.

That was the genius of Roger Miller.

Look, I don't want to get pedantic or anything,

but the essence of any great country song is always the lyrics.

There has to be a narrative,

something that explores the, I don't know,

the fragility of life, family, relationships,

the fact that there is no easy solution to the contradictions

of life, rural values or dogs.

When country music gets away from that essence, those core values,

it sucks. Roger Miller's lyrics were basically sending up the banality

of country music at the time, but he wasn't a novelty act.

He'd written great songs, brilliant songs,

songs like Husbands And Wives, or It Only Hurts When I Cry.

And he knew a good song when he heard one, which is why in 1969

he recorded a song by a young songwriter named

Kris Kristofferson,

who was hanging out here at the Exit/In on Elliston Place.

He'd only just arrived in Nashville, and he'd written a song called

Me And Bobby McGee.

# Feeling good was easy, Lord

# When Bobby sang the blues

# Feeling good was good enough for me

# Good enough for me and Bobby McGee... #

Kristofferson was one of those prodigal golden children who always

seemed to show up in Nashville when they need him the most.

# Bobby shared the secrets of my soul... #

When Johnny Cash recorded

Kristofferson's Sunday Morning Coming Down

it immediately went to number one, and when he started telling anyone

who would listen that Kris Kristofferson and

Mickey Newbury were the two hot new songwriters in town,

then Kris Kristofferson was anointed.

Do you understand?

Patronage is a very, very important part of country music's endurance -

people support each other.

You don't get those knock-down, drag-out feuds that always involve

Taylor Swift and Kanye West, or Taylor Swift and Nicki Minaj,

or Taylor Swift and every boyfriend who's ever dumped her.

The point I'm making is that nowhere,

by any stretch of the imagination,

in any realm, in this or any other universe,

is Taylor Swift a country artist.

# There's a road in Oklahoma... #

Kristofferson and a group of friends - Willy Nelson, Waylon,

Jessi Colter, Tompall Glaser and Billy Joe Shaver - had taken to

viewing themselves as rebels within Nashville's music immunity.

By rebels, I mean that their stuff wasn't exactly flying out of

the record bins, but they had cultivated an outlaw image,

and that brought in a whole new fan base,

made up of some of the more marginalised members of society.

# I pushed that load

# From here to someday... #

The outlaw image was poles apart from that Carter Family

wholesome country music. It was a reaction

to the slick Nashville sound, but the irony was that

Nashville itself was about to cash in on the movement.

The head of RCA Nashville, Jerry Bradley,

was about to get shit-canned. He wasn't selling any country albums,

but he did own a back catalogue of Willie, Waylon,

Jessi and Tompall material,

so he thumbed through a Time Life book on the Old West and found

a wanted poster, took it into RCA's design department and said,

"Hey, let's put Willie and Waylon on a wanted poster."

Then he chucked on 11 songs that he just kind of had laying around.

The album had all the production values of a blown speaker

in the back of a Mexican Chevy, but wouldn't you know,

it would become the biggest selling album in the history

of country music.

# Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys

# Don't let 'em pick guitars or drive them old trucks

# Make 'em be doctors and lawyers and such... #

That album and its follow-up, which featured Willie and Waylon

singing Mommas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys,

created a new legion of country converts.

# Even with someone they love... #

Never mind that this scheme was cooked up by RCA,

pretty much the quintessential embodiment of corporate thinking,

it didn't matter. These guys were selling records,

so they played up the image to the hilt.

There's still no-one that I'd rather introduce than my musical comrades,

Kris Kristofferson,

Waylon Jennings, and the baby-faced kid from Texas named Willie Nelson.

They call us The Highwaymen.

# I was a highwayman

# Along the coach roads I did ride

# With sword and pistol by my side... #

The distinction of original bad boy, of course, belongs to Johnny Cash,

who would team up with Willie, Waylon and Kris to form

The Highwaymen, a country supergroup

that took the outlaw motif to its natural conclusion.

Now, Cash didn't actively promote a bad boy image,

but neither did he try to deny it.

There were rumours he'd been in prison.

Not true. The only brushes he'd ever had with the law was when his

Winnebago somehow accidentally set a camp ground on fire,

and once for possession of painkillers,

but to America he was The Man In Black.

Again, not to evince an aura of bad-assness,

he just wanted to dress like one of his heroes,

the human rights activist and calypso singer Harry Belafonte.

# Perhaps I may become a highwayman again

# Or I may simply be a single drop of rain

# But I will remain

# And I'll be back again, and again and again and again and again... #

In the homogenised world of country music,

Johnny Cash will always stand alone.

He sang in that deep baritone, he married into a pedigree family,

he is revered in folk circles as much as the Nashville scene.

In fact, people who hate country music love Johnny Cash.

Love him! And Dolly Parton.

People would love country music a lot more if it would maintain

some kind of constant standard, but it never does.

In the 1980s, one man single-handedly reduced

country music to a bovine cesspool of boot-scooting,

line-dancing vulgaria.

That man's name was John Travolta.

Hey. How you doing?

-Fine!

-Anything I can do for you?

-Not yet.

Are you a real cowboy?

Well, that depends on what you think a real cowboy is.

The movie Urban Cowboy came along and just really screwed it up,

cos then it wasn't about the music, it was about mechanical bulls,

you know? Like a country disco, you know, line dancing and all that.

It just... It kind of ruined it, I thought.

Country music had become a backing track for scores of big-haired

secretaries and weekend Wyatt Earps to join together in a drunken

lockstep, and slip and slide through puddles of Margarita,

while Johnny Lee sang.

# I was looking for love in all the wrong places

# Looking for love in too many faces... #

Nashville desperately needed to get back to its roots.

Ricky Skaggs, a musical prodigy with the fingers of Bill Monroe

and the head of Conway Twitty,

believed that country music needed to pay more attention to its elders,

to dance with the one that brung you, so to speak.

# Well, these Highway Forty blues

# I've walked holes in both my shoes

# Counted the days since I've been gone

# And I'd love to see the lights of home... #

It was a combination of vintage stylings, carefully crafted vocals,

and, most importantly, superb musicianship.

The country acts who followed in the late '80s - Vince Gill,

Randy Travis, George Strait - were a new generation of musicians who had

grown up in the age of rock and roll. They didn't strum guitars,

they played the everlasting shit out of them.

FAST RIFF

But if you put in the time and the shoe leather,

eventually you may find yourself on stage with Albert Lee,

one of the greatest country guitarist ever,

who just happens to be English.

At that point, you've been benighted.

If there's one certainty in this world,

it's that Nashville will always survive.

It has a formula and it sticks to it,

but the best country music hasn't been coming from Nashville.

It's been coming from a place 850 miles west of Nashville.

# Screw you, we're from Texas

# Screw you, we're from Texas... #

Austin, Texas, calls itself the live music capital of the world,

and since the 1970s it's really become an alternative to Nashville.

# We're from Texas

# We're from Texas

# Ah, screw you... #

We tend to think of Nashville songwriters as being craftsmen,

and we tend to think of Texas songwriters as being poets.

# Now don't get me wrong, I love the USA and the other states

# Yeah, they're OK... #

Texas is very much a conservative state,

but Austin is very much a liberal bastion.

# We got Willie and Jackie and Jack, Robert Earle

# And a whole lot more So screw you... #

Austin is really probably

a more important music town than Nashville now.

# Screw you, we're from Texas

# We're from Texas, screw you... #

What does a town need to become musically vital?

It needs a lot of competing styles, that's what.

In and around Austin in the 1960s, you could hear folk, honky-tonk,

bluegrass, Cajun, zydeco, Tejano, and even some rocking German oompah.

If that sounds like an impossible stew of cacophony, it is.

One of the great things about being a Texas songwriter is that you have

the wellspring of Texas tradition to draw from, always, right,

and so if things seemed to get to be a little too commercial

or a little too out of touch with reality,

you can always go back and dig into cowboy songs and cowboy mythology,

or go back to the blues roots to reinvent your work,

or to reinvent the music that's coming out of that community.

The whole thing about the Texas thing is there's this whole

independent history of Texas, you know, being very independent,

"don't tell us what to do."

You know, like, we didn't have to depend on a record label saying,

"Yes, we'll give you a deal, and here's the money," you just did it.

And that's the great thing about

a lot of the songwriters and musicians that come down here.

They have this incredible freedom to write.

-I've written a song for you.

-OK.

-You want to hear it?

-Yeah.

You're going to like this, you're going to want to record this.

-OK.

-It's called The Border Collie Song.

That's a good title.

# I'm ready to work, I'm ready to work, I'm ready to work, let's go!

# What's the hold-up? I am ready to work, I'm ready to herd

# I'm ready to go, just say the word

# In case you dogs have not heard I'm a goddamn working dog

HE LAUGHS

# Working dog, you son of a bitch I take my bath in a drainage ditch

# Wait one second Let me scratch this itch

# I'm back

# Yippee-ki-oh, yippie-ki-yay

# I can do this all damn day, get off of my porch, get out of my way

# I'm a goddamn working dog

# Off my porch, get out of my way,

# I'm a goddamn working dog. #

-I like it.

-It's yours!

# I'm a rolling stone from Texas

# Rolling stone from the plains... #

Texas has always been an incredibly conservative state.

It's Republican ground zero, but Austin has two things going for it -

it's the state capital, and it's home to the University of Texas,

so if there was ever going to be any semblance of progressive thinking

in the Lone Star State, it was going to be in Austin.

Every time there's a new generation of young people coming to town,

there's a new musical revolution,

there's always something new, something fresh.

And this is the reason Austin was able to develop a music scene

that was different to Nashville.

In the late '60s, it was attracting hippies, activists, baby boomers,

people looking for an artistic oasis.

They had to build their own scene in Austin,

so that they could have long hair

and smoke a little marijuana and listen to the music

that they cared about, and still be safe doing it.

# My baby... #

Now, in the early '60s,

listening to counterculture music in Texas consisted of coming down here,

tapping your penny loafers to a sizzling hot folk trio

at Threadgill's.

In 1933, this place had been a gas station,

and a fellow named Kenneth Threadgill worked there.

He pumped enough gas to eventually buy the joint

and turn it into a hootenanny tavern.

After World War II, he started running open mic nights,

basically so he could get up and yodel with the musicians.

There was no stage. The musicians just sat amongst each other

and played, and then old Kenny would wander over and start yodelling.

HE YODELS

This literally was the beginning of the Austin scene.

A little dive bar kind of on the outskirts of town that had been open

since the '30s, it was the first place to get a beer license

after Prohibition, and they have these things,

they called them hootenannies, and they would sing folk songs,

and they would trick cheap beer and eat cheap hamburgers

and have a nice time a couple of days a week.

And you had people who were, you know, aspiring folk singers,

people who were interested in Jimmie Rodgers' songs,

going all the way back to the beginnings of country music,

and people who were interested in the blues.

But all these styles emphasised a point. This was music about

Lone Star heritage, played by Texans for Texans.

In the mid-1960s, two musicians

from a band called Hootenanny Hoots were on their way here to perform.

They picked up a scruffy hitchhiker along the way,

and she accompanied them to Threadgill's.

Notably, as so many hitchhikers did at the time,

she was carrying an autoharp.

# Don't you know that you're nothing more than a one-night stand... #

She was a University of Texas student with a relaxed approach

to personal hygiene and a fondness for Pearl beer.

At UT, she had actually been voted Ugliest Man On Campus.

Her name was Janis Joplin.

Wednesday night at Threadgill's, and that's where everybody heard

Janis Joplin sing in public regularly for the first time.

And that was right here?

And that was right here in this little space.

# Don't you know that you're nothing more than a one-night stand... #

Soon people were packing Threadgill's on a Wednesday night

to watch Janis perform. She would

of course go on to become the pre-eminent blues rock singer

of the '60s, Queen of the West Coast psychedelic movement,

and when she OD'd in 1970,

kind of a poster child for rock and roll excess.

She's not really associated with the Texas music scene,

but that was the thing about Kenny Threadgill -

he would let anybody who wanted to, perform.

The general consensus is that her excessive lifestyle

is what led to Janis's demise, but actually that is not true.

Her autopsy confirmed that so many little pieces of her heart

had been taken that she could no longer function.

# Take it

# Take another little piece of my heart now, baby

# Break it

# Break another little bit of my heart now, darling, yeah, yeah... #

Tragic, just tragic.

This was the crazy thing about the emerging Austin scene.

There was such an eclectic mix of people and music,

no-one could quite define what it was.

In the late '60s, Texas music had a problem

converting rednecks into hippies.

See, rock and psychedelia were sweeping the coast,

but Texas was resistant,

and the Threadgill's vibe needed a bigger format, a place to expand.

# There's a place every one of us can go to

# Maybe you have been there once or twice... #

This place would be the Armadillo World Headquarters.

Struggling promoter Eddie Wilson opened its doors in 1973

to anyone who wanted good music and cheap beer.

Our job was to find a place to play so that we could have a payday

every now and then. And I had discovered a huge, empty building,

it looked like a National Guard armoury.

We set out to try to fill it up,

and it stayed empty most of the time for the first couple of years.

It was lonely and miserable, and...

I felt sorry for myself.

But then gradually people heard about it,

-and then they sought it out.

-Were you a fan of music at this time?

Did you know what you were doing, did you know who you were booking,

-or could anybody play?

-I didn't know anything at all

about the contemporary music scene.

It was an education by submersion,

and luckily I came up before I drowned.

# The doorman winks at you on your way out... #

The Armadillo World Headquarters

would have a huge effect on Texas music.

It was a venue where the world of the hippie and the world of

the redneck collided, for better or worse, and the artists who were

looking for an alternative to Nashville started drifting there.

One singer-songwriter

forever associated with this town would write a song

that somehow brought it all together.

In 1972, a Dallas-born musician named Michael Martin Murphey sat on

a rooftop in New York City and composed the song Cosmic Cowboy.

When I left Los Angeles,

I had been through a lot, and I said,

# Burial grounds and merry-go-rounds are all the same to me. #

I'd been living close to Disneyland,

and a lot of my friends were dying, from drugs. So...

# Burial grounds and merry-go-rounds are all the same to me

# Horses on posts and kids and ghosts

# The spirits they all are set free... #

Now, he was homesick for Texas,

he was clearly fed up with the music recording business,

and he was probably stoned,

but the song envisioned a mythical place where a musician can thrive

free of competition and creative restraints,

you know, a place where he can ride and rope and hoop.

# I just wanna be a cosmic cowboy

# I just want to ride and rope and hoop... #

My second album was based on trying to describe this movement

that was beginning to come together.

Jerry Jeff Walker, Kris Kristofferson,

we had a cosmic perspective, and it was very poetic.

So that's why I called them the Cosmic Cowboys.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

You had the cosmic cowboy hippie thing going on,

and then the country thing,

and when they kind of meshed, you had these long-haired, you know,

dope-smoking hippies wearing cowboy hats and cowboy boots, you know?

And it was very cool.

Now, Murphey had grown up on cowboy songs,

so he was very enamoured with the imagery of the south-west,

and he worked it into a modern scenario,

that of a frustrated musician

going back to an earlier time in a simpler place.

He invoked a lot of very specific Austin references,

like Hippie Hollow, which is a local skinny-dipping spot,

or Lone Star beer, Armadillo World Headquarters.

In other words, he made Austin both specific and mythical,

and he recorded a song with a very imprecise, spontaneous background

that kind of rejected the Nashville slick style sound.

It wasn't Murphey's intention to galvanise the subculture,

but that's kind of what happened.

Now, if you were a Baptist-raised, backsliding Texan

who'd somehow succumbed to the wiles of grade A weed,

you had a name to call yourself - Cosmic Cowboy.

Murphey struck a blow of independence for

all those songwriters looking to avoid Nashville,

and scores of Texas-born musicians took up the mantle.

Guys like BW Stevenson and Jerry Jeff Walker showed up

from California. Others, like Gary P Nunn's

Lost Gonzo Band, had never left Texas.

The underlying theme of so much of this early Austin music

was homesickness, and wistfulness, and escape.

Even if you've never been to Texas,

guys like Michael Martin Murphey

and Gary P Nunn made you feel like you are missing out on something

if you weren't here. They were creating a shit-kicking,

freewheeling oasis in a sea of Richard Nixon conservatism.

You only have to go up north to Oklahoma

to realise that country music was still the domain of conservatives.

One of the most popular songs at the time

was Okie From Muskogee by Merle Haggard.

# Leather boots were still in style for manly footwear

# Beads and Roman sandals won't be seen

# And football's still the roughest thing on campus

# And the kids here still respects the college dean

# And I'm proud to be an Okie from Muskogee... #

Nixon's America really cottoned on to Okie From Muskogee.

It was a backlash to all those commie pinko hippies

protesting the Vietnam War. But there's always been speculation

that Haggard wrote the song as a joke,

an accusation he's chosen not to clarify when interviewed.

You didn't have any tremendous inspiration,

-or motivation behind writing that song at the time?

-No.

-Of course,

you know it was controversial at the time,

and some people probably still hold it against you.

Yeah, I don't know,

maybe they do, I'll argue the point with them.

You know, I think what they were actually...

The main bitch during the time at which Okie From Muskogee came out

was the right to do whatever the hell you wanted to do.

I jumped out there and did it and they jumped on me.

Think about that a minute.

Whether Haggard meant it as a joke or not, a few years later

Ray Wylie Hubbard answered the song

with Up Against The Wall Redneck Mother,

a satire about rednecks who enjoy inflicting copious amounts

of whoop-ass on peace-loving hippies.

# He was born in Oklahoma... #

The song was alternately performed by Hubbard and another

influential Texas songwriter, Jerry Jeff Walker.

# It's up against the wall, redneck mother

HE YODELS

# Mother who has raised her son so well

-# So well

-So well

# He's 34 and drinkin' in a honky-tonk

# Kickin' hippies' asses and raisin' hell... #

He thinks Johnny Gimble hung the moon.

In August of 1973, Walker recorded his Viva Terlingua album

entirely in this small Texas hill town

with intermittent electricity called Luckenbach.

He wanted to reject the formal approach to making albums,

so he invited a lot of musical friends, and they showed up with

some half-thought-out ideas and rough musical sketches, and about

18,000 gallons of sangria.

To me, like I said, that Viva Terlingua album

is still the definitive progressive country album.

-Did you record on that?

-No, I didn't, I got lost.

I couldn't get down to Luckenbach that day, but they called me up,

and Bob called me up and said,

"Hey, man, Jerry Jeff is down here cutting this album,

"and we want to do the song Up Against The Wall Redneck Mother."

I go, "You've got to be kidding me?" He goes, "No, they want to do it."

And he said, "But we need a second verse."

So I said, "Well, he sure likes to drink...Falstaff beer,"

so I wrote the second verse over the phone, with kind of what I was...

"He likes to drink it with Wild Turkey liquor" -

I just kind of looked around, and saw what was around me at the time.

# Sure does like to drink his old beer

# Chasing that down with Turkey Bourbon liquor

# Gobble, gobble, gobble... #

It was progressive, what they were doing,

cos nobody was really doing that.

I mean, Jerry Jeff really kind of meshed that country rock and roll.

You know, it wasn't just like country rock, it was rock and roll,

guys, you know, just showing up,

and just destroying the stage and leaving,

and just, you know, going crazy, and it was just an incredible band.

# He's 34 and drinking in the honky-tonk... #

Call it cosmic cowboy music, or gonzo music, or Armadillo music,

this emerging sound was like a musical travel brochure

for the state of Texas, you know,

full of specific references

and place names and incestuous name-dropping.

It was kind of a spontaneous approach to recording.

Now, Viva Terlingua wasn't some kind of defiant,

self-produced indie record. Much like The Outlaws' album,

it was actually financed by a large record company, MCA,

but they went along with Jerry Jeff's crazy, crazy idea,

and it was a success,

in the sense that it was critically well-received.

All the musicians made a bit of money off of it,

and it took a place no-one had ever heard of

and turned it into a household name.

In 1977, nearly four years after Jerry Jeff's Viva Terlingua album,

old Waylon Jennings had a hit with his own Luckenbach-inspired song.

# Let's go to Luckenbach, Texas

# With Waylon and Willie and the boys... #

Did Waylon move to Luckenbach? No.

The guy never even set foot in the place, but Viva Terlingua struck

a balance between creative freedom and commercial vitality, and it

showed that Texas music was about the people, not the studios.

# I've no regrets about the past

# There's nothing I can change

# But life's a road you walk just one way down... #

So this Texas music scene had clearly taken country music into

a new direction but it still needed something, someone to solidify it,

to pull it all together.

Texas has always been conservative, but it's also nonconformist,

and when these two disciplines meet, something mutant is going to emerge.

Let me explain it in terms of tribal electric friction.

If the static object is C, conservative Texas,

represented by guys with cans of Lone Star beer, Levi's,

starched white shirts and a Protestant upbringing

meets D, the drifting force, incense, tie-dye shirts,

and some pot-infused dream of becoming a cowboy,

then V is the vector where these farm boys have moved to Houston

or Dallas, and somehow think that Smokey And The Bandit,

about two idiot rednecks smuggling beer across state lines,

is the greatest cinematic achievement ever,

share a co-efficiency with romantic longhairs who want to get back to

the land, and think that Up In Smoke by Cheech and Chong

is the greatest film ever, because

it's about two idiot hippies smuggling dope across state lines,

then the result is an electrostatic charge, which,

when mixed with a flammable vapour, like alcohol and marijuana,

produces a gaseous cloud called Willie Nelson.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

# On the road again

# I just can't wait to get on the road again

# The life I love is making music with my friends

# And I can't wait to get on the road again... #

What Willie did, what was his real genius,

was that he got the rednecks and the really conservative people together

with the really liberal people in the hippie generation,

and they all got along.

And he put on these events where everybody was there.

So Willie may not have been to Austin first,

but he picked up the football and ran,

when that ball was fumbled many times.

Back in Nashville in 1971, Willie was drowning in molasses.

This was a guy who'd written Crazy for Patsy Cline,

he'd written Funny How Time Slips Away,

Night Life,

tunes that would be standards in anyone's American song book,

but Nashville was killing Willie Nelson.

Every one of his albums would have two or three self-penned diamonds,

and then a whole lot of crap.

Then one day, thankfully, his house caught fire.

The story goes that he ran inside to salvage a pound of Colombian

as the house was burning.

He instructed his nephew to park a beat-up old car

in the garage so he could claim it

on insurance and then he headed to Bandera, Texas.

When he re-emerged, the old sport coat and turtleneck Willie

had been replaced. He had hippie hair.

He wore a Native American bandana, Jesus sandals and earrings.

This guy was appropriating so many conflicting cultures,

no-one knew what to make of him. And they didn't care,

because nobody on the planet doesn't love Willie Nelson.

# On the road again

# I just can't wait to get on the road again... #

The new Texas music up to this point was basically a celebration of

arrested adolescence.

Willie made it about arrested behaviour of an indeterminate age,

because nobody knows how old Willie Nelson is.

Might be 65, he might be 103.

In 1973, he organised the first Willie Nelson 4th of July picnic

in Dripping Springs.

Anyone with a beard and a small kitten was admitted for free.

The annual 4th of July picnics have become a staple of Texas music and

over the years, every kind of country musician has played there.

Which makes the event inclusionary!

I think I just made that word up.

So many of the performers are from Texas,

but because the event is held in Texas and it celebrates Texas,

it's exclusionary. To mainstream country music, that is.

You know, Nashville.

# Now, grab your partner and pat her on the head