'God and Mother and Betrayal'

The poet Turner Cassity in the April 2000 issue of Modernism/modernity reviewed Workin’ Man Blues: Country Music in California by Gerald W. Haslam, and he takes it seriously, without condescension. Readers shouldn’t be surprised. We already know that anything might show up in Cassity's poems. They have identifiable subjects. They are always about something other than the poet and his precious feelings. Cassity revels in knowing things. In this he reminds me of Guy Davenport, who wrote: “I am not writing for scholars or fellow critics, but for people who like to read, to look at pictures, and to know things.” Cassity shares what he and Haslam know:

“Haslam’s own credentials are flawless. He went to elementary school in Oildale, outside Bakersfield, with Merle Haggard, and he makes the point right away that Nashville’s claim to have been, if not the mother city, then at least the Bayreuth of country is not secure. Atlanta in the 1920s, Chicago in the 1930s, and Hollywood in the 1940s could challenge its primacy. Nashville is a manipulation of the recording companies, whose fickleness the book details.”

 

Cassity was born in Mississippi in 1929 and for almost forty years he worked as a librarian at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga. He was a Southerner. At least by the late 60s, country music had gone mainstream. In 1969 I bought the double album Same Train, A Different Time: Merle Haggard Sings the Great Songs of Jimmie Rodgers, and albums by Lefty Frizzell, George Jones, and Hank Williams, who died just months after I was born. And, of course, Gram Parsons. I love the scene in The Last Waltz when Arkansas-born Levon Helm casually refers to Muddy Waters as “the king of country music.” Cassity writes:

 

“Not surprisingly, the subject matter of the lyrics is pretty much as it has been parodied. Only in tango is there a higher percentage of God and Mother and betrayal. However, Haslam supplies enough background and supporting material to soften the edges of the stereotype, making it clear that there were Okies who had to put up with things that would have frightened John Steinbeck to death.”

 

At his death in 2009, Cassity left two unpublished books of poems: Hitler’s Weather and Poems for Isobel. Cassity’s literary executor, R.L. Barth, sent me copies of the manuscripts. In his review of Haslam's book, Cassity refers to “Hank Williams the Elder.” Williams makes a brief appearance in “Oppie in the Heartland” in Hitler’s Weather. “Oppie” is J. Robert Oppenheimer:

 

“End of the World, for Pentecostal outreach groups

In 1930s farm states, so preoccupies

Revivals that not much is heard of cards, strong drink,

And missionaries. Not that, ordinarily,

The End is spelled out in detail. The Last Trump sounds;

Imagination does the rest, and memories

Of illustrations from the Dore Bible. Meant

As an apotheosis, Come-To-Jesus seems

Almost a comedown. But with 1945

And the atomic bomb, and possibility

The world in fact may end, the tent revivalists

Fall strangely quiet. Some, the more sophisticated,

Take on godless communism; most fall back

To battling Darwin. Missionaries may have lost

Cachet, along with China, and as a destroyer

Of worlds J. Robert Oppenheimer, stringy build

And hair out of control, have less the look of Shiva

Than of, say, Hank Williams, Sr.--and be fit

Reminder that the worlds of gambling and of drink

Go on--yet change and incongruity cannot

Prevent re-labeling as ‘Rapture’ what was once

The Day of Judgment, or to anti-Darwin minds

Point out that Fundamentalism too evolves.”