July 10, 2025 • 43 mins
Why does country music make you cry, but rock and roll doesn’t? We revisit a musical interpretation of a divided America in this episode from 2017.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. I started listening to country music when I was
about twelve or thirteen. This was rural Ontario in the
nineteen seventies. Everyone else my age was listening to The
Eagles or Fleetwood Mac or some properly Canadian rock band
like Rush. But for some inexplicable reason, I, a British
(00:37):
Jamaican kid marooned in the Canadian heartland, found solace in
the music coming out of Nashville. Lots of Johnny cash Lorette, Lynn,
Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings. I can still sing almost all
of Good Hearted Woman from memory, and of course George Jones.
I still remember the first time I heard the grand
tour step right up, come on in, if you'd like
(01:01):
to take the Grand Tour of a lonely house that
once was home, sweet home, and then the amazing lines,
I have nothing here to sell you, just some things
that I will tell you, some things I know will
chill you to the bone. To my Maudlin thirteen year
(01:22):
old heart, the line some things I know will chill
you to the bone was so fantastic, so over the top,
so bonkers, and just thinking about that lonely house that
was once home, sweet home brought tears to my eyes.
Pop music, particularly the pop music of that era, just
couldn't compete with that. I carried George Jones in my
(01:43):
heart for a very long time until the point that
I decided it was time to revisit the question what
exactly is country music doing when it makes you cry?
In Nashville, Tennessee, there is a songwriter named Bobby Braddock.
He's in his seventies, maybe five foot seven, bald head,
scruffy beard, wiry, like if you messed with them in
(02:05):
a bar, you'd probably lose. The most striking thing about
him is his eyes, which are the palest and most
intense shade of blue. He wears sunglasses a lot, and
it's almost as if he needs to protect the world
from that look there. I met him on a music
row in Nashville. We had lunch, and then we sat
in one of the writer's rooms in the Sony building,
(02:27):
piano in the corner, couches to one side, and he
talked about his education in the music business.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
I think I always had the reputation as being kind
of a quirky writer, maybe a little left field.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
The turning point in Braddock's career was a song you've
probably heard of. It was performed by Tammy Wynette back
when she was the reigning Queen of country music nineteen
sixty eight, about a mom who had to spell out
the word dvo rcee so her kids wouldn't know their
parents were splitting up.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
So dw r C.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah wrote this, did it? Demo on it and no tikers,
nobody did it, nobody would recorded.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
D iv o r C was a song with a gimmick.
Braddick did a lot of gimmicky songs back then. No
one wanted this one. So Braddick went to a friend
and longtime collaborator, Curly Putman, So.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
I said, well, why is nobody recording? He said, I
think around the important part of your song said, sad song,
and your melodies on that part is too happy. What
I was doing was, oh, I wish that could stop
this lifty s a little bit like a like a
(03:46):
soap commercial. I said, well, what would you do? And
he gave a guitar and he had this really mournful
singing style. Tammy Whenette was a big fan of Curly singing,
she left her singing because he had I mean, he
just he singing was just so sad. It gives it
a guitar and.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
Said, oh, wish that we could start this, So I said,
just get your guitar, let's put it on.
Speaker 5 (04:18):
Take what.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
D I V O r C went to number one.
It was Bobby Braddock's first great exercise in how to
make people cry, and from then on things just got sadder.
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
(04:47):
about something that has never made sense to me. Maybe
it's because I'm a Canadian, or maybe Americans puzzle about
this too. I'm talking about the bright line that divides
American society, not the color line or the ideological line.
I'm talking about the sad song line. I don't know
(05:12):
why people don't talk about this more because it's weird.
For the sake of argument, let's use the rock magazine
Rolling Stone's list of the best songs of all time,
the top fifty. These are the critics choices. Hotel California
by The Eagles comes in at forty nine, which, as
far as I can tell, is a song about drugs.
Tooty Fruity by Little Richard at forty three. Tutty Fruity,
(05:36):
which I remind you has is its signature lyric tooty fruity,
oh ruddy touty fruity, Oh rudy tooty fruity, Oh rudy
tooty fruity, oh rudy Wop Bop alo bop a loop
bam boom. There's Dancing in the Street at forty light,
My Fire Be My Baby, Nirvana's smells like teen Spirit,
(05:58):
Derek and the Dominoes Leila. There are songs about wanting
to have sex, songs about having sex, songs about getting high,
presumably after having sex. Number one song on the list
like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. Ah, You've gone
to the finest schools, all right, miss Lonely, but you
know you only used to get juiced in it. Nobody's
(06:19):
ever taught you how to live out on the street,
and now you're gonna have to get used to it.
I think that's a song about someone who dropped out
of Harvard. The number one rock song of all time
is about dropping out of Harvard. In all of those
fifty songs, nobody dies after a long illness, No marriage
(06:41):
disintegrates nobody's killed on a battlefield. No mother grieves for
a son. The closest that any song in Rolling Stone's
list comes to being truly sad is Smokey Robinson's Tracks
of My Tears, which is first of all, number fifty,
so they put the sad song at the bottom of
the list. And secondly, it's about a guy at a
party in their moments of greatest travail. The protagonists of
(07:05):
rock and roll's sad songs still get to go to parties. Now.
Just turn on a country music station, especially a traditional
country music station, and listen. It's like a different universe.
Marriage is going to hell, people staring into their shot
glass in a honky tonk, people dying young. If you
ever heard John Prine's Unweed Fathers, it's a devastating bit
(07:28):
of songwriting about a teenage mom fleeing town. He sings
it with his wife Rachel.
Speaker 6 (07:34):
Almost so Verio man smoking man Bell, Now come in,
Lolla bad.
Speaker 7 (07:48):
Your daddy meant to hurt you, ever, it's just don live.
Speaker 8 (07:59):
That you got his.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Those last two lines. Your daddy never meant to hurt
you ever. He just don't live here. But you've got
his eyes that's brutal, black subad dream.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
All on.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
We fove One half of the country, the rock music part,
wants their music to be hymns to extra version. The
other half wants to talk about real life dramas and
have a good cry. I don't get it. By the way,
you know who wrote that unwed father's song with John Prime,
(08:39):
Bobby Braddock? Or maybe you've heard this another classic recorded
by Tammy Whynatt Golden.
Speaker 8 (08:51):
Good, Long Time.
Speaker 6 (08:54):
Arcas Loud the bung.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Bus Golden Ring. It follows a couple from first love
to the breakup of their marriage by tracing the journey
of their wedding ring from chop to pawnshop. It's a weeper.
Who wrote it, Bobby Braddock, and today, forty years after
he wrote it, Braddock is still mad about a one
(09:21):
word change made by the song's producer of Billy Cheryl,
because that made his song one crucial degree less sad.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
But we had He says, you won't admit it, but
I know you're running around and Billy changed it too.
He says, you won't admit it, but I know you're
leaving town. That's not as that's not as powerful as
you're running around.
Speaker 9 (09:41):
He says, you won't admit it, but I know you
leave in town.
Speaker 10 (09:47):
She says one, thanks for circ I don't love you anymore.
It throws down the ring as she walks out the door.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I think country music is supposed to be about real life,
you know, and I try to reflect that about all right.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Gold which brings us to maybe the greatest country song
of all time, certainly the saddest country song of all time,
the song that made me get on a plane and
go to Nashville. It was recorded by the great George Jones,
(10:25):
one of the half dozen or so most iconic figures
in the history of country music. You just heard him
singing in Golden Ring. Jones was famously the husband of
Tammy Wynett for a time, a hard living, dissolute megastar. Once,
in the midst of an epic bender, jones family took
his keys away, so he got on his riding mower
and drove eight miles to the liquor store to get
(10:47):
some whiskey. This was a man who could pour his
fractured heart into his music like no one else. A
half dozen times in his career, Jones found a song
truly worthy of his talents, but it never got better
than he stopped loving her. Today, I still remember when
I first heard that song, and from the day I
started thinking about this episode, I haven't been able to
(11:10):
get it out of my head.
Speaker 10 (11:12):
He said, I'll love you till I die. She told
him you forgetting time. As the years went slowly by,
(11:32):
She's still prayed up all his his wine.
Speaker 11 (11:38):
He kept her pictures on his wall.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Do I need to tell you who wrote that song?
Bobby Braddock? Bobby Braddock is the king of tears.
Speaker 7 (11:52):
But he still loved through it all, hoping she'd come
back again.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Oh man. One of the things that got me interested
in sad songs was a story my sister in law, Bev,
told me. She and my brother live in the same area.
I grew up in Waterloo County in southern Ontario, and
a while ago she went to a performance by a
(12:24):
local chamber choir thirty singers. They sang a cantata called
Annalise by the British composer James Whitbourne, a choral composition
which puts the words of an Frank's diary to music.
I know this seems like a little bit of a
digression from country music, but it's a really useful case
study in understanding why some songs make us cry. The
(12:47):
performance Bev told me about was on a Sunday afternoon,
a free performance of the Public Library, which is a
very utilitarian, very nineteen sixties building on Queen Street in
downtown Kitchener. I've been there many times, waldewell carpet, that
old books library smell, which I have to admit, I love.
Speaker 12 (13:05):
How many people are there.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
It's in their main reading room, moved around all the
tables and one hundred, one hundred and twentieth full, pretty
much standing room only.
Speaker 13 (13:17):
Why as they're singing, I think, why is that also
not singing? And then I look over and I think
somebody else as Aprian, I'm not singing. That's odd because
(13:38):
everybody else in their parts is singing. And I realized
they were crying and they couldn't sing.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Bev says she cried pretty much through the entire performance.
She was looking straight ahead because she didn't want people
to see she was crying, but it didn't matter because
everyone was crying. When the performance was over, Bev approached
the stage to talk to the soloist, the woman singing
Anne Frank's words.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
I just went up to her afterwards and congratulated her
on the beauty of the piece then and her singing,
And I said, and how did you to sing without crying?
And she said, well, I couldn't look at Mark the
conductor because he was wiping tears from his eyes, and
I had my back to the choir, so that was good.
(14:23):
And I didn't look at anybody in the audience because
they were crying. So I just looked up in the
middle distance and I sang, it was a good thing.
I hadn't memorized.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
I was at home in Canada when Bev told me
that story, so I called up Mark the conductor, and
the soloist, whose name is Natasha. They're actually husband and wife.
They only live a few minutes away from my brother.
So they came over. Mark sat at the piano in
the living room and Natasha stood behind him, and they
performed one of the pieces from Annalyst that they did
that day in the library.
Speaker 14 (14:54):
This is the last movement. It's called Anne's Meditation. I
see the world, I see the world being slowly turned
turn into a wilderness.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Now I realized this is a crazy question, because we're
hearing a piece based on the Diary of Anne Frank,
which is one of the most heartbreaking stories from one
of the most horrific moments in recent history. But why
was everyone crying that day at the Kitchener Library. The
(15:59):
obvious reason is that the music is beautiful, so is
Natasha's singing. The performance is also authentic. There's nothing contrived
about it. It wasn't at Carnegie Hall. People weren't wearing
suits and evening gowns. They were at the Kitchener Library.
And whose family's getting books and kids running around and
everyone's on stacking chairs with the tables pushed off to
(16:20):
the side. But here's the most important thing annelis is specific.
It's a cantata about the actual experiences of a real person.
In her own words, Bev says that when she cried,
(16:42):
she started thinking about her own family, Mennonites, who escaped
terrible persecution in Russia. Natasha says that as she sang
about twelve year old and Frank, she was thinking about
her own daughter, who was ten and who was sitting
right next to Bev in the audience. Beauty and authenticity
can create a mood. They set the stage. But I
(17:04):
think the thing that pushes us over the top into
tears is details. We cry when melancholy collides with specificity,
and specificity is not something every genre does well. Wild
(17:34):
Horses by the Rolling Stones, written by Keith Richards and
Mick Jagger. It's a song about a conversation a man
is having with a silent, suffering loved one. The story
goes that Mick Jagger dreamt up the verses while sitting
at the bedside of his then girlfriend Mary and Faithful,
as she recovered from an overdose. Oh love you suffer.
Speaker 12 (17:58):
Bell.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
I watched you suffer a dull, aching pain. Now you've
decided to show me the same. No sweeping exit or
off stage lines could make me feel bitter or treat
you unkind. Wild Horses couldn't drag me away. Wild Wild
Horses couldn't drag me away. Wild Horses was recorded first
(18:23):
by the legendary Graham Parsons. Not long afterwards, Parsons died
of an overdose, and his friend in protege, the country
music singer Emmy Lou Harris, made a song in his memory.
She wrote it with Bill Danoff. It's called from Boulder
to Birmingham.
Speaker 8 (18:41):
I don't want a hee, so.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
I got on the zep plane just to flow.
Speaker 8 (18:53):
Damn nolder me, but all that you can show me,
he's a pre masco.
Speaker 6 (19:09):
I don't want to hear said story.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Someone who has suffered a terrible loss has gotten on
a plane and she's so numbed by grief that she
can no longer see those around her.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
Blessed time a fool like this.
Speaker 6 (19:25):
I was in the wilderness and again those on.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
The from Boulder to Birmingham and wildhorses are both beautiful melancholy.
They're about the same thing, the ties the living and
the healthy have to those in pain. But which is
the sadder song? I don't think there's any question. Wild
horses is generic. Listen to how it starts. Childhood. Living
(19:56):
is easy to do the things you wanted. I bought
them for you. Graceless lady. You know who I am.
You know I can't let you slide through my hands.
What's going on? Any idea? What is Mickey hammering on about? Now?
Compare that to the specificity of looking down from the
airplane and seeing nothing but prairie. Then standing on a
(20:16):
mountain and watching a canyon burn.
Speaker 8 (20:19):
Was our rackassle.
Speaker 7 (20:26):
In the bosom of a.
Speaker 6 (20:30):
I would hold.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
Race away from bald.
Speaker 14 (20:45):
About at sea.
Speaker 7 (20:49):
I could see.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
First she references the great black spiritual rock my soul
in the bosom of Abraham. The bosom of Abraham is
where the righteous dead go while awaiting judgment. Then she sings,
and I would also walk all the way from Boulder
to Birmingham. Now she's locating her grief. I would make
a pilgrimage from progressive hippie liberal. Remember this is nineteen
(21:15):
seventy three, dope smoking Colorado back to the repressive heart
of the old South, just to see your face. Two
completely different specific images, each with its own set of
emotional triggers, and she's piled one on top of another.
Mark Vornan, the music director of the choir in My hometown,
(21:37):
says that there's a part in Analyse that does the
same thing Anne is.
Speaker 5 (21:42):
They're in hiding already, and she starts singing, and the
composer has set these words in kind of a style
of an American sousa march, and so she's talking about
being in the bathtub and being scrubbed in the bathtub,
and it's a Susa. We scrub, scrubs, scrub ourselves in
La Tinta right, very happy and optimistic music.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
And Frank in the bathtub to the tune of a
Sousa march with the horrors of the Holocaust outside her door.
Three absolutely concrete images in merciless combination.
Speaker 5 (22:19):
It just floored me every time I heard it because
it was so close to our own daughter, you know,
to think that she would have to create this kind
of fiction in order to just get through the day.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
That's how you get tears. You make the story so
real and the details so sharp, and you add in
so many emotional triggers that the listener cannot escape. But
it's a risky thing to do, right If you aren't
a talented composer, and you don't do a sensitive rendition
of those lyrics, they could fall flat, could seem forced,
(22:54):
even offensive. Far easier just to fall back on the
blend cliche that wild horses couldn't drag you away. Country
music makes people cry because it's not afraid to be specific.
Speaker 11 (23:09):
You know, she came to see him one last time,
and we all wondered if she would, and it kept
brought in through.
Speaker 10 (23:24):
My mind.
Speaker 11 (23:28):
This time.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Bobby Braddock was born in Auburndale, Florida, a little town
between Tampa and Orlando. His father grew Citrus. They were
Church of Christ, just about the most fundamentalist of fundamentalist Christians.
Braddock moved to Nashville in nineteen sixty four, just after
getting married, to seek his fortune in the music business.
He wrote his memoirs a few years ago. It's called
(24:03):
A Life on Nashville's Music Row. I read it before
I went to see him, and the best way to
describe the book is that it's exhausting. I don't mean
that in a bad way because I couldn't put it down.
But so much happens.
Speaker 12 (24:18):
You've lived this incredibly tumultuous, emotionally tumultuous lit Yeah, And
in the book it sounds like the first precipitating event
is the death of your son.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Braddock was touring with the country music legend Mardy Robbins
at the time. He and his wife, Sue had a baby.
The child was just a few months old when he died.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Whenever I was in town, not on the road with
Marty Robbins, every single day we'd buy fresh flowers, go
put it on. It's gray. We were just pathetic.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
He and Sue fight. She cheats on him. He cheats
on her, they break up, they get back together, they
have a daughter, they divorce. His ex wife mysteriously vanishes.
He drinks a lot, gets into fights, owes enormous sums
to the irs, has a major bout with depression, smokes
a lot of pot, lurches from one volcanic event to
the next, and through it all, Braddock writes songs, hundreds
(25:11):
of them.
Speaker 12 (25:12):
You were kind of tolerance for emotional volatility seems extraordinary.
Speaker 6 (25:24):
I guess.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Tolerance is probably a pretty good word for it.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Braddock walks over to the keyboard on the other side
of the room. He begins to talk about an old
girlfriend named Angela, who committed suicide by driving her car
into the river.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
When Angela died, her mother took her baby to raise it.
And she sent me a picture with a little girl,
Angela's child when she was about four or five years old,
look just like her mom. Picture her standing out in
the yard. And boy did a number on me, despite
(26:10):
all the dishters.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
He wrote a song about that in twenty minutes. He
played it for me. Then he played his favorite bit
of a sad Randy Newman song. He played me a
heartbreaking song he wrote once after getting up in the
middle of the night and passing his lover in the hallway,
and as he played one weeper after another, I realized
that the thing I'd said about Braddock's tolerance for emotional
(26:37):
volatility tolerance was the wrong word. That was just me
projecting my uptight Canadian self on to Braddock. But Braddock
is from the musical side of the United States, where
emotion is not something to be endured, it's something to
be embraced. At one point, when cell phones were still analog,
you could buy a scanner and listen in to other
(26:58):
people's conversations, and that's what Braddock does. He can't help himself.
A woman complains to her husband for an hour about
his lack of affection from the parking out at the
grocery store. Then ask him what he wants, and he says,
maybe Apple Newton's. And then this is my favorite part
I'm quoting now from Braddock's memoir. The conversation that truly
(27:20):
touched me was between a man perhaps forty and his mother,
maybe late sixties, in which the sun opened up about
sexual problems he was having with his wife. And I
envied the sprinkling of profanities and the mother's invitation to
come over to the house, son, and let's open a
bottle of whiskey and talk about it. Wishing I had
that kind of easy and open communication with my mom.
(27:42):
Then learning that the guy's mother was terminally ill with cancer.
If you're keeping track, that's marital difficulty, sex, profanity, whisky mom,
and terminal cancer in one conversation, and it truly touched him.
Do you know what Braddot's favorite song is? Vince Gills
(28:04):
Go Rest High on that Mountain, which Gil wrote in
memory both of his brother who died young of a
heart attack and fellow country star Keith Whitley, who drank
himself to death.
Speaker 9 (28:14):
Oh on, and son, you.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Corner is dn go dude, Oh my god. When Vince
Gill and Ricky Skaggs and Painty Lovelace are singing harmony
on that thing, I go nuts. It still tears me up,
knowing that it's about death, and Vince wrote it about
Keith Whitley and then about his own brother, and just
(28:48):
the emotion that sending that song. It's just it's just powerful.
Speaker 8 (28:53):
Day you lift us.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Gathered round.
Speaker 8 (29:01):
You agreed to.
Speaker 10 (29:06):
Shock good seeing.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
It's heartbreaking. Listening to that song makes me wonder if
some portion of what we call ideological division in America
actually isn't ideological at all. How big are the political
differences between red and blue states anyway, in the grand
scheme of things, not that big. Maybe what we're seeing
instead is a difference of emotional opinion. Because if your
(29:37):
principal form of cultural expression has drinking, sex, suicide, heart attacks,
mom and terminal cancer all on the table for public discussion,
then the other half of the country is going to
seem really chilly and uncaring. And if you're from the
rock and roll half clinging semi ironically to two Dy
Fruity O Rudy, when you listen to a song written
(29:57):
about a guy's brother who died young of a heart
attack and another guy who drank himself to death, you're
going to think, who are these people? Here's another way
to think about the sad song line. Let me read
(30:17):
you the list of the birthplaces of the performers of
the top twenty country songs of all time Again. I'm
going to use the Rolling Stone magazine list. Ready, Arkansas, Virginia, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi,
Mississippi Georgia, California, Central Valley, by the way, not Los Angeles, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Texas, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Texas, Kentucky, Texas.
(30:43):
I could do the top fifty, or the top one hundred,
or the top two hundred, and you get the same pattern. Basically,
you cannot be a successful country singer or songwriter if
you're not from the South. It's impossible. There's one exception,
which is the great songwriter Harlan Howard, who was born
in Detroit, but almost immediately thereafter his family moves to
(31:03):
a farm in rural Kentucky. It's like the five to
second roll when you drop a piece of food on
the floor. If it's not on the ground long enough,
it doesn't count. As far as I can tell, there
are no Jews on the country list, almost no Catholics,
only two black people. It's white Southern Protestants all the
way down. Now compare that to the rock and roll list.
(31:27):
You've got Jews from Minnesota, black people from Detroit, Catholics
from New Jersey, middle class British art school dropouts, Canadians, Jamaicans.
Rock and roll is the Rainbow Coalition that diversity is
a good thing. It's why there's so much innovation in
rock and roll, but you pay a price for that.
(31:51):
There was a very clever bit of research published recently
by Colin Morrison the magazine The Pudding. He analyzed fifteen
thousand popular songs using an algorithm that can presses digital files.
So if you take out the repetitive bits in a song,
how much of it is left. Morris's big finding is
that rock and roll as a genre is really, really repetitive.
(32:15):
Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, the Beatles, If you take out
the duplicative parts, their music shrinks by sixty percent. That's
what happens when everyone is from somewhere different. Nobody speaks
the same language, so you have to use cliche, the
same phrases over and over again, because if you go
(32:35):
deeper or try to get more specific, you start to
lose people. Country music, on the other hand, is not
nearly as repetitive. When Morris ran the lyrics of popular
country singers through his algorithm, they only shrank by about
forty percent, a third less than the rock and rollers.
Nor is hip hop repetitive, which makes sense. The birthplaces
(32:57):
of everyone on Rolling Stones list of greatest rap songs
reads like an urban version of the country list. Queen's
South Central lal A Brooklyn, Long Island, South Central Long Beach,
Houston means the Bronx Englewood, New Jersey. The Bronx. Hip
Hop and country are both tightly knit musical communities. And
when you're speaking to people who understand your world and
(33:20):
your culture and your language, you can tell much more
complicated stories. You can use much more precise imagery. You
can lay yourself bare because you're among your own. In
the book, it sounds like your relationship with Sparky was
(33:41):
the one that seemed the most creatively fruitful. It was
it was Sparky was a beautiful blonde from northern Alabama,
the great love of Bobby Braddock's life.
Speaker 9 (33:52):
Why was that?
Speaker 2 (33:54):
I think because my favorite her are so strong. I mean,
is it's sort of a visceral thing.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
I think That's why I found Bobby Braddock's book so
exhaust It's because everything is felt, everything is a mountain
peak and Sparky, Sparky was everest high altitude infatuation.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
That's the sort of thing that made people go absolutely crazy.
You know, and that was the case with her. You know,
that's what gets the animal instinct of people maybe who
haven't evolved as much as they should, and cause them
to go out and get a gun, blow somebody's brains
out over some gun not being a can't stand the
(34:42):
thought or someone you know, having sex with a person
that he loves.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Braddick and Sparky were on and off lovers for years.
It was intense, painful, euphoric. When it ended, Braddick was
in pieces.
Speaker 8 (35:00):
He kept her picture on the wall wind half crazy
now in.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
The that's Braddick in the original demo he made of
he stopped loving her today.
Speaker 8 (35:12):
He still loved her through it all, hoping she'd come back.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
I'm not sure where it came from. It may have
come from Sparky, you know, honestly not know it would
be interesting.
Speaker 12 (35:29):
How could it not?
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yeah, well, if I think it probably, I think it
probably did. But I just I can't see it. I
can't see that for certainty to.
Speaker 8 (35:36):
Marvell carry him.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
I felt like Bradick shrink at that moment, listening to
his tangled dreams and then wanting to shake him at
the end of the session. It's Sparky Sparky.
Speaker 8 (35:48):
They found some letters by He's a being.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
I mean, you wrote a song in the middle of
the great defining love affair of your life, the relationship ends,
and you write write a song about the heartbreak of
that a man carries to his grave. I mean, could
could it be more clear?
Speaker 8 (36:12):
I went to see him one last time.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Bobby Braddick wrote he stopped loving her today with his
friend Curly. In nineteen seventy seven, they took it to
the singer George Jones. Jones was then at his lowest
ebb a wreck, strung out on cocaine and whiskey. He
just checked out of a psychiatric hospital. The great love
of his life, Tammy Wynette, had embodied her hit song
div O RCEE and left him. Jones had just nearly
(36:41):
shot and killed one of his best friends. The heartbroken
Bobby Braddock has written a song about a man who
cannot stop loving a woman, and it's sung by the
heartbroken George Jones. Who cannot stop loving a woman, Get
him some.
Speaker 8 (36:56):
Letters byes Babe.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
D.
Speaker 10 (37:03):
In nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 8 (37:10):
He had underlined and m.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
Underlined in red every single I love you, every single
I love you.
Speaker 10 (37:22):
I went to see him just today. Oh but I
didn't see no tears, all dressed up to go away.
First time I've seen him smiling.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
You.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Why did he finally turn his back on his great love?
Why is this the first time he smiled in years?
Because he's dead. Only death could end his love.
Speaker 7 (37:56):
It blazed red upon his dog.
Speaker 8 (38:02):
And sing, They'll carry.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
You.
Speaker 8 (38:10):
Stopped loving hard today.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
It's totally over the top, Madelin sentimental Kitchie, call it
whatever you want, just don't fight it. One thing that
Bobby Braddock told me in passing that I think about
a lot is that he thought of the character in
his song as a bad role model. The man was obsessed.
He couldn't let go. But that's the point, right, That's
(38:36):
why we cry, because the song manages to find beauty
and even a little bit of grandeur in someone's frailty.
Speaker 10 (38:44):
I'm sol carried.
Speaker 8 (38:52):
He stopped loving hard today.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Wild horses, please.
Speaker 9 (39:10):
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Grand
Ole Opry House to the celebration of life of George
Glenn Jones. One of the most important people ever of
all time and of any time in the history of
country music.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
George Jones died in twenty thirteen. Everyone who was anyone
in country music came to his memorial service. You should
watch it if you get the chance. It's on YouTube,
all two hours and forty one minutes of it, because
it's everything I've been talking about. Vince Gill stands up
with Patty Lovelace and sings, go rest high in that
Mountain and breaks down halfway through. Travis Tritt remembers a
(40:06):
conversation he once had with Chris Christofferson about how they
expected George Jones to have died years before.
Speaker 15 (40:14):
And I looked at Chris and I made the comment,
you know, with all the years of hard living that
George had, who would have ever thought that he would
outlive Tammy. And Chris looked at me and said, had
(40:35):
it not been for Nancy, he would not have.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Nancy Jones, George Jones's fourth and final wife, the real
love of his life, his soulmate and companion. Travis Tritt
holds out his hand towards Nancy, who's sitting right in
the front row.
Speaker 15 (40:56):
George said it many times. She's my angel, and she
saved my life, and so we owe you a debt
of gratitude.
Speaker 5 (41:06):
For that.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Comes the crowning moment of the day, the final performance.
Alan Jackson strides out onto the stage a big rangy
guy craggy features cowboy boots, jeans, long coat, white statson.
He looks squarely at Nancy Jones and without introduction, launches
into he stopped loving her today.
Speaker 7 (41:29):
He shout, all love you till I die. She told
em you are yet time as he years when clool.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
And you realize as he sings that Braddock's song has
gotten even more specific. It's no longer about a long
ago love affair. It's about right now. This is the
day George Jones stopped loving Nancy Jones. Alan Jackson takes
off his hat and play says it over his heart.
Speaker 7 (42:12):
He stopped loving her.
Speaker 12 (42:17):
Today.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
And if you aren't crying, I can't help you.
Speaker 9 (42:26):
I love you, George. All of the three grades of
our time, ladies and gentlemen at all time. That's Alan Jackson,
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
Revision's History is produced by Emil LaBelle and Jacob Smith,
with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Ciomara Martinez White. Our
editor is Julia Barton. Lawn Williams is our engineer. Original
music by Luis Sciarra. Special thanks to Andy Bauers and
Jacob Weisberger Panicle. I'm Malcolm gadwe
Pushkin. I started listening to country music when I was
about twelve or thirteen. This was rural Ontario in the
nineteen seventies. Everyone else my age was listening to The
Eagles or Fleetwood Mac or some properly Canadian rock band
like Rush. But for some inexplicable reason, I, a British
(00:37):
Jamaican kid marooned in the Canadian heartland, found solace in
the music coming out of Nashville. Lots of Johnny cash Lorette, Lynn,
Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings. I can still sing almost all
of Good Hearted Woman from memory, and of course George Jones.
I still remember the first time I heard the grand
tour step right up, come on in, if you'd like
(01:01):
to take the Grand Tour of a lonely house that
once was home, sweet home, and then the amazing lines,
I have nothing here to sell you, just some things
that I will tell you, some things I know will
chill you to the bone. To my Maudlin thirteen year
(01:22):
old heart, the line some things I know will chill
you to the bone was so fantastic, so over the top,
so bonkers, and just thinking about that lonely house that
was once home, sweet home brought tears to my eyes.
Pop music, particularly the pop music of that era, just
couldn't compete with that. I carried George Jones in my
(01:43):
heart for a very long time until the point that
I decided it was time to revisit the question what
exactly is country music doing when it makes you cry?
In Nashville, Tennessee, there is a songwriter named Bobby Braddock.
He's in his seventies, maybe five foot seven, bald head,
scruffy beard, wiry, like if you messed with them in
(02:05):
a bar, you'd probably lose. The most striking thing about
him is his eyes, which are the palest and most
intense shade of blue. He wears sunglasses a lot, and
it's almost as if he needs to protect the world
from that look there. I met him on a music
row in Nashville. We had lunch, and then we sat
in one of the writer's rooms in the Sony building,
(02:27):
piano in the corner, couches to one side, and he
talked about his education in the music business.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
I think I always had the reputation as being kind
of a quirky writer, maybe a little left field.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
The turning point in Braddock's career was a song you've
probably heard of. It was performed by Tammy Wynette back
when she was the reigning Queen of country music nineteen
sixty eight, about a mom who had to spell out
the word dvo rcee so her kids wouldn't know their
parents were splitting up.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
So dw r C.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
Yeah wrote this, did it? Demo on it and no tikers,
nobody did it, nobody would recorded.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
D iv o r C was a song with a gimmick.
Braddick did a lot of gimmicky songs back then. No
one wanted this one. So Braddick went to a friend
and longtime collaborator, Curly Putman, So.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
I said, well, why is nobody recording? He said, I
think around the important part of your song said, sad song,
and your melodies on that part is too happy. What
I was doing was, oh, I wish that could stop
this lifty s a little bit like a like a
(03:46):
soap commercial. I said, well, what would you do? And
he gave a guitar and he had this really mournful
singing style. Tammy Whenette was a big fan of Curly singing,
she left her singing because he had I mean, he
just he singing was just so sad. It gives it
a guitar and.
Speaker 4 (04:04):
Said, oh, wish that we could start this, So I said,
just get your guitar, let's put it on.
Speaker 5 (04:18):
Take what.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
D I V O r C went to number one.
It was Bobby Braddock's first great exercise in how to
make people cry, and from then on things just got sadder.
My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
(04:47):
about something that has never made sense to me. Maybe
it's because I'm a Canadian, or maybe Americans puzzle about
this too. I'm talking about the bright line that divides
American society, not the color line or the ideological line.
I'm talking about the sad song line. I don't know
(05:12):
why people don't talk about this more because it's weird.
For the sake of argument, let's use the rock magazine
Rolling Stone's list of the best songs of all time,
the top fifty. These are the critics choices. Hotel California
by The Eagles comes in at forty nine, which, as
far as I can tell, is a song about drugs.
Tooty Fruity by Little Richard at forty three. Tutty Fruity,
(05:36):
which I remind you has is its signature lyric tooty fruity,
oh ruddy touty fruity, Oh rudy tooty fruity, Oh rudy
tooty fruity, oh rudy Wop Bop alo bop a loop
bam boom. There's Dancing in the Street at forty light,
My Fire Be My Baby, Nirvana's smells like teen Spirit,
(05:58):
Derek and the Dominoes Leila. There are songs about wanting
to have sex, songs about having sex, songs about getting high,
presumably after having sex. Number one song on the list
like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. Ah, You've gone
to the finest schools, all right, miss Lonely, but you
know you only used to get juiced in it. Nobody's
(06:19):
ever taught you how to live out on the street,
and now you're gonna have to get used to it.
I think that's a song about someone who dropped out
of Harvard. The number one rock song of all time
is about dropping out of Harvard. In all of those
fifty songs, nobody dies after a long illness, No marriage
(06:41):
disintegrates nobody's killed on a battlefield. No mother grieves for
a son. The closest that any song in Rolling Stone's
list comes to being truly sad is Smokey Robinson's Tracks
of My Tears, which is first of all, number fifty,
so they put the sad song at the bottom of
the list. And secondly, it's about a guy at a
party in their moments of greatest travail. The protagonists of
(07:05):
rock and roll's sad songs still get to go to parties. Now.
Just turn on a country music station, especially a traditional
country music station, and listen. It's like a different universe.
Marriage is going to hell, people staring into their shot
glass in a honky tonk, people dying young. If you
ever heard John Prine's Unweed Fathers, it's a devastating bit
(07:28):
of songwriting about a teenage mom fleeing town. He sings
it with his wife Rachel.
Speaker 6 (07:34):
Almost so Verio man smoking man Bell, Now come in,
Lolla bad.
Speaker 7 (07:48):
Your daddy meant to hurt you, ever, it's just don live.
Speaker 8 (07:59):
That you got his.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Those last two lines. Your daddy never meant to hurt
you ever. He just don't live here. But you've got
his eyes that's brutal, black subad dream.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
All on.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
We fove One half of the country, the rock music part,
wants their music to be hymns to extra version. The
other half wants to talk about real life dramas and
have a good cry. I don't get it. By the way,
you know who wrote that unwed father's song with John Prime,
(08:39):
Bobby Braddock? Or maybe you've heard this another classic recorded
by Tammy Whynatt Golden.
Speaker 8 (08:51):
Good, Long Time.
Speaker 6 (08:54):
Arcas Loud the bung.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Bus Golden Ring. It follows a couple from first love
to the breakup of their marriage by tracing the journey
of their wedding ring from chop to pawnshop. It's a weeper.
Who wrote it, Bobby Braddock, and today, forty years after
he wrote it, Braddock is still mad about a one
(09:21):
word change made by the song's producer of Billy Cheryl,
because that made his song one crucial degree less sad.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
But we had He says, you won't admit it, but
I know you're running around and Billy changed it too.
He says, you won't admit it, but I know you're
leaving town. That's not as that's not as powerful as
you're running around.
Speaker 9 (09:41):
He says, you won't admit it, but I know you
leave in town.
Speaker 10 (09:47):
She says one, thanks for circ I don't love you anymore.
It throws down the ring as she walks out the door.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
I think country music is supposed to be about real life,
you know, and I try to reflect that about all right.
Speaker 1 (10:03):
Gold which brings us to maybe the greatest country song
of all time, certainly the saddest country song of all time,
the song that made me get on a plane and
go to Nashville. It was recorded by the great George Jones,
(10:25):
one of the half dozen or so most iconic figures
in the history of country music. You just heard him
singing in Golden Ring. Jones was famously the husband of
Tammy Wynett for a time, a hard living, dissolute megastar. Once,
in the midst of an epic bender, jones family took
his keys away, so he got on his riding mower
and drove eight miles to the liquor store to get
(10:47):
some whiskey. This was a man who could pour his
fractured heart into his music like no one else. A
half dozen times in his career, Jones found a song
truly worthy of his talents, but it never got better
than he stopped loving her. Today, I still remember when
I first heard that song, and from the day I
started thinking about this episode, I haven't been able to
(11:10):
get it out of my head.
Speaker 10 (11:12):
He said, I'll love you till I die. She told
him you forgetting time. As the years went slowly by,
(11:32):
She's still prayed up all his his wine.
Speaker 11 (11:38):
He kept her pictures on his wall.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Do I need to tell you who wrote that song?
Bobby Braddock? Bobby Braddock is the king of tears.
Speaker 7 (11:52):
But he still loved through it all, hoping she'd come
back again.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Oh man. One of the things that got me interested
in sad songs was a story my sister in law, Bev,
told me. She and my brother live in the same area.
I grew up in Waterloo County in southern Ontario, and
a while ago she went to a performance by a
(12:24):
local chamber choir thirty singers. They sang a cantata called
Annalise by the British composer James Whitbourne, a choral composition
which puts the words of an Frank's diary to music.
I know this seems like a little bit of a
digression from country music, but it's a really useful case
study in understanding why some songs make us cry. The
(12:47):
performance Bev told me about was on a Sunday afternoon,
a free performance of the Public Library, which is a
very utilitarian, very nineteen sixties building on Queen Street in
downtown Kitchener. I've been there many times, waldewell carpet, that
old books library smell, which I have to admit, I love.
Speaker 12 (13:05):
How many people are there.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
It's in their main reading room, moved around all the
tables and one hundred, one hundred and twentieth full, pretty
much standing room only.
Speaker 13 (13:17):
Why as they're singing, I think, why is that also
not singing? And then I look over and I think
somebody else as Aprian, I'm not singing. That's odd because
(13:38):
everybody else in their parts is singing. And I realized
they were crying and they couldn't sing.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Bev says she cried pretty much through the entire performance.
She was looking straight ahead because she didn't want people
to see she was crying, but it didn't matter because
everyone was crying. When the performance was over, Bev approached
the stage to talk to the soloist, the woman singing
Anne Frank's words.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
I just went up to her afterwards and congratulated her
on the beauty of the piece then and her singing,
And I said, and how did you to sing without crying?
And she said, well, I couldn't look at Mark the
conductor because he was wiping tears from his eyes, and
I had my back to the choir, so that was good.
(14:23):
And I didn't look at anybody in the audience because
they were crying. So I just looked up in the
middle distance and I sang, it was a good thing.
I hadn't memorized.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
I was at home in Canada when Bev told me
that story, so I called up Mark the conductor, and
the soloist, whose name is Natasha. They're actually husband and wife.
They only live a few minutes away from my brother.
So they came over. Mark sat at the piano in
the living room and Natasha stood behind him, and they
performed one of the pieces from Annalyst that they did
that day in the library.
Speaker 14 (14:54):
This is the last movement. It's called Anne's Meditation. I
see the world, I see the world being slowly turned
turn into a wilderness.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Now I realized this is a crazy question, because we're
hearing a piece based on the Diary of Anne Frank,
which is one of the most heartbreaking stories from one
of the most horrific moments in recent history. But why
was everyone crying that day at the Kitchener Library. The
(15:59):
obvious reason is that the music is beautiful, so is
Natasha's singing. The performance is also authentic. There's nothing contrived
about it. It wasn't at Carnegie Hall. People weren't wearing
suits and evening gowns. They were at the Kitchener Library.
And whose family's getting books and kids running around and
everyone's on stacking chairs with the tables pushed off to
(16:20):
the side. But here's the most important thing annelis is specific.
It's a cantata about the actual experiences of a real person.
In her own words, Bev says that when she cried,
(16:42):
she started thinking about her own family, Mennonites, who escaped
terrible persecution in Russia. Natasha says that as she sang
about twelve year old and Frank, she was thinking about
her own daughter, who was ten and who was sitting
right next to Bev in the audience. Beauty and authenticity
can create a mood. They set the stage. But I
(17:04):
think the thing that pushes us over the top into
tears is details. We cry when melancholy collides with specificity,
and specificity is not something every genre does well. Wild
(17:34):
Horses by the Rolling Stones, written by Keith Richards and
Mick Jagger. It's a song about a conversation a man
is having with a silent, suffering loved one. The story
goes that Mick Jagger dreamt up the verses while sitting
at the bedside of his then girlfriend Mary and Faithful,
as she recovered from an overdose. Oh love you suffer.
Speaker 12 (17:58):
Bell.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
I watched you suffer a dull, aching pain. Now you've
decided to show me the same. No sweeping exit or
off stage lines could make me feel bitter or treat
you unkind. Wild Horses couldn't drag me away. Wild Wild
Horses couldn't drag me away. Wild Horses was recorded first
(18:23):
by the legendary Graham Parsons. Not long afterwards, Parsons died
of an overdose, and his friend in protege, the country
music singer Emmy Lou Harris, made a song in his memory.
She wrote it with Bill Danoff. It's called from Boulder
to Birmingham.
Speaker 8 (18:41):
I don't want a hee, so.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
I got on the zep plane just to flow.
Speaker 8 (18:53):
Damn nolder me, but all that you can show me,
he's a pre masco.
Speaker 6 (19:09):
I don't want to hear said story.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
Someone who has suffered a terrible loss has gotten on
a plane and she's so numbed by grief that she
can no longer see those around her.
Speaker 4 (19:21):
Blessed time a fool like this.
Speaker 6 (19:25):
I was in the wilderness and again those on.
Speaker 1 (19:31):
The from Boulder to Birmingham and wildhorses are both beautiful melancholy.
They're about the same thing, the ties the living and
the healthy have to those in pain. But which is
the sadder song? I don't think there's any question. Wild
horses is generic. Listen to how it starts. Childhood. Living
(19:56):
is easy to do the things you wanted. I bought
them for you. Graceless lady. You know who I am.
You know I can't let you slide through my hands.
What's going on? Any idea? What is Mickey hammering on about? Now?
Compare that to the specificity of looking down from the
airplane and seeing nothing but prairie. Then standing on a
(20:16):
mountain and watching a canyon burn.
Speaker 8 (20:19):
Was our rackassle.
Speaker 7 (20:26):
In the bosom of a.
Speaker 6 (20:30):
I would hold.
Speaker 5 (20:35):
Race away from bald.
Speaker 14 (20:45):
About at sea.
Speaker 7 (20:49):
I could see.
Speaker 1 (20:53):
First she references the great black spiritual rock my soul
in the bosom of Abraham. The bosom of Abraham is
where the righteous dead go while awaiting judgment. Then she sings,
and I would also walk all the way from Boulder
to Birmingham. Now she's locating her grief. I would make
a pilgrimage from progressive hippie liberal. Remember this is nineteen
(21:15):
seventy three, dope smoking Colorado back to the repressive heart
of the old South, just to see your face. Two
completely different specific images, each with its own set of
emotional triggers, and she's piled one on top of another.
Mark Vornan, the music director of the choir in My hometown,
(21:37):
says that there's a part in Analyse that does the
same thing Anne is.
Speaker 5 (21:42):
They're in hiding already, and she starts singing, and the
composer has set these words in kind of a style
of an American sousa march, and so she's talking about
being in the bathtub and being scrubbed in the bathtub,
and it's a Susa. We scrub, scrubs, scrub ourselves in
La Tinta right, very happy and optimistic music.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
And Frank in the bathtub to the tune of a
Sousa march with the horrors of the Holocaust outside her door.
Three absolutely concrete images in merciless combination.
Speaker 5 (22:19):
It just floored me every time I heard it because
it was so close to our own daughter, you know,
to think that she would have to create this kind
of fiction in order to just get through the day.
Speaker 1 (22:33):
That's how you get tears. You make the story so
real and the details so sharp, and you add in
so many emotional triggers that the listener cannot escape. But
it's a risky thing to do, right If you aren't
a talented composer, and you don't do a sensitive rendition
of those lyrics, they could fall flat, could seem forced,
(22:54):
even offensive. Far easier just to fall back on the
blend cliche that wild horses couldn't drag you away. Country
music makes people cry because it's not afraid to be specific.
Speaker 11 (23:09):
You know, she came to see him one last time,
and we all wondered if she would, and it kept
brought in through.
Speaker 10 (23:24):
My mind.
Speaker 11 (23:28):
This time.
Speaker 1 (23:41):
Bobby Braddock was born in Auburndale, Florida, a little town
between Tampa and Orlando. His father grew Citrus. They were
Church of Christ, just about the most fundamentalist of fundamentalist Christians.
Braddock moved to Nashville in nineteen sixty four, just after
getting married, to seek his fortune in the music business.
He wrote his memoirs a few years ago. It's called
(24:03):
A Life on Nashville's Music Row. I read it before
I went to see him, and the best way to
describe the book is that it's exhausting. I don't mean
that in a bad way because I couldn't put it down.
But so much happens.
Speaker 12 (24:18):
You've lived this incredibly tumultuous, emotionally tumultuous lit Yeah, And
in the book it sounds like the first precipitating event
is the death of your son.
Speaker 1 (24:30):
Braddock was touring with the country music legend Mardy Robbins
at the time. He and his wife, Sue had a baby.
The child was just a few months old when he died.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
Whenever I was in town, not on the road with
Marty Robbins, every single day we'd buy fresh flowers, go
put it on. It's gray. We were just pathetic.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
He and Sue fight. She cheats on him. He cheats
on her, they break up, they get back together, they
have a daughter, they divorce. His ex wife mysteriously vanishes.
He drinks a lot, gets into fights, owes enormous sums
to the irs, has a major bout with depression, smokes
a lot of pot, lurches from one volcanic event to
the next, and through it all, Braddock writes songs, hundreds
(25:11):
of them.
Speaker 12 (25:12):
You were kind of tolerance for emotional volatility seems extraordinary.
Speaker 6 (25:24):
I guess.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
Tolerance is probably a pretty good word for it.
Speaker 1 (25:32):
Braddock walks over to the keyboard on the other side
of the room. He begins to talk about an old
girlfriend named Angela, who committed suicide by driving her car
into the river.
Speaker 2 (25:42):
When Angela died, her mother took her baby to raise it.
And she sent me a picture with a little girl,
Angela's child when she was about four or five years old,
look just like her mom. Picture her standing out in
the yard. And boy did a number on me, despite
(26:10):
all the dishters.
Speaker 1 (26:16):
He wrote a song about that in twenty minutes. He
played it for me. Then he played his favorite bit
of a sad Randy Newman song. He played me a
heartbreaking song he wrote once after getting up in the
middle of the night and passing his lover in the hallway,
and as he played one weeper after another, I realized
that the thing I'd said about Braddock's tolerance for emotional
(26:37):
volatility tolerance was the wrong word. That was just me
projecting my uptight Canadian self on to Braddock. But Braddock
is from the musical side of the United States, where
emotion is not something to be endured, it's something to
be embraced. At one point, when cell phones were still analog,
you could buy a scanner and listen in to other
(26:58):
people's conversations, and that's what Braddock does. He can't help himself.
A woman complains to her husband for an hour about
his lack of affection from the parking out at the
grocery store. Then ask him what he wants, and he says,
maybe Apple Newton's. And then this is my favorite part
I'm quoting now from Braddock's memoir. The conversation that truly
(27:20):
touched me was between a man perhaps forty and his mother,
maybe late sixties, in which the sun opened up about
sexual problems he was having with his wife. And I
envied the sprinkling of profanities and the mother's invitation to
come over to the house, son, and let's open a
bottle of whiskey and talk about it. Wishing I had
that kind of easy and open communication with my mom.
(27:42):
Then learning that the guy's mother was terminally ill with cancer.
If you're keeping track, that's marital difficulty, sex, profanity, whisky mom,
and terminal cancer in one conversation, and it truly touched him.
Do you know what Braddot's favorite song is? Vince Gills
(28:04):
Go Rest High on that Mountain, which Gil wrote in
memory both of his brother who died young of a
heart attack and fellow country star Keith Whitley, who drank
himself to death.
Speaker 9 (28:14):
Oh on, and son, you.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
Corner is dn go dude, Oh my god. When Vince
Gill and Ricky Skaggs and Painty Lovelace are singing harmony
on that thing, I go nuts. It still tears me up,
knowing that it's about death, and Vince wrote it about
Keith Whitley and then about his own brother, and just
(28:48):
the emotion that sending that song. It's just it's just powerful.
Speaker 8 (28:53):
Day you lift us.
Speaker 1 (28:57):
Gathered round.
Speaker 8 (29:01):
You agreed to.
Speaker 10 (29:06):
Shock good seeing.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
It's heartbreaking. Listening to that song makes me wonder if
some portion of what we call ideological division in America
actually isn't ideological at all. How big are the political
differences between red and blue states anyway, in the grand
scheme of things, not that big. Maybe what we're seeing
instead is a difference of emotional opinion. Because if your
(29:37):
principal form of cultural expression has drinking, sex, suicide, heart attacks,
mom and terminal cancer all on the table for public discussion,
then the other half of the country is going to
seem really chilly and uncaring. And if you're from the
rock and roll half clinging semi ironically to two Dy
Fruity O Rudy, when you listen to a song written
(29:57):
about a guy's brother who died young of a heart
attack and another guy who drank himself to death, you're
going to think, who are these people? Here's another way
to think about the sad song line. Let me read
(30:17):
you the list of the birthplaces of the performers of
the top twenty country songs of all time Again. I'm
going to use the Rolling Stone magazine list. Ready, Arkansas, Virginia, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi,
Mississippi Georgia, California, Central Valley, by the way, not Los Angeles, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Texas, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Texas, Kentucky, Texas.
(30:43):
I could do the top fifty, or the top one hundred,
or the top two hundred, and you get the same pattern. Basically,
you cannot be a successful country singer or songwriter if
you're not from the South. It's impossible. There's one exception,
which is the great songwriter Harlan Howard, who was born
in Detroit, but almost immediately thereafter his family moves to
(31:03):
a farm in rural Kentucky. It's like the five to
second roll when you drop a piece of food on
the floor. If it's not on the ground long enough,
it doesn't count. As far as I can tell, there
are no Jews on the country list, almost no Catholics,
only two black people. It's white Southern Protestants all the
way down. Now compare that to the rock and roll list.
(31:27):
You've got Jews from Minnesota, black people from Detroit, Catholics
from New Jersey, middle class British art school dropouts, Canadians, Jamaicans.
Rock and roll is the Rainbow Coalition that diversity is
a good thing. It's why there's so much innovation in
rock and roll, but you pay a price for that.
(31:51):
There was a very clever bit of research published recently
by Colin Morrison the magazine The Pudding. He analyzed fifteen
thousand popular songs using an algorithm that can presses digital files.
So if you take out the repetitive bits in a song,
how much of it is left. Morris's big finding is
that rock and roll as a genre is really, really repetitive.
(32:15):
Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, the Beatles, If you take out
the duplicative parts, their music shrinks by sixty percent. That's
what happens when everyone is from somewhere different. Nobody speaks
the same language, so you have to use cliche, the
same phrases over and over again, because if you go
(32:35):
deeper or try to get more specific, you start to
lose people. Country music, on the other hand, is not
nearly as repetitive. When Morris ran the lyrics of popular
country singers through his algorithm, they only shrank by about
forty percent, a third less than the rock and rollers.
Nor is hip hop repetitive, which makes sense. The birthplaces
(32:57):
of everyone on Rolling Stones list of greatest rap songs
reads like an urban version of the country list. Queen's
South Central lal A Brooklyn, Long Island, South Central Long Beach,
Houston means the Bronx Englewood, New Jersey. The Bronx. Hip
Hop and country are both tightly knit musical communities. And
when you're speaking to people who understand your world and
(33:20):
your culture and your language, you can tell much more
complicated stories. You can use much more precise imagery. You
can lay yourself bare because you're among your own. In
the book, it sounds like your relationship with Sparky was
(33:41):
the one that seemed the most creatively fruitful. It was
it was Sparky was a beautiful blonde from northern Alabama,
the great love of Bobby Braddock's life.
Speaker 9 (33:52):
Why was that?
Speaker 2 (33:54):
I think because my favorite her are so strong. I mean,
is it's sort of a visceral thing.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
I think That's why I found Bobby Braddock's book so
exhaust It's because everything is felt, everything is a mountain
peak and Sparky, Sparky was everest high altitude infatuation.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
That's the sort of thing that made people go absolutely crazy.
You know, and that was the case with her. You know,
that's what gets the animal instinct of people maybe who
haven't evolved as much as they should, and cause them
to go out and get a gun, blow somebody's brains
out over some gun not being a can't stand the
(34:42):
thought or someone you know, having sex with a person
that he loves.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
Braddick and Sparky were on and off lovers for years.
It was intense, painful, euphoric. When it ended, Braddick was
in pieces.
Speaker 8 (35:00):
He kept her picture on the wall wind half crazy
now in.
Speaker 1 (35:08):
The that's Braddick in the original demo he made of
he stopped loving her today.
Speaker 8 (35:12):
He still loved her through it all, hoping she'd come back.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
I'm not sure where it came from. It may have
come from Sparky, you know, honestly not know it would
be interesting.
Speaker 12 (35:29):
How could it not?
Speaker 2 (35:30):
Yeah, well, if I think it probably, I think it
probably did. But I just I can't see it. I
can't see that for certainty to.
Speaker 8 (35:36):
Marvell carry him.
Speaker 1 (35:39):
I felt like Bradick shrink at that moment, listening to
his tangled dreams and then wanting to shake him at
the end of the session. It's Sparky Sparky.
Speaker 8 (35:48):
They found some letters by He's a being.
Speaker 1 (35:52):
I mean, you wrote a song in the middle of
the great defining love affair of your life, the relationship ends,
and you write write a song about the heartbreak of
that a man carries to his grave. I mean, could
could it be more clear?
Speaker 8 (36:12):
I went to see him one last time.
Speaker 1 (36:18):
Bobby Braddick wrote he stopped loving her today with his
friend Curly. In nineteen seventy seven, they took it to
the singer George Jones. Jones was then at his lowest
ebb a wreck, strung out on cocaine and whiskey. He
just checked out of a psychiatric hospital. The great love
of his life, Tammy Wynette, had embodied her hit song
div O RCEE and left him. Jones had just nearly
(36:41):
shot and killed one of his best friends. The heartbroken
Bobby Braddock has written a song about a man who
cannot stop loving a woman, and it's sung by the
heartbroken George Jones. Who cannot stop loving a woman, Get
him some.
Speaker 8 (36:56):
Letters byes Babe.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
D.
Speaker 10 (37:03):
In nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 8 (37:10):
He had underlined and m.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
Underlined in red every single I love you, every single
I love you.
Speaker 10 (37:22):
I went to see him just today. Oh but I
didn't see no tears, all dressed up to go away.
First time I've seen him smiling.
Speaker 2 (37:45):
You.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Why did he finally turn his back on his great love?
Why is this the first time he smiled in years?
Because he's dead. Only death could end his love.
Speaker 7 (37:56):
It blazed red upon his dog.
Speaker 8 (38:02):
And sing, They'll carry.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
You.
Speaker 8 (38:10):
Stopped loving hard today.
Speaker 1 (38:14):
It's totally over the top, Madelin sentimental Kitchie, call it
whatever you want, just don't fight it. One thing that
Bobby Braddock told me in passing that I think about
a lot is that he thought of the character in
his song as a bad role model. The man was obsessed.
He couldn't let go. But that's the point, right, That's
(38:36):
why we cry, because the song manages to find beauty
and even a little bit of grandeur in someone's frailty.
Speaker 10 (38:44):
I'm sol carried.
Speaker 8 (38:52):
He stopped loving hard today.
Speaker 1 (38:57):
Wild horses, please.
Speaker 9 (39:10):
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Grand
Ole Opry House to the celebration of life of George
Glenn Jones. One of the most important people ever of
all time and of any time in the history of
country music.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
George Jones died in twenty thirteen. Everyone who was anyone
in country music came to his memorial service. You should
watch it if you get the chance. It's on YouTube,
all two hours and forty one minutes of it, because
it's everything I've been talking about. Vince Gill stands up
with Patty Lovelace and sings, go rest high in that
Mountain and breaks down halfway through. Travis Tritt remembers a
(40:06):
conversation he once had with Chris Christofferson about how they
expected George Jones to have died years before.
Speaker 15 (40:14):
And I looked at Chris and I made the comment,
you know, with all the years of hard living that
George had, who would have ever thought that he would
outlive Tammy. And Chris looked at me and said, had
(40:35):
it not been for Nancy, he would not have.
Speaker 1 (40:42):
Nancy Jones, George Jones's fourth and final wife, the real
love of his life, his soulmate and companion. Travis Tritt
holds out his hand towards Nancy, who's sitting right in
the front row.
Speaker 15 (40:56):
George said it many times. She's my angel, and she
saved my life, and so we owe you a debt
of gratitude.
Speaker 5 (41:06):
For that.
Speaker 1 (41:09):
Comes the crowning moment of the day, the final performance.
Alan Jackson strides out onto the stage a big rangy
guy craggy features cowboy boots, jeans, long coat, white statson.
He looks squarely at Nancy Jones and without introduction, launches
into he stopped loving her today.
Speaker 7 (41:29):
He shout, all love you till I die. She told
em you are yet time as he years when clool.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
And you realize as he sings that Braddock's song has
gotten even more specific. It's no longer about a long
ago love affair. It's about right now. This is the
day George Jones stopped loving Nancy Jones. Alan Jackson takes
off his hat and play says it over his heart.
Speaker 7 (42:12):
He stopped loving her.
Speaker 12 (42:17):
Today.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
And if you aren't crying, I can't help you.
Speaker 9 (42:26):
I love you, George. All of the three grades of
our time, ladies and gentlemen at all time. That's Alan Jackson,
Thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (43:03):
Revision's History is produced by Emil LaBelle and Jacob Smith,
with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Ciomara Martinez White. Our
editor is Julia Barton. Lawn Williams is our engineer. Original
music by Luis Sciarra. Special thanks to Andy Bauers and
Jacob Weisberger Panicle. I'm Malcolm gadwe
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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