July 20, 2017 • 41 mins
Why country music makes you cry, and rock and roll doesn’t: A musical interpretation of divided America.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin In Nashville, Tennessee. There's a songwriter named Bobby Braddock.
He's in his seventies, maybe five foot seven, bald head,
scruffy beard, wiry, like if you messed them in a bar,
you'd probably lose. The most striking thing about him is
his eyes, which are the palest and most intense shade
(00:36):
of blue. He wears sunglasses a lot, and it's almost
as if he needs to protect the world from that look.
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, piano in the corner,
couches to one side, and he talked about his education
in the music business. I think I always had the
(00:58):
reputation as Ben kind of a quirky rider, maybe a
little left field. The turning point in Braddock's career was
a song you've probably heard of. He was performed by
Tammy white Net back when she was the reigning Queen
of country music nineteen sixty eight, about a mom who
had to spell out the word d I v O
r ce so her kids wouldn't know their parents were
(01:20):
splitting up. So dr ce Yeah. Brote this did a
demo on it, and no tigers, nobody did it. Nobody
would recording. D I v o r CE was a
song with a gimmick. Braddock did a lot of gimmicky
songs back then. No one wanted this one. So Braddock
(01:40):
went to a friend and longtime collaborator, Curly Putman. So,
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 I could
(02:03):
stop this a little bit like a soap commercial. I said, well,
what would you do? And he guys a guitar and
he had this really mournful singing style. Tammy Wynette was
a big fan of Curly sing and she loved his
singing because he had I mean it just you singing
(02:25):
was just so sad. He oh, I wish that we
gets drop this d So I said, get your guitar,
let's let's put it on tape. Right then, you know,
d I v O r CE went to number one.
(02:46):
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
(03:11):
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
(03:35):
why people don't talk about this more because it's weird.
For the sake of argument, let's use the rock magazine
Rolling Stones list to the best songs of all time,
the top fifty. These are the critics choices. Hotel California
by the Eagles comes in up forty nine, which, as
far as I can tell, is a song about drugs.
Tutti Fruity by Little Richard at forty three Tutti Fruity,
(03:59):
which I remind you has as its signature lyric Tutti
fruity O rudy tutti fruiti O rudy tutti fruity O
rudy tutti FRUITI rudy wop bop A loop 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,
(04:22):
Derek and the Domino's 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 A You've gone
to the finest schools, all right, miss Lonely, but you
know you only used to get juiced in it. Nobody's
(04:43):
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 disintegrates,
(05:05):
nobody's killed on a battlefield, no mother grieves for a on.
The closest that any song and Rolling Stones 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
(05:26):
of greatest travail. The protagonists of rock and roll's sad
songs still get to go to parties now. Just turn
on a country music station, especially at 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. Have you ever heard John
(05:48):
Prine's Unwed Fathers. It's a devastating bit of songwriting about
a teenage mom fleeing town. He sings it with his
wife Rachel. Also wearier man, smoking man, she bother and
(06:09):
all a bad Your daddy meant to hurt youever? It
just don't love but you got his e Those last
two lines, your daddy never meant to hurt you ever.
(06:32):
He just don't live here, but you've got his eyes.
That's brutal black some bad dream all on with Bob
one half of the country, the rock music part, wants
to music to be hymns to extra version. The other
half wants to talk about real life dramas and have
(06:54):
a good cry. I don't get it, By the way,
you know who wrote that Unwd Father's song? With John
Bryan Bobby Braddock or maybe you've heard this another classic
recorded by Tammy way Natt Long Time, So Long, Golden Ring.
(07:26):
It follows a couple from first love to the break
up of their marriage by tracing the journey of their
wedding ring from pawnshop 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 word
change made by the song's producer, Billy Sheryl, because that
(07:48):
made his song one crucial degree less sad what we had.
He says, you won't admit it about who 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 that's
not as powerful as you're right now right. He says,
you won't admit it, but I know leave town. She
(08:11):
says one. Thanks for certain I don't love you anymore.
It throws down the ring ash She walks out of
the door. And country music is supposed to be about
real life, you know, and I try to reflect that
and bo all right, Golden Ring, which brings us to
(08:38):
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, 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 Wynette for a time,
(08:59):
a hard living, dissolute megastar. Once, in the midst of
an epic bender, jones family took his keys away, so
we got on his riding mower and drove eight miles
to the liquor store to get 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,
(09:23):
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 get it out of my head.
He said, I'll love you till I've done. She told
him you for getting time. As the years went slowly by,
(09:56):
she still prayed upon him. He kept her pictures on
his wall do I need to tell you who wrote
that song? Bobby Braddock. Bobby Braddock is the king of tears.
He's still after through it all, hoping she ain't come
(10:25):
back again. 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 local chamber choir thirty singers. They
(10:47):
sang a cantata called Annalise by the British composer James Whitbourne,
a choral composition which puts the words of Anne 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 performance Bev told me about out was
(11:09):
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 to many times
Waldo wald Carpet, that old book's library smell, which I
have to admit, I love how many people are there.
It's in their main reading room. They moved around all
(11:29):
the tables and one hundred one hundred twentieth full, pretty
much standing room only. Why as they're singing, I think,
(11:50):
why is that alto not singing? And then I look
over and I think somebody else so prime I'm not singing?
That's all because everybody else in their parts is singing,
and I realized they were crying and they couldn't sing.
Bev says, she cried pretty much through the entire performance.
She was looking straight ahead because she didn't want people
(12:11):
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, 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
manage to sing without crying? And she said, well, I
(12:35):
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, 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. I was
at home in Canada when Bev told me that story,
(12:56):
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 Annale's they did that day
in the library. This is the last moment and called
(13:16):
it's called Anne's Meditation. I see the world. I see
the world being slowly turned turned into a wilderness. Now
(13:54):
I realized this is a crazy question, because we're hearing
a piece based in 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 obvious
(14:20):
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
families getting books and kids running around, and everyone's on
stacking chairs with the tables pushed off to the side.
(14:42):
But here's the most important thing. Analise is specific It's
a cantata about the actual experiences of a real person.
In her own words, Bev says that when she cried,
(15:02):
she started thinking about her own family, Mennonites, who escaped
terrible persecution in Russia. Natasha says that as she sang
about twelve year old Anne 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
(15:24):
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
(15:50):
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. I watched you suffer
(16:20):
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 by the legendary Graham Parsons.
(16:42):
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. I don't
own he I got on the sab plane just to
(17:06):
fly down the other's love. But all that you can
show me a Briian sky, and I don't want to hear,
(17:26):
says story. Someone who has suffered a terrible loss has
gotten on a plane and she's so numbed by grief
that she could no longer see those around her. The
last time I feel like this, I was in the wilderness,
and the canon was on fine from Boulder to Birmingham
(17:52):
and wild horses 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 is easy to
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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 mountain
(18:32):
and watching a canyon burn I watched in the buzz
of Babor. I would holding grace I could see. First,
(19:09):
she references the great black spiritual rocked 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
(19:31):
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 Varnen, the music director of the choir in my hometown,
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says that there's a part in analys that does the
same thing, and is they're in hiding already. And she
starts singing, and the composer has set these words in
kind of a style of an American Susa March, and
so she's talking about being in the bathtub and being
scrubbed in the bathtub, and it's a Susa We'll scrub, scrub,
(20:13):
scrub ourselves in the tinta right, very happy and optimistic music.
And Frank in the bathtub to the tune of a
Susan March with the horrors of the Holocaust outside her door.
Three absolutely concrete images in merciless combination. It just floored
(20:36):
me every every time I heard it, because it was
so close to, you know, 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.
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
(20:59):
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,
even offensive. Far easier just to fall back on the
bland cliche that wild horses couldn't drag you away. Country
music makes people cry because it's not afraid to be specific.
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You know, she came to see him one last time
all and we all wondered if she were and it
kept running through my mind this time. Bobby Braddock was
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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 A Life on
(22:20):
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. You've lived this incredibly tumultuous, emotionally tumultuous life. Yeah. Yeah,
(22:40):
And in the book it sounds like the first precipitating
event as the death of your son. Braddock was touring
with the country music legend Marty Robbins at the time.
He and his wife, Sue had a baby. The child
was just a few months old when he died. Whenever
I was in town, not on the road with Marty Robins,
every single day we'd buy fresh flowers to put it
(23:00):
on it's gray. We were just pathetic. 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
(23:21):
from one volcanic event to the next, and threw it all.
Braddock writes songs, hundreds of them. You're kind of tolerance
for emotional volatility seems extraordinary. I guess tolerance is probably
(23:46):
a pretty good word for it. 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. When
Angela died, her mother took her baby to raise it.
And she sent me a picture of the little girl,
(24:08):
Angela's child, who about four or five years old, look
just like her mom. Picture her standing out in the
arm and boy did a number on me spid distance.
(24:32):
He wrote a song about that in twenty minutes. He
played it for me. Then he played his favorite bit
of a sad Randy Newan 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 that thing I'd said about Braddock's tolerance for emotional volatility,
(24:54):
tolerance was the wrong word. That was just me projecting
my upti Canadian self onto 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 people's conversations,
(25:16):
and that's what Braddock does. He can't help himself. A
woman complains to her husband for an hour about its
lack of affection from the parking lot of the grocery store.
Then ask him what he wants, and he says, may
be Apple Newton's. And then this is my favorite part
I'm quoting now from Braddock's memoir. The conversation that truly
touched me was between a man perhaps forty and his mother,
(25:40):
may be late sixties, in which the son 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 whisky and talk about it. Wishing I
had that kind of easy and open communication with my mom.
Then learning that the guy's mother was terminally ill with cancer.
(26:02):
If you're keeping track, that's marital difficulty, sex, profanity, whiskey mom,
and terminal cancer in one conversation, and it truly touched him.
Do you know what. Bradditt's favorite song is Vince Gills
Go Rest High on that Mountain, which Gill wrote in
memory both of his brother who died young of a
(26:24):
heart attack and fellow country star Keith Whitley, who drank
himself to death. Son you done, Oh my God. When
(26:49):
Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs and Patty Lovelace are singing
harmony on that thing, I go to nuts. It still
tears me up. Northern. It's about death, and Vince wrote
it about Keith Whitland, then about his own brother, and
just the emotion that's in that song. It's just it's
just powerful. Days gathered r green, we shot goody face.
(27:31):
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
(27:53):
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 tutty fruity
O Rudy, when you listen to a song written about
(28:14):
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 songline. Let me read you the
(28:34):
list of the birthplaces of the performers of the top
twenty country songs of all time Again. I'm going to
use a 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.
(28:59):
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
(29:19):
a farm in rural Kentucky. It's like the five 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
(29:42):
that to the rock and roll list. 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.
(30:02):
But you pay a price for that. There was a
very clever bit of research published recently by Colin Morris
in 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,
(30:23):
how much of it is left. Morris's big finding is
that rock and roll as a genre is really, really repetitive.
Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, the Beatles. If you take out
the Duke bookative parts, their music shrinks by sixty percent.
That's what happens when everyone is from somewhere different. Nobody
(30:44):
speaks the same language, so you have to use cliche,
the same phrases over and over again, because if you
go 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
(31:05):
about forty percent, a third less than the rock and
roll nor is hip hop repetitive, which makes sense. The
birthplaces of everyone on Rolling Stones list of Greatest rap
songs reads like an urban version of the country list. Queens,
South Central lay Brooklyn, Long Island, South Central Long Beach, Houston, Queens,
The Bronx, Englewood, New Jersey, The Bronx. Hip hop and
(31:29):
country are both tightly knit musical communities, and when you're
speaking to people who understand your world and 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,
(31:53):
it sounds like your relationship with Sparky was 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. Why was that? I think
because my family her are so strong, I mean, sort
(32:20):
of a virtual thing. I think that's why I found
Bobby Braddock's book so exhausting. It's because everything is felt,
everything is a mountain peak, and Sparky, Sparky was everest
high altitude infatuation. That's the kind of short thing that
made people go absolutely crazy, you know, And that was
(32:43):
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 mean it can't stand the thought or someone you know,
having sex with a person that he loves. Braddock and
(33:04):
Sparky were on and off lovers for years. It was intense, painful, euphoric.
When it ended, Braddock was in pieces. He kept her
picture on the wall, went half crazy now in the
(33:25):
that's Braddock in the original demo he made of he
Stopped Loving Her Today. He still loved her through it all,
hoping she come back again. So I'm not sure where
it came from. It may have come sparky, you know, honestly,
not now be interesting? How could it not? Yeah, well,
(33:46):
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. Tomorrow they'll carry him away. I felt
like Braddock 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. They found some letters
by his being. I mean, you wrote a song in
(34:09):
the middle of the great defining love affair of your life,
the relationship ends, and you write a song about the
heartbreak of that a man carries to his grave. I mean,
it's could it be? Could it be more clear? I
went to see him one last time, Bobby Braddock wrote
(34:35):
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 Wynett,
had embodied her hit song d I V O r
Ce and left him. Jones had just nearly shot and
(34:58):
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.
Cannot stop loving a woman keept some letters by bid
(35:19):
it in nineteen sixty two. He had underlined and ran,
underlined and read every single I love you, every single
I love you. I went to see him just today.
(35:45):
Oh but I didn't seen old tears, all dressed up
to go away. First time I'd seen him smiling. You.
Why did he finally turn his back on his great love?
Why is this the first time he smiled in years?
(36:08):
Because he's dead. Only death could end his love. It
plays to read I'm soon thout carry he stopped loving Harday.
(36:30):
It's totally over the top, modeling 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
(36:52):
why we cry, because the song manages to find beauty
and even a little bit of grandeur in someone's frailty.
I'm soon thout caring. He stopped Hi today, wild horses, please,
(37:22):
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. George Jones died in twenty thirteen. Everyone who
was anyone in country music came to his memorial service.
(37:43):
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 Hyghenete Mountain
and breaks down halfway through. Oh. Travis Tritt remembers a
(38:18):
conversation he once had with Chris Christofferson about how they
expected George Jones to have died years before, 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?
(38:42):
And Chris looked at me and said, had it not
been for Nancy, he would not have. 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
(39:05):
towards Nancy, who's sitting right in the front row. George
it many times, she's my angel, and she saved my life,
and so we owe you a debt of gratitude for that.
Then comes the crowning moment of the day, the final performance.
Alan Jackson strides out onto the stage a big, rangy guy,
(39:29):
craggy features, cowboy boots, jeans, long coat, white stetson. He
looks squarely at Dancy Jones and without introduction, launches into
he stopped loving her today, He said, all love you
till I live. She told him you more good time
(39:56):
as your years when flu 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 places
(40:21):
it over his heart. He stopped loving her today. And
if you aren't crying, I can't help you. I love you, George.
(40:44):
All the three breaks of our time, ladies and gentlemen,
at all time. That's Alan Jackson. Thank you so, Mark Jolan.
(41:15):
Revisionist History is produced by Meil Lobelle and Jacob Smith,
with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Silmarra Martinez White. Our
editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Original
music by Luis Guera. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and
Jacob Weisberg of Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gradwell
Pushkin In Nashville, Tennessee. There's a songwriter named Bobby Braddock.
He's in his seventies, maybe five foot seven, bald head,
scruffy beard, wiry, like if you messed them in a bar,
you'd probably lose. The most striking thing about him is
his eyes, which are the palest and most intense shade
(00:36):
of blue. He wears sunglasses a lot, and it's almost
as if he needs to protect the world from that look.
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, piano in the corner,
couches to one side, and he talked about his education
in the music business. I think I always had the
(00:58):
reputation as Ben kind of a quirky rider, maybe a
little left field. The turning point in Braddock's career was
a song you've probably heard of. He was performed by
Tammy white Net back when she was the reigning Queen
of country music nineteen sixty eight, about a mom who
had to spell out the word d I v O
r ce so her kids wouldn't know their parents were
(01:20):
splitting up. So dr ce Yeah. Brote this did a
demo on it, and no tigers, nobody did it. Nobody
would recording. D I v o r CE was a
song with a gimmick. Braddock did a lot of gimmicky
songs back then. No one wanted this one. So Braddock
(01:40):
went to a friend and longtime collaborator, Curly Putman. So,
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 I could
(02:03):
stop this a little bit like a soap commercial. I said, well,
what would you do? And he guys a guitar and
he had this really mournful singing style. Tammy Wynette was
a big fan of Curly sing and she loved his
singing because he had I mean it just you singing
(02:25):
was just so sad. He oh, I wish that we
gets drop this d So I said, get your guitar,
let's let's put it on tape. Right then, you know,
d I v O r CE went to number one.
(02:46):
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
(03:11):
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
(03:35):
why people don't talk about this more because it's weird.
For the sake of argument, let's use the rock magazine
Rolling Stones list to the best songs of all time,
the top fifty. These are the critics choices. Hotel California
by the Eagles comes in up forty nine, which, as
far as I can tell, is a song about drugs.
Tutti Fruity by Little Richard at forty three Tutti Fruity,
(03:59):
which I remind you has as its signature lyric Tutti
fruity O rudy tutti fruiti O rudy tutti fruity O
rudy tutti FRUITI rudy wop bop A loop 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,
(04:22):
Derek and the Domino's 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 A You've gone
to the finest schools, all right, miss Lonely, but you
know you only used to get juiced in it. Nobody's
(04:43):
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 disintegrates,
(05:05):
nobody's killed on a battlefield, no mother grieves for a on.
The closest that any song and Rolling Stones 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
(05:26):
of greatest travail. The protagonists of rock and roll's sad
songs still get to go to parties now. Just turn
on a country music station, especially at 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. Have you ever heard John
(05:48):
Prine's Unwed Fathers. It's a devastating bit of songwriting about
a teenage mom fleeing town. He sings it with his
wife Rachel. Also wearier man, smoking man, she bother and
(06:09):
all a bad Your daddy meant to hurt youever? It
just don't love but you got his e Those last
two lines, your daddy never meant to hurt you ever.
(06:32):
He just don't live here, but you've got his eyes.
That's brutal black some bad dream all on with Bob
one half of the country, the rock music part, wants
to music to be hymns to extra version. The other
half wants to talk about real life dramas and have
(06:54):
a good cry. I don't get it, By the way,
you know who wrote that Unwd Father's song? With John
Bryan Bobby Braddock or maybe you've heard this another classic
recorded by Tammy way Natt Long Time, So Long, Golden Ring.
(07:26):
It follows a couple from first love to the break
up of their marriage by tracing the journey of their
wedding ring from pawnshop 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 word
change made by the song's producer, Billy Sheryl, because that
(07:48):
made his song one crucial degree less sad what we had.
He says, you won't admit it about who 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 that's
not as powerful as you're right now right. He says,
you won't admit it, but I know leave town. She
(08:11):
says one. Thanks for certain I don't love you anymore.
It throws down the ring ash She walks out of
the door. And country music is supposed to be about
real life, you know, and I try to reflect that
and bo all right, Golden Ring, which brings us to
(08:38):
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, 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 Wynette for a time,
(08:59):
a hard living, dissolute megastar. Once, in the midst of
an epic bender, jones family took his keys away, so
we got on his riding mower and drove eight miles
to the liquor store to get 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,
(09:23):
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 get it out of my head.
He said, I'll love you till I've done. She told
him you for getting time. As the years went slowly by,
(09:56):
she still prayed upon him. He kept her pictures on
his wall do I need to tell you who wrote
that song? Bobby Braddock. Bobby Braddock is the king of tears.
He's still after through it all, hoping she ain't come
(10:25):
back again. 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 local chamber choir thirty singers. They
(10:47):
sang a cantata called Annalise by the British composer James Whitbourne,
a choral composition which puts the words of Anne 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 performance Bev told me about out was
(11:09):
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 to many times
Waldo wald Carpet, that old book's library smell, which I
have to admit, I love how many people are there.
It's in their main reading room. They moved around all
(11:29):
the tables and one hundred one hundred twentieth full, pretty
much standing room only. Why as they're singing, I think,
(11:50):
why is that alto not singing? And then I look
over and I think somebody else so prime I'm not singing?
That's all because everybody else in their parts is singing,
and I realized they were crying and they couldn't sing.
Bev says, she cried pretty much through the entire performance.
She was looking straight ahead because she didn't want people
(12:11):
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, 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
manage to sing without crying? And she said, well, I
(12:35):
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, 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. I was
at home in Canada when Bev told me that story,
(12:56):
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 Annale's they did that day
in the library. This is the last moment and called
(13:16):
it's called Anne's Meditation. I see the world. I see
the world being slowly turned turned into a wilderness. Now
(13:54):
I realized this is a crazy question, because we're hearing
a piece based in 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 obvious
(14:20):
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
families getting books and kids running around, and everyone's on
stacking chairs with the tables pushed off to the side.
(14:42):
But here's the most important thing. Analise is specific It's
a cantata about the actual experiences of a real person.
In her own words, Bev says that when she cried,
(15:02):
she started thinking about her own family, Mennonites, who escaped
terrible persecution in Russia. Natasha says that as she sang
about twelve year old Anne 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
(15:24):
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
(15:50):
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. I watched you suffer
(16:20):
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 by the legendary Graham Parsons.
(16:42):
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. I don't
own he I got on the sab plane just to
(17:06):
fly down the other's love. But all that you can
show me a Briian sky, and I don't want to hear,
(17:26):
says story. Someone who has suffered a terrible loss has
gotten on a plane and she's so numbed by grief
that she could no longer see those around her. The
last time I feel like this, I was in the wilderness,
and the canon was on fine from Boulder to Birmingham
(17:52):
and wild horses 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 is easy to
(18:12):
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 mountain
(18:32):
and watching a canyon burn I watched in the buzz
of Babor. I would holding grace I could see. First,
(19:09):
she references the great black spiritual rocked 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
(19:31):
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 Varnen, the music director of the choir in my hometown,
(19:53):
says that there's a part in analys that does the
same thing, and is they're in hiding already. And she
starts singing, and the composer has set these words in
kind of a style of an American Susa March, and
so she's talking about being in the bathtub and being
scrubbed in the bathtub, and it's a Susa We'll scrub, scrub,
(20:13):
scrub ourselves in the tinta right, very happy and optimistic music.
And Frank in the bathtub to the tune of a
Susan March with the horrors of the Holocaust outside her door.
Three absolutely concrete images in merciless combination. It just floored
(20:36):
me every every time I heard it, because it was
so close to, you know, 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.
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
(20:59):
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,
even offensive. Far easier just to fall back on the
bland cliche that wild horses couldn't drag you away. Country
music makes people cry because it's not afraid to be specific.
(21:25):
You know, she came to see him one last time
all and we all wondered if she were and it
kept running through my mind this time. Bobby Braddock was
(21:58):
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 A Life on
(22:20):
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. You've lived this incredibly tumultuous, emotionally tumultuous life. Yeah. Yeah,
(22:40):
And in the book it sounds like the first precipitating
event as the death of your son. Braddock was touring
with the country music legend Marty Robbins at the time.
He and his wife, Sue had a baby. The child
was just a few months old when he died. Whenever
I was in town, not on the road with Marty Robins,
every single day we'd buy fresh flowers to put it
(23:00):
on it's gray. We were just pathetic. 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
(23:21):
from one volcanic event to the next, and threw it all.
Braddock writes songs, hundreds of them. You're kind of tolerance
for emotional volatility seems extraordinary. I guess tolerance is probably
(23:46):
a pretty good word for it. 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. When
Angela died, her mother took her baby to raise it.
And she sent me a picture of the little girl,
(24:08):
Angela's child, who about four or five years old, look
just like her mom. Picture her standing out in the
arm and boy did a number on me spid distance.
(24:32):
He wrote a song about that in twenty minutes. He
played it for me. Then he played his favorite bit
of a sad Randy Newan 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 that thing I'd said about Braddock's tolerance for emotional volatility,
(24:54):
tolerance was the wrong word. That was just me projecting
my upti Canadian self onto 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 people's conversations,
(25:16):
and that's what Braddock does. He can't help himself. A
woman complains to her husband for an hour about its
lack of affection from the parking lot of the grocery store.
Then ask him what he wants, and he says, may
be Apple Newton's. And then this is my favorite part
I'm quoting now from Braddock's memoir. The conversation that truly
touched me was between a man perhaps forty and his mother,
(25:40):
may be late sixties, in which the son 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 whisky and talk about it. Wishing I
had that kind of easy and open communication with my mom.
Then learning that the guy's mother was terminally ill with cancer.
(26:02):
If you're keeping track, that's marital difficulty, sex, profanity, whiskey mom,
and terminal cancer in one conversation, and it truly touched him.
Do you know what. Bradditt's favorite song is Vince Gills
Go Rest High on that Mountain, which Gill wrote in
memory both of his brother who died young of a
(26:24):
heart attack and fellow country star Keith Whitley, who drank
himself to death. Son you done, Oh my God. When
(26:49):
Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs and Patty Lovelace are singing
harmony on that thing, I go to nuts. It still
tears me up. Northern. It's about death, and Vince wrote
it about Keith Whitland, then about his own brother, and
just the emotion that's in that song. It's just it's
just powerful. Days gathered r green, we shot goody face.
(27:31):
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
(27:53):
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 tutty fruity
O Rudy, when you listen to a song written about
(28:14):
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 songline. Let me read you the
(28:34):
list of the birthplaces of the performers of the top
twenty country songs of all time Again. I'm going to
use a 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.
(28:59):
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
(29:19):
a farm in rural Kentucky. It's like the five 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
(29:42):
that to the rock and roll list. 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.
(30:02):
But you pay a price for that. There was a
very clever bit of research published recently by Colin Morris
in 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,
(30:23):
how much of it is left. Morris's big finding is
that rock and roll as a genre is really, really repetitive.
Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, the Beatles. If you take out
the Duke bookative parts, their music shrinks by sixty percent.
That's what happens when everyone is from somewhere different. Nobody
(30:44):
speaks the same language, so you have to use cliche,
the same phrases over and over again, because if you
go 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
(31:05):
about forty percent, a third less than the rock and
roll nor is hip hop repetitive, which makes sense. The
birthplaces of everyone on Rolling Stones list of Greatest rap
songs reads like an urban version of the country list. Queens,
South Central lay Brooklyn, Long Island, South Central Long Beach, Houston, Queens,
The Bronx, Englewood, New Jersey, The Bronx. Hip hop and
(31:29):
country are both tightly knit musical communities, and when you're
speaking to people who understand your world and 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,
(31:53):
it sounds like your relationship with Sparky was 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. Why was that? I think
because my family her are so strong, I mean, sort
(32:20):
of a virtual thing. I think that's why I found
Bobby Braddock's book so exhausting. It's because everything is felt,
everything is a mountain peak, and Sparky, Sparky was everest
high altitude infatuation. That's the kind of short thing that
made people go absolutely crazy, you know, And that was
(32:43):
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 mean it can't stand the thought or someone you know,
having sex with a person that he loves. Braddock and
(33:04):
Sparky were on and off lovers for years. It was intense, painful, euphoric.
When it ended, Braddock was in pieces. He kept her
picture on the wall, went half crazy now in the
(33:25):
that's Braddock in the original demo he made of he
Stopped Loving Her Today. He still loved her through it all,
hoping she come back again. So I'm not sure where
it came from. It may have come sparky, you know, honestly,
not now be interesting? How could it not? Yeah, well,
(33:46):
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. Tomorrow they'll carry him away. I felt
like Braddock 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. They found some letters
by his being. I mean, you wrote a song in
(34:09):
the middle of the great defining love affair of your life,
the relationship ends, and you write a song about the
heartbreak of that a man carries to his grave. I mean,
it's could it be? Could it be more clear? I
went to see him one last time, Bobby Braddock wrote
(34:35):
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 Wynett,
had embodied her hit song d I V O r
Ce and left him. Jones had just nearly shot and
(34:58):
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.
Cannot stop loving a woman keept some letters by bid
(35:19):
it in nineteen sixty two. He had underlined and ran,
underlined and read every single I love you, every single
I love you. I went to see him just today.
(35:45):
Oh but I didn't seen old tears, all dressed up
to go away. First time I'd seen him smiling. You.
Why did he finally turn his back on his great love?
Why is this the first time he smiled in years?
(36:08):
Because he's dead. Only death could end his love. It
plays to read I'm soon thout carry he stopped loving Harday.
(36:30):
It's totally over the top, modeling 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
(36:52):
why we cry, because the song manages to find beauty
and even a little bit of grandeur in someone's frailty.
I'm soon thout caring. He stopped Hi today, wild horses, please,
(37:22):
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. George Jones died in twenty thirteen. Everyone who
was anyone in country music came to his memorial service.
(37:43):
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 Hyghenete Mountain
and breaks down halfway through. Oh. Travis Tritt remembers a
(38:18):
conversation he once had with Chris Christofferson about how they
expected George Jones to have died years before, 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?
(38:42):
And Chris looked at me and said, had it not
been for Nancy, he would not have. 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
(39:05):
towards Nancy, who's sitting right in the front row. George
it many times, she's my angel, and she saved my life,
and so we owe you a debt of gratitude for that.
Then comes the crowning moment of the day, the final performance.
Alan Jackson strides out onto the stage a big, rangy guy,
(39:29):
craggy features, cowboy boots, jeans, long coat, white stetson. He
looks squarely at Dancy Jones and without introduction, launches into
he stopped loving her today, He said, all love you
till I live. She told him you more good time
(39:56):
as your years when flu 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 places
(40:21):
it over his heart. He stopped loving her today. And
if you aren't crying, I can't help you. I love you, George.
(40:44):
All the three breaks of our time, ladies and gentlemen,
at all time. That's Alan Jackson. Thank you so, Mark Jolan.
(41:15):
Revisionist History is produced by Meil Lobelle and Jacob Smith,
with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Silmarra Martinez White. Our
editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Original
music by Luis Guera. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and
Jacob Weisberg of Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gradwell
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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