Growing Up Among the Poor and Pissed Off

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	• Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music Dana Jennings Faber & Faber, 2008 - 272 pages average customer review:based on 5 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

a wise and poignant debut memoir

The voice in Dana Jenning's SING ME BACK HOME is accessible, open, brave and candid. I couldn't put it down!

Hollers and heartaches

For anyone who thinks country music begins and ends with Kenny Chesney, here's your reality check. Part autobiography, part music appreciation course, the author gives the reader a lean, mean lesson in what country music -- in its Golden Age -- was all about. Far more than just twangy songs about drinking and cheating, the country music of those times and artists tied the music to the poorest, the marginalized, the most helpless of Americans. The prose is eloquent and evocative, yet sparse as a meal in the Depression. Also funny, biting, and wryly witty at times. The author reminds us, too, that country music didn't stem solely from, nor was it intended solely for the people of the rural south. Instead, artists like Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Faron Young, the Louvin Brothers, Connie Smith, et al, were all people who came up from hardscrabble lives & times, and their music resonated with people everywhere who suffered from deprivation, whether the listeners lived in Kingston, New Hampshire, or Stollings, West Virginia. The music of our youth evokes the people, the pain, the loves, the losses, and the emotions of our youth. Like the author, I had turned away from country music during my youth, and when I returned to it later in life I found that there isn't any (almost none, anyway) country music anymore. No more fiddle, no more steel, no more twang. Honesty? Fuhgeddaboudit!

This book reminded me in so many ways of the music I love, but more than that, it brought back the people I loved most and who are no longer with me. Yeah, this book was a trip down memory lane for me, but it also felt like validation for the appreciation I've put into this kind of music. And it's a great tool for beginners who want to learn what the Golden Age of country music really sounded like, and where to begin listening.

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This one pleased me a great deal...

Like the author, I was a yankee (New Jersey in my case, NH in his) who grew up in a poor white family whose main musical preference was country. I am older than the author, and his 1960's experiences were my '50's memories. My family was maybe a bit less broke, a bit more functional despite the presence of a lot of drinking. But Hank Williams and Slim Whitman and Eddy Arnold and the Sons of the Pioneers and Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and Jimmy Wakely and Red Foley and Tex Ritter were on our turntable all the time. Auto mechanics directly, and auto racing indirectly, and fishing and hunting and target shooting were the big recreational events of my youth. My folks had schooling that stopped at fourth grade for my orphaned dad and sixth grade for my ma. There were sporadic tragedies involving guns and cars and divorces and diseases and feuds in my extended clan. Dana Jennings has written about this kind of childhood, punctuated by what is now called "classic country music" and I identified with almost all of what he went through and what he thinks about it. Like him, I escaped into journalism. Despite our similar backgrounds, I could not have written nearly as well about my family as he wrote about his own. I think he did a grand job in this effort.

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Another yankee hillbilly!

I grew up in upstate New York on the Canadian border in the 50's and can remember listening to Country music in the 40's, actually. It was MY music! I was sixteen in 1957 when the author was born. I had about three years of guitar under my belt by then and had switched to Rockabilly but the love of Country remained. We weren't poor or dysfunctional but no more than blue collar working class people. I recall hearing more Country on Canadian radio stations than American up that way. But there was a lot of it. Lots of people young and old listened to Country back then in my hometown. The author confirms that that was happening all over the Northeast and I suspect all over the country. I enjoyed the book very much. I remember a friend of mine from North Carolina years ago telling me if it weren't for white trash there wouldn't be any Country music. He was joking but there is some truth in it I suppose. I would recommend this book to any Country fan young or old. A four star book for sure. It was a great era. It was certainly the golden age of electric Country music. This book defines it well.

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Growing Up Among the Poor and Pissed Off

OK, I admit it. When it comes to real country music, and those whom I believe truly appreciate it as the art form that it is, I am prejudiced. Never in a million years would I believe that some guy from New Hampshire, a writer and editor for the New York Times, of all the newspapers in the word, for crying out loud, would know much about the real thing; no way would someone with that background actually understand the music and those who created it. Well, that was before I read Sing Me Back Home, by Dana Jennings, who is exactly the guy I just described.

I want to apologize, Mr. Jennings, and I salute you, sir.

Sing Me Back Home is not a straight forward history of country music. Books like those serve their purpose, certainly, and there are many worthy ones out there already that take that approach. Jennings, on the other hand, turns the history of country music into something very personal: a way to share his own family story.

As most country music historians (and knowledgeable fans) agree, the years from the late forties to the very end of the sixties mark the period of classic country music. The music reached its peak during those years and has faced a steady, downhill slide since 1970 with the exception of a small (and poorly rewarded) group of pickers and singers that refuses to let classic country music completely disappear. But, overall, country music has probably never been in a sorrier state than it is in today. According to Jenkins, in fact, "It can be entertaining, but the difference between today's country and the summits of the 1950s and `60s is the difference between the lightning and the lighting bug."

As Jennings puts it, "country music was made by poor people for poor people." At its best, country music reflected, and maybe even justified, the lives endured by the rural poor who lived all around the United States, not just those from the South or the mountains and coal-producing regions of the Southeast. It is the history of working people, those who made livings with their hands, often at the sacrifice of their health or even their lives, during those two decades. Nothing for them came easy and, when they finally made it to Saturday night, they became walking, talking country songs themselves. They lived the cheating songs and the drinking songs; they spent time in prison, went hungry in the bad times, hit the road out of desperation or despair, had love affairs end badly, and repented on Sunday mornings with the full knowledge that they would backslide again come the very next Saturday night.

But what makes Sing Me Back Home so memorable is the way that Dana Jennings readily fits a member of his own family to every kind of classic country song there is. He lived it - and he remembers it because it made him the man that he is today despite the fact that he sits behind a desk at the New York Times. Song by song, the reader meets members of Jennings' family who could easily have been the inspirations for those same songs because, not only did these folks love and surround themselves with country music, they lived the lifestyle at its heart.

For those of us of a certain age, and of a certain upbringing, this book is like preaching to the choir. We already knew this deep down in our souls. But having someone as frank, and just as importantly, as articulate, as Dana Jennings come along to tell the real story of country music's golden age and how its listeners related to those songs, is a real bonus.

Sing Me Back Home fits longtime country music fans like an old glove. But the book is also a perfect primer for those newer fans who wonder about the country music legends that are barely more than names to them today. In fact, the discography at the end of the book is worth its whole $24 dollar cover price. Those willing to spend the money and time required to surround themselves with the albums and box sets listed by Jennings in that discography will learn more about the history of America's working class than they could ever learn from any textbook.

Despite what David Allan Coe says to the contrary, I do not believe in the perfect country music song. But there just might be a perfect country music book. If so, this is it.

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The years from about 1950 to 1970 were the golden age of twang. Country music?s giants all strode the earth in those years: Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, George Jones and Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. And many of the standards that still define country were recorded then: ?Folsom Prison Blues,? ?Your Cheatin? Heart,? ?Mama Tried,? ?Stand by Your Man,? and ?Coal Miner?s Daughter.?

In Sing Me Back Home, Dana Jennings pushes past the iconic voices and images to get at what classic country music truly means to us today. Yes, country tells the story of rural America in the twentieth century?but the obsessions of classic country were obsessions of America as a whole: drinking and cheating, class and the yearning for home, God and death.

Jennings, who grew up in a town that had more cows than people when he was born, knows all of this firsthand. His people lived their lives by country music. His grandmothers were honky-tonk angels, his uncles men of constant sorrow, and his father a romping, stomping hell-raiser who lived for the music of Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the other rockabilly hellions.

Sing Me Back Home is about a vanished world in which the Depression never ended and the sixties never arrived. Jennings uses classic country songs to explain the lives of his people, and shows us how their lives are also ours?only twangier.

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