Sing Me Back Home
September08, books September 16th, 2008
Reviewed by William McKeen, September 2008
By Dana Jennings
Faber and Faber, 257 pages, hardcover, $24
This magnificent book is one of the best things written about American music in the last two decades. Not since Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music in 1986 has a writer so deftly interwoven music history with the fabric of the daily lives of those who listen to – and live – the songs.
Dana Jennings could probably write a straight-ahead history of the great country and western artists of the 20th century, but why would he want to? In Sing Me Back Home, he stitches patches of biography (Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash) alongside the material from his own life. The book is populated with the drunk and ne’er-do-well aunts, uncles, and mamas and daddies that helped him survive—just barely—his impoverished childhood.
Funny thing is, Jennings does not fit the geographic profile of a country music fan. He’s from New Hampshire. But his childhood stories sound like something right out of Hickory Hollow, and the comedies and tragedies of his youth inform the truth in the greatest of country songs.
And that’s the best part of Sing Me Back Home: Jennings brings together Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, Faron Young and other early country singers and helps us appreciate (or “re-appreciate,” if that’s a word) their enormous contributions to music. The tortured poetry of Cash and Haggard, for example, deftly chronicled the lives of those behind bars. America’s love-hate relationship with the bottle and the salacious sagas of cheating freckle the recording resumès of Patsy and Loretta and Old Hank.
Though it’s part memoir, the history part of the book is as well researched as a doctorial dissertation in American history. We learn about the tragedy behind the comedy of Roger Miller, the mid-1960s country wunderkind who wrote King of the Road and Dang Me. In an extensive discography, Jennings helps readers go deeper into the music by listing and critiquing the definitive recordings of country classics. Jennings tips his hat to a couple of modern country artists, but the implied between-the-lines jab is that no matter how many millions they make, they’ll never write a song the way Merle Haggard can write a song.
And few people will ever write a book on music this good.
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Sing Me Back Home
September08, books September 16th, 2008Reviewed by William McKeen, September 2008
By Dana Jennings
Faber and Faber, 257 pages, hardcover, $24
This magnificent book is one of the best things written about American music in the last two decades. Not since Peter Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music in 1986 has a writer so deftly interwoven music history with the fabric of the daily lives of those who listen to – and live – the songs.
Dana Jennings could probably write a straight-ahead history of the great country and western artists of the 20th century, but why would he want to? In Sing Me Back Home, he stitches patches of biography (Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash) alongside the material from his own life. The book is populated with the drunk and ne’er-do-well aunts, uncles, and mamas and daddies that helped him survive—just barely—his impoverished childhood.
Funny thing is, Jennings does not fit the geographic profile of a country music fan. He’s from New Hampshire. But his childhood stories sound like something right out of Hickory Hollow, and the comedies and tragedies of his youth inform the truth in the greatest of country songs.
And that’s the best part of Sing Me Back Home: Jennings brings together Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, Faron Young and other early country singers and helps us appreciate (or “re-appreciate,” if that’s a word) their enormous contributions to music. The tortured poetry of Cash and Haggard, for example, deftly chronicled the lives of those behind bars. America’s love-hate relationship with the bottle and the salacious sagas of cheating freckle the recording resumès of Patsy and Loretta and Old Hank.
Though it’s part memoir, the history part of the book is as well researched as a doctorial dissertation in American history. We learn about the tragedy behind the comedy of Roger Miller, the mid-1960s country wunderkind who wrote King of the Road and Dang Me. In an extensive discography, Jennings helps readers go deeper into the music by listing and critiquing the definitive recordings of country classics. Jennings tips his hat to a couple of modern country artists, but the implied between-the-lines jab is that no matter how many millions they make, they’ll never write a song the way Merle Haggard can write a song.
And few people will ever write a book on music this good.
