A Turn in the South
Jim said to Ben, “A lesson in helping others.” And to me, “A great amount of peer pressure which the adolescent faces. We believe that Christians live in the real world and should not withdraw from the real world.”
Ben said: “Occasionally we would—thirty or forty of us—go out of town, to a camp area, where we would be away from a lot of the distractions, the TV and radio, the outside influences, where we would all be together and break down into groups of four or five people. In the smaller groups you can always get more personal. It’s easier to share with each other in the smaller group than in the group of thirty.”
I said, “Like the early Christians going into the desert.”
Jim said, “It’s comparable.”
Ben said, “That re-creation of our spiritual lives—that’s where the comparison with the early Christians holds good.”
“How long were those camps?”
“Friday afternoon, all of Saturday, and much of Sunday. A weekend.”
“Fun? Or solemn?”
“Not solemn,” Ben said. “Meaningful.”
“Joyful occasions?”
“Joyful. An inner joy, that we were re-creating, and growing. We knew that we were always stronger people, closer to God, and closer to the people around us as well as to ourselves, when we left. And that’s the idea of the whole weekend.”
“How many weekends have you been on?”
“I’ve been on eight.”
Jim said, “Twice a year.”
I asked him about his knowledge of God, and how that had come.
“Oh, not miraculous. Nothing that happened last Wednesday or last Thursday. But all through the day I have a constant feeling of his presence and I know that he’s with me. It’s really developed in the last couple of years, when I have started to search the Scriptures. We’re encouraged to search the Scriptures. You don’t have to. It’s a personal decision.”
“What of the future now?”
“I hope to become a lawyer. I think it fits hand in hand. The type of religion that we have is a people religion. Just as Mr. Vandiver can be an influence from the pulpit, just as easily I can be a light in my community as a lawyer, and have people see me as a kindhearted, moral individual.”
“But the Church of Christ brotherhood is shrinking.”
“Numerically we might decrease. But the people who will be falling by the wayside will be those people who were halfhearted in their faith anyway.”
HENRY, in all his turmoil, had spoken—and Jim Vandiver had pointed it out to me—of his emotional attachment to the fellowship within the church. And Ben loved the idea of the brotherhood. But Melvin, who was in his early forties, and had drifted away from the Church of Christ in the last five years, made a face when I mentioned the subject of fellowship.
He said, “No, no. The fellowship would irritate me. I’ve never enjoyed the fellowship, ever.”
And it was hard, indeed, to see someone so elegant and accomplished, playing down his profession and his skill in that profession-it was hard to see someone with those manners drawing sustenance from the kind of weekend Ben had described.
He said, “It’s boring.”
And at once the objection, so simple, appeared unanswerable. But Melvin had been in the church for much of his life. There was much knowledge behind that snappy word.
“I don’t think it was always boring. Going back seventy-five years, I think it would have been entertaining, a form of entertainment, the fellowship. Now I would agree that it’s an extension of the evangelical movement. To keep you involved, to keep the numbers up.
“The South was almost entirely agrarian. Tent revivals were an opportunity for almost the entire community to meet in one place—as well as Sunday services. You’ll find that revivals played a very large part in the growth of the Church of Christ up till ten years ago—and they are the most boring, dull experiences you can have.”
I said, “America being a fun civilization.”
“Agree. They’re fighting a losing battle. And that’s a very large factor, the fun civilization. Most of the people that attend these large evangelical events are young people. Eventually they don’t go back. They get bored. And that’s unfortunate. The church should never attempt to provide entertainment. It’s boring when they try. It doesn’t stimulate you emotionally or intellectually. All you have to do is to turn your TV on to be entertained.
“I think I could defend this point easily. The whole American evangelical movement was based on these shows, these circuses. The best example now is Oral Roberts. Those days are gone. There’s movies, TV, traveling. But if all you did in the old days was sit on your farm, that provided a break in your life.
“It will completely die, the church. Or let’s say it will not exist in twenty-five years as it exists today. If it were to exist at all, it must go back to its teachings. No, that’s wrong. I think it probably was an error from the beginning. To keep it alive, it must offer answers of a redemptive nature. By which I mean that’s really all it can do. It can only address people’s questions about what life is. It’s got to stop trying to be a judge, the entertainer, the meeting place. In the old days it was even the town hall. You didn’t take your problem to a lawyer. You went to the church. The Church of Christ will tell you today that you shouldn’t bring a lawsuit against anyone, that you should take your problems to the church and allow the church to arbitrate. This was a very efficient way of handling problems in a small agrarian community. Very effective. Though the church being judge and jury imposed on people moral guilt—they felt condemned by God for civil offenses.”
A rising professional man, he had grown to reject the completeness of the culture of his childhood. Religion, the frontier faith, had created this completeness; now it was a burden he could do without. In a new world, he wished religion to have its place, like everything else. Yet he knew that he was rejecting a part of his identity.
“The Church of Christ does an excellent job in meshing traditional values with Christian principles, universal Christian principles. The result is that when one begins to doubt the traditions he is unable to separate his doubt about tradition from his belief in Christian principles. It becomes very confusing. The confusion is at times unbearable. I can understand why Henry has trouble finding words for certain things. There’s guilt and alienation, the idea of abandoning your heritage. I went through a lot of guilt. Guilt is the most critical. The Church of Christ deliberately instills guilt in people. It is extremely judgmental. There is almost the circle-of-wagons sense that if you attack certain traditions it’s blasphemy. I think I should tell you that I think of myself as a spiritual person. Actually, I think I am more spiritual now than I was. In a literal sense.”
And in Melvin there was something like grief at the necessary break with the South he had known.
“The South is losing its identity, and that’s a lamentable thing. Being Southern is a state of mind. I know that’s a trite thing to say. It’s a way of looking at your place in the world, a place that’s more defined than many other places. Have you been to California? It’s everything the South isn’t. And an odd thing about that is that many business ideas begin in California. The fast food, the interstate highways, clothing styles. The reason is that creative people are stifled in the South. They move from the South and other places to California. Creative people have to get away from the South. It will be a very long time before that stifling will disappear. It will be my generation that will break the link. It’s not something I say with any pride. Nor shame. No judgment. I say it purely as fact.”
Wasn’t there the possibility of a new kind of intellectual life, a new kind of strength, from that breaking of the link?
Melvin wasn’t having any of that. He went back to his original point. “The link is broken by people of my generation because they don’t want the boredom deal. As opposed to soul-searching experiencing. ‘I just don’t need this.’ The church are genuinely perplexed by what’s happening.”
/> There was confirmation of what Melvin had said from another distinguished man. This man told me that his neighbors, professional people, successful people, originally from small towns where they had been Baptist or Church of Christ, were now all Presbyterians. One reason (as Reverend Ptomey had hinted) was that the Presbyterian religion was more socially acceptable. The other reason was that it was more lenient, less demanding, less intrusive or encompassing. Religion now had to have its compartment, almost its social place.
The frontier had ceased to exist. And the religions it had bred were beginning slowly to die. In the old days, when men, often of little education, had needed only to declare themselves ministers, people would have seen themselves reflected in the expounders of the Word. This quality of homespun would have made the religions appear creations of a community, personal and close and inviolable. Now a certain distance was needed.
ONE OF the most successful country-music songwriters is Bob McDill. The South is his best subject: redneck celebration, against a background of the hard years middle-aged men have lived through and have spoken to their children about. McDill’s best songs have the feel of folk songs.
Cotton on the roadside, cotton in the ditch.
We all picked the cotton, but we never got rich.
He had an office in a music publisher’s in Nashville, and he had a certain fame for going to his office every working day to write his songs. It was there that I went to see him. On his desk was a lined yellow pad with what looked like a fair copy in pencil of a finished song. There were no other papers on his desk. But there were curious ornaments: London mementoes—a toy red double-decker bus, a guardsman, beefeaters, a London taxi.
He was forty-three. He was tall and slender. He liked the outdoor life, and went out duck-shooting. (That was the gentleman’s sport here, as Campbell had told me; real rednecks were meat-hunters.) He had been born in East Texas, and had been writing songs since he was fifteen or sixteen. He had always been interested in poetry, music, guitars, drums, banjos, pianos. “Not that I play them all, or play them well.”
He said that the early songs he had written were self-indulgent. “I didn’t learn to write commercially until I was in my late twenties.” The professional attitude was necessary. The songwriter writes for singers, and has a special relationship with singers.
He went to Memphis in 1967 and spent a year there. “In Memphis I tried to write songs for black artists, black singers. I was on the staff of a publisher as a writer, and was also working in a studio as an assistant engineer.” That attempt to write black songs didn’t work. “I could have succeeded if I had had time enough to learn that black mentality, that black approach to music. I was beginning to learn it when I left. You’ve got to say something that the singer wants to say and can identify with. It was the same thing when I moved here. I had to learn this mind-set. I learned this subculture, which wasn’t my own. The vocabulary is very limited. You have to learn to do big things with little words. In both black music and country music, and more so in country music.”
It was such a special art, songwriting, so far from my own. I wanted to be taken into it a little way, and I asked him to talk about the problems he had had with a song.
He chose “Somebody’s Always Saying Goodbye.”
Railroad stations, midnight trains,
Lonely airports in the rain,
And somebody stands there with tears in their eyes.
It’s the same old scene, time after time.
That’s the trouble with all mankind.
Somebody’s always saying goodbye.
Taxicabs that leave in the night,
Greyhound buses with red taillights.
Someone’s leaving and someone’s left behind.
Well, I don’t know how things got that way,
But every place you look these days
Somebody’s always saying goodbye.
Take two people like me and you.
We could’ve made it. We just quit too soon.
Oh, the two of us, we could’ve had it all,
If we’d only tried.
But that’s the way love is, it seems.
Just when you’ve got a real good thing,
Somebody’s always saying goodbye.
Bob McDill said: “The bridge—between the images of the first two stanzas, the detachment, and the personal thing—that gave me a lot of trouble. Until I hit on the idea of just conversation. It eases the listener into it. There was another problem—I still hadn’t defined the situation between the two people, the lover and the lost one. I had to do that in four lines. It seems so obvious now. But you know how long the obvious takes. I saw that there was no need to make a judgment on the behavior of either party. ‘Somebody is always leaving.’ It sounds almost as if it could be her, the singer. But, for whatever reason, she knows now it was a terrible thing—he threw away a great thing. Two verses of images, and then in seven lines you have to create all that personal thing.
“I also had trouble with it musically. Two long pieces of melody that are complete once, twice. You need relief—and then I hit on the idea of repeating just the second half of the A-section melody.”
When he began to talk about the writing he stood up and looked away.
“Sometimes you begin with an emotion, a feeling about something. Sometimes a title, sometimes a line of the lyric. But then the hard part comes. You take that little thing, that little bit of idea, and build on it and build on it. That’s the tough part. The problem then is not to mess it. Your text is so small that every word has to count. From the very first word you are working towards that center.
“You write line by line. The couple of parts we have to deal with which serious poets don’t have to deal with is the tonality and also the singability. You can’t do complex things and things that are hard to say. It has to be so easy to say and sing. It has to fall out of the singer’s mouth.”
I asked him for an example of a line that had to be put right. He couldn’t think of anything like that in his own work.
“The computer in the brain is rejecting all the time. It rejects everything that is clumsy, hard to sing.”
And at the end there was no way of defining what a good song was going to be. It was all a matter of feeling.
“If it feels good, if it does something to you, it’s good.”
No amount of questioning, no amount of explaining, even from someone as willing to talk as Bob McDill was, could take one to the magic: the calling up and recognition of impulses that on the surface were simple, but which, put together with music, made rich with a chorus, seemed to catch undefined places in the heart and memory.
Mama said, don’t go near that river.
Don’t go hangin’ round ole Catfish John.
But come the mornin’ I’d always be there
Walkin’ in his footsteps in the sweet delta dawn.
Almost nothing at first. But then the images and the associations come: Mama, river, catfish, footsteps, delta, dawn.
Bob McDill said he had had to learn the subculture. But the Southern images and words of his best songs are far from the stylized motifs of a good deal of country music. And though he makes much of writing in an office in a matter-of-fact, day-to-day way—and perhaps because he talks in a matter-of-fact way, since the mystery cannot be described—it is probably true that, when moved, he writes with that most private part of the self with which Proust said serious writers write.
He says that his best song is “Good Ole Boys like Me.”
When I was a kid Uncle Remus he put me to bed,
With a picture of Stonewall Jackson above my head.
Then Daddy came in to kiss his little man
With gin on his breath and a Bible in his hand.
And he talked about honor and things I should know.
Then he staggered a little as he went out the door.…
I guess we’re all gonna be what we’re gonna be.
So what do you do with good o
le boys like me?
Every detail there was considered. His aim, he said, was to get as much of the South as he could in a few lines. And the song has become very famous; many people I spoke to referred to it; the mood of the song spoke for them. A “good ole boy” (as I had gathered from Campbell in Jackson) was a redneck; but it was also a more general word for an old Southerner, someone made by the old ways. The song might seem ironical, then celebratory. But below that it is an elegy for the South, old history and myth, old community, old faith.
THE SOUTHERN Baptist convention, meeting two weeks or so before in Saint Louis, had voted itself—over strong moderate opposition—into an extreme fundamentalist position. Baptist seminaries were to be purged of people who didn’t believe in biblical literalism. Sunday-school literature was to reflect this new strictness.
Reverend Tom Ward, the pastor of Christ Episcopal Church, said, “The more the Baptist religion is threatened, the more fervent it becomes.” Reverend Ptomey, the Presbyterian, thought that the new moves represented the negative side of Baptist fervor. He said, “They’ve manipulated the political processes within their denomination to appoint people to the boards of their schools who share their perspective on biblical literalism.”
Reverend Will Campbell, more involved than either of these men, was outraged. Will Campbell was a famous local Baptist pastor or counselor. He had no church of his own. He operated informally, from his forty-acre farm just outside Nashville; the informality was part of his fame. In spite of the Thoreau-like setting and his frontiersman style, he had had a formal theological education, including three years at Yale Divinity School. He was in his early sixties.