Willie Nelson in The Atlantic

[Lazaro Vega]

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/04/what-willie-nelson-understands-about-country-deep-down-its-like-jazz/274996/

[danasgoodstuff]

I didn't quite see what the point of this article was, but I loves me some Willie!

[JSngry]

Same here, more or less (I think the "point of the article" was to be dutifully hip PR, but other than that, thanks for pretty much nothing on this one, The Atlantic!).

I'll post this one one more time, just becuase:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZhQhMpb2pY

I do think the "country jazz" thing presented in the article is a little off, though, since there's a fundamental difference in rhythmic impetus between most "country jazz" players (there's a "bluegrass" thing going on in the rhythm that seems to not be noticed by those eager to proclaim an exactness of kinship) as opposed to "jazz jazz" players (where there's...not a bluegrass thing going on ). This became apparent to me on an eight hour (each way) road trip a few years ago with a guy who was deep into "Western Swing" and had an impressive archive on his iPod. It's really not "the same thing", and all the better so for all concerned. Opposites attract, and Yin becomes Yang eventually (and vice-versa). 6 does indeed turn out to be 9, and I don't mind. But make the check out right anyway.

All of which just to the point that, same thing, only different, and that's "and", not "but".

[John Litweiler]

Jazz swing feels like 4/4 or 2/2, country swing feels to me closer to 2/4. I used to enjoy Willie Nelson, including a TV purported Charlie Christian tribute that had him with a 3 guitars-fiddle-bass quintet doing songs in a Hot Club style. (Johnny Gimble was the fiddle player and I wished jazz fiddle players could have a sound as good as his.) But in the last decade or two Willie has become so mannered, especially his singing the lines before the next chord change, that he's lost me.

[JSngry]

Jazz swing feels like 4/4 or 2/2, country swing feels to me closer to 2/4. I used to enjoy Willie Nelson, including a TV purported Charlie Christian tribute that had him with a 3 guitars-fiddle-bass quintet doing songs in a Hot Club style. (Johnny Gimble was the fiddle player and I wished jazz fiddle players could have a sound as good as his.) But in the last decade or two Willie has become so mannered, especially his singing the lines before the next chord change, that he's lost me.

That's the math, yeah, but...I had no real insight into the "why" of all this until I met my wife (a proud product of Boomer, WV) and started spending real time with people with deep roots in West Virginia, Virginia, Southern Ohio, Kentucky, that whole area. It's not just the meter of the music that sounds like that, it's the speech, the walk, the posture, the whole life. Kittie Wells used to sound like a voice to me, some iconic assemblage of sound in the form of a voice. Now she sounds like my mother-in-law. (Too bad it doesn't work the other way around )

And it's different there than it is in Texas, which is also different than it is in the so-called "Deep South". Yet it's all called "Country", just as it's all called "Jazz", etc., which yeah, I suppose it is. But before of any of that, it's about people. And people are...interesting, to put it mildly. Individually and collectively. Differences and similarities. I'm increasingly becoming a fan of the 3-D Venn diagram, you might say.

As for Willie, he started running out of steam for me in the late 70s, tbh. But I give him ongoing props for staying stoned that long, living even longer, and just for always being there in general with something besides mummydom. Maybe it's just genetics, or maybe it IS the herb! Or maybe both!

But then there's this... country boys who stuck their finger in the light socket and never got around to pulling it out.

All bets are off once the finger gets stuck in the socket!

[John Litweiler]

Jim, you remind me that as a 1950s teenager I worked a couple summers in a church camp (in IN) with several kids the same age from our denomination's mission school in Harlan county, KY. It was a conservative denomination. I asked one of the KY guys if they allowed dancing in the mission school. He said, "No, but they have what they call folk dancing, and you can't tell that from the real thing."

I took this seriously for many decades. Only lately, I began to wonder if he was country-boying me.

BTW these kids knew a lot of songs and hymns that I came to like. Now-archaic music. In years to come I heard bluegrass singers assassinate those songs.

[JSngry]

Great story.

As for the hymns, I was raised Missouri Synod Lutheran, and their hymnal was full of these decidedly..."German" songs of worship. Dad like nothing else, and Mom liked them well enough, although growing up as a Methodist in the South, she was not unfamiliar with a more, shall we say, syncopated approach. But she adapted.

I guess at some point the MS changed their hymnal and got rid of a lot of those old songs in favor of more/more broadly known hymns of American origin. The old man was livid! "I don't see why they even call it Tehran anymore: he'd grumble. And just last week, I was discussing funeral music with a young MS pastor, and he said, "these days we use the same songs as everybody........but we still get a few requests for the old German songs..." He said it with an air of bemusement, like somebody still having an antenna to get TV or someting, but I LOL'ed because I knew JUST the type of person he was talking about!

Anyway, yeah, Willie...you get into Central Texas and there's been a lot of German/Czech/Polish immigrants there over the years, and that, too affects the music (and everything else). It can claim parenthood to Conjunto, and all the Western Swing guys I know can play a polka just as well as they can anything else (and a lot of those guys can play everything really well...it's scary sometimes...). That's a part of Willie's musical lineage too.

Like the Schottische? Here ya' go!

[Hoppy T. Frog]

Great story.

As for the hymns, I was raised Missouri Synod Lutheran, and their hymnal was full of these decidedly..."German" songs of worship. Dad like nothing else, and Mom liked them well enough, although growing up as a Methodist in the South, she was not unfamiliar with a more, shall we say, syncopated approach. But she adapted.

I guess at some point the MS changed their hymnal and got rid of a lot of those old songs in favor of more/more broadly known hymns of American origin. The old man was livid! "I don't see why they even call it Tehran anymore: he'd grumble. And just last week, I was discussing funeral music with a young MS pastor, and he said, "these days we use the same songs as everybody........but we still get a few requests for the old German songs..." He said it with an air of bemusement, like somebody still having an antenna to get TV or someting, but I LOL'ed because I knew JUST the type of person he was talking about!

Around the time of the Mo Synod fundamentalist takeover around 1976, the pastor of my family's dissident liberal Mo Synod church fumed that at a church convention they sang "Amazing Grace", because it was not theologically correct. ("Grace" being a Methodist concept--we Lutherans are supposed to believe that we have some responsibility for our own salvation).

[JSngry]

Both folks had AG played at their funerals, and it is proudly inscribed on their tombstone.That was one non-German song that my Dad could get with, albeit more so as he aged.

I was raised - and had it instilled in some pretty rigorous confirmation classes - that salvation was by grace and grace alone. Justified by faith.

But yeah, you to keep up your end of the deal, because Once Saved Always Saved was not a Lutheran construct. That was for Baptists and other people (like Willie Nelson) looking for any old easy excuse to feel good.