You can take the boy out
of the stories, but you can’t take the stories out of the boy.
The usual saying is, “You
can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the
boy.” In my day, we country boys were called hillbillies, so I say, “You can
take the boy out of the hills, but you can’t take the hills out of the boy.”
I did not want to be a
hillbilly, and I assumed that if I liked hillbilly music, that meant I was a
hillbilly. I had to listen to quite a bit of it, though, from age ten on,
because it was my father’s favorite, and he had control of the radio, which
before TV was like having control of the remote.
I was ten years old when
we moved 135 mile south, from the laboring lower class near east side of
Indianapolis, to a hardscrabble farm near Oakland City. It was definitely a
step down socially and economically.
In Indianapolis we did not
have a car, but we could walk or ride the street car [a bus on rails in the
middle of the street] to any place we wanted to go. We had a furnace in the
basement, and a gas stove, and an indoor toilet. On the farm, we had none of
these things. We barely had electricity, and that only in the house, not the
barn or the other out-buildings. We didn’t have a car, so we didn’t go any
place, except for hitching the horse up to the wagon to go into town to have
feed ground. It was a hillbilly existence. I did not want to be a hillbilly, so
I did not like their music.
It wasn’t just that I
wanted to be a city guy with a car and indoor plumbing. Hillbilly music just
banged off my ear drums. It was twangy and nasal and ungrammatical. I had not
lived long enough to understand that the twangs and the “ain’ts” were the
necessary way to tell the stories of those songs. I had not lived enough
stories yet to realize that the best songs always tell a story, a real one, an
honest one, a true one.
All this comes to mind
because we watched the excellent Ken Burns documentary on PBS about country
music.
In Indianapolis I had liked
folk songs that I learned at Lucretia Mott Public School # 3, on Rural Street.
My sister and I sang them as we did the dishes—Down In the Valley, Darling Clementine, I’ve Been Workin’ On The
Railroad, etc. I didn’t understand that folk and hillbilly came out of the
same stories.
In high school, there were
plenty of hillbilly kids, kids who liked hillbilly music. I wanted to run with
the cool kids, though, the ones who listened to Frank Sinatra and Doris Day,
not Hank Williams and Kitty Wells, the ones who danced to Benny Goodman and
Count Basie, not to Bill Monroe and Bob Wills. I wanted the musical stories
that came from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, not from Jimmy Rodgers
and Minnie Pearl.
But “story” became the
motif of my life. That’s all I’ve ever been—a story listener, a story teller, a
story preacher, a story sharer. So country music became a part of my life, too,
because of the stories, so much so that in my latter years I have gladly
referred to myself as “a hillbilly.”
I usually add “liberal,”
as in “hillbilly liberal,” so folks will know I like Meredith Willson as well
as Tom T. Hall, but I’m my father’s son, even though there was a time he didn’t
think so. I know he’s my father, because I like hillbilly music.
John Robert McFarland
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