Revisionist History - The King of Tears

Episode Date: July 20, 2017

Why country music makes you cry, and rock and roll doesn’t: A musical interpretation of divided America. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In Nashville, Tennessee, there's a songwriter named Bobby Braddock. He's in his 70s, maybe 5'7", bald head, scruffy beard, wiry, like if you messed with him in a bar, you'd probably lose. The most striking thing about him is his eyes, which are the palest and most intense shade of blue. He wears sunglasses a lot, and it's almost as if he needs to protect the world from that look. I met him on Music Row in Nashville. We had lunch, and then we sat in one of the writers' rooms in the Sony building,

piano in the corner, couches to one side, and he talked about his education in the music business. I think I always had the reputation as being kind of a quirky writer, maybe a little left field. The turning point in Braddock's career was a song you've probably heard of. It was performed by Tammy Wynette back when she was the reigning queen of country music, 1968, about a mom who had to spell out the word D-I-V-O-R-C-E so her kids wouldn't know their parents were splitting up. So, D-I-V-O-R-C-E. Yeah. Wrote this, did a demo on it, and no checkers.

Nobody did it. Nobody recorded it. D-I-V-O-R-C-E was a song with a gimmick. Braddock did a lot of gimmicky songs back then. No one wanted this one. So Braddock went to a friend and longtime collaborator, Curly Putman. So I said, well, why is nobody recording? He said, I think around the important part of your song, it's a sad song and your melodies on that part is too happy. What I was doing was

Oh I wish that we could stop this D.I.V.O. car scene. A little bit like a soap commercial. I said, well what would you do? And he got his guitar and he had this really mournful singing style. Tammy Wynette was a big fan of Curly singing. She loved his singing because he had, I mean he just, his singing was justI-V-O-R-C-E. So I said, get your guitar. Let's put it on tape like that. D-I-V-O-R-C-E went to number one. It was Bobby Braddock's first great exercise in how to make people cry. And from then on, things just got sadder.

My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is about something that has never made sense to me. Maybe it's because I'm a Canadian, or maybe Americans puzzle about this too. I'm talking about the bright line that divides American society. Not the color line, or the ideological line. I'm talking about the sad song line. I don't know why people don't talk about this more.

Because it's weird. For the sake of argument, let's use the Rock Magazine Rolling Stones list of the best songs of all time. The top 50. These are the critics' choices. Hotel California by the Eagles comes in at 49. Which, as far as I can tell, is a song about drugs. Tootie Fruity by Little Richard at 43. Tootie Fruity, which I remind you has as its signature lyric, Tootie Fruity, oh Rudy, Tootie Fruity, oh Rudy, Tootie Fruity, oh Rudy, Tootie Fruity, oh Rudy, wop bop a loooo Bop Alop Bam Boom.

There's Dancing in the Street at 40, Light My Fire, Be My Baby, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, Derek and the Dominoes, Layla. There are songs about wanting to have sex, songs about having sex, songs about getting high, presumably after having

sex. Number one song on the list, Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. Ah, you've gone to the finest schools, all right, Miss Lonely, but you know you only used to get juiced in it. Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street, and now you're gonna have to get used to it. I think that's a song about someone

who dropped out of Harvard. The number one rock song of all time is about dropping out of Harvard. The number one rock song of all time is about dropping out of Harvard. In all of those 50 songs, nobody dies after a long illness. No marriage disintegrates. Nobody's killed on a battlefield. No mother grieves for a son.

The closest that any song in Rolling Stone's list comes to being truly sad is Smokey Robinson's Tracks of My Tears, which is, first of all, number 50, so they put the sad song at the bottom of the list. And secondly, it's about a guy at a party. In their moments of greatest travail, the protagonists of rock and roll's sad songs still get to go to parties. Now just turn on a country music station, especially a traditional country music station, and listen. It's like a different universe. Marriages going to hell, people staring into their shot glass in a honky-tonk, people dying young. Have you ever heard John Prine's Unwed Fathers? It's a devastating bit

of songwriting about a teenage mom fleeing town. He sings it with his wife, Rachel. All about Your daddy never Meant to hurt you ever You just don't live here But you've got his eyes Those last two lines, your daddy never meant to hurt you ever, he just don't live here but you've got his eyes.

That's brutal. One half of the country, the rock music part, wants their music to be hymns to extroversion. The other half wants to talk about real-life dramas and have a good cry. I don't get it. By the way, you know who wrote that unwed father's song with John Prine?

Bobby Braddock. Or maybe you've heard this, another classic recorded by Tammy Wynette. Golden rain With one tiny little stone Another classic recorded by Tammy Wynette. Golden Ring. It follows a couple from first love to the breakup of their marriage by tracing the journey of their wedding ring from pawn shop to pawn shop. It's a weeper.

Who wrote it? Bobby Braddock. And today, 40 years after he wrote it, Braddock is still mad about a one word change made by the song's producer Billy Sherrill because that made his song one crucial degree less sad. What we had

was, he says you won't admit it, but I know you're running around. And Billy changed it to, he says you won't admit it, but I know you're leaving town. That's not as powerful as you're running around. That's sad. He says you won't admit it, but I know you're leaving town. She says one thing's for certain. I don't love you anymore. And throws down the ring as she walks

out the door. I think country music's supposed to be about real life, you know, and I try to reflect that in my life. Golden rings. Which brings us to maybe the greatest country song of all time. Certainly the saddest country song of all time.

The song that made me get on a plane and go to Nashville. It was recorded by the great George Jones, one of the half dozen or so most iconic figures in the history of country music. You just heard him singing in Golden Ring. Jones was famously the husband of Tammy Wynette for a time, a hard-living, dissolute megastar. Once, in the midst of an epic bender, Jones' family took his keys away, so he got on his riding mower and drove eight miles to the liquor store to get some whiskey.

This was a man who could pour his fractured heart into his music like no one else. A half dozen times in his career, Jones found a song truly worthy of his talents. But it never got better than He Stopped Loving Her Today. I still remember when I first heard that song. And from the day I started thinking about this episode, I haven't been able to get it out of my head. He said, I'll love you till I die. She told him you'll forget in time.

As the years went slowly by, she still prayed upon his mind. He kept her picture on his wall. Do I need to tell you who wrote that song? Bobby Braddock. Bobby Braddock is the king of tears. But he still loved her through it all. Hoping she'd come back again. Oh, man.

One of the things that got me interested in sad songs was a story my sister-in-law Bev told me. She and my brother live in the same area I grew up in, Waterloo County in southern Ontario. And a while ago, she went to a performance by a local chamber choir, 30 singers. They sang a cantata called Annalise by the British composer James Whitbourne, a choral composition which puts the words of Anne Frank's diary to music. I know this seems like a little bit of a digression from country music,

but it's a really useful case study in understanding why some songs make us cry. The performance Bev told me about was on a Sunday afternoon, a free performance at the Public Library, which is a very utilitarian, very 1960s building on Queen Street in downtown Kitchener. I've been there many times. Wall-to-wall carpet, that old books library smell, which I have to admit I love. How many people are there?

It's in their main reading room. They've moved around all the tables, and 100 a hundred? A hundred and twenty? It's full. Pretty much standing room only. My last night in my own bed In the morning... As they're singing I think,

why is that alto not singing? And then I look over and I think, that's somebody else, a soprano not singing. That's odd because everybody else in their parts is singing. And I realized they were crying and they couldn't sing. Bev says she cried pretty much through the entire performance. She was looking straight ahead because she didn't want people to see she was crying,

but it didn't matter because everyone was crying. When the performance was over, Bev approached the stage to talk to the soloist, the woman singing Anne Frank's words. I just went up to her afterwards and congratulated her on the beauty of the piece and her singing. And I said, and how did you manage to sing without crying? And she said, well, I couldn't look at Mark, the conductor, because he was wiping tears from his eyes. And I had my back to the choir, so that was good. And I didn't look at anybody in the audience, because they were crying. So I just looked up in the middle distance, and I sang. It was a good thing I had it memorized. I was at home in Canada when Bev told me that story,

so I called up Mark, the conductor, and the soloist, whose name is Natasha. They're actually husband and wife. They only live a few minutes away from my brother. So they came over. Mark sat at the piano in the living room, and Natasha stood behind him, and they performed one of the pieces from Annalise that they did that day in the library. This is the last movement. It's called Anne's Meditation.

I see the world, I see the world being slowly turned, turned into a wilderness. And yet, when I look at the sky. I feel everything will change for the better. Whenever you feel... Now, I realize this is a crazy question, because we're hearing a piece based on the Diary of Anne Frank, which is one of the most heartbreaking stories from one of the most horrific moments in recent history.

But why was everyone crying that day at the Kitchener Library? And looking, looking at The obvious reason is that the music is beautiful. So is Natasha's singing. The performance is also authentic. There's nothing contrived about it. It wasn't at Carnegie Hall. People weren't wearing suits and evening gowns. They were at the

Kitchener Library, and there's families getting books and kids running around and everyone's on stacking chairs with the tables pushed off to the side. But here's the most important thing. Annalise is specific. It's a cantata about the actual experiences of a real person in her own words. Bev says that when she cried, she started thinking about her own family, Mennonites who escaped terrible persecution in Russia. Natasha says that as she sang about 12-year-old Anne Frank, she was thinking about

her own daughter, who was 10, and who was sitting right next to Bev in the audience. Beauty and authenticity can create a mood. They set the stage. But I think the thing that pushes us over the top into tears is details. We cry when melancholy collides with specificity. And specificity is not something every genre does well. Wild Horses by the Rolling Stones Written by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. It's a song about a conversation a man is having with a silent, suffering loved one. The story goes that Mick Jagger dreamt up the verses while sitting at the bedside of his then-girlfriend Marianne Faithfull as she recovered from an overdose. I watched you suffer

A delicate life I watched you suffer a dull aching pain. I watched you suffer a dull aching pain. Now you've decided to show me the same. No sweeping exit or offstage lines could make me feel bitter or treat you unkind. Wild horses couldn't drag me away. Wild, wild horses couldn't drag me away. No, Wild Horses Couldn't Drag Me Away. Wild Horses was recorded first by the legendary Graham Parsons. Not long afterwards, Parsons died of an overdose,

and his friend and protege, the country music singer Emmylou Harris, made a song in his memory. She wrote it with Bill Danoff. It's called From Boulder to Birmingham. I don't want to hear a love song I got on this airplane just to fly And I know there's life below me But all that you can show me

Is the prairie and the sky And I don't want to hear a sad story Someone who has suffered a terrible loss has gotten on a plane And she's so numbed by grief that she can no longer see those around her. The last time I felt like this I was in the wilderness And the canyon was on fire From Boulder to Birmingham and Wild Horses are both beautiful, melancholy.

They're about the same thing. The ties the living and the healthy have to those in pain. But which is the sadder song? I don't think there's any question. Wild Horses is generic. Listen to how it starts. Childhood living is easy to do. The things you wanted, I bought them for you.

Graceless lady, you know who I am. You know I can't let you slide through my hands. What's going on? Any idea? What is Mick yammering on about? Now compare that to the specificity of looking down from the airplane and seeing nothing but prairie, then standing on a mountain and watching a canyon burn. In his saving grace I would walk all the way From Boulder to Birmingham

If I thought I could see I could see your face First she references the great black spiritual, Rock My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham. The Bosom of Abraham is where the righteous dead go while awaiting judgment. Then she sings, And I would also walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham. Now she's locating her grief.

I would make a pilgrimage from progressive, hippie, liberal, remember this is 1973, dope-smoking Colorado, back to the repressive heart of the Old South, just to see your face. Two completely different, specific images, each with its own set of emotional triggers, and she's piled one on top of another. Mark Voronin, the music director of the choir in my hometown, says that there's a part in Annalise that does the same thing.

Anne is, they're in hiding already, and she starts singing, and the composer has set these words in kind of a style of an American Sousa march. And so she's talking about being in the bathtub and being scrubbed in the bathtub, and it's this Sousa, we'll scrub, scrub, scrub ourselves in the tin tub. Very happy and optimistic music. Anne Frank in the bathtub, to the tune of a Sousa march with the horrors of the Holocaust outside her door. Three absolutely concrete images in merciless combination. It just floored me every

time I heard it because it was so close to, you know, our own daughter, you know, to think that she would have to create this kind of fiction in order to just get through the day. That's how you get tears. You make the story so real and the details so sharp, and you add in so many emotional triggers that the listener cannot escape. But it's a risky thing to do, right? If you aren't a talented composer and you don't do a sensitive rendition of those lyrics, they could fall flat, could seem forced, even offensive. Far easier just to fall back on the bland cliché

that wild horses couldn't drag you away. Country music makes people cry because it's not afraid to be specific. You know, she came to see him one last time. Oh, and we all wondered if she were. And it kept running through my mind. This time, he's over her. Bobby Braddock was born in Auburndale, Florida, a little town between Tampa and Orlando.

His father grew citrus. They were Church of Christ, just about the most fundamentalist of fundamentalist Christians. Braddock moved to Nashville in 1964, just after getting married, to seek his fortune in the music business. He wrote his memoirs a few years ago. It's called A Life on Nashville's Music Row.

I read it before I went to see him. And the best way to describe the book is that it's exhausting. I don't mean that in a bad way, because I couldn't put it down. But so much happens. You've lived this incredibly tumultuous, emotionally tumultuous life. I have, yeah. And in the book, it sounds like the first precipitating event is the death of your son. Braddock was touring with the country music legend Marty Robbins at the time. He and his wife Sue had a baby. The child was just a few months old when he died. Whenever I was in town, not on the road with Marty Robbins,

every single day we'd buy fresh flowers, go put it on his grave. We were just pathetic. He and Sue fight. She cheats on him. He cheats on her. They break up. They get back together. They have a daughter. They divorce. His ex-wife mysteriously vanishes. He drinks

a lot. Gets into fights, owes enormous sums to the IRS, has a major bout with depression, smokes a lot of pot, lurches from one volcanic event to the next, and through it all, Braddock writes songs, hundreds of them. Your kind of tolerance for emotional volatility seems extraordinary? I guess. Tolerance is probably a pretty good word for it. Braddock walks over to the keyboard on the other side of the room. He begins to talk about an old girlfriend named Angela who committed suicide by driving her car into the river.

When Angela died, her mother took her baby to raise it. And she sent me a picture of the little girl, Angela's child, when she was about four or five years old. Looked just like her mom. Picture her standing out in the yard. And boy, it did a number on me. He wrote a song about that in 20 minutes. He played it for me. Then he played his favorite bit of a sad Randy Newman song. He played me a heartbreaking

song he wrote once after getting up in the middle of the night and passing his lover in the hallway. And as he played one weeper after another, I realized that that thing I'd said about Braddock's tolerance for emotional volatility? Tolerance was the wrong word. That was just me projecting my uptight Canadian self onto Braddock. But Braddock

is from the musical side of the United States, where emotion is not something to be endured, it's something to be embraced. At one point, when cell phones were still analog, you could buy a scanner and listen in to other people's conversations. And that's what Braddock does. He can't help himself. A woman complains to her husband for an hour about his lack of affection from the parking lot of the grocery store. Then asks him what he wants.

And he says, maybe Apple Newtons? And then, this is my favorite part. I'm quoting now from Braddock's memoir. The conversation that truly touched me was between a man, perhaps 40, and his mother, maybe late 60s, in which the son opened up about sexual problems he was having with his wife.

And I envied the sprinkling of profanities and the mother's invitation to come over to the house, son, and let's open a bottle of whiskey and talk about it, wishing I had that kind of easy and open communication with my mom, then learning that the guy's mother was terminally ill with cancer. If you're keeping track, that's marital difficulty, sex, profanity, whiskey, mom, and terminal cancer in one conversation, and it truly touched him. Do you know what Braddock's favorite song is? Vince Gill's Go Rest High on That Mountain,

which Gill wrote in memory both of his brother, who died young of a heart attack, and fellow country star Keith Whitley, who drank himself to death. Go rest God, when Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs and Patti Loveless are singing harmony on that thing, I go nuts. It still tears me up. Knowing that it's about death and that Vince wrote it about Keith Whitley

and then about his own brother and just the emotion that's in that song, it's just powerful. The day you left us You gathered round your grave to grieve Wish I could see angels' faces It's heartbreaking. Listening to that song makes me wonder if some portion of what we call ideological division in America actually isn't ideological at all.

How big are the political differences between red and blue states anyway? In the grand scheme of things, not that big. Maybe what we're seeing instead is a difference of emotional opinion. Because if your principal form of cultural expression has drinking, sex, suicide, heart attacks, mom, and terminal cancer all on the table for public discussion, then the other half of the country is going to seem really chilly and uncaring. And if you're from the rock and roll half,

clinging semi-ironically to Tootie Fruity Oh Rudy, when you listen to a song written about a guy's brother who died young of a heart attack and another guy who drank himself to death, you're going to think, who are these people? Here's another way to think about the sad song line. Let me read you the list of the birthplaces of the performers of the top 20 country songs of all time. Again, I'm going to use the Rolling Stone magazine list. Ready? Arkansas, Virginia, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, Mississippi, Georgia, California, Central Valley, by the way,

not Los Angeles, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Texas. Kentucky, Alabama. Tennessee, Arkansas. Texas, Texas. Kentucky, Texas. I could do the top 50 or the top 100 or the top 200, and you get the same pattern. Basically, you cannot be a successful country singer or songwriter if you're not from the South. It's impossible. There's one exception, which is the great songwriter Harlan Howard, who was born in Detroit, but almost immediately thereafter, his family moves to a farm

in rural Kentucky. It's like the five-second rule when you drop a piece of food on the floor. If it's not on the ground long enough, it doesn't count. As far as I can tell, there are no Jews on the country list, almost no Catholics, only two black people. It's white, southern Protestants all the way down. Now, compare that to the rock and roll list. You've got Jews from Minnesota, black people from Detroit, Catholics from New Jersey, middle-class British art school dropouts? Canadians? Jamaicans? Rock and roll is the rainbow coalition. That diversity is a good thing.

It's why there's so much innovation in rock and roll. But you pay a price for that. There was a very clever bit of research published recently by Colin Morris in the magazine The Pudding. He analyzed 15,000 popular songs using an algorithm that compresses digital files. So if you take out the repetitive bits in a song, how much of it is left? Morris's big finding is that rock and roll as a genre is really, really repetitive. Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, the Beatles. If you take out the duplicative parts, their music shrinks by 60%. That's what happens when everyone is from somewhere different.

Nobody speaks the same language, so you have to use cliché. The same phrases over and over again. Because if you go deeper or try to get more specific, you start to lose people. Country music, on the other hand, is not nearly as repetitive. When Morris ran the lyrics of popular country singers through his algorithm, they only shrank by about 40%, a third less than the rock and rollers. Nor is hip-hop repetitive, which makes sense.

The birthplaces of everyone on Rolling Stone's list of greatest rap songs reads like an urban version of the country list. Queens, South Central LA, Brooklyn, Long Island, South Central, Long Beach, Houston, Queens, the Bronx, Englewood, New Jersey, the Bronx. Hip-hop and country are both tightly knit musical communities. And when you're speaking to people who understand your world and your culture and your language, you can tell much more complicated stories. You can use much more precise imagery. You can lay yourself bare

because you're among your own. In the book, it sounds like your relationship with Sparky was the one that seemed the most creatively fruitful. It was. It was. Sparky was a beautiful blonde from northern Alabama, the great love of Bobby Braddock's life. Why was that? I think because...

my feelings about her are so strong, I mean, it was sort of a visceral thing. I think that's why I found Bobby Braddock's book so exhausting. It's because everything is felt. Everything is a mountain peak. And Sparky, Sparky was Everest. High altitude infatuation. That's the sort of thing that makes people go absolutely crazy, you know. And that was the case with her, you know. That's what gets the animal instinct of people maybe who haven't evolved as much as they

should and cause them to go out and get a gun, blow somebody's brains out over it. Some guy not being able, can't stand the thought of someone, you know, having sex with a person that he loves. Braddock and Sparky were on-and-off lovers for years. It was intense, painful, euphoric. When it ended, Braddock was in pieces. He kept her picture on the wall Went half crazy now and then

That's Braddock in the original demo he made of He Stopped Loving Her Today. He still loved her through it all Hoping she'd come back again I said, I'm not sure where it came from. It may have come from Sparky, you know. I honestly don't know. It'd be interesting. How could it not?

Yeah, well, I think it probably did, but I can't say that for any certainty. Tomorrow they'll carry him away I felt like Braddock shrink at that moment, listening to his tangled dreams, and then wanting to shake him at the end of the session. It's sparky, sparky. They found some letters by his bed

I mean, you wrote a song in the middle of the great defining love affair of your life. The relationship ends and you write a song about the heartbreak that a man carries to his grave. I mean, could it be more clear? Bobby Braddock wrote He Stopped Loving Her Today with his friend Curly in 1977. They took it to the singer George Jones. Jones was then at his lowest ebb, a wreck, strung out on cocaine and whiskey.

He'd just checked out of a psychiatric hospital. The great love of his life, Tammy Wynette, had embodied her hit song D-I-V-O-R-C-E and left him. Jones had just nearly shot and killed one of his best friends. The heartbroken Bobby Braddock has written a song about a man who cannot stop loving a woman, and it's sung by the heartbroken George Jones, who cannot stop loving a woman. Kept some letters by his bed It in 1962

He had underlined in red Underlined in red Every single I love you Every single I love you Every single I love you I went to see him just today Oh, but I didn't see no tears

All dressed up to go away First time I'd seen him smile in years Why did he finally turn his back on his great love? Why is this the first time he's smiled in years? Because he's dead. Only death could end his love. He placed a wreath upon his door he's dead. Only death could end his love. It's totally over the top. Modeling, sentimental, kitschy. Call it whatever you want.

Just don't fight it. One thing that Bobby Braddock told me in passing that I think about a lot is that he thought of the character in his song as a bad role model. The man was obsessed. He couldn't let go. But that's the point, right? That's why we cry.

Because the song manages to find beauty And even a little bit of grandeur In someone's frailty And soon they'll carry him away He stopped loving her today Wild horses, please. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Grand Ole Opry House, to the celebration of life of George Glenn Jones,

one of the most important people ever, of all time, and of any time, in the history of country music. George Jones died in 2013. Everyone who was anyone in country music came to his memorial service. You should watch it if you get the chance. It's on YouTube, all two hours and 41 minutes of it, because it's everything I've been talking about. Vince Gill stands up with Patti Loveless and sings Go Rest High in That Mountain and breaks down halfway through. Your words on earth Travis Tritt remembers a conversation he once had with Chris Christopherson about how they expected George Jones to have died years before. And I looked at Chris and I made the comment,

you know, with all the years of hard living that George had, who would have ever thought that he would outlive Tammy? And Chris looked at me and said, had it not been for Nancy, he would not have. Nancy Jones, George Jones' fourth and final wife, the real love of his life, his soulmate and companion. Travis Tritt holds out his hand towards Nancy, who's sitting right in the front row.

George said it many times, she's my angel, and she saved my life. And so we owe you a debt of gratitude for that. Then comes the crowning moment of the day, the final performance. Alan Jackson strides out onto the stage, a big rangy guy, craggy features, cowboy boots, jeans, long coat, white Stetson. He looks squarely at Nancy Jones and without introduction launches into He Stopped Loving Her Today. He said I'll love you till I die

She told him you'll forget time And you realize, as he sings, that Braddock's song has gotten even more specific. It's no longer about a long-ago love affair. It's about right now. This is the day George Jones stopped loving Nancy Jones. Alan Jackson takes off his hat and places it over his heart. He stopped loving her today. And if you aren't crying, I can't help you.

We love you, George. One of the true greats of our time, ladies and gentlemen, at all times. That's Alan Jackson. Thank you so much, Alan. Revisionist History is produced by Mia Lobel and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Xiomara Martinez-White.

Our editor is Julia Barton. Flan Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg of Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.