I've been going through a bit of a tough time in a romantic relationship recently. Now, I'm not looking for pity (although I'm not saying I'd turn it down). Mostly. it just means that I've been looking for some sort of a coping mechanism, and that's what I want to write about.
One might point out that pouring out your woes in the newspaper is one way to get some catharsis, but I'm not sure. With the exception of this column-which I'm writing because I'm just too distracted to think of anything else to write-it goes contrary to all my instincts.
Here's my confession: I've been drowning my sorrows in country music the last couple of days.
Not Faith Hill or Garth Brooks, but more along the lines of alt-country: Ryan Adams, Whiskeytown, Son Volt, Uncle Tupelo and the peerless Gram Parsons.
Many folks I talk to think the blues is about being sad, but the theorists of blues-yes, these people exist-argue quite rightly that blues is about getting happy. You sing about your sorrows, dance to it and try to forget it all for a while. If blues is, at heart, a rural black form, then country music has to be its rural white counterpart (with lots of crossover of course-Bill Monroe is often credited with inventing bluegrass as a mix of Appalachian music, blues and jazz).
So country, too, is all about getting your blues out, if you'll forgive the idiom. Though I don't have the space, insight or stamina to figure out why I find a Merle Haggard song about dysfunctional relationships any more sustaining than a similar one by One Republic, at the end of the day, I just know that it works.
Maybe it's just that I like anything swathed in pedal steel guitar and fiddle. But there's something visceral about the lyrics, an authenticity that somehow appeals to me as if my family were ever poor, rural whites (they were actually poor, urban whites).
Gram Parsons, I think, felt that too. He was a wealthy Harvard dropout who somehow sang the most powerfully plaintive poor, white music. And though I'm not a drunk and my heart's not broken in two, I'm transported when I listen to Gram sing:
Alone and forsaken, so blue I could die/I just sit here drinking till the bottle runs dry.
To try and forget you I turn to the wine/An empty bottle, a broken heart, and you're still on my mind.
It's balm for the soul, and I'm glad to have it.
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