Sing Me Back Home tells why country music matters — in personal and historical terms
By Eryn Loeb
Published: May 21st, 2008 | 12:15pm
Unabashedly nostalgic, Sing Me Back Home is a near-seamless fusion of autobiography and music criticism. Journalist and New York Times editor Dana Jennings grew up in a "rogue northeastern extension of Appalachia" in the 1960s, where country music was the twangy heartbeat of daily life. Merle Haggard and Loretta Lynn were folk heroes, weaving songs from the kind of pain everyone understood.
With love — but little mercy — he describes how his own family lived out the classic country tropes of drinkin' and cheatin' and doin' time. Country music is authentic stuff, he insists, and if the songs seem obsessed with these sorts of indiscretions, it's only because listeners' lives were full of them, too.
Jennings slips in and out of folksy slang as he recounts juicy bits of personal history, and reflects on the songs that were inextricable from these private dramas. Throughout, he considers the unlikely legacies of country royalty like Johnny Cash, Webb Pierce, and Patsy Cline. He likens Loretta Lynn's songs to "blue-collar romance novels" that resonated with people (especially women) who were struggling to deal with harsh circumstances, pointing out that Lynn "sang a hell of a lot better than Betty Friedan."
By tying the sounds of country to the stories he knows best, Jennings makes a persuasive case for the cultural significance of a misunderstood musical tradition: a tradition that is purely — and sometimes devastatingly — American.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music
By Dana Jennings
272 pages, $24
Issue #35
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