Country Music Memories

One of the legends of country music died yesterday. George Jones had several nicknames over the years, "The Possum" and "No Show Jones" being two of the most famous. He was a hard drinker for many years, and his drug addictions and numerous failed marriages were the stuff of tabloid fodder. You don't see a lot of performers who truly qualify to be called "larger-than-life," but George Jones was definitely one of them.

I loved his music. Any fan of traditional country music loves George Jones. I remember hearing "White Lightning" when I was a kid and being enchanted by the sound effects it included (the sound of a cork being pulled out of a jug, for example), and as I grew older, I came to appreciate just how much drama and emotion Jones's songs conveyed. I teared up today when I listened to one of his greatest songs, "He Stopped Loving Her Today." Everyone loved that song, it was an instant favorite, but everyone also has at least one other George Jones song that they love. Mine is "Choices," a song from 1999 about living your life according to your own rules. There was always a rather thin line between the words of his songs and the events of his life, so when he readily admits in the song that some of his choices were mistakes, you know that's coming from a place of deep, personal understanding.





The list of great George Jones songs goes on and on. A few of my other favorites:

• "Window Up Above," one of his first songs to convey the sadness of love gone wrong
• "She Thinks I Still Care," a great song with a sly sense of humor to it
• "A Good Year for the Roses," which he recorded twice, perhaps most famously with Alan Jackson
• "A Picture of Me (Without You)," a song which Lorrie Morgan covered in the 1990s, but no one sings it like the original
• "The Grand Tour," a remarkably poignant song about a man who has truly lost everything important to him
• "If Drinking Don't Kill Me (Her Memory Will)," the song that, to me, perhaps best represents the intertwining of lyrics and personal life

And then there were the duets with Tammy Wynette, whose voice still makes me shiver. I loved Tammy Wynette, and her pairings with her then-husband were legendary. I have a story to tell about one of them in particular. "Golden Ring" came out in 1976, just a couple of years after my maternal grandparents divorced. That summer my grandmother and I spent a couple of weeks with my mother in northern Illinois, and "Golden Ring" (which was recorded the year after George and Tammy had themselves divorced) was a staple on country music radio. We were sitting at the kitchen table one day when it came on, and my grandmother remarked how much she liked the song. My mother and I acknowledged this but didn't place much importance on it. My grandmother returned home to Mississippi and I stayed a few weeks longer in Illinois until my grandfather came to pick me up. We were in the kitchen one day when the song came on, and he too said that he really liked the song. At this point, my mother and I made eye contact and silently noted that both of them probably had some regrets about having ending their marriage and that the song had caused those feelings to resurface. We knew they still loved each other, but they just couldn't be married any longer.

"Golden Ring" isn't the true story of what happened between George and Tammy, and it certainly isn't the story of what actually happened between my grandparents, but its message about two people who love each other despite not being able to live with each other certainly resonated with my family.

I think that's what makes George Jones's music so great, so timeless.His music was about love and loss, about pain and regret. His voice conveyed the difficulties of life and put you into the song in a way that few of today's country singers (or singers of any kind of music, for that matter) can ever achieve. I posted the video for his song "Who's Gonna Fill Their Shoes" on Facebook as a tribute yesterday because I truly think we've seen the last of singers like George Jones.

I had only one chance to see him in my lifetime. He was playing in Tupelo, Mississippi, during the 1980s. Family members were buying tickets and asked me if I wanted to come home from the university on the weekend to go to the concert. Jones's reputation for failing to make appearances at the time was at its height, and I thought it would be a waste of money to buy a ticket for someone who wasn't likely to show up. They went to the concert without me and, of course, it turned out to be one of the greatest shows they ever saw. I have a few regrets about people I had the chance to see perform live but never did (Bea Arthur, for example), and missing that show in Tupelo is certainly one of them.

Dead Poem Society

There are still times when my students write something that catches me completely off guard. I know you would expect that this happens in a freshman composition class or (perhaps especially) in a developmental writing class. However, I'm often willing to give those students the benefit of the doubt when they make mistakes. They are, after all, still learning the intricacies of the language and how to express themselves better.

No, the ones that really stun me are the ones written by students in literature courses. Many of them are, as you might expect, English majors and should appreciate the nuances of words and meanings. Most of them assert that they really like reading and have even expressed a desire to become teachers some day. It gives me a sense of optimism for the future of my profession when young people want to carry on the traditions of literary study.

And then I'll read a sentence that stops me cold.

I assign several poems written about and during World War I when I teach British literature. It's a particularly rich period for British poetry: Wilfred Owen, Sigfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke are all from this era. You can sense that it's dominated by poems by men. However, there were women who served as nurses or who saw loved ones go off to war who wrote some exceptional poetry during that time. One of those is May Wedderburn Cannan, whose poem "Lamplight" is a favorite of mine. (Should I spell that "favourite" in honor of the British I'm discussing?)

"Lamplight" is a poem about regret, about the plans you make with someone, only to see them destroyed by the death of your lover. Its first line, "We planned to shake the world together, you and I," is so optimistic and audacious; it's that emotion so powerful in the young, that sense that you will accomplish great things in life. You will survive and succeed.

However, this being a war poem, it seems inevitable that tragedy will strike. And it does. The last stanza echoes the optimism of the first, but it signals just how much has changed: "We shall never shake the world together, you and I." If you've never read the poem, look it up. It's a wonderful evocation of the raw emotion one feels after having lost someone. Some of the references might send you to Wikipedia or Google, but doing so won't negate any of the poem's powerful final images.

One of my students a couple of semesters ago decided to tackle this poem for her final out-of-class essay. Not a great deal has been written about Cannan and her work, just a few biographical sketches and such, and not a great deal was or is available in our library about her or her poetry. So the student was venturing off into unknown territory. Sometimes, when you're doing that, you try to figure out a way to use whatever information you can find. And she did.

Here's the sentence that still makes me crazy with its lack of attention to the language used: "The poem has similarities to Cannans' [sic] personal life which gives the reader a reason to think it may be based off Cannans [sic] personal life while engaged to Bevil Quiller-Couch, who like the poem, had died after the war."

Yes, I know what the student intended to say there. Well, I think I know. I'll bet her spell check function let that one pass too. I think I just circled it on the page and hoped the student would figure out the error on her own.

What I would have loved to have said is that the poem has not died. It still lives on in our anthology and in our class discussions. In fact, every class that uses the Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2C, to be precise, keeps the poem alive. And each student who reads it, whether it is assigned or just found, makes another small but successful attempt at CPR for Cannan's "Lamplight." I might have even asked if her choice of the poem to be the subject of her essay didn't indicate to her that it still had vibrancy, that there's still a pulse to be found. I would have probably punctuated all of these comments with exclamation marks.

I said none of this.

I just puzzled over it and wrote down the sentence and let it "simmer" for almost a year before writing this post about it. Even now I am trying to doing my part to keep alive this poem my student has seemingly buried along with Cannan's real-life paramour. It seems to be a losing battle (no pun intended) sometimes.

I know it's probably unfashionable in some circles to think of literature as a living, breathing entity, something that still has the capacity to speak to us, something that can still resonate with us both personally and intellectually. (And I realize that, for some people reading this, I'm making far too much of an issue out of what was likely a simple grammatical mistake.) Yet it's that feeling about literature that made me want to study English in the first place, and it's why I still sign up to teach literature courses when many of my colleagues have given up and started to concentrate just on composition classes. As much pleasure as I derive from seeing students become better writers in all of my classes, I need an occasional foray into literary study just to maintain my sense of purpose, and that's why I wasn't ready then and I'm still not ready to accept the "death" of this poem, no matter how many times a student's essay might suggest that the designation of "DNR" has been attached to it.