Two decades ago, the alternative country movement
propelled a group of politically aware lyricists into the Nashville
mainstream, and they brought with them empathy for particular
segments of American society: the female point of view, certain
religions, the lonely, the mentally ill, the aged and dying,
the criminal, and the mistreated. Among these lyricists were Steve Earle and
Rosanne Cash, two artists whose politics and empathy manifest
themselves in opposite, but equally effective, ways. Earle's Doghouse
Roses contains the same amount of external overtness as
his lyrics while Cash's lyrics and the stories from Bodies
of Water and Songs Without Rhythm explore a woman's
inner rhythms.
The first part of this article appeared in the Autumn
2004 issue of Chapter&Verse,
and Jason Gross, editor of the famed webzine Perfect Sound Forever, selected it as one of the best pieces of music
writing for 2004, placing it in the top category of "Super-Scribing
Awards: Best Writing of the Year”. According to Gross, "though
it plays up the romantic notion of Earle and Cash as commercial
outsiders, this does a brilliant job of delving into their
worldviews, via songs” (Visit: http://rockcritics.com/jasongross2004_intro.html).
Part two continues with an exploration of the two
artists, their lyrics, prose, and views on such subjects as
the death penalty in the United States and America’s Second
War in Iraq. SW
* * *
“Texas has been a key player in the death
penalty since it was re-instated in 1976. Between then and now, the State of Virginia
had the next highest count of 87. Since
that date, Texas has put 290 people to death. The
majority of states, including Texas, favor death by lethal
injection; although, the electric chair has been used in 150
executions since 1976. Hanging,
the gas chamber, and firing squads have been used in the more
than eight hundred executions since that date. In
2002, nearly half of the executions in the United States took
place in Texas” (The Life of David Gale, 2003).
“My main objection to the death penalty
isn’t about trying to save anybody on death row”
(Earle, 2003, p. 35)
“My objection to the death penalty is spiritual, not
political. I have
a political objection to it, in that I don’t think any government
should have the power of life and death. But
that’s based on the fact that in a democracy, the government
is us. If the government
kills somebody, I’m killing somebody. And I object to the damage that does to my
spirit.”—Steve Earle
(Nance, 2002, pp. 18-21)
* * *
Empathy for all those associated with,
and impacted by, the carrying out of the death penalty is a
theme that has influenced Earle’s lyrics, prose, and now a
play. The subject matter
first appeared in his music on The Hard Way album with the song “Billy Austin,” a tune that explored
the feelings and point of view a murderer on death row through
such lyrics as, “but my trial was over quickly/And then the
long hard wait began/Court appointed lawyer/Couldn’t look me
in the eye/He just stood up and closed his briefcase/When they
sentenced me to die.” and “So when the preacher comes to get
me/And they shave off all my hair/Could you take that long
walk with me/Knowing hell is waitin’ there/Could you pull that
switch yourself sir/With a sure and steady hand/Could you still
tell youself/That you’re better than I am” (Earle, 1990).
Earle doesn’t make excuses for the characters
in his songs. They are
who they are; they did what they did: they’re guilty. As a result, he’s not on the defensive as a
storyteller. He’s just
telling the tale, allowing the listener to react as he or she
will. Specifically, “Billy Austin” was a catalyst
the catapulted Earle further into a movement that he was already
passionate about.
Since the release of this song, Earle “got
regular requests from anti-death-penalty activist groups to
perform at rallies and vigils…and he has sung and spoken at
abolitionist events, but he’s also washed dishes, directed
traffic, taken out the trash. He has slept in churches, gymnasiums and community
centers, not his usual form of accommodation” (Nance, 2002,
pp. 18-21). According
to Earle, “Texas has become internationally known more for
the death penalty than it is for cowboys and the Alamo…Go to
Italy and say Texas, and they’re immediately talking about
the death penalty. The
Coliseum in Rome is lit up every time someone’s executed in
Texas—only in Texas” (Nance, 2002, pp. 18-21).
“Growing up in San Antonio, Earle first
became interested in the death penalty in 1963, when his father
wrote a letter to the governor to protest the handling of a
capital case” (Nance, 2002, pp. 18-21). And
as Earle elaborated in an interview early in 2003, “My opposition
to the death penalty probably goes back to reading Truman Capote’s In
Cold Blood for the first time as a kid. That
book does a really good job when it gets down to the execution—showing
how it dehumanizes everyone involved in the process” (Earle,
2003, p. 35).
Earle had an opportunity to explore the
greater impact of the death penalty while writing “Ellis Unit
One,” a song he wrote specifically for the movie, Dead
Man Walking. Taking
the point of view of a prison guard, Earle explores the emotional
impact of an execution on those carrying out the sentence with
the lines, “Well, I’ve seen ‘em fight like lions, boys/I’ve
seen ‘em go like lambs/And I’ve helped to drag ‘em when they
could not stand.” At the same time, Earle empathizes with family
members as he writes, “And I’ve heard their mamas cryin’ when
they heard that big door slam/And I’ve seen the victim’s family
holdin’ hands” (Earle, 2002).
By this time, Earle was interacting more
and more with groups and individuals involved in the movement. According to Earle, “Dead Man Walking led to meeting people who worked with Murder Victims’ Families
for Reconciliation and Journey of Hope from Violence to Healing—which
were mindblowers. These
are people whose family members have been murdered and still
they oppose the death penalty” (Earle, 2003, p. 35).
Additionally, people on death row started
writing to Earle, including Jonathan Wayne Nobles. In October of 1998, Nobles was executed by
lethal injection for stabbing two women to death in 1986 while
high on drugs. He asked
Earle to attend his execution. In
the weeks prior to the execution, Earle visited him repeatedly,
and in the final four days, Earle spent long hours with him,
even helping him plan his funeral (Nance, 2002, pp. 18-21). “All
he wanted was to have one person there that didn’t hate him,” Earle
said (Orr, 1999, 1F).
The artistic outcome of this experience
was the short story “Witness,” the play Karla,
and the song “Over Yonder (Jonathan’s Song).” “It (the song)
was part of a process that I’m probably still going through.
It’s not a political song. My other death penalty songs are. They deal with my opposition to the death penalty
as an idea. This is
simply me processing the fact that I witnessed a horrific act” (Earle,
2002b).
“Over
Yonder (Jonathan's Song)”
(Steve
Earle)
The warden
said he'd mail my letter
The chaplain's
waitin' by the door
Tonight we'll
cross the yard together
Then they
can't hurt me anymore
I am going
over yonder
Where no ghost
can follow me
There's another
place beyond here
Where I'll
be free I believe
Thibodeaux
can have my fan
Send my Bible
home to Mama
Call her every
now and then
I suppose
I got it comin'
I can't ever
pay enough
All my rippin'
and a runnin'
I hurt everyone
I loved
The world'll
turn around without me
The sun'll
come up in the east
Shinin' down
on all of them that hate me
I hope my
goin' brings 'em peace
Empathizing with the protagonist, Earle
is stating as simply as he can what the person on death row
is going through during his last moments. The
murderer isn’t asking for forgiveness or claiming any internal
change at the end. He did what he did, and now it’s time for him
to face his consequences, as emphasized in the lines, “I suppose
I got it comin'/I can't ever pay enough/All my rippin' and
a runnin'/I hurt everyone I loved.” What’s
interesting in these specific lines is the author’s ability
to empathize with murderer enough to allow him to feel love
and regret, expressing it in a genuine way.
Earle extends this empathy to his fiction,
as in the short story “Witness.” This
short story is told from the point of view of Gordon Elliot,
a corporate attorney whose wife (Joan) was murdered. Her accused and convicted killer is Andres
Camacho, an illegal alien from El Salvador who was working
as a gardener and landscaper for the Elliots. Andres
is on death row, and his execution is the arc of this story. What the reader doesn’t discover until the
end of the short story is that Gordon was the actual murderer. And in a way, Gordon’s deception is another
prism through which Earle explores this story. This
allows the author to apply empathy for nearly every point of view in the story, regardless of situation
and how the reader may feel about any character or that person’s
participating—direct and indirect—in this execution.
The lethal injection itself is as it has
been designed: quick. The
first drug is pentobarbital, rendering the individual unconscious. The next drug is pancurium bromide. This stops the breathing. The last drug is potassium chloride, which
stops the heart. “The
whole cocktail costs the State of Texas $86.08 per elimination” (The
Life of David Gale, 2003).
In terms of what Earle was most unprepared
for as he witnessed the execution of Jonathan Wayne Nobles,
he said was, “my own empathy for the people that had to participate
in that execution. Jon was really inceredibly well prepared, and
it was hard to watch. He
was genuinely remorseful. And,
you know, he was just trying to die the best that he could. But
the other people—I don’t know where it came from; I didn’t
see anything from them that would normally evoke empathy—but
it just dawned on me that what I was looking at was people
protecting a relatively low-paying job with halfway decent
benefits. It (the prison
system) is the only industry in Huntsville, Texas” (Earle,
2002b).
As Earle empathized with the guards and
those involved in the execution, a piece of telling detail
is the fact that as the visitors waited and prepared for the
execution in the guards’ break room, the place where employees
go traditionally to relax and escape their job for a few moments
in the day, and the death imagery is everywhere:
Finally, he (Gordon Elliot) was ushered
into a bare-bones kind of a lounge, normally used by prison
employees for coffee breaks. One
step further, he thought to himself, and he would have passed
out cold on the floor.
The harsh fluorescent lighting reflecting
off the freshly painted off-white surfaces cast a surreal pall
over the room. Inside
there was a Coke machine, some uncomfortable-looking institutional
furniture, and for this occasion one of those long, heavy-duty
Formica-top folding tables covered in a red-and-white-checkered
tablecloth. On the table
were two large coffee urns (regular and decaf), an assortment
of store-bought cookies, and a plate of pimento cheese sandwiches
with the crusts cut off. The
coffee was going fast, but no one except the wire service reporter
was eating anything. (Earle, 2001, p. 176)
The death imagery is packed into this
small amount of narrative with such nouns, verbs, adjectives
and phrases as ushered, bare-bones, surreal pall, the color
red, and the urns. The guards aren’t eating in
a room specifically designed for them to eat in order to
keep some sort of boundary between their normal, everyday lives
and the days on which they are required to help kill someone. In
another passage, Earle expresses empathy for other law enforcement
officers involved in the process through the following passage:
Gordon
looked around the room. Besides
the two reporters there were a handful of correctional officers
and state police standing around. Occasionally
one of them would look Gordon’s way, but other then that there
was no attempt to make any other sort of contact
(Earle,
2001, p. 178).
In addition, Earle shows the warden an
equal portion of empathy by revealing how the warden must behave
in order to make it through the execution. As
Warden Larkin addresses those present for the execution, he
has a down home mannerism, using such lines as “Folks, I’m
Sam Larkin, the warden” (Earle, 2001, p. 187). And a page later as the warden prepares to
take everyone through the procedures, Earle offers the following
transitional passage:
Suddenly, Warden Larkin’s entire demeanor changed.
“Now, let me tell you a little bit about what you
can expect to happen here tonight.”
He looked down at his watch. (Earle, 2001, p. 188)
After a couple pages of instruction from the warden,
Earle brings the warden back to a more…personable tone with:
The warden went on down his customary list of offenses
punishable by removal and then suddenly the military demeanor
dissolved and was replaced once again by the familiar funeral
director’s smile and barely audible monotone.
“We have a job to do here today. That is to enforce the letter of the law and
the will of the people of this state. With
your cooperation we will accomplish that task as quickly and
as painlessly as possible. Thank
you for your attention.”
Warden Larkin turned and exited the room…(Earle,
2001, p. 191)
Earle easily creates empathy for Camacho through
the execution scene. The
information is delivered in an intelligent way. First,
the below information is delivered to the reader. Then, as Gordon leaves the prison, the true
murderer is revealed, leaving the reader to ponder the murder
of an innocent man.
He mercifully turned away. Staring straight up at the ceiling, he took
a long, ragged breath, closed his eyes and began saying a Hail
Mary in Spanish. Gordon
noticed that Chaplin Meeks was resting his right hand on Camacho's
leg just below the knee. For some reason that he couldn't explain, the
contact offended him. Now,
more than ever, Gordon wanted the whole horrible business over
with. Finished.
What Gordon didn't know was that the Hail Mary was
the signal that Camacho had agreed to so that Warden Larkin
knew he was ready, and Gordon had missed the warden's subtle
hand signal to the unseen executioner behind the one-way glass.
Therefore, he had no way of knowing that the poison had already
made its way down the plastic tubing and was racing through
Andreas Camacho's body.
“…ahora y en la hora de la muerte nuestra…”
Andy's prayer was interrupted by a sound from his
own lips, a low-pitched bark, a startling, incongruous sound,
like a small child with whooping cough, as the air was suddenly
forced from his lungs and his head pitched forward until his
chin lodged on his chest. It was as if an invisible anvil had been dropped
on his chest from a great height. It
was much more violent than Gordon had ever imagined it would
be. He had convinced himself that this would be
different somehow. On
paper it was efficient and clinical. Instead there was the
unmistakable sense that he was witnessing a soul being brutally
and unnaturally ripped from a human body. (Earle, 2001, p.
195)
“The Witness” with its persecution of
the poor is an appropriate window to the remaining stories
in the collection. These
stories deal with working-class people striving towards a better
life (“Billy The Kid”) and with the working poor, who are either
trying to survive (“The Red Suitcase”) or dealing with consequences
of drugs and crime (“Jaguar Dance,” “Doghouse Roses,” and “A
Eulogy of Sorts”).
The working poor has long been a serious
topic of Earle’s lyrics, starting with his first album Guitar Town and his hit, “Good Ole Boy:” “I was born in the land of plenty/Now there
ain’t enough/Getting’ cold/I’ve been told/Nowadays it just
don’t pay to be a good ole boy” (Earle, 1986).
Earle elaborated in February 2003 interview: ‘Everything
that’s being thrown at us right now is completely and totally
geared towards marketing to not even middle class people but
upper middle class people, and it’s kind of frightening. We’ve
forgotten about a blue collar segment in America. Those
people are completely and totally disenfranchised and completely
and totally forgotten about. It’s
like, ‘Fuck off and go work at McDonalds.’ And that’s kind
of scary to me” (Earle, 2003, p. 35).
“Earle claims to be a borderline Marxist
whose politics have gotten both more simple and more radical
with age and experience” (Gray, 1998).
“I cut my teeth on the books [Eldridge
Cleaver’s] Soul
on Ice and The Communist
Manifesto back when I was playing coffee-houses,” says
Earle. “I don’t understand the political process,
but I just know that it’s about money and always has been” (Morse,
1998, p. 30). “I believe
everything Karl Marx said about economics. I
think the biggest mistake he made is he forgot that you’ll
never make a revolution with the people by ignoring poor people’s
spirituality because it’s all we got” (Earle, 2003, p. 35). “I
see no reason for anyone to go hungry in the richest country
in the world; There is absolutely no excuse for it. There
is no excuse for everyone not to have the medical attention
they deserve. This big argument about health care shouldn’t
even be happening. We’ve
managed to raise an entire generation of kids who think you’re
destitute if you make less than $80,000 a year. It’s
greed” (Gray, 1998).
Earle’s name is but one on a long list
of country music artists who write, sing, and take action for
what they believe in. Ricky
Van Shelton, Gary Morris, Reba McEntire, Minnie Pearle, and
Lorrie Morgan have all championed such causes as cancer, hunger,
ataxia, alcoholism, and so on. The
list is huge. One name
that must be included is that of Rosanne Cash.
Early last decade in Music City, Cash
was the head of the Earth Communications Office (ECO), a group
dedicated to environmental awareness. She
has sung out for world peace and against nuclear arms. And
her music has addressed domestic violence and child abuse (Oermann,
1990, p. 1J).
And more recently, there’s the second
Iraq War.
Cash “appeared at a press conference to
support an effort spearheaded by David Byne and Russell Simmons
called “Musicians United to Win Without War.” She
also signed a full-page protest in the New York Times, together with Lou Reed, Lucinda Williams and Steve
Earle, along with a bunch of hip-hop and world music artists” (Alterman,
2003).
“…I got enormous backlash from speaking
out against going to war, you know. Just
from—I don’t know. Just
from people sending e-mails to my Web site or writing me. And
it wasn’t people saying in a very thoughtful manner, ‘I disagree
with you, and here’s why.’ It
was people calling me every name in the book and being very
abusive about it. And at first I wrote some of them back, and
I was respectful and I said, ‘Well, here’s why I believe this,
this, and here’s why I think this.’ But
it didn’t work. You
know, they didn’t want to have a dialogue” (Cash, 2003).
Just after starting work on her current
album Rules of Travel back
in 1998, Cash discovered that she was pregnant and that a polyp
shut down her vocal chords, preventing her from singing. According
to Cash, that period of near verbal silence in her life helped
her to find her voice.
“My songwriting has definitely been changed
by this and mainly because I didn’t write any songs while I
had lost my voice. And
I started writing a lot of prose. I wrote for New
York Magazine, and I wrote for the New
York Times magazine and for Oxford
American. And even for Martha Stewart Living, I wrote a piece on lullabies. And I edited a book of songwriters’ prose (Songs Without Rhyme), and it changed me
as a songwriter, definitely. It
gave me a wider sandbox to play in. As
a songwriter, you’re bound to melody, you’re bound to a rhyme
scheme, you’re bound to a three- or four-minute format. And
usually because I’m a very structured person, I really loved
that. I love knowing
the perimeters and setting up the internal rules of each song
and then just staying in that. It feels safe, and you know, I have all the
freedom within that box. But
when writing prose, you know, it’s a lot of rope to hang yourself
with, but it’s also a lot of freedom and relief. There’s
no rhyme. There’s no
melody, but it’s very subtle. You
know, you can go on as long as you want. You
don’t have to stop after three minutes. So,
I brought some of that freedom back to songwriting, I think. At least it feels like I did” (Cash, 2003).
Cash has said that “it kind of turns me
off when artists get on their soapboxes. Art
does not give you a better insight into politics” (Alterman,
2003), and she insists that “I still hesitate to take big political
stances in songwriting. How
it all relates to individuals is what interests me” (Gardner,
2003).
Cash’s opinions on art and politics are
reflected in her lyrics. When
her latest album Rules
of Travel appeared with a song that involved the Middle
East (“Western Wall”), neither guns nor politicians existed. Instead,
she went internal and concentrated on acceptance, as illustrated
in the following lyrics: “I
stand here by the Western Wall/maybe a little of that wall/stands
inside of us all/I shove my prayers in the cracks/I got nothing
to lose/No one to answer back/All these years I’ve brought
up for review/I wasn’t taught this, but I learned something
new/I had to answer a distant call/At the Western Wall.”
“I went to Israel a few times in my youth,
and I remember standing in front of the Wailing Wall—I loved
the whole idea of writing a prayer on a tiny piece of paper
and putting it into a crack in the wall, and believing that
someone or something is going to receive that prayer. It’s
a powerful idea” (“The Making of Rules of Travel”, 2003).
The songs off Rules of Travel are a reflection of Cash’s entire career, in that
she uses the power of her music (and prose) and her lyrics
to empathize with humanity. The
subjects of her songs have included the lonely, the abused,
those surviving divorce, the mistreated, and, certainly, the
aging: those coming to terms with their humanity, as exposed
in another song from Rules
of Travel, “September When It Comes.”
“Over simple acoustic guitar picking,
Rosanne describes a young child in bed, waiting for a father
who was too often away from home; she then admits that ‘the
baby became me.’ As a melancholy keyboard figure comes in under
the guitar, she confesses that she locked those feelings away
for years, and only now, in the autumn of her parents’ lives,
can she unlock them again. Then
Johnny Cash’s voice comes in, resembling his daughter’s not
so much in timbre as in its deliberate, dignified phrasing. Sounding
craggier than ever, he acknowledges his own aging: ‘I can no
longer run/I cannot be who I was then/In a way, I never was’” (Himes,
2003).
Cash’s empathy has given a voice to the
silent, as in “This World,” “a song that uses a chilling child
abuse case to urge everyone to see all of humanity as their
concern” (Oermann, 1990, p. 1J), through such lyrics as “I
read about this baby/She got beat up by her dad/She was nine
months old and he was a full/grown man/She may have been learning
how to crawl/And he put a fist in her face/And the doctor said
this baby’s gone/She can’t be replaced” (Cash, 1990).
“It’s truth,” Rosanne Cash says of “This
World.” “I did read
about this baby last year and I did go down to the hospital
and try to see this baby. I was so disturbed. I kept crying at night, couldn’t sleep. What is a person supposed to do about something
like this?” (Oermann, 1990, p. 1J).
Throughout her career, Cash has steadfastly
backed not only women but strong women.
“Cash
is part of a new breed of country singers. She’s
true to the field’s hard-core emotion, but resists its clichés. Unwilling
to settle for the country stereotype of the helpless woman, she is as concerned
with standing up for herself as simply standing by her man, as illustrated
in a line from one of the album’s (Seven
Year Ache) key tunes: “How can it
all look so right and feel so wrong?/I’ll play the victim for you, honey, but
not for long” (Hilburn, 1981).
“On her fine, hard-edged second album, Seven Year Ache, Cash takes tunes by men and about men and switches
the gender, crooning—in her unmannered, wafting tenor—all those
plots about leaving lovers and getting the urge to light out
for the territory. Cash renders these time-tired male themes as
women’s work, and the result is an exhilarating country-rock
record. Whether she’s turning Steve Forbert’s “What
Kinda Guy” into “What Kinda Girl” or claiming Keith Syke’s
tough-guy imagery in “Rainin’” as her own, the singer remains
pleasingly aloof” (Tucker, 1981).
In 2001, 14 artists used the lyrics of
one of their own songs as a starting point for a piece of prose,
and Cash was both included in that collection and edited the
entire work, Songs Without Rhyme. Cash’s contribution was a short story entitled, “bells,
ink, sand and roses,” printed alongside her song, “bells, ink,
sand and roses.”
There is a questioning of one’s identity,
a desire to fill something missing in both the lyrics and the
prose. With the song,
Cash says, “bells and roses/fill up the silence/and the place
where he once lay.” With the short story, the missing elements
are senses. The story
is set on Bellarosa Utone’s birthday on the day she was born
in 2107 and then on 2149. She
had no father. Instead, she was genetically created using
only her mother’s information. Whether
she is a clone is not specifically addressed in the story,
but the side effects of her birth is the creation of five new
senses: 1) the ability to hear color, 2) the ability
to see sound, 3) the ability to smell memory, 4) the ability
to perceive emotional content by contact with objects and rooms
associated with another person, and 5) the ability to see inside
one’s own body. Apparently, there are others like Bellarosa,
and they are known as multisensates. Due
to her altered states, “subject must be indoctrinated from
early childhood in the construction of internal filters. Subject
must also avoid intense emotional experiences of all kinds. Some multisensates find that it is healthier
for them to choose a solitary life, forgoing love and romantic
relationships, as the normal physical and emotional components
of love and sex will prove to be too overwhelming, in a very
literal sense” (Cash, 1986, p. 43).
The rest of the short story deals with
the adult Bellarosa as she decides to break this protocol,
taking the reader to the very moment: “She still had another
few seconds to react, to stop the activation, to draw her filters
up with her breath, but instead, she drew the platter to her
and bend her head over it, as if to inhale the story is was
going to tell her” (Cash, 1986, p. 47). And
the rest of the story is the backstory of the plate and how
it came to be in her possession from an art dealer in Munich. Bellarosa had purchased many items, and the
plate was one small piece in the collection.
Bodies
of Water, Cash’s first collection of short stories stands
in contrast to Earle’s short pieces. Here,
while Cash’s characters are in motion, too, their trips are
internal. The collection is built around several female
characters and explores these women at critical points in
their lives: giving birth, questioning work choices, losing
love, and facing middle age. The stories’ themes of self-forgiveness, freedom
from delusion, and gaining power from the past are those
frequently purveyed in her lyrics.
“All of the book is based in some part
on her life…Cash lays a lot of her inner life on the table,
but remains at ease with the vulnerability” (Roland). This
may explain why the protagonists in seven of Cash’s nine stories
have no names, and eight of them are in the first person, creating
an intimacy between the writer and the reader and adding to
the reader’s potential tendency to think that he or she is
reading a non-fiction piece.
“But the book is not a diary,” Cash has
said. “It hopefully
is a work of art, or at least a work of mild literature” (Roland,
1996, p. 3D).
Whether intentional or accidental, Cash’s respect
for the rhythms of literature is evident through her writing
by using the first person, present tense to create intimacy
and immediacy. In Shakespeare's King John (Rolfe, 1908, p.
88), Constance says, "Grief fills the room up of my absent
child/Lie in his bed, walks up and down with me/Puts on his
pretty looks, repeats his words/Remembers me of all his gracious
parts/Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form." In "We
Are Born," Cash's fist person narrator says, "This
pain fills the room, rattles the windows, drips down the walls,
crushes me back into my pillows, dampens the sheets, and creates
an acrid smell in my nostril" (Cash, 1996, p. 11). Whether
Cash ever read King John is known only to her, but that does
not diminish the power of the action verbs, the repetition,
and first person interaction with the power of life--one gone,
the other arriving--cannot be denied.
A literary ode for children is another
aspect of this collection of short stories. “Bodies
of Water,” “We Are Born,” “Shelly’s Voices,” “A Week at the
Gore,” “Dinner,” and “The Last Day of the Year” all deal with
children in some way. Cash
has three children.
“One thing that was kind of shocking to
me when I became a mother is how much passion children stirred
up…I thought that that kind of depth of feeling was reserved
for romance, and romantic relationships, but I found that children
were incredibly provocative and caused you so much anguish
and so much joy, and taught you so much, and stirred like the
deepest recesses of passion. And
I just never anticipated that” (Roland, 1996, p. 3D).
With “We Are Born,” the author takes the
reader along the journey of childbirth, from the first contractions
to the delivery, but there is a twist. The
lady is in labor for a long time, as the baby is stuck. Once out, Cash said the following:
“The
poor battered creature is as ravaged as I am. She
has been squeezed so tightly inside me that all the blood vessels
in her right eye have burst, and it is brilliant red where
it should be white. She is swollen and bruised, and the most luminous
being I have ever seen.” (Cash, 1996, p. 15)
Looking ahead, both Earle and Cash say
that they’re at work on their next bit of prose.
According to Earle, he’s “working on a
novel right now. It’s
called I’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive at
this point, and it’s about a fictional character who’s based
on a person who really existed, who may or may not have been
a doctor who was traveling with Hank Williams when he died. I’d
been working on it for a while, but then stopped to finish
the play I wrote, Karla [about famed Texas Death Row inmate
Karla Faye Tucker]. That’s
finished; we put it on up here in Nashville, and it did well;
the reviews were great. We’re
working on putting it on in L.A. this summer, and probably
Chicago after that” (Moreau, 2003).
As for Cash, she’s finishing up a non-fiction
work entitled, 44 Stories. “It is a recollection—‘I hate the word memoir,’ she
declares—about her formative years as an aspiring musician. ‘I’m not very far into it, but the first chapter
is in 1976 when I moved to London and how that set me up as
a songwriter and formed my later adulthood’” (Shelbume,
2003).
* * *
“I don’t see myself as a political writer,
but I don’t make any bones about having an agenda,” Earle said
(Nance, 2002, p. 19).
* * *
Singles, pairs, trios, and quartets whispered
secret songs and spotted the landscape, patrolled as it was
with white girls selling soda pop and black boys pedaling snow
cones. Old Marlboro cigarette butts flattened to the
earth from previous performances had nothing to do with the
smell of tobacco sifting in the air. The
far off sound of electric guitars and drums pushed out of the
seemingly tiny speakers on the distant stage, which existed
beyond 50 rows of red and blue seats. Backs of heads bobbed up and down in rhythm,
and small figures walked around the stage doing small things. And finally, a voice blended with the notes:
“Look at yah/Yeah, take a look in the
mirror now tell me what you see/Another satisfied customer
in the front of the line for the American dream/I remember
when we was both out on the boulevard/Talkin’ revolution and
singin’ the blues/Nowadays it’s letters to the editor and cheatin’ on
our taxes/Is the best that we can do/Come on.” (Earle, 2002c)
Above the stage, the corporate world intruded on
the tunes with mammoth signs that glowed with words and slogans:
Party Place, Dodge-RAM Tuff, Chrysler, and Jeep. Advertisers
followed the patrons into the bathrooms. With the audience captive, blurbs hanging above
urinals sold job placement services, CDs, and Harley Davidsons. And there was a question to be asked: “Everyone
has an HIV status; do you know yours?”
“Look around/There’s doctors down on Wall
Street/Sharpenin’ their scalpels and tryin’ to cut a deal/Meanwhile,
back at the hospital/We got accountants playin’ God and countin’ out
the pills/Yeah, I know, that sucks—that your HMO/Ain’t doin’ what
you thought it would do/But everybody’s gotta die sometime
and we can’t save everybody/it’s the best that we can do.” (Earle,
2002c)
A woman announced that she was “making a b-line for
the…cocktail-age” as she headed towards the Old No 7 Jack Daniels
Lounge just on the backside of the grass, and her female companion
slurped on a $7 draft beer. Another
woman sat on the ground, listened to the music, and sipped
two dollars worth of margarita out of a $15 ridiculous glass,
a souvenir that would not be saved. And there, among the butts, class oozed and
intruded with rented brown seats that unfolded and hovered
above the dirt and dying grass. They
were stacked up in rows as if order existed with people striving
to be above the song that was playing:
“Four score and a hundred and fifty years
ago/Our forefathers made us equal as long as we can pay/Yeah,
well maybe that wasn’t exactly what they was thinkin’/Version
six-point-oh of the American way/But hey we can just build
a great wall around the country club/To keep the riff-raff
out until the slump is through/Yeah, I realize that ain’t exactly
democratic, but its either them or us and/And it’s the best
we can do.” (Earle, 2002c)
Dozens of empty red and blue seats existed, and many
a green patch remained unclaimed. And
it was easy to wonder just who was paying for the gas in the
tour busses and keeping the electric flowing to the guitars.
“Yeah,
passionately conservative/It’s the best we can do.” (Earle,
2002c)
A red moon ascended; it was full and glowing, and
two monster screens at each side of the stage flickered and
brightened in the now-dark arena. Security
guards in yellow shirts unclipped the felt gate, pulled it
aside, and walked backwards slowly, still protecting the high
rollers in rows A-Z. Many of those in the crowd flocked towards
the red and the blue as if they were let in on a little secret,
and a hard-core troubadour appeared god-like on the screens,
bringing down The Word to the people. Those
in the rented brown seats remained hovering among the now discarded
souvenir glasses, fresh empty cigarette packs, and spilled
beer.
“Conservatively
passionate/It’s the best we can do.” (Earle, 2002c)
A temp agency worker back beyond admission puts out
his generic menthol cigarette, folded up his lawn chair, and
walked towards his import that leaked a quart of oil every
two weeks, and a left behind sign still continued to lie, trying
to convince someone, anyone, that cracked concrete and rippling
uneven blacktop deserved an extra five dollars for VIP parking.
“Meanwhile,
still thinkin’/Hey, let’s wage a war on drugs/It’s the best
we can do/Well, I don’t know about you, but I kinda dig this
global warming thing…” (Earle, 2002c)
Bibliography
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(1986) Songs Without Rhyme. New York: Hyperion.
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(2002b) Interview. Fresh
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(2003) “Fellow Traveler: Rosanne Cash may have left Music Row
long behind, but as her fine album proves, country music is
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(2002) “No time to kill: Nashville singer-songwriter Steve
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Discography
Cash, Rosanne.
(1990) “This World.” Interiors. Columbia.
Earle, Steve.
(1986) “Good Ole Boy.” Guitar
Town. MCA.
Earle, Steve.
(1990) “Billy Austin.” The
Hard Way. E-Squared/Artemis.
Earle, Steve.
(2002) “Ellis Unit One.” Sidetracks. E-Squared/Artemis.
Earle, Steve.
(2002c) “Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do).” Jerusalem.
E-Squared/Artemis.
