Country Willie: His Own Songs (1965)

Willie kick’s off his Proustian ramblings with “I live ‘One Day at a Time,’ I dream one dream at a time. Yesterday’s dead and tomorrow is blind.” But is it true? Isn’t Willie constantly thinking about the past and lost time? Doesn’t he dwell on the past? “Don’t ask me how long I plan to stay. It never crossed my mind.” Really? Doesn’t it cross his mind all the time? Isn’t every one of his songs about how often and how intensely it crosses his mind? “[A sparrow] searching for a patch of sunlight, so am I. I wish I didn’t have to follow. And perhaps I won’t in time.” Willie is that sparrow searching for a patch of sunlight, and in time he continues to follow it. Like Gatsby, Willie “beat[s] on, [like] boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Fighting the current of time, kayaking upstream at times, at other times drifting, giving in.

Willie’s love is indeed peculiar:

It would be a comfort just to know that you never doubt me

Even though I give you cause most every day.

He wants a love that can never be doubted. An unconditional love that will never falter or fade even if he forsakes it or runs away “most every day.” Who besides God can offer this kind of Agape love? And then he asks his lover:

Don't doubt my love if sometimes my mind should wander

To a suddenly remembered yesterday

Willie’s mind wanders from his present love to a more perfect, platonic ideal of love in the past. He assures his lover that

my mind could never stay too long away from you.

Love is all in the mind. “You were always on my mind.” Except when you weren’t. Except when I was in love with my own mind.

In 1965, Willie lays out the paradoxical problem of love that will occupy him for the next 45 years. We want love to be perfect and frozen like the lovers on Keats’ Grecian urn, but we don’t want it at the same time. We both desire and fear unconditional love (see C.S. Lewis on this).

Chet Atkins’ “Nashville Sound” has been much maligned, but this album seems tasteful and understated without syrupy strings or cheesy background choruses.

“Night Life” may be the slowest, sparest recording I have ever heard. Willie sings like Cormac McCarthy writes. I could do without the snaps in the background. The guitar work in the background is virtuosic.

“Funny How Time Slips Away” tops my list of Willie-penned songs, and this ranks as one of the top versions. I’ve been singing this song all day today, but I’ve been singing it like Dave Matthews on his live solo acoustic version I found on-line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzQYNT19hkw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7th5Tm5-64

“Healing Hands of Time” I need to quote in its entirety:

They're working while I'm missing you those healing hands of time

And soon they'll be dismissing you from this heart of mine

They'll lead me safely through the night and I'll follow as though blind

My future tightly clutched within those healing hands of time

They let me close my eyes just then those healing hands of time

And soon they'll let me sleep again those healing hands of time

So already I've reached mountain peaks and I've just begun to climb

I'll get over you by clinging to those healing hands of time

Willie is in love with time. Love causes pain, but time heals (or does it?).

I prefer the version of “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” on Teatro to this one.

Talking to walls, windows, ceilings, and crickets. Some call it the pathetic fallacy, but it works for Willie in this song. Love does seem to imbue our inanimate surroundings, as if they were complicit, in on our heartbreak. The Japanese capture this in their courtly love poetry as well. Murasaki, in her Tale of Genji, would have loved Willie’s music. As would the Tang dynasty poets in China.

“Are You Sure” may be the most credible song on this album. “Please don’t let my tears persuade you. I had hoped I wouldn’t cry. But lately teardrops seem a part of me.” Neither Petrarch nor the courtliest of courtly lovers could cry more than this guy. He is a teardrop. He has taken so many opportunities to cry that he has become a human teardrop. Pure love, pure pain, pure anguish. Teardrops are so often distilled pain from the past, memory concentrated into physical form through pain.

“Could there somewhere be a lonely man like me?” Art and songs on the radio remind us that other people are as lonely as we are. This may be as good an explanation for the purpose and existence of art as any.

“It Should Be Easier Now,” but it isn’t. The healing hands of time don’t heal. This reminds me of the current New Yorker article about facing death, grieving, and mourning. The rivers of his tears have carved canyons in his heart. In her essay, “Good Grief,” Meghan O’Rourke surveys the literature on grief. She focuses on Elisabeth Kuber-Ross and her 1969 classic, On Death and Dying. Kuber-Ross outlines the five stages of grieving. You could read her book, or listen to Willie’s album, recorded four years earlier. The poets and artists are always there first, before the scientists. Freud said that everywhere he went, the poets had always been there first. Robert Burton got there in 1676 with his Anatomy of Melancholy, which I need to read. It probably covers the same ground as Willie’s oeuvre. The stages, according to Kuber-Ross, are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Don’t all country songs fit into those five categories. Five different ways to deal with loss (in love or death).

“Too much to do all alone.” This album may be the most concentrated and consistent collection of songs focused purely on loneliness, heartache, time, memory, and love. Time contracts and expands with our emotions. Emotions like gravity bend time. A honky tonk e=mc squared.

Rich Kienzle writes a lot of the liner notes for Willie’s albums. I couldn’t find any of his music criticism or a book about Willie online. Still looking for a definitive critic of Willie’s music.

“Although I stand outside, my heart’s within your crowd.” Like Beethoven, Dante, Fitzgerald, and Petrarch, so many artists have been driven to create great art to compensate for the inability to obtain unobtainable, inaccessible women (Beatrice, Daisy/Zelda). Like the mechanical rabbit luring the greyhounds around the racetrack.

This album was completed in a mere three days. Rich Kienzle calls these songs “melancholy, anguished originals.” Jerry Reed and Ray Edenton shine on guitar, as does Pete Drake on pedal steel. Henry Strzelecki (bass) and Buddy Harman (drums) are steady and unobtrusive. “Night Life” was first recorded in 1959 (I guess as a demo or single), but this is Willie’s first LP. Atkins produced over 44 RCA sessions from ‘64 to ‘72 before they finally found any real success.