Speaker 1: Pushkin In Nashville, Tennessee. There's a songwriter named Bobby Braddock.
Speaker 1: He's in his seventies, maybe five foot seven, bald head,
Speaker 1: scruffy beard, wiry, like if you messed with them in
Speaker 1: a bar, you'd probably lose. The most striking thing about
Speaker 1: him is his eyes, which are the palest and most
Speaker 1: intense shade of blue. He wears sunglasses a lot, and
Speaker 1: it's almost as if he needs to protect the world
Speaker 1: from that look there. I met him on a music
Speaker 1: row in Nashville. We had lunch, and then we sat
Speaker 1: in one of the writer's rooms in the Sony Building,
Speaker 1: piano in the corner, couches to one side, and he
Speaker 1: talked about his education in the music business.
Speaker 2: I think I always had the reputation as being kind
Speaker 2: of a quirky writer, maybe a little left field.
Speaker 1: The turning point in Braddock's career was a song you've
Speaker 1: probably heard of. It was performed by Tammy Whyne that
Speaker 1: back when she was the reigning Queen of country music
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty eight, about a mom who had to spell
Speaker 1: out the word d I v O rcee so her
Speaker 1: kids wouldn't know their parents were splitting up.
Speaker 2: So D w r C.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I wrote this, did a demo on it, and no tikers,
Speaker 2: nobody did it. Nobody would recorded.
Speaker 1: D I v O RCE was a song with a gimmick.
Speaker 1: Braddick did a lot of gimmicky songs back then. No
Speaker 1: one wanted this one. So Braddick went to a friend
Speaker 1: and longtime collaborator, Curly Putman.
Speaker 2: So I said, well, why haf nobody recording? He said,
Speaker 2: I think around the important part of your song, said,
Speaker 2: sad song, and your melodies on that part is too happy.
Speaker 2: What I was doing was, oh, stop this a little
Speaker 2: bit like a like a soap commercial. I said, well,
Speaker 2: what would you do? And he gets a guitar and
Speaker 2: he had this really mournful singing style. Tammy Whnette was
Speaker 2: a big fan of Curly singing. She left her singing
Speaker 2: because he had. I mean, he just you singing. It
Speaker 2: was just so sad. It gives a guitar. Oh wish
Speaker 2: we get started this. So I said, just get your guitar.
Speaker 2: Let's let's put it on tape like that, you know.
Speaker 1: D I v O r C went to number one.
Speaker 1: It was Bobby Braddock's first great exercise in how to
Speaker 1: make people cry and From then on, things just got sadder.
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
Speaker 1: about something that has never made sense to me. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's because I'm a Canadian, or maybe Americans puzzle about
Speaker 1: this too. I'm talking about the bright line that divides
Speaker 1: American society, not the color line or the ideological line.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about the sad song rie. I don't know
Speaker 1: why people don't talk about this more because it's weird.
Speaker 1: For the sake of argument, let's use the rock magazine
Speaker 1: Rolling Stone's list of the best songs of all time,
Speaker 1: the top fifty. These are the critics choices. Hotel California
Speaker 1: by the Eagles comes in up forty nine, which, as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, is a song about drugs.
Speaker 1: Toutty Fruity by Little Richard at forty three Tuty Fruity,
Speaker 1: which I remind you has as its signature lyric tooty fruity,
Speaker 1: oh ruddy touty fruity, Oh rudy touty fruity, oh rudy
Speaker 1: touty fruity, O rudy wop bop alo Bop a Loop,
Speaker 1: Bam boom, there's Dancing in the Street at forty light,
Speaker 1: My Fire Be My Baby, Nirvana's Smells like Teen Spirit,
Speaker 1: Derek and the dominoes Leyla. There are songs about wanting
Speaker 1: to have sex, songs about having sex, songs about getting high,
Speaker 1: presumably after having sex. Number one song on the list
Speaker 1: like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. Ah, You've gone
Speaker 1: to the finest schools, all right, miss Lonely, But you
Speaker 1: know you only used to get juiced in it. Nobody's
Speaker 1: ever taught you how to live out on the street,
Speaker 1: and now you're gonna have to get used to it.
Speaker 1: I think that's a song about someone who dropped out
Speaker 1: of Harvard. The number one rock song of all time
Speaker 1: is about dropping out of Harvard. In all of those
Speaker 1: fifty songs, nobody dies after a long illness, no marriage disintegrates,
Speaker 1: nobody's killed on a battlefield, no mother grieves for a
Speaker 1: so on. The closest that any song in Rolling Stone's
Speaker 1: list comes to being truly sad is Smoky Robinson's Tracks
Speaker 1: of My Tears, which is first of all number fifty.
Speaker 1: So they put the sad song at the bottom of
Speaker 1: the list. And secondly, it's about a guy at a
Speaker 1: party in their moments of greatest travail. The protagonists of
Speaker 1: rock and roll's sad songs still get to go to parties. Now.
Speaker 1: Just turn on a country music station, especially a traditional
Speaker 1: country music station, and listen. It's like a different universe.
Speaker 1: Marriage is going to hell, people staring into their shot
Speaker 1: glass in a honky tonk, people dying young. If you
Speaker 1: ever heard John Prine's Unwed Fathers, it's a devastating bit
Speaker 1: of songwriting about a teenage mom fleeing town. He sings
Speaker 1: it with his wife Rachel.
Speaker 3: Also Wario Bam smoking Mantain.
Speaker 4: She bow. Now all the bad.
Speaker 5: Your daddy meant to hurt you ever, You just don't
Speaker 5: live here, but you got his eyes.
Speaker 1: Those last two lines, your daddy never meant to hurt
Speaker 1: you ever. He just don't live here, but you've got
Speaker 1: his eyes.
Speaker 6: That's brutal, black bad dream all on. We fob.
Speaker 1: One half of the country, the rock music part, wants
Speaker 1: their music to be hymns to extra version. The other
Speaker 1: half wants to talk about real life dramas and have
Speaker 1: a good cry. I don't get it, by the way,
Speaker 1: you know who wrote that unwed Father's Song with John Prine,
Speaker 1: Bobby Braddock, or maybe you've heard this another classic recorded
Speaker 1: by Tammy Whynett Golden.
Speaker 3: Word with a Long Time Long pritaside.
Speaker 1: Loud long bus Golden Ring. It follows a couple from
Speaker 1: first love to the breakup of their marriage by tracing
Speaker 1: the journey of their wedding ring from pawnshop to pawnshop.
Speaker 1: It's a weeper who wrote it, Bobby Braddock, and today,
Speaker 1: forty years after he wrote it, Braddock is still mad
Speaker 1: about a one word change made by the song's producer,
Speaker 1: Billy Cheryl, because that made his song one crucial degree
Speaker 1: less sad.
Speaker 7: But we had.
Speaker 2: He says, you won't admit it, but I know you're
Speaker 2: running around and Billy changed it too. He says, you
Speaker 2: won't admit it, but I know you're leaving town. That's
Speaker 2: not as that's not as powerful as you're running around.
Speaker 7: He says, you won't admit it, but I know you
Speaker 7: leave in town.
Speaker 3: She says one thanks for circ I.
Speaker 8: Don't love you anymore.
Speaker 3: As throws down the ring as she walks out the door.
Speaker 2: I think country music is supposed to be about real life,
Speaker 2: you know, And I try to reflect that in bout
Speaker 2: all Right.
Speaker 1: Gold Ring, which brings us to maybe the greatest country
Speaker 1: song of all time, certainly the saddest country song of
Speaker 1: all time, the song that made me get on a
Speaker 1: plane and go to Nashville. It was recorded by the
Speaker 1: great George Jones, one of the half dozen or so
Speaker 1: most iconic figures in the history of country music. You
Speaker 1: just heard him singing in Golden Ring. Jones was famously
Speaker 1: the husband of Tammy Wynett for a time, a hard living,
Speaker 1: dissolute megastar. Once, in the midst of an epic bender,
Speaker 1: jones family took his keys away, so he got on
Speaker 1: his writing mower and drove eight miles to the liquor
Speaker 1: store to get some whiskey. This was a man who
Speaker 1: could pour his fractured heart into his music like no
Speaker 1: one else. A half dozen times in his career, Jones
Speaker 1: found a song truly worthy of his talents, but it
Speaker 1: never got better than he stopped loving her. Today, I
Speaker 1: still remember when I first heard that song, and from
Speaker 1: the day I started thinking about this episode, I haven't
Speaker 1: been able to get it out of my head.
Speaker 3: He said, I'll love you till I die. She told him,
Speaker 3: you forgetting time As the years went slowly by, she
Speaker 3: still prayed.
Speaker 6: Up all his his mind.
Speaker 3: He kept her picture on his wall.
Speaker 1: Do I need to tell you who wrote that song?
Speaker 1: Bobby Braddock? Bobby Braddock is the king of tears.
Speaker 3: But he still loved him through it all, hoping she'd
Speaker 3: come back again.
Speaker 1: Oh man. One of the things that got me interested
Speaker 1: in sad songs was a story my sister in law,
Speaker 1: Bev told me. She and my brother live in the
Speaker 1: same area. I grew up in Waterloo County in southern Ontario,
Speaker 1: and a while ago she went to a performance by
Speaker 1: a local chamber choir thirty singers. They sang a cantata
Speaker 1: called Annalise by the British composer James Whitbourne, a choral
Speaker 1: composition which puts the words of n Frank's diary to music.
Speaker 1: I know this seems like a little bit of a
Speaker 1: digression from country music, but it's a really useful case
Speaker 1: study in understanding why some songs make us cry. The
Speaker 1: performance Bev told me about was on a Sunday afternoon,
Speaker 1: a free performance at the Public Library, which is a
Speaker 1: very utilitarian, very nineteen sixties building on Queen Street in
Speaker 1: downtown Kitchener. I've been there many times. Waaldwall carpet, that
Speaker 1: old books library smell, which I have to admit, I love.
Speaker 1: How many people are there.
Speaker 9: It's in their main reading room. They've moved around all
Speaker 9: the tables and one hundred one hundred and twentieth full,
Speaker 9: pretty much standing room only.
Speaker 1: Why light?
Speaker 9: As they're singing, I think, why is that also not singing?
Speaker 9: And then I look over and I think somebody else
Speaker 9: as a Frian, I'm not singing. That's odd because everybody
Speaker 9: else in their.
Speaker 10: Parts is singing.
Speaker 9: And I realized they were crying and they couldn't sing.
Speaker 1: Bev says, she cried pretty much through the entire performance.
Speaker 1: She was looking straight ahead because she didn't want people
Speaker 1: to see she was crying. But it didn't matter because
Speaker 1: everyone was crying. When the performance was over, Bev approached
Speaker 1: the stage to talk to the soloist, the woman singing
Speaker 1: Anne Frank's words.
Speaker 9: I just went up to her afterwards and congratulated her
Speaker 9: on the beauty of the piece then and her singing,
Speaker 9: And I said, and how did you manage to sing
Speaker 9: without crying? And she said, well, I couldn't look at Mark,
Speaker 9: the conductor, because he was wiping tears from his eyes,
Speaker 9: and I had my back to the choir, so that
Speaker 9: was good. And I didn't look at anybody in the
Speaker 9: audience because they were crying. So I just looked up
Speaker 9: in the middle distance and I sang, it was a
Speaker 9: good thing. I hadn't memorized.
Speaker 1: I was at home in Canada when Bev told me
Speaker 1: that story, so I called up Mark, the conductor, and
Speaker 1: the soloist, whose name is Natasha. They're actually husband and wife.
Speaker 1: They only live a few minutes away from my brother,
Speaker 1: so they came over. Mark sat at the piano in
Speaker 1: the living room and Natasha stood behind him, and they
Speaker 1: performed one of the pieces from Analyst they did that
Speaker 1: day in the library.
Speaker 10: This is the last movement. It's called Anne's Meditation. I
Speaker 10: see the world, I see the world being slowly turned
Speaker 10: turned into a wilderness.
Speaker 1: Now I realized, this is a crazy question, because we're
Speaker 1: hearing a piece based on the diary of Anne Frank,
Speaker 1: which is one of the most heartbreaking stories from one
Speaker 1: of the most horrific moments in recent history. But why
Speaker 1: was everyone crying that day at the Kitchener library. The
Speaker 1: obvious reason is that the music is beautiful, so is
Speaker 1: Natasha's singing. The performance is also authentic. There's nothing contrived
Speaker 1: about it. It wasn't at Carnegie Hall. People weren't wearing
Speaker 1: suits and evening gowns. They were at the Kitchener Library
Speaker 1: and there's families getting books and kids running around, and
Speaker 1: everyone's on stacking chairs with the tables pushed off to
Speaker 1: the side. But here's the most important thing. Annalise is
Speaker 1: specific It's a cantata about the actual experiences of a
Speaker 1: real person. In her own words, Bev says that when
Speaker 1: she cried, she started thinking about her own family, Mennonites,
Speaker 1: who escaped terrible persecution in Russia. Natasha's says that as
Speaker 1: she sang about twelve year old an Frank, she was
Speaker 1: thinking about her own daughter, who was ten and who
Speaker 1: was sitting right next to Bev in the audience. Beauty
Speaker 1: and authenticity can create a mood. They set the stage.
Speaker 1: But I think the thing that pushes us over the
Speaker 1: top into tears is details. We cry when melancholy collides
Speaker 1: with specificity, and specificity is not something every genre does well.
Speaker 1: Wild Horses by the Rolling Stones, written by Keith Richards
Speaker 1: and Mick Jagger, It's a song about a conversation a
Speaker 1: man is having with a silent, suffering loved one. The
Speaker 1: story goes that Mick Jagger dreamt up the verses while
Speaker 1: sitting at the bedside of his then girlfriend Mary and Faithful,
Speaker 1: as she recovered from an overdose.
Speaker 6: Oh suffer, Bill, I watched.
Speaker 1: You suffer a dull, aching pain. Now you've decided to
Speaker 1: show me the same. No sweeping exit or off stage
Speaker 1: lines could make me feel bitter or treat you unkind.
Speaker 1: Wild Horses couldn't drag me away. Wild Wild Horses couldn't
Speaker 1: drag me away. Wild Horses was recorded first by the
Speaker 1: legendary Graham Parsons. Not long afterwards, Parsons died of an overdose,
Speaker 1: and his friend in protege, the country music singer Emmy
Speaker 1: Lou Harris, made a song in his memory. She wrote
Speaker 1: it with Bill Danoff. It's called from Boulder to Birmingham.
Speaker 6: I don't want a hee song. I got on the
Speaker 6: zepplin just a flow damn nods below me.
Speaker 9: But all that you can.
Speaker 6: Show me is a premium.
Speaker 5: Mascuy, And I don't only hear he said.
Speaker 9: Story.
Speaker 1: Someone who has suffered a terrible loss has gotten on
Speaker 1: a plane and she's so numbed by grief that she
Speaker 1: can no longer see those around her.
Speaker 6: Blessed time.
Speaker 7: I feel like this.
Speaker 1: I was in the wilderness in.
Speaker 9: The can was on FA.
Speaker 1: From Boulder to Birmingham, and wildhorses are both beautiful melancholy.
Speaker 1: They're about the same thing, the ties the living and
Speaker 1: the healthy have to those in pain. But which is
Speaker 1: the sadder song? I don't think there's any question. Wild
Speaker 1: horses is generic. Listen to how it starts childhood. Living
Speaker 1: is easy to do the things you wanted. I bought
Speaker 1: them for you. Graceless lady, you know who I am.
Speaker 1: You know I can't let you slide through my hands?
Speaker 1: What's going on? Any idea? What is Mickey yammering on about? Now?
Speaker 1: Compare that to the specificity of looking down from the
Speaker 1: airplane and seeing nothing but prairie. Then standing on a
Speaker 1: mountain and watching a canyon burn.
Speaker 6: Was our rapsle in the coosm.
Speaker 4: I would hold.
Speaker 6: Any say, race away from all.
Speaker 5: Act I could see.
Speaker 1: First, she references the great black spiritual rock my soul
Speaker 1: in the Bosom of Abraham. The Bosom of Abraham is
Speaker 1: where the righteous dead go while awaiting judgment. Then she sings,
Speaker 1: and I would also walk all the way from Boulder
Speaker 1: to Birmingham. Now she's locating her grief. I would make
Speaker 1: a pilgrimage from progressive, hippie liberal Remember this is nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three, dope smoking Colorado back to the repressive heart
Speaker 1: of the Old South, just to see your face. Two
Speaker 1: completely different specific images, each with its own set of
Speaker 1: emotional triggers, and she's piled one on top of another.
Speaker 1: Mark Vornan, the music director of the choir in my hometown,
Speaker 1: says that there's a part in Annalise that does the
Speaker 1: same thing. Anne is.
Speaker 10: They're in hiding already, and she starts singing, and the
Speaker 10: composer has set these words in kind of a style
Speaker 10: of an American Sousa march, and so she's talking about
Speaker 10: in the bathtub and being scrubbed in the bathtub, and
Speaker 10: it's a SUSA we scrub, scrub, scrub ourselves in the
Speaker 10: tin right, very happy and optimistic music.
Speaker 1: And Frank in the bathtub to the tune of a
Speaker 1: SUSA march with the horrors of the Holocaust outside her door.
Speaker 1: Three absolutely concrete images in merciless combination.
Speaker 10: It just floored me every time I heard it, because
Speaker 10: it was so close to you know, our own daughter,
Speaker 10: you know, to think that she would have to create
Speaker 10: this kind of fiction in order to just get through
Speaker 10: the day.
Speaker 1: That's how you get tears. You make the story so
Speaker 1: real and the details so sharp, and you add in
Speaker 1: so many emotional triggers that the listener cannot escape. But
Speaker 1: it's a risky thing to do, right if you aren't
Speaker 1: a talented composer and you don't do a sensitive rendition
Speaker 1: of those lyrics, they could fall flat, could seem forced,
Speaker 1: even offensive. Far easier just to fall back on the
Speaker 1: blend cliche that wild horses couldn't drag you away. Country
Speaker 1: music makes people cry because it's not afraid to be specific.
Speaker 8: You know, she came to see him one last time,
Speaker 8: and we all wondered if she would, and it kept
Speaker 8: running through my mind.
Speaker 6: At this time.
Speaker 1: Bobby Braddock was born in Auburndale, Florida, a little town
Speaker 1: between Tampa and Orlando. His father grew Citrus. They were
Speaker 1: Church of Christ, just about the most fundamentalist of fundamentalist Christians.
Speaker 1: Braddock moved to Nashville in nineteen sixty four, just after
Speaker 1: getting married to seek his fortune in the music business.
Speaker 1: He wrote his memoirs a few years ago. It's called
Speaker 1: A Life on Nashville's Music Row. I read it before
Speaker 1: I went to see him, and the best way to
Speaker 1: describe the book is that it's exhausting. I don't mean
Speaker 1: that in a bad way, because I couldn't put it down.
Speaker 1: But so much happens.
Speaker 11: You've lived this incredibly tumultuous, emotionally tumultuous life. Yeah, And
Speaker 11: in the book it sounds like the first precipitating event
Speaker 11: is the death of your son. Braddock was touring with
Speaker 11: the country music legend Mardy Robbins at the time. He
Speaker 11: and his wife, Sue had a baby. The child was
Speaker 11: just a few months old when he died.
Speaker 2: Whenever I was in town, not on the road with
Speaker 2: Marty Robbins, every single day we'd buy fresh flowers, go
Speaker 2: put it on it's gray. We were just pathetic.
Speaker 1: He and Sue fight, She cheats on him, he cheats
Speaker 1: on her. They break up, they get back together, they
Speaker 1: have a daughter. The divorce, his ex wife mysteriously vanishes.
Speaker 1: He drinks a lot, gets into fights, owes enormous sums
Speaker 1: to the irs, has a major Boutwood depression, smokes a
Speaker 1: lot of pot, lurches from one volcanic event to the next,
Speaker 1: and through it all Braddock writes songs, hundreds of them.
Speaker 1: Your kind of tolerance for emotional volatility seems extraordinary.
Speaker 2: I guess tolerance is probably a pretty good word for it.
Speaker 1: Braddock walks over to the keyboard on the other side
Speaker 1: of the room. He begins to talk about an old
Speaker 1: girlfriend named Angela, who committed suicide by driving her car
Speaker 1: into the river.
Speaker 2: When Angela died, her mother took her baby to raise it.
Speaker 2: And she sent me a picture of the little girl
Speaker 2: Angela's when she's about four or five years ago, look
Speaker 2: just like her mom. Picture of her standing out in
Speaker 2: the arm And boy did a number on me, despite
Speaker 2: all the dusts.
Speaker 1: He wrote a song about that in twenty minutes. He
Speaker 1: played it for me. Then he played his favorite bit
Speaker 1: of a sad Randy Newman song. He played me a
Speaker 1: heartbreaking song he wrote once after getting up in the
Speaker 1: middle of the night and passing his lover in the hallway.
Speaker 1: And as he played one weeper after another, I realized
Speaker 1: that the thing I'd said about Braddock's tolerance for emotional volatility,
Speaker 1: tolerance was the wrong word. That was just me projecting
Speaker 1: my uptight Canadian self onto Braddock. But Braddock is from
Speaker 1: the musical side of the United States, where emotion is
Speaker 1: not something to be endured, it's something to be embraced.
Speaker 1: At one point, when cell phones were still analog, you
Speaker 1: could buy a scanner and listen in to other people's conversations,
Speaker 1: and that's what Braddock does. He can't help himself. A
Speaker 1: woman complains to her husband for an hour about his
Speaker 1: lack of affection from the parking lot at the grocery store.
Speaker 1: Then ask him what he wants and he says, maybe
Speaker 1: Apple Newton's. And then this is my favorite part I'm
Speaker 1: quoting now from Braddock's memoir. The conversation that truly touched
Speaker 1: me was between a man perhaps forty and his mother
Speaker 1: may Bee, late sixties, in which the sun opened up
Speaker 1: about sexual problems he was having with his wife. And
Speaker 1: I envied the sprinkling of profanities and the mother's invitation
Speaker 1: to come over to the house, son, and let's open
Speaker 1: a bottle of whisky and talk about it. Wishing I
Speaker 1: had that kind of easy and open communication with my mom.
Speaker 1: Then learning that the guy's mother was terminally ill with cancer.
Speaker 1: If you're keeping track, that's marital difficulty, sex, profanity, whisky mom,
Speaker 1: and terminal cancer in one conversation, and it truly touched
Speaker 1: him free. Do you know what Braddott's favorite song is
Speaker 1: Vince Gills go Rest High on that Mountain, which Gil
Speaker 1: wrote in memory both of his brother who died young
Speaker 1: of a heart attack and fellow country star Keith Whitley,
Speaker 1: who drank himself to death.
Speaker 2: O on.
Speaker 9: Song you.
Speaker 6: Is dumb, dude, Oh my god.
Speaker 2: When Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs and Patty Lovelace are
Speaker 2: singing harmony on that thing, I go nuts. It still
Speaker 2: tears me up. Knowing that it's about death, and Vince
Speaker 2: wrote it about Keith Whitley and then about his own brother,
Speaker 2: and just the emotion that sending that song, It's just
Speaker 2: it's just powerful day.
Speaker 6: Left us gathered round agree degree we shock, goody.
Speaker 4: Faces.
Speaker 1: It's heartbreaking. Listening to that song makes me wonder if
Speaker 1: some portion of what we call ideological division in America
Speaker 1: actually isn't ideological at all. How big are the political
Speaker 1: differences between red and blue states anyway, in the grand
Speaker 1: scheme of things, not that big. Maybe what we're seeing
Speaker 1: instead is a difference of emotional opinion, because if your
Speaker 1: principal form of cultural expression has drinking, sex, suicide, heart attacks,
Speaker 1: mom and terminal cancer all on the table for public discussion,
Speaker 1: then the other half of the country is going to
Speaker 1: seem really chilly and uncaring. And if you're from the
Speaker 1: rock and roll half, clinging send me ironically to two
Speaker 1: Dy Fruity O Rudy. When you listen to a song
Speaker 1: written about a guy's brother who died young of a
Speaker 1: heart attack and another guy who drank himself to death,
Speaker 1: you're going to think, who are these people? Here's another
Speaker 1: way to think about the sad song line. Let me
Speaker 1: read you the list of the birthplaces of the performers
Speaker 1: of the top twenty country songs of all time Again.
Speaker 1: I'm going to use the Rolling Stone magazine list. Ready, Arkansas, Virginia, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, Mississippi, Georgia, California,
Speaker 1: Central Valley, by the way, not Los Angeles, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Texas, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Texas, Kentucky, Texas.
Speaker 1: I could do the top fifty, or the top one hundred,
Speaker 1: or the top two hundred and you get the same pattern. Basically,
Speaker 1: you cannot be a successful country singer or songwriter if
Speaker 1: you're not from the South. It's impossible. There's one exception,
Speaker 1: which is the great songwriter Harlan Howard, who was born
Speaker 1: in Detroit, but almost immediately thereafter his family moves to
Speaker 1: a farm in rural Kentucky. It's like the five to
Speaker 1: second roll when you drop a piece of food on
Speaker 1: the floor. If it's not on the ground long enough,
Speaker 1: it doesn't count. As far as I can tell, there
Speaker 1: are no Jews on the country list, almost no Catholics,
Speaker 1: only two black people. It's white Southern Protestants all the
Speaker 1: way down. Now compare that to the rock and roll list.
Speaker 1: You've got Jews from Minnesota, black people from Detroit, Catholics
Speaker 1: from New Jersey, middle class British art school dropouts, Canadians, Jamaicans.
Speaker 1: Rock and roll is the rainbow coalition that diversity is
Speaker 1: a good thing. It's why there's so much innovation in
Speaker 1: rock and roll. But you pay a price for that.
Speaker 1: There was a very clever bit of research published recently
Speaker 1: by Colin Morris in the magazine The Pudding. He analyzed
Speaker 1: fifteen thousand popular songs using an algorithm that can presses
Speaker 1: digital files. So if you take out the repetitive bits
Speaker 1: in a song, how much of it is left. Morris's
Speaker 1: big finding is that rock and roll as a genre
Speaker 1: is really, really repetitive. Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, the Beatles,
Speaker 1: If you take out the duplicative parts, their music shrinks
Speaker 1: by sixty percent. That's what happens when everyone is from
Speaker 1: somewhere different. Nobody speaks the same language, so you have
Speaker 1: to use cliche, the same phrases over and over again,
Speaker 1: because if you go deeper or try to get more specific,
Speaker 1: you start to lose people. Country music, on the other hand,
Speaker 1: is not nearly as repetitive. When Morris ran the lyrics
Speaker 1: of popular country singers through his algorithm, they only shrank
Speaker 1: by about forty percent, a third less than the rock
Speaker 1: and roller. Nor is hip hop repetitive, which makes sense.
Speaker 1: The birthplaces of everyone on Rolling Stones list of greatest
Speaker 1: rap songs reads like an urban version of the country list. Queens,
Speaker 1: South Central, La Brooklyn, Long Island, South Central Long Beach, Houston, Queens,
Speaker 1: The Bronx, Englewood, New Jersey, The Bronx. Hip Hop and
Speaker 1: country are both tightly knit musical communities. And when you're
Speaker 1: speaking to people who understand your world and your culture
Speaker 1: and your language, you can tell much more complicated stories.
Speaker 1: You can use much more precise imagery, you can lay
Speaker 1: yourself bare because you're among your own. In the book,
Speaker 1: it sounds like your relationship with Sparky was the one
Speaker 1: that seemed the most creatively fruitful. It was it was
Speaker 1: Sparky was a beautiful blonde from northern Alabama, the great
Speaker 1: love of Bobby Braddock's life. Why was that?
Speaker 2: I think because my family her is so strong. I mean,
Speaker 2: it's it's sort of a visceral thing.
Speaker 1: I think that's why I found Bobby Braddock's book so exhausting.
Speaker 1: It's because everything is felt, everything is a mountain peak
Speaker 1: and Sparky, Sparky was everest, high altitude infatuation.
Speaker 2: That's the sort of thing that make people go absolutely crazy,
Speaker 2: you know, and that was the case with her. You know,
Speaker 2: that's what gets the animal instinct of people maybe who
Speaker 2: haven't evolved as much as they should, and cause them
Speaker 2: to go out and get a gun, blow somebody's brains
Speaker 2: out over some gun. Not being able can't stand the thought,
Speaker 2: or someone you know, having sex with the person that
Speaker 2: he loves.
Speaker 1: Braddick and Sparky were on and off lovers for years.
Speaker 1: It was intense, painful, euphoric. When it ended, Braddock was
Speaker 1: in pieces.
Speaker 3: He kept her picture on the wall.
Speaker 2: Went half crazy.
Speaker 1: Now in the that's Braddock in the original demo he
Speaker 1: made of he stopped loving her today.
Speaker 3: He still loved her through it all, hoping she'd come
Speaker 3: back looking.
Speaker 2: I said, I'm not sure where it came from. It
Speaker 2: may have come from Sparky, you know, honestly not know
Speaker 2: it would be interesting.
Speaker 9: How could it not?
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, if I think it probably, I think it
Speaker 2: probably did. But I just I can't see it. I
Speaker 2: can't see that for any certainty to mar.
Speaker 1: They'll carry him will I felt like Braddick shrink at
Speaker 1: that moment, listening to his tangled dreams and then wanting
Speaker 1: to shake him. At the end of the session. It's Sparky.
Speaker 3: Sparky, they found some letters by his bed.
Speaker 1: I mean, you wrote a song in the middle of
Speaker 1: the great defining love affair of your life. The relationship ends,
Speaker 1: and you write a song about the heartbreak of that
Speaker 1: a man carries to his grave. I mean, could it
Speaker 1: be more clear?
Speaker 3: I went to see him one last time.
Speaker 1: Bobby Braddock wrote, he stopped loving her today With his
Speaker 1: friend Curly in nineteen seventy seven, they took it to
Speaker 1: the singer George Jones. Jones was then at his lowest
Speaker 1: ebb a wreck, strung out on cocaine and whiskey. He
Speaker 1: just checked out of a psychiatric hospital. The great love
Speaker 1: of his life, Tammy Wynette, had embodied her hit song
Speaker 1: Di v O rcee and left him. Jones had just
Speaker 1: nearly shot and killed one of his best friends. The
Speaker 1: heartbroken Bobby Braddock has written a song about a man
Speaker 1: who cannot stop loving a woman, and it's sung by
Speaker 1: the heartbroken George Jones, who I cannot stop loving a woman.
Speaker 3: Get some letters byes Babe.
Speaker 2: Eight.
Speaker 3: In nineteen sixty two, he had underline and red.
Speaker 1: Underlined and read every single I love you, every single
Speaker 1: I love you.
Speaker 3: I went to see him just today. Oh but I
Speaker 3: didn't seen old tears, all dressed up to go away.
Speaker 3: First time I'd seen him smiling you.
Speaker 1: Why did he finally turn his back on his great love?
Speaker 1: Why is this the first time he smiled in years?
Speaker 1: Because he's dead? Only death could end his.
Speaker 6: Love it blaster red upon his dog. I'm sung belt Carrier.
Speaker 3: He stopped loving hard today.
Speaker 1: It's totally over the top. Madelin sentimental Kitchie, call it
Speaker 1: whatever you want, just don't fight it. One thing that
Speaker 1: Bobby Braddock told me in Passing that I think about
Speaker 1: a lot is that he thought of the character in
Speaker 1: his song as a bad role model. The man was obsessed.
Speaker 1: He couldn't let go. But that's the point, right, That's
Speaker 1: why we cry, because the song manages to find beauty
Speaker 1: and even a little bit of grandeur in someone's frailty.
Speaker 6: I'm song belt Carriage.
Speaker 3: He stopped hard today.
Speaker 1: Wild horses please.
Speaker 7: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Grand
Speaker 7: Ole Opry House, to the celebration of life of George
Speaker 7: Glenn Jones. One of the most important people ever, of
Speaker 7: all time and of any time in the history of
Speaker 7: country music.
Speaker 1: George Jones died in twenty thirteen. Everyone who was anyone
Speaker 1: in country music came to his memorial service. You should
Speaker 1: watch it if you get the chance. It's on YouTube,
Speaker 1: all two hours and forty one minutes of it. Because
Speaker 1: it's everything I've been talking about. Vince Gill stands up
Speaker 1: with Patty Lovelace and sings go Rest High in that
Speaker 1: Mountain and breaks down halfway through. Travis Tritt remembers a
Speaker 1: conversation he once had with Chris Christofferson about how they
Speaker 1: expected George Jones to have died years before.
Speaker 12: And I looked at Chris and I made the comment,
Speaker 12: you know, with all the years of hard living that
Speaker 12: George had, who would have ever thought that he would
Speaker 12: outlive Tammy. And Chris looked at me and said, had
Speaker 12: it not been for Nancy, he would not have.
Speaker 1: Nancy Jones, George Jones's fourth and final wife, the real
Speaker 1: love of his life, his soulmate and companion. Travis Tritt
Speaker 1: holds out his hand towards Nancy, who's sitting right in
Speaker 1: the front row.
Speaker 12: It many times she's my angel, and she saved my
Speaker 12: life and so we owe you a debt of gratitude.
Speaker 10: For that.
Speaker 1: Then comes the crowning moment of the day, the final performance.
Speaker 1: Alan Jackson strides out onto the stage a big rangy guy,
Speaker 1: craggy features, cowboy boots, jeans, long coat, white statson. He
Speaker 1: looks squarely at Nancy Jones and without introduction, launches into
Speaker 1: he stopped loving her?
Speaker 4: Today, he said, all of you till I die. She
Speaker 4: told him you are good time as years went fool.
Speaker 1: And you realize as he sings, that Braddock's song has
Speaker 1: gotten even more specific. It's no longer about a long
Speaker 1: ago affair. It's about right now. This is the day
Speaker 1: George Jones stopped loving Nancy Jones. Alan Jackson takes off
Speaker 1: his hat and places it over his heart.
Speaker 4: He stopped loving her.
Speaker 6: Today.
Speaker 1: And if you aren't crying, I can't help you.
Speaker 3: Love you, George.
Speaker 7: All the free grades of our time, ladies and gentlemen
Speaker 7: at all time. That's Alan Jackson, Thank you so much.
Speaker 3: John.
Speaker 1: Revision's History is produced by Mio Lobel and Jacob Smith,
Speaker 1: with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Siomara Martinez White. Our
Speaker 1: editor is Julia Barton. Lawn Williams is our engineer. Original
Speaker 1: music by Luis Sciarra. Special thanks to Andy Bauers and
Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberger. Panoply, I'm Malcolm gardwe