Speaker 1: Pushkin. I started listening to country music when I was
Speaker 1: about twelve or thirteen. This was rural Ontario in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. Everyone else my age was listening to The
Speaker 1: Eagles or Fleetwood Mac or some properly Canadian rock band
Speaker 1: like Rush. But for some inexplicable reason, I, a British
Speaker 1: Jamaican kid marooned in the Canadian heartland, found solace in
Speaker 1: the music coming out of Nashville. Lots of Johnny cash Lorette, Lynn,
Speaker 1: Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings. I can still sing almost all
Speaker 1: of Good Hearted Woman from memory, and of course George Jones.
Speaker 1: I still remember the first time I heard the grand
Speaker 1: tour step right up, come on in, if you'd like
Speaker 1: to take the Grand Tour of a lonely house that
Speaker 1: once was home, sweet home, and then the amazing lines,
Speaker 1: I have nothing here to sell you, just some things
Speaker 1: that I will tell you, some things I know will
Speaker 1: chill you to the bone. To my Maudlin thirteen year
Speaker 1: old heart, the line some things I know will chill
Speaker 1: you to the bone was so fantastic, so over the top,
Speaker 1: so bonkers, and just thinking about that lonely house that
Speaker 1: was once home, sweet home brought tears to my eyes.
Speaker 1: Pop music, particularly the pop music of that era, just
Speaker 1: couldn't compete with that. I carried George Jones in my
Speaker 1: heart for a very long time until the point that
Speaker 1: I decided it was time to revisit the question what
Speaker 1: exactly is country music doing when it makes you cry?
Speaker 1: In Nashville, Tennessee, there is 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 Wynette back
Speaker 1: when she was the reigning Queen of country music nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, about a mom who had to spell out
Speaker 1: the word dvo rcee so her kids wouldn't know their
Speaker 1: parents were splitting up.
Speaker 3: So dw r C.
Speaker 2: Yeah wrote this, did it? Demo on it and no tikers,
Speaker 2: nobody did it, nobody would recorded.
Speaker 1: D iv o r C 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, So.
Speaker 2: I said, well, why is nobody recording? He said, I
Speaker 2: think around the important part of your song said, sad song,
Speaker 2: and your melodies on that part is too happy. What
Speaker 2: I was doing was, oh, I wish that could stop
Speaker 2: this lifty s a little bit like a like a
Speaker 2: soap commercial. I said, well, what would you do? And
Speaker 2: he gave a guitar and he had this really mournful
Speaker 2: singing style. Tammy Whenette was a big fan of Curly singing,
Speaker 2: she left her singing because he had I mean, he
Speaker 2: just he singing was just so sad. It gives it
Speaker 2: a guitar and.
Speaker 4: Said, oh, wish that we could start this, So I said,
Speaker 4: just get your guitar, let's put it on.
Speaker 5: Take what.
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 line. 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 at forty nine, which, as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, is a song about drugs.
Speaker 1: Tooty Fruity by Little Richard at forty three. Tutty Fruity,
Speaker 1: which I remind you has is its signature lyric tooty fruity,
Speaker 1: oh ruddy touty fruity, Oh rudy tooty fruity, Oh rudy
Speaker 1: tooty fruity, oh 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 Leila. 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
Speaker 1: disintegrates nobody's killed on a battlefield. No mother grieves for
Speaker 1: a son. The closest that any song in Rolling Stone's
Speaker 1: list comes to being truly sad is Smokey 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 Unweed 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 6: Almost so Verio man smoking man Bell, Now come in,
Speaker 6: Lolla bad.
Speaker 7: Your daddy meant to hurt you, ever, it's just don live.
Speaker 8: That you got his.
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 that's brutal, black subad dream.
Speaker 2: All on.
Speaker 1: We fove One half of the country, the rock music part,
Speaker 1: wants their music to be hymns to extra version. The
Speaker 1: other half wants to talk about real life dramas and
Speaker 1: have a good cry. I don't get it. By the way,
Speaker 1: you know who wrote that unwed father's song with John Prime,
Speaker 1: Bobby Braddock? Or maybe you've heard this another classic recorded
Speaker 1: by Tammy Whynatt Golden.
Speaker 8: Good, Long Time.
Speaker 6: Arcas Loud the bung.
Speaker 1: Bus Golden Ring. It follows a couple from first love
Speaker 1: to the breakup of their marriage by tracing the journey
Speaker 1: of their wedding ring from chop to pawnshop. It's a weeper.
Speaker 1: Who wrote it, Bobby Braddock, and today, forty years after
Speaker 1: he wrote it, Braddock is still mad about a one
Speaker 1: word change made by the song's producer of Billy Cheryl,
Speaker 1: because that made his song one crucial degree less sad.
Speaker 2: But we had He says, you won't admit it, but
Speaker 2: I know you're running around and Billy changed it too.
Speaker 2: He says, you won't admit it, but I know you're
Speaker 2: leaving town. That's not as that's not as powerful as
Speaker 2: you're running around.
Speaker 9: He says, you won't admit it, but I know you
Speaker 9: leave in town.
Speaker 10: She says one, thanks for circ I don't love you anymore.
Speaker 10: It 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 about all right.
Speaker 1: Gold which brings us to maybe the greatest country song
Speaker 1: of all time, certainly the saddest country song of all time,
Speaker 1: the song that made me get on a plane and
Speaker 1: go to Nashville. It was recorded by the great George Jones,
Speaker 1: one of the half dozen or so most iconic figures
Speaker 1: in the history of country music. You just heard him
Speaker 1: singing in Golden Ring. Jones was famously the husband of
Speaker 1: Tammy Wynett for a time, a hard living, dissolute megastar. Once,
Speaker 1: in the midst of an epic bender, jones family took
Speaker 1: his keys away, so he got on his riding mower
Speaker 1: and drove eight miles to the liquor store to get
Speaker 1: some whiskey. This was a man who could pour his
Speaker 1: fractured heart into his music like no one else. A
Speaker 1: half dozen times in his career, Jones found a song
Speaker 1: truly worthy of his talents, but it never got better
Speaker 1: than he stopped loving her. Today, I still remember when
Speaker 1: I first heard that song, and from the day I
Speaker 1: started thinking about this episode, I haven't been able to
Speaker 1: get it out of my head.
Speaker 10: He said, I'll love you till I die. She told
Speaker 10: him you forgetting time. As the years went slowly by,
Speaker 10: She's still prayed up all his his wine.
Speaker 11: He kept her pictures 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 7: But he still loved through it all, hoping she'd come
Speaker 7: 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, Bev,
Speaker 1: told me. She and my brother live in the same area.
Speaker 1: I grew up in Waterloo County in southern Ontario, and
Speaker 1: a while ago she went to a performance by a
Speaker 1: local chamber choir thirty singers. They sang a cantata called
Speaker 1: Annalise by the British composer James Whitbourne, a choral composition
Speaker 1: which puts the words of an 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 of 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, waldewell carpet, that
Speaker 1: old books library smell, which I have to admit, I love.
Speaker 12: How many people are there.
Speaker 3: It's in their main reading room, moved around all the
Speaker 3: tables and one hundred, one hundred and twentieth full, pretty
Speaker 3: much standing room only.
Speaker 13: Why as they're singing, I think, why is that also
Speaker 13: not singing? And then I look over and I think
Speaker 13: somebody else as Aprian, I'm not singing. That's odd because
Speaker 13: everybody else in their parts is singing. And I realized
Speaker 13: 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 3: I just went up to her afterwards and congratulated her
Speaker 3: on the beauty of the piece then and her singing,
Speaker 3: And I said, and how did you to sing without crying?
Speaker 3: And she said, well, I couldn't look at Mark the
Speaker 3: conductor because he was wiping tears from his eyes, and
Speaker 3: I had my back to the choir, so that was good.
Speaker 3: And I didn't look at anybody in the audience because
Speaker 3: they were crying. So I just looked up in the
Speaker 3: middle distance and I sang, it was a good thing.
Speaker 3: 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 Annalyst that they did
Speaker 1: that day in the library.
Speaker 14: This is the last movement. It's called Anne's Meditation. I
Speaker 14: see the world, I see the world being slowly turned
Speaker 14: turn 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 whose family's 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 annelis is specific.
Speaker 1: It's a cantata about the actual experiences of a real person.
Speaker 1: In her own words, Bev says that when she cried,
Speaker 1: she started thinking about her own family, Mennonites, who escaped
Speaker 1: terrible persecution in Russia. Natasha says that as she sang
Speaker 1: about twelve year old and Frank, she was thinking about
Speaker 1: her own daughter, who was ten and who was sitting
Speaker 1: right next to Bev in the audience. Beauty and authenticity
Speaker 1: can create a mood. They set the stage. But I
Speaker 1: think the thing that pushes us over the top into
Speaker 1: tears is details. We cry when melancholy collides with specificity,
Speaker 1: and specificity is not something every genre does well. Wild
Speaker 1: Horses by the Rolling Stones, written by Keith Richards and
Speaker 1: Mick Jagger. It's a song about a conversation a man
Speaker 1: is having with a silent, suffering loved one. The story
Speaker 1: goes that Mick Jagger dreamt up the verses while sitting
Speaker 1: at the bedside of his then girlfriend Mary and Faithful,
Speaker 1: as she recovered from an overdose. Oh love you suffer.
Speaker 12: Bell.
Speaker 1: I watched you suffer a dull, aching pain. Now you've
Speaker 1: decided to show me the same. No sweeping exit or
Speaker 1: off stage lines could make me feel bitter or treat
Speaker 1: you unkind. Wild Horses couldn't drag me away. Wild Wild
Speaker 1: Horses couldn't drag me away. Wild Horses was recorded first
Speaker 1: by the legendary Graham Parsons. Not long afterwards, Parsons died
Speaker 1: of an overdose, and his friend in protege, the country
Speaker 1: music singer Emmy Lou Harris, made a song in his memory.
Speaker 1: She wrote it with Bill Danoff. It's called from Boulder
Speaker 1: to Birmingham.
Speaker 8: I don't want a hee, so.
Speaker 1: I got on the zep plane just to flow.
Speaker 8: Damn nolder me, but all that you can show me,
Speaker 8: he's a pre masco.
Speaker 6: I don't want to hear said 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 4: Blessed time a fool like this.
Speaker 6: I was in the wilderness and again those on.
Speaker 1: The 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 hammering 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 8: Was our rackassle.
Speaker 7: In the bosom of a.
Speaker 6: I would hold.
Speaker 5: Race away from bald.
Speaker 14: About at sea.
Speaker 7: 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 Analyse that does the
Speaker 1: same thing Anne is.
Speaker 5: They're in hiding already, and she starts singing, and the
Speaker 5: composer has set these words in kind of a style
Speaker 5: of an American sousa march, and so she's talking about
Speaker 5: being in the bathtub and being scrubbed in the bathtub,
Speaker 5: and it's a Susa. We scrub, scrubs, scrub ourselves in
Speaker 5: La Tinta right, very happy and optimistic music.
Speaker 1: And Frank in the bathtub to the tune of a
Speaker 1: Sousa march with the horrors of the Holocaust outside her door.
Speaker 1: Three absolutely concrete images in merciless combination.
Speaker 5: It just floored me every time I heard it because
Speaker 5: it was so close to our own daughter, you know,
Speaker 5: to think that she would have to create this kind
Speaker 5: of fiction in order to just get through 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 11: You know, she came to see him one last time,
Speaker 11: and we all wondered if she would, and it kept
Speaker 11: brought in through.
Speaker 10: My mind.
Speaker 11: 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 12: You've lived this incredibly tumultuous, emotionally tumultuous lit Yeah, And
Speaker 12: in the book it sounds like the first precipitating event
Speaker 12: is the death of your son.
Speaker 1: Braddock was touring with the country music legend Mardy Robbins
Speaker 1: at the time. He and his wife, Sue had a baby.
Speaker 1: The child was 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, they 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 bout with depression, smokes
Speaker 1: a lot of pot, lurches from one volcanic event to
Speaker 1: the next, and through it all, Braddock writes songs, hundreds
Speaker 1: of them.
Speaker 12: You were kind of tolerance for emotional volatility seems extraordinary.
Speaker 6: I guess.
Speaker 2: 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 with a little girl,
Speaker 2: Angela's child when she was about four or five years old,
Speaker 2: look just like her mom. Picture her standing out in
Speaker 2: the yard. And boy did a number on me, despite
Speaker 2: all the dishters.
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
Speaker 1: volatility tolerance was the wrong word. That was just me
Speaker 1: projecting my uptight Canadian self on to Braddock. But Braddock
Speaker 1: is from the musical side of the United States, where
Speaker 1: emotion is not something to be endured, it's something to
Speaker 1: be embraced. At one point, when cell phones were still analog,
Speaker 1: you could buy a scanner and listen in to other
Speaker 1: people's conversations, and that's what Braddock does. He can't help himself.
Speaker 1: A woman complains to her husband for an hour about
Speaker 1: his lack of affection from the parking out at the
Speaker 1: grocery store. Then ask him what he wants, and he says,
Speaker 1: maybe Apple Newton's. And then this is my favorite part
Speaker 1: I'm quoting now from Braddock's memoir. The conversation that truly
Speaker 1: touched me was between a man perhaps forty and his mother,
Speaker 1: maybe late sixties, in which the sun opened up about
Speaker 1: sexual problems he was having with his wife. And I
Speaker 1: envied the sprinkling of profanities and the mother's invitation to
Speaker 1: come over to the house, son, and let's open a
Speaker 1: bottle of whiskey and talk about it. Wishing I had
Speaker 1: 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 him.
Speaker 1: Do you know what Braddot's favorite song is? Vince Gills
Speaker 1: Go Rest High on that Mountain, which Gil wrote in
Speaker 1: memory both of his brother who died young of a
Speaker 1: heart attack and fellow country star Keith Whitley, who drank
Speaker 1: himself to death.
Speaker 9: Oh on, and son, you.
Speaker 2: Corner is dn go dude, Oh my god. When Vince
Speaker 2: Gill and Ricky Skaggs and Painty Lovelace are singing harmony
Speaker 2: on that thing, I go nuts. It still tears me up,
Speaker 2: knowing that it's about death, and Vince wrote it about
Speaker 2: Keith Whitley and then about his own brother, and just
Speaker 2: the emotion that sending that song. It's just it's just powerful.
Speaker 8: Day you lift us.
Speaker 1: Gathered round.
Speaker 8: You agreed to.
Speaker 10: Shock good seeing.
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 semi ironically to two Dy
Speaker 1: Fruity O Rudy, when you listen to a song written
Speaker 1: about a guy's brother who died young of a heart
Speaker 1: attack and another guy who drank himself to death, you're
Speaker 1: going to think, who are these people? Here's another way
Speaker 1: to think about the sad song line. Let me read
Speaker 1: you the list of the birthplaces of the performers of
Speaker 1: the top twenty country songs of all time Again. I'm
Speaker 1: going to use the Rolling Stone magazine list. Ready, Arkansas, Virginia, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi,
Speaker 1: Mississippi Georgia, California, 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 Morrison the magazine The Pudding. He analyzed fifteen
Speaker 1: thousand popular songs using an algorithm that can presses digital files.
Speaker 1: So if you take out the repetitive bits in a song,
Speaker 1: how much of it is left. Morris's big finding is
Speaker 1: that rock and roll as a genre is really, really repetitive.
Speaker 1: Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, the Beatles, If you take out
Speaker 1: the duplicative parts, their music shrinks by sixty percent. That's
Speaker 1: what happens when everyone is from somewhere different. Nobody speaks
Speaker 1: the same language, so you have to use cliche, the
Speaker 1: same phrases over and over again, because if you go
Speaker 1: deeper or try to get more specific, you start to
Speaker 1: lose people. Country music, on the other hand, is not
Speaker 1: nearly as repetitive. When Morris ran the lyrics of popular
Speaker 1: country singers through his algorithm, they only shrank by about
Speaker 1: forty percent, a third less than the rock and rollers.
Speaker 1: Nor is hip hop repetitive, which makes sense. The birthplaces
Speaker 1: of everyone on Rolling Stones list of greatest rap songs
Speaker 1: reads like an urban version of the country list. Queen's
Speaker 1: South Central lal A Brooklyn, Long Island, South Central Long Beach,
Speaker 1: Houston means the Bronx Englewood, New Jersey. The Bronx. Hip
Speaker 1: Hop and country are both tightly knit musical communities. And
Speaker 1: when you're speaking to people who understand your world and
Speaker 1: your culture and your language, you can tell much more
Speaker 1: complicated stories. You can use much more precise imagery. You
Speaker 1: can lay yourself bare because you're among your own. In
Speaker 1: the book, it sounds like your relationship with Sparky was
Speaker 1: the one that seemed the most creatively fruitful. It was
Speaker 1: it was Sparky was a beautiful blonde from northern Alabama,
Speaker 1: the great love of Bobby Braddock's life.
Speaker 9: Why was that?
Speaker 2: I think because my favorite her are so strong. I mean,
Speaker 2: is it's sort of a visceral thing.
Speaker 1: I think That's why I found Bobby Braddock's book so
Speaker 1: exhaust It's because everything is felt, everything is a mountain
Speaker 1: peak and Sparky, Sparky was everest high altitude infatuation.
Speaker 2: That's the sort of thing that made 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 a can't stand the
Speaker 2: thought or someone you know, having sex with a person
Speaker 2: that he loves.
Speaker 1: Braddick and Sparky were on and off lovers for years.
Speaker 1: It was intense, painful, euphoric. When it ended, Braddick was
Speaker 1: in pieces.
Speaker 8: He kept her picture on the wall wind half crazy
Speaker 8: now in.
Speaker 1: The that's Braddick in the original demo he made of
Speaker 1: he stopped loving her today.
Speaker 8: He still loved her through it all, hoping she'd come back.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure where it came from. It may have
Speaker 2: come from Sparky, you know, honestly not know it would
Speaker 2: be interesting.
Speaker 12: 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 certainty to.
Speaker 8: Marvell carry him.
Speaker 1: I felt like Bradick shrink at that moment, listening to
Speaker 1: his tangled dreams and then wanting to shake him at
Speaker 1: the end of the session. It's Sparky Sparky.
Speaker 8: They found some letters by He's a being.
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 write a song about the heartbreak of
Speaker 1: that a man carries to his grave. I mean, could
Speaker 1: could it be more clear?
Speaker 8: I went to see him one last time.
Speaker 1: Bobby Braddick 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: div O RCEE and left him. Jones had just nearly
Speaker 1: shot and killed one of his best friends. The heartbroken
Speaker 1: Bobby Braddock has written a song about a man who
Speaker 1: cannot stop loving a woman, and it's sung by the
Speaker 1: heartbroken George Jones. Who cannot stop loving a woman, Get
Speaker 1: him some.
Speaker 8: Letters byes Babe.
Speaker 3: D.
Speaker 10: In nineteen sixty two.
Speaker 8: He had underlined and m.
Speaker 1: Underlined in red every single I love you, every single
Speaker 1: I love you.
Speaker 10: I went to see him just today. Oh but I
Speaker 10: didn't see no tears, all dressed up to go away.
Speaker 10: First time I've seen him smiling.
Speaker 2: 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 love.
Speaker 7: It blazed red upon his dog.
Speaker 8: And sing, They'll carry.
Speaker 3: You.
Speaker 8: 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 10: I'm sol carried.
Speaker 8: He stopped loving hard today.
Speaker 1: Wild horses, please.
Speaker 9: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Grand
Speaker 9: Ole Opry House to the celebration of life of George
Speaker 9: Glenn Jones. One of the most important people ever of
Speaker 9: all time and of any time in the history of
Speaker 9: 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 15: And I looked at Chris and I made the comment,
Speaker 15: you know, with all the years of hard living that
Speaker 15: George had, who would have ever thought that he would
Speaker 15: outlive Tammy. And Chris looked at me and said, had
Speaker 15: 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 15: George said it many times. She's my angel, and she
Speaker 15: saved my life, and so we owe you a debt
Speaker 15: of gratitude.
Speaker 5: For that.
Speaker 1: Comes the crowning moment of the day, the final performance.
Speaker 1: Alan Jackson strides out onto the stage a big rangy
Speaker 1: guy craggy features cowboy boots, jeans, long coat, white statson.
Speaker 1: He looks squarely at Nancy Jones and without introduction, launches
Speaker 1: into he stopped loving her today.
Speaker 7: He shout, all love you till I die. She told
Speaker 7: em you are yet time as he years when clool.
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 love affair. It's about right now. This is the
Speaker 1: day George Jones stopped loving Nancy Jones. Alan Jackson takes
Speaker 1: off his hat and play says it over his heart.
Speaker 7: He stopped loving her.
Speaker 12: Today.
Speaker 1: And if you aren't crying, I can't help you.
Speaker 9: I love you, George. All of the three grades of
Speaker 9: our time, ladies and gentlemen at all time. That's Alan Jackson,
Speaker 9: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Revision's History is produced by Emil LaBelle and Jacob Smith,
Speaker 1: with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Ciomara 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 Panicle. I'm Malcolm gadwe