The Legend and the Pen

Hank Cochran

Livin’ for a Song (Gifted Few Records)

Who’ll be the next to pick up the pen

That holds the ink the words flow with

And be brave enough to bare the depths of their soul?

Who is able to live with their heart full of holes?

Hank Cochran, the man who wrote those lines, is nothing if not a survivor. Not the kind we see on TV, roasting rodent kabobs on exotic beaches and battling trumped-up hardships, but the real hardscrabble deal. Barely educated, a castoff who grew up in foster homes and orphanages, Cochran represents a breed of songwriter that’s almost unrecognizable to us now—a species in rapid decline like some rare jungle tribe whose habitat has been eroded by civilization.

Today, Music Row is populated by singers and songwriters with MBAs and sweatless Stetsons who learned their licks not in the honky-tonks but from their mom and dad’s Merle Haggard LPs. Country’s pioneers—Harlan Howard, Waylon Jennings and Chet Atkins—are vanishing at an alarming rate. Faithful to his lifelong belief in God and the pen, Cochran—now 67, married five times and fighting diabetes—mourns his fallen peers and keeps on going.

“The Pen,” a song from Cochran’s latest album, Livin’ for a Song, testifies to his unwavering commitment to the songwriter’s life, as well as to the ties that bind those who embrace it.

That pen you’re holding, son, is mightier than the sword

And it flows with the blood of the lamb and the power of the Lord

The pen brought me fortune and I pray for you it does the same

And when they open that Big Book let us stand together

When they call our names.

Cochran, who has heard everyone from Patsy Cline to Elvis Costello cut his songs, has good reason to respect, and even worship, the power of the pen. Born Garland Perry Cochran in Isola, Miss., in 1935, he was a child not only of the Depression but also of divorce, neglect and various other Dickensian clouts of ill fortune. As a young boy, he spent time in St. Peter’s Orphan’s Home in Memphis before moving back to Mississippi to live with his preacher grandfather and his wife. Confused and rootless, he ran away a lot, but somewhere along the way discovered music, learning a few chords on the guitar and singing in church. Like many before and since, he also sat glued to the weekly broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry as if salvation itself might emanate from the radio speaker. In Cochran’s case, it probably did.

At age 12, Cochran and a guitar-playing uncle hitchhiked to New Mexico, where the two found jobs as roustabouts in the oil fields in and around Hobbs. Drained by the dangerous work, Cochran eventually made his way to Los Angeles, where he worked at Sears, Roebuck and Co. and, not yet 16, was forced to return to school. To his humiliation, the burly ex-roughneck found himself sitting in a class of fourth graders.

Enjoying some success in local talent contests, Cochran continued to heed the call of music. He advertised for a guitar player to form a group and met future rock ’n’ roll icon Eddie Cochran (“Summertime Blues”). Though unrelated, the two formed a duo called The Cochran Brothers that hovered somewhere between country and rock ’n’ roll, releasing a few records to no great acclaim. Eddie then followed Elvis into the wild lands of rock ’n’ roll, while Hank cast his vote for country. The two parted amiably, Eddie becoming a short-lived rock star before dying in a car accident in 1960. Hank moved to Nashville to begin one of the longest-running and most illustrious careers in the annals of country music.

By that point (1960) a husband and father, Cochran began writing for Pamper Music, barely scraping by on his songwriter’s draw of $50 a week. Then, in 1961, Patsy Cline cut a song he wrote with Harlan Howard called “I Fall to Pieces.” The record became a smash on both the country and pop charts, and suddenly, Cochran found himself in demand as a writer, guitarist (backing up Justin Tubb on the Opry)—even a recording artist, scoring a Top 20 hit with “Sally Was a Good Old Girl.”

Inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Association International’s Hall of Fame in 1974, the man that some call “The Legend” has had his songs sung by such luminaries as Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and Loretta Lynn. Cochran’s “Make The World Go Away” was a 1965 hit for Eddy Arnold, and it’s been covered by numerous others since. Actor-folksinger Burl Ives had a pop hit with “Funny Way of Laughin’ ” in 1962, a song Cochran swears he wrote in his sleep, waking only long enough to mumble it into a bedside tape recorder. (He claims to have “dream-written” many songs.) Two decades later, George Strait took a pair of Cochran co-writes, “Ocean Front Property” and “The Chair,” to the top of the country charts.