Books
A GUITAR AND A PEN: STORIES BY COUNTRY MUSIC’S GREATEST SONGWRITERS
Edited by Robert Hicks, John Bohlinger and Justin Stelter (Center Street, 252 pp., $23.99) Robert Hicks will discuss and sign A Guitar and a Pen at Davis-Kidd Booksellers on Monday, May 12 at 7 p.m.
A great song requires two essential ingredients: a hook, and a lyric that touches on some universal human experience. A Guitar and a Pen: Stories by Country Music’s Greatest Songwriters seems to have been created with the same recipe. The hook is that the stories—most fictional, some true—all come from successful country songwriters, many of whom are stars in their own right. The foreword by Vince Gill, along with the publisher’s contest for readers to win a Gibson guitar, drills at the target market like an earworm chorus—“This is for you, country music fans.” As for the stories themselves, they mostly stick to well-worn themes of family drama and love gone wrong, with occasional forays into white trash looniness and the trials of the music business. With the exception of Hal Ketchum’s vignette about a suicide bomber, the stories don’t wander far from the cultural terrain of mainstream America.
The editors wisely chose to open the collection with an offering by that third degree master of the story song, Tom T. Hall. “The Day Jimmy Killed the Rabbit” is a coming-of-age tale set in the Depression, and shows the deft characterization and mastery of narrative that make Hall’s songs so powerful. Hall has produced quite a bit of short fiction over the years, and his experience shows in his pared-down prose style, which is more elegant than most of what appears in A Guitar and a Pen. Even the death of the rabbit, which is the dramatic midpoint of the story, is told without a spare word:
“He swung the axe quickly. The furry creature kicked violently for a few seconds before settling into a motionless ball. Jimmy reached down and picked up the rabbit; he stared at the dead animal in awe. He turned and looked back down the hill as if he had been watched. Smoke rose from the chimney of his uncle’s house. There was no one in sight.”
Like so many of Hall’s songs, the story takes an ironic turn, but fans expecting his usual gently wry ending will be disappointed, maybe even a little shocked. The conclusion is brutal and sad, more painful than would be tolerable in a pop song.
Unfortunately, few of the stories that follow meet Hall’s standard. Not that they’re bad. On the contrary, many of them are entertaining and clever, but they don’t offer much challenge to the reader. Most are short and simple, and some, like Kevin Welch’s abbreviated romantic tragedy “The Box,” are hardly more than sketches. Somber fare alternates with occasionally perverse humor, as in Robert Hicks’ “Gathering Together,” which shakes up clichés about eccentric Southern ladies by marching its cast of grandes dames into gross-out territory. In “He Always Knew Who He Was,” Hazel Smith gives a hilarious true account of Bill Monroe’s visit to the White House, where the father of Bluegrass dissed fellow honoree Frank Sinatra and terrorized the help. Bob McDill contributes a sweet, funny tale of men’s club politics with “The Care and Feeding of Camp Cooks,” while Robbie Fulks takes a snarky jab at celebrity-obsessed teens in “Career Day.”
Janis Ian’s “Of Guitars and Righteous Men,” is perhaps the best of the musician tales. It’s the story of her prized Martin D-18, which she portrays so vividly that it becomes a living character: “I moved to Los Angeles in 1972 and took her with me (somehow, over the years, she’d become “her”—my closest confidante, dearest companion).” The story is told without a single flowery phrase or narrative backflip, yet it conveys a powerful sense of Ian’s spiritual devotion to music.
Robert Hicks
Not surprisingly, trouble between the sexes is a recurring theme in A Guitar and a Pen, and since 21 of the 25 authors are men, an overabundance of male perspective on romance tends to create the impression that the book has a hostile slant toward women. Readers who plow straight through the collection in a sitting—easy enough to do with this slim volume—will find themselves repeatedly running into dislike and lack of respect for women. Mark D. Sanders’ “Mr. Munch Has a Murmur” is a bitter, hallucinatory rant littered with furious asides against the narrator’s nameless, faceless ex-wife: “ ‘It’s always all about you’—that’s how my ex likes to put it, and she likes to put it right between the eyes: kapow, knock me down, bruise my ego, beat the crap out of me in a very civilized way.” The protagonist in Tim Putnam’s “The River” tells us his girlfriend is “a lady and a whore. That’s what I loved about her.” “Cheeseburger Boogie” by Bob DiPiero features a has-been guitar player who takes crude pleasure in his sexual conquest of Vandy coeds. He seems almost proud that he can’t recall “the face of the English lit major that buried herself drunkenly in his lap.” In this context, even Tia Sillers’ nicely written “How I Stayed a Boy” is troubling in its apparent sympathy for female self-loathing.
Nevertheless, the stories overall are sensitive and insightful, and original enough to keep readers engaged without asking them to accept anything too unfamiliar. Alice Munro has nothing to worry about, but A Guitar and a Pen is a respectable literary product that provides the same easy pleasure as a chart-topping song.
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