Revolutions per Minute
New book on country’s greatest singles offers an eye-opening look at the music’s breadth and depth
by Jim Ridley
Heartaches By the Number
By David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren (Vanderbilt University Press/ Country Music Foundation Press, 286 pp., $27.95)
Book-signing 1 p.m. March 22 in the Country Music Hall of Fame gift shop
Nothing raises a music geek’s adversarial hackles faster than a list of the all-time greatest (fill in the blank). That goes double for country, where the definition of what does or doesn’t fit is always being argued. A volume with the audacity to pick the best country records is bound to catch hell from every side: from KDF fans pissed that Toby Keith doesn’t own the top 10, from tradition cops who see red when they hear strings.
At least authors and Scene contributors David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren won’t make it easy for their skeptics. Heartaches by the Number, their guide to “Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles,” avoids the empty provocations of so many list-making exercises. The authors aren’t here to tell listeners why their favorite song sucks, or why George Jones is markedly inferior to some edgy Dust Bowl turnip-picker whose only 78 was destroyed by revenooers. Their generous, kaleidoscopic book attempts to draw the broadest possible portrait of the music, and by inference its audience.
“No fences” is one of their stated creeds, a phrase that deliberately evokes Bing Crosby’s “Don’t Fence Me In” as well as Garthzilla’s gazillion seller. If Cantwell and Friskics-Warren have any explicit agenda, it’s to obliterate the myth of country’s “purity,” the idea that its roots were, are and somehow must be sheltered from the outside influences of rock, blues and Tin Pan Alley. Appropriately, the authors’ choice for No. 1 isn’t a hillbilly chestnut or gospel favorite. It’s a dyed-in-the-wool product of the controversial Nashville Sound, laden with strings, steeped in pop and soul, and thoroughly countrypolitan.
From there, the authors make a case that country’s greatest artists—from Ray Price to Dolly Parton, from Bill Monroe to Elvis Presley—were those who worried least about its boundaries. They pinpoint the years between 1967 and 1973 as a golden era when the Nashville Sound, particularly in producer Billy Sherrill’s roomy masterpieces with Tammy Wynette, George Jones and Charlie Rich, made distinctions between pop and country meaningless. To the authors, this cross-pollination isn’t corruption; it’s a process of renewal. By the 1990s, when Shania Twain and Mutt Lange yoked fiddles to Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and called it “Any Man of Mine,” they weren’t doing much different from what Monroe had done to his own post-Elvis torching of “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”
Heartaches’ hit parade forms an alternate history of country music, in which the Monroe Brothers’ “What Would You Give in Exchange?” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Atlantic City” finish each other’s thoughts about urban alienation, and Elvis’ “Don’t Be Cruel” launches rather than provokes the Nashville Sound. It’s more spacious than the conventional history, especially in racial matters. In the authors’ rotisserie hall of fame, R&B artists Otis Redding, James Carr and Solomon Burke are key players. Indeed, the main difference between Heartaches’ Country Music Hall of Fame and the official one is that Cantwell and Friskics-Warren have already inducted pioneering black Opry star DeFord Bailey.
That Hank Williams clocks in at No. 2—and registers only eight more singles in the subsequent 498 entries—isn’t a putdown or a cooler-than-thou reversal of expectations. Placing a pop-leaning, expertly orchestrated single at the very top establishes one of the book’s guiding principles: The 45, with its brevity, emotional immediacy and tidy completeness, is the foundation of country music. Heartaches treats landmark singles as a triumph of collaboration—a reflection, intended or not, of the music’s roots in community. Even Hank, the authors point out, worked only in singles. “You can take a lousy-to-good song,” they argue, “and, by virtue of a strong vocal performance, arrangement and production, turn it into a great record. The opposite doesn’t work.”
Don’t put too much stock in the book’s rankings. In their introduction, the authors stress that the numerical listings aren’t meant as bedrock judgments—which explains why the mighty “He Stopped Loving Her Today” barely cracks 150. Sometimes the strain of balancing the top-500 gimmick with the authors’ wide-ranging enthusiasm shows. If the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love” started a string of hits “that remain among the finest Nashville has ever produced,” as Cantwell writes, then why’s it all the way down at 104? Also, while the authors’ magnifying-glass parsing of lyrics and content is often revelatory—as in an eye-opening reading of Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” that encapsulates Friskics-Warren’s class concerns—it’s the tiniest bit PC-stodgy at times. In the midst of a properly raucous entry on “Pussy Pussy Pussy,” it’s not necessary to point out that the Light Crust Doughboys are “objectifying women.”
Such quibbles are negligible in a book that country music has long needed: one that offers newcomers a point of entry into the canon the way the Rolling Stone music guides did for generations of rock fans, while challenging and delighting the faithful. Heartaches by the Number is great fun just as a reference book, but it’s most rewarding as cover-to-cover reading, where its clustered themes jostle, expand and recombine with each entry. As celebrated in the authors’ slangy, precise and imagistic prose, the music has never seemed more expansive. That’s why it’s called country. Within its amorphous boundaries, there’s a home for everyone.
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