From its beginning, Garland Perry "Hank" Cochran's life was a country song. He was born on the Mississippi Delta in the midst of the Great Depression, a sickly child who almost died at age 2 from a combination of illnesses. His parents divorced when he was 9, giving him his first good, long look at heartbreak. He wound up in the St. Peter's Orphan's Home in Memphis, until he ran away so many times that he was shipped off to his grandparents.
At 12 he hitchhiked from Mississippi to New Mexico to work in the oil fields, but hit the road again two years later after resolving to earn his living from making music. He had played guitar since childhood, and his horizons had been widened by the sounds beamed in through his radio from the Grand Ole Opry.
"They said I'd be back, because if you ever got that oil in your hair, you'd return to it," he recalled in 2002. "Wrong!"
And how. Cochran rolled into Nashville in 1960 and was quickly hired by the Pamper Music publishing company to write songs for $50 a week. (He later gave up a raise to convince the company to hire a young Willie Nelson.) Within a year he hit upon a hot streak of the kind any Music Row tunesmith would kill or die for. Patsy Cline made an instant classic of "I Fall to Pieces," which he wrote with Harlan Howard; 12 months later she did the same with Cochran's own "She's Got You." Burl Ives made Cochran's "A Little Bitty Tear" a pop hit in 1961. Inspiration was constant and irresistible: Cochran once walked out of a movie, dragging his perplexed date behind him, when he got a song idea. By the time he got home he had finished composing "Make the World Go Away," later to be recorded by everyone from Eddy Arnold to Elvis Presley.
His songs in those early days had in common a dreamy melancholy, a piercing sadness enveloped in such loveliness and grace that it seemed an enviable state of mind. Cochran constructed two-minute universes of hurt, built from floating melodies and effortlessly economical turns of phrase. These were songs made to be sung; they gave vocalists room to move, to slide in or out of a syllable with ease. "It's not simplicity," Elvis Costello said of Cochran's songwriting. "It's purity." Or as Cochran himself famously put it, "Make it short, make it sweet and make it rhyme."
In the reality created by Hank Cochran's songs, searing reminders of heartaches past were constant dangers. In "She's Got You," a picture sets off a torrent of painful memories. The wrong song played on a jukebox threatens the singer's well-being in "A-11," while the right song blasting from "a vintage Victrola 1951" massages a freshly broken heart in "Set 'Em Up Joe." The object of desire in "Don't You Ever Get Tired (Of Hurting Me)" works the narrator into a seemingly unending state of lovelorn torment; no wonder Cochran said it was his favorite of his own songs. "It can still cut me up just like the day I wrote it," he said, four decades after that day had passed.
Cochran learned about heartbreak in hands-on fashion — he was divorced four times before settling down for good with wife Suzi in 1982. His later songs were accordingly more upbeat, and he employed his wry wit more often. George Strait's No. 1 hit "The Chair" is built around a sweet-natured pickup line; the poor fellow in "Ocean Front Property" (yet another Strait No. 1) pines for his lost love, but with tongue firmly in cheek. By the time of the hopeful "Miami, My Amy," a breakthrough single for Keith Whitley in 1985, Cochran was drawing inspiration from his son's love life. Cochran continued writing and recording for the rest of his days, and his songs are now being discovered by a new generation of singers. Brad Paisley cut "Is It Raining At Your House" a few years back, and Jamey Johnson's upcoming album The Guitar Song sports a faithful rendition of "Set 'Em Up Joe."
Johnson was among the friends gathered at Cochran's bedside on July 15, when he passed away at age 74 after a hard-fought battle with pancreatic cancer. For the next little while, be careful when you're making your selection at the jukebox. Like the song says, if you play "A-11," there'll be tears.
