Harlan Howard, who died early this week at 74, was the Balzac or the Simenon of country songwriters. If anything, his career's 1,200 or more recorded songs told more stories than the work of both legendarily prolific French novelists combined. Most of his themes revolved around love that tended toward misery—whether the misery of anxiety in Buck Owens' recording of “I've Got a Tiger by the Tail”; of devastation in Patsy Cline's “I Fall to Pieces”; or of cold dread in Ray Price's “Heartaches by the Number.”
But there were also stories of blue-collar economic stress (Johnny Cash's and Ray Charles' “Busted”), prison suicide (Cash's “The Wall”) and so on. These and all of Howard's songs were written for and about the anonymous kind of people whose under-noticed lives constitute the pumping blood of America and the world. If country music is, as Johnny Cash has famously asserted, the literature of the working class, Harlan Howard long merited its Nobel Prize.
A former paratrooper born in Kentucky and reared in Detroit, he apprenticed in the comparatively uninhibited 'tonks of Bakersfield, Calif., before heading to Nashville in 1960 to make a songwriting fame unlikely to be matched again: hits stretching through five decades. A survivor extraordinaire, he nevertheless was outspokenly critical of the pabulum to which he felt Nashville songwriting had increasingly turned.
“We need to get real,” he told this writer in a 1997 interview. “You got a 50 percent divorce rate here [in America]. Let's write about that.”
He said that probably not more than a dozen titles in his huge catalog fit the vapid, “positive, up-tempo love song” description he so disdained.
He might have added that even one of the greatest of these dozen, Buck Owens' and Ray Charles' “Together Again,” cannot keep from dwelling on “tears” that have “stopped falling” and “long lonely nights” that have “come to an end.” Its message seems to be that you can't experience happiness without being deeply familiar with the opposite.
Its composer professed to admire and feel kinship with other kinds of writers, as well as most creative people in general. He appeared to feel a camaraderie of shared dedication to an essentially solitary craft and its elemental tools: a pencil and a heart.
At a show last year, Harlan picturesquely groused about an establishment having the gall to host a country music performance and require its patrons to go outside to smoke.
One of that night's performers was keith urban, of whom The Old Master hadn't heard. As urban took the stage, and as Harlan learned that the young Australian was a riveting guitar player, he watched with eyes that had seen a thousand other young hyped hotshots, but his gaze took on respect as urban made the strings sizzle. After a couple of minutes of silent spectating, the veteran observer nodded approval.
“That boy,” he said, “has spent a lot of hours in a lonely room.”
It takes one to know one.
