Written by Bobbie Gentry
Capitol 5950 1967 Billboard: # 1
580. TANYA TUCKER, "Delta Dawn"
Written by Larry Collins and Alex Harvey
Columbia 45588 1972 Billboard: # 72
581. HELEN REDDY, "Angie Baby"
Produced by Joe Wissert; written by Alan O'Day
Capitol 3972 1974 Billboard: # 1
The mid-twentieth century American national imaginary is almost unimaginable without the South. Not only was it the source of most of the music from that period that was most identifiably American, but it was also the setting for fiction and drama by William Faulkner, Tennesee Williams, Truman Capote, and others that were among the most riveting stories of the age.
This wasn't the first time that the South took over Northern imaginations--in the late ninteeenth century there had been the Plantation School, in the early twentieth century the Fugitives and Agrarians--but it was the Southern Gothic, which really took hold after World War II, that left the strongest impact on American culture. Its underlying focus was personal and psychological rather than political and ideological, and because of that it was probably able to transcend region more easily than those earlier movements.
What made Southern writing Southern Gothic? Mostly it was about decay, as if the broomsedge against which the protagonist of Ellen Glasgow's 1925 novel Barren Ground fights her whole life had actually won out over all human effort. Mid-twentieth century Southern Gothic is among the most decadent literature that the United States has ever produced, in large part because so many of its characters were being choked by the vines of tradition. Viewed in this sense, you could almost call as old a text as "The Fall of the House of Usher" the first great work in this tradition (although you'd have to finally settle on which state gets to claim Edgar Allan Poe as a resident). Whenever it began, Southern Gothic undeniably flourished in fiction and drama during the 1940s and 1950s. It was dark, it was gnarled, and it was steeped in suffocating tradition.
There was another notable thing about Southern Gothic, especially within the specific context of contemporaneous American literature: it was open to women. Start counting on your fingers the widely read American women fiction writers from the 1940s or 1950s who weren't from the South, and you may not even need a second hand. Obviously, there were a great many talented women fiction writers working during this period, but for various institutional reasons Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty and others were the women who were actually promoted and read at that time. Certainly, American women at midcentury knew a fair amount about being strangled by tradition and propriety.
Fastforward a decade or two to pop music, where so many cultural movements seem to go to die. They begin in the avant garde, then move to middlebrow literature, movies, and finally pop songs. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the New South was finally about to produce its first emblematic president, the hardscrabble Depression-era region that had given rise to the whole genre of Country music had become, for the most part, a reflexively invoked childhood memory for most practicing artists within the genre. For a time, Country grew almost unspeakably morbid for a widely circulated form of music, and women were at the forefront of this morbidity, just as they had been at the forefront of the corresponding literary movement a few years earlier.
The most obvious example of this trend was Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billy Joe," quite possibly the creepiest song to ever hit # 1 on the Billboard Hot 100
. What occurs in the song is probably wholly natural rather than supernatural--except for whatever gets thrown off the bridge, which listeners have, of course, been speculating about for more than four decades now. But, as Greil Marcus noted sideways during his thorough analysis of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes, the point of this song isn't what happened to Billie Joe. It's what's continuing to happen to the narrator: the slow way she's being crushed under the weight of her family's displeasure; the tightlipped escape she may get to enjoy in the song's final verse. As with the best of Katherine Anne Porter's stories, it's almost pointless to ask whether "Ode to Billie Joe" is a feminist text or not: it captures the inner experience of a young woman's life, and Western art always needs more of that.
By contrast, "Delta Dawn," Tanya Tucker's first hit single five years later, is certainly not a feminist text.
It observes the title character from the outside and objectifies her. It turns her into a statue in the town square even as it attempts to pay her tribute, and it should come as no surprise that the song was written by two men for a thirteen-year-old girl to sing on her first album. (As noted in a previous post, the great David Allen Coe judged much better when he gave Tucker the beautiful, impossibly aged "Would You Lay with Me in a Field of Stone?" to sing on the same debut album.) The best line in this song's lyric is the first: She's forty years old and her daddy still calls her baby. There's a novel in that. Even better, there's the sort of compression that a good short story writer would use. For the most part, though, we don't get enough of the texture of the protagonist's life in this song to fully appreciate it: it could be supernatural or merely pathetic, mythic or merely cliched. As in the best Southern writing, however, we do get a sense of the weight of the community pressing down on the protagonist, in the way it presses down on the protagonists of so many of Eudora Welty's stories. In a sense that is almost antithetical to the tenets of twentieth-century modernism, the character almost doesn't exist without her social setting.
By 1973, creepy Southern songs had gone so mainstream in American pop that even non-Southern artists were recording them. Thanks to countless episodes of Mamma's Family and Hannah Montana, many people may think that Vicki Lawrence hails from the South, but she was actually from Inglewood, California--not even Bakersfield, which at that point was still very much an Okie outpost. You can tell how non-Southern Lawrence is when you listen to her 1973 # 1 hit "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia" (and yes, even though I sometimes consider that song a guilty pleasure, you will note that I haven't given it a spot in The Thousand and One). Lawrence can fake the accent, but she can't fake the feeling. As lurid as her single is, it's a performance of Southernness by an outsider. You don't believe she's ever lived in a house with a shotgun, let alone learned how to use one.
For some reason, Australians seem to make the translation to Southern culture much more easily than Californians do. In a previous post, I've taken note of Olivia Newton-John's spooky-cheery 1971 rendition of the old murder ballad "Banks of the Ohio," but three years later her fellow sheila Helen Reddy did her one better by recording "Angie Baby," not as creepy a # 1 hit as Gentry's but quite possibly a weirder one.
On first hearing, and perhaps subsequent hearings as well, the listener comes away asking Did I just hear what I thought I heard? Those of us who lived through the 1970s can remember an interpretative ballet a la Jerome Robbins on a breakaway attic set that accompanied one of Reddy's variety show renditions of the song. Yes, it probably is up somewhere on YouTube, but I'm not sure that I want to find it and see it again. The memory alone gives me the willies.
Technically, we aren't told that the song takes place in the South. (Given the presence of a portable transistor radio, chronologically it has to take place during the approximate period in which it was recorded.) Still, I've always considered this song a part of the same tradition as those other singles, especially since Reddy's own rendition of "Delta Dawn" had gone all the way to #1 in 1973. Certainly, its title character lives in a small town, and she is subject to the same kinds of smalltown pressures as the characters in those other songs. She is constantly observed and gossiped about, and her life is more a performance being observed by her neighbors than a narrative that she can construct for herself.
The fact that all these songs charted so high beyond the country music ghetto in the late 1960s and early 1970s suggests that they had less to do with the actual South and more to do with the birthpangs of modern feminism. Heard today, "I Am Woman (Hear Me Roar)" is almost painful to listen to, but this song . . . Angie starts out pathetic, but you may find yourself smiling sickly at the end of the song over her little joke on the world. I am by no means a fan of Reddy's, but she does nail the two lines here that matter: It's so nice to be insane/No one asks you to explain. On "I Am Woman," she oversold the song's self-consciously empowering lyrics. These lyrics, though, she tosses off, especially after the release of the bridge. Her undisguised 'Strian accent, the way the As in those two lines almost sound like Is, actually helps the process. Perhaps as a result of cultural prejudice, they make Angie sound like a more likely criminal. In any case, they alienate U. S. ears enough that we can begin to consider exactly how calculating this seemingly pathetic girl may be.
Is this gothic? Noir? Horror? In an age before the Runaways and X-Ray Spex, let alone Hole and Sleater-Kinney, the brief renaissance of Southern Gothic in American pop probably exposed more young girls and women to the possibility of rebellion behind the mask of respectability than Ms. magazine or the collected writings of Valerie Solanis. Songs as seemingly mainstream as these could pass into any home, much like the music on Angie's bedside transistor set. They could do their work quietly, without any immediate, directly challenging signs of revolution. In the end, they may have changed more people's lives than William Faulkner's prototypically Southern Gothic story "A Rose for Emily." So who's to say where the real art lies, in critically recognized literature or disposable 7-inch singles?
