Born Fighting (27 page)

When the roads and railroads did come, the people of Appalachia greeted them with mixed reviews, for it was largely Yankee interest in timber and especially coal that caused them to be built. The ever-hungry industrialists had discovered that West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southwest Virginia sat atop one huge vein of coal. And so the rape began. The people from the outside showed up with complicated contracts that the small-scale cattle raisers and tobacco farmers could not fully understand, asking for “rights” to mineral deposits they could not see, and soon they were treated to a sundering of their own earth as the mining companies ripped apart their way of life, so that after a time the only option was to go down into the hole and bring the Man his coal, or starve. The Man got his coal, and the profits it brought when he shipped it out. They got their wages, black lung, and the desecration of their land. Oil made the Middle East rich. Coal made this part of Appalachia a poverty-stricken basket case while the rest of the mountain region remained mired in isolation.

By the turn of the century, swarms of mountaineers had begun departing their long-held hamlets and hollows, pouring east into the mill towns of North and South Carolina or westward into the farmlands of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and beyond. My great-grandfather left southwest Virginia for eastern Kentucky, in his later years bringing his family to Missouri, where they worked their way across the state year by year as tenant farmers and finally settled on its western edge. Struck with the wanderlust that so characterizes the Scots-Irish culture, James T. Webb then headed south to Texas, where he was soon killed in a logging accident. My grandfather Robert Lee Webb, born in Kentucky, tried Colorado for a while and then returned to Missouri, where he married a woman descended from three men who had fought brilliantly at King’s Mountain and another who had fought at Cowpens. Mary Smith’s family, made up also of Condleys, Lains, Millers, and McKnights, had migrated from the mountains of eastern Tennessee and Virginia into the rich farmlands of Scotland County in Missouri’s northeastern corner.

This sort of exodus was repeated countless times. People became the South’s most important export, whole families again departing, bringing their traditions with them, fueled by “the itch” to roam and by the failed political and economic structure they were forced to leave behind. By 1920, nearly 3 million people born in the South were living outside the region.
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Those who left had brought with them strong backs, an even stronger sense of individualism, zero money, and very few academic skills. And those who stayed behind displayed the same characteristics, although the prospects for a better life continued to be bleak inside a region that was dominated by a small elite and had come to be alternately forgotten or feared by the rest of the country.

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Fight. Sing. Drink. Pray.
                              

THE STRONG SCOTS
-
IRISH
tradition of soldiering, its unique musical style, and its emphasis on Calvinist theology all continued, both in the mountain and backland communities of the region and wherever else they settled.

The warrior ethic has always been the culture’s strong suit. The Scots-Irish emphasis on soldiering builds military leaders with the same focus and intensity that Talmudic tradition creates legal scholars. The tendency of this culture’s “best and brightest” to choose a military life actually increased in the wake of the Civil War for a variety of reasons. First, the most nobly remembered creature throughout the South and in many border areas such as Indiana, Ohio, and southern Pennsylvania was the Civil War soldier memorialized by the ever-present statue in the town square. In the South, despite the travails of Reconstruction and the poverty that followed, the dignity of those soldiers—and of the ancestors who had preceded them on other battlefields—was the linchpin of regional pride. And, as always with this culture, wherever it resides, honorable military service remained one of the surest stepping-stones to respect and even advancement inside the community.

Second, and more subtly, the appointment system to West Point and Annapolis allowed every member of Congress to send young men from his district to these elite military academies, thus guaranteeing a steady flow of young Southerners into quality educational systems of the sort not available in the South. Although the actual practice of congressional appointments was heavily tilted toward the more influential families, it nonetheless allowed Southerners to be educated in national schools, and the Scots-Irish influence to continue at the military’s highest levels. Military people may have had their regional prides, but the military as an institution lived separate from and was not responsive to normal political bickering. Yankee Republicans by and large controlled national politics and Southern Democrats reigned supreme in regional affairs, but the military traditions that had long preceded these vicious political debates remained in many ways pristine and even above them.

And finally, this long-held tradition did indeed serve the interests of the nation. Southerners and others from the Scots-Irish cultural base were willing soldiers, in both the officer and enlisted ranks, and their style of soldiering was well matched to the American concept of democracy itself. The informal but powerful notion of Celtic kinship had always bred a different type of leader and follower than most other armies. It was built on a seemingly conflicting set of premises, at the same time autocratic and democratic, that had been tested and found valuable for more than a millennium. On the one hand, every soldier’s life was viewed as equally valuable, and despite his power to discipline, an officer owed his soldiers a measure of humility in order to be fully respected. On the other, these soldiers galvanized around strong and daring leaders who “led from the front” and who, despite a measure of command informality, would not hesitate to discipline troops when necessary. The very character of the American military, especially in its ground forces, was built around such concepts, and their Celtic origins are one reason that so many descendants of later Irish immigrations also found their way naturally into military careers.

Further, as World War I commenced and the Marine Corps prepared for extended ground combat for the first time in its history, many Southerners whose families still winced at the notion of their sons wearing the army blue of Yankeedom opted instead for Marine Corps green. This accentuated an earlier trend and reinforced a strong tradition of Scots-Irish and Southern influence on the culture and leadership style of that elite Corps, which continues to this day. Many of the Marine Corps’ most hallowed heroes—two among a legion far too numerous to list in detail would include the legendary Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller and combat genius Gen. Raymond Davis, the most highly decorated Marine of the Korean War—have come from the states represented on the Confederate battle flag. So also have a majority of the Marine Corps’ commandants since World War I.
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During World War I, soldiers from those thirteen states were awarded 38 Medals of Honor out of a total of 118 given in the war, a rate well exceeding their proportion of the overall population despite the regional and other political sensitivities that often attend the awarding of this hallowed medal. These numbers do not include many soldiers from other states, particularly Pennsylvania, Kansas, Ohio, California, and Colorado, whose surnames clearly indicate Scots-Irish heritage.
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Many forget also that Douglas MacArthur, whose combat record in World War I brought him out of the shadow of an ethnically Scottish father who had won the Medal of Honor for heroism in the Civil War, was also a son of the South. His mother, Pinky Hardy, who had a profound—some would say unnatural—influence on MacArthur well into his fifties, was a native Virginian whose two Confederate veteran brothers refused to attend her wedding because she was marrying a Yankee.
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The mother of Missouri-born John J. Pershing, the overall military commander of American battle forces, was of Scots-Irish ancestry, her family having moved to Missouri from Kentucky. And the most celebrated heroic act of the war came at the hands of Alvin York, an unassuming corporal from the Tennessee mountains who, during a battle in October 1918, took command of his platoon after its leaders had become casualties. York, who became
Sergeant York
in the famous film about his exploits, led a seven-man assault directly into a German machine gun nest, creating such havoc that in the end all the guns were captured along with four German officers and 128 soldiers who surrendered to the small American force.
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In the mountains and the backcountry, the music got even better. And throughout the region the religion became even more fundamentalist.

In August 1927 sisters Sara and Maybelle Carter left the little village of Hiltons, a few miles east of Big Moccasin Gap, for a historic recording session in Bristol, a town twenty-five miles farther east that straddled the Tennessee–Virginia border. At this session, sponsored by the Victor Talking Machine Company, the Carter sisters were joined by another future legend, Mississippi-born Jimmie Rodgers, who in his audition sang, rather appropriately, a song called “The Soldier’s Sweetheart.” Rodgers later became known not only as the father of country music, but also as the man who first popularized a style called “the white man’s blues.” Three decades later another Mississippian, Elvis Presley, would ratchet up that style another notch into “blue-eyed soul,” mingling his early music directly with “juke joint” African-American rhythms in such songs as “That’s All Right Mama,” “Mean Woman Blues,” and “Lawdy, Miss Clawdy,” and bringing it into mainstream rock and roll.

But in 1927 the Bristol recording sessions were not just about music; they represented a leap into the phenomenon of mass audiences. The Victor Talking Machine Company was cutting records, a new phenomenon that, combined with the technology that made radio an accessible luxury, soon exposed the entire nation to the gut-level influence of a musical form that was truly American. For the first time the haunting acoustics and powerful storytelling of ordinary Scots-Irish people reached beyond their mountain hollows and country stores. And if Jimmie Rodgers, “the blue yodeler,” became the father of country music, the talented Carter family thereafter claimed the title of First Family.

This music was simple in its verbal structure but emotionally potent in its acoustics and its message. The old Celtic lyrical and instrumental traditions had melded with a deep religiosity in the mountains and backcountry. Much of the music that had evolved during the century of isolation had sprung from church and evangelical settings as a way for an increasingly illiterate population to share the teachings of a Bible that many of them could not read. Other songs reflected life’s hard lessons, or the playful and even sly humor of a people who were on the one hand intensely religious but on the other unapologetically wild. From those origins came modern country music. And the wonder of live radio provided country music its principal forum, the Grand Ole Opry. Soon the entire nation was being treated to the deliberately cornball humor of the rural South and its contradictory musical patterns of intricate instrumentals mixed with simple lyrics.

The traditions continued. The Carter family recorded more than three hundred songs between 1927 and 1942, including the classics “Wabash Cannonball,” “Wildwood Flower,” and “Keep on the Sunny Side,” most of them written and arranged by A. P. Carter, Sara’s husband. In the late 1940s, Hank Williams, born in a sharecropper’s cabin in Alabama, became one of country music’s first “bad boys,” singing of hard living, cheating hearts, and good-looking women. True to form, Williams died drunk in the backseat of a Cadillac at the age of twenty-nine, on the way to a concert in rural West Virginia. His son, Hank Williams, Jr., would carry on the family tradition of hard living and unapologetic lyrics.

Maybelle Carter’s daughters frequently performed with her, and one of them, June, eventually married Johnny Cash, the fabled Man in Black. Cash, in the tradition of a score of great country performers, had lived the life of which he sang, from the turmoil of booze, drugs, and busted marriages to the insistently deep religious feeling that seemed so contradictory to those who did not understand the culture. The Arkansas-born, Scots-Irish Cash also wrote and sang “Forty Shades of Green,” one of the most memorable paeans to Ireland ever written, symbolic of the emotional bonding of the two formerly warring ethnic strains that had journeyed from the Emerald Isle to America. Johnny and June Carter Cash assumed a royalty all their own and dominated the hearts of country music lovers for decades.

As a Greek philosopher once said, life reduces to art, and art reduces to music. And country music, like the Scots-Irish culture itself, has evolved in the public consciousness to the point that it is in many ways the bedrock of what it means to be American. Indeed, if one were to look back at the music industry’s political message over the past forty years, one would find few songs outside the realm of country that are even mildly empathetic to a soldier’s plight. The Vietnam era was inundated with antiwar songs and others that glorified the leaders of the countercultural movement. Country—with such songs as Kenny Rogers’s “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” Merle Haggard’s “Fighting Side of Me,” Glenn Campbell’s “Galveston” (written by Oklahoman Jimmy Webb), Steve Earle’s brilliant “Copperhead Road” and “Johnny Come Lately,” David Ball’s “Riding with Private Malone,” and the Dixie Chicks’ “Traveling Soldier”—has been almost alone in directly capturing the military experience from the lives of those who were called upon to fight.

Writing from that perspective was natural for many country singers and songwriters. Military service is central to their heritage, and their brothers, fathers, and friends are more likely to have served during wartime than those from any other culture. Country singers were the first to react musically to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, notably Alan Jackson with “Where Were You?” and Toby Keith with “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” which began with a tribute to his father’s army service. And the most moving popular song of the 2003 Iraq war, “Love Me When I’m Gone,” was written and sung by Three Doors Down, a Mississippi group.

Other powerfully creative American musical forms swirl around country music, and its own styles frequently change and adapt. But when country music changes, it does so slowly, always sensitive to the people and traditions from whence it sprang. And just as the culture itself has quietly infused its power on the national mind-set a person and a family at a time, so has the music reached far beyond its original audience, a listener at a time. Despite the pervasive hype from other musical forms, in today’s America there are more radio stations playing country music than any other format. In 2002 there were almost twice as many country music stations (2,139) than the next two formats combined, 1,167 with a news/talk format, and 1,136 playing adult contemporary music. Surveys indicate that country music radio reaches more adults than any other format, and in 2001 five of the ten most-listened-to singers in the United States were country artists: Faith Hill (1), Tim McGraw (3), George Strait (6), Alan Jackson (7), and Garth Brooks (9). Country music stations currently rank number one or number two in 27 of America’s top 100 markets, including such seemingly unlikely places as Akron, Ohio; Albany, New York; Fort Myers/Naples, Florida; Riverside/San Bernardino, California; Seattle/Tacoma, Washington; and Indianapolis, Indiana.
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This phenomenal success was not predictable eighty years ago. And when it did come, it would contrast, as always, with the serious side of the Scots-Irish culture, the straitlaced fire and brimstone of its religious leadership that over the generations gave birth to America’s deeply conservative Bible Belt.

In the post-Reconstruction years, as the South became more isolated and even less educated, many of its religious leaders took Calvinist doctrine into the realm of an extreme, literal fundamentalism. Parishioners were taught, and warned, that every word of the Bible, despite its centuries of varying linguistic interpretations and its frequent internal contradictions, was “the Gospel truth.” The theological rigidity of many Protestant fundamentalists sometimes dovetailed with the equally strong intolerance of the Democratic Party’s political hegemony, reinforcing the regional taboo against dissent of any kind and galvanizing mistrust against outsiders. This combination of forces, which still exists in muted form in many areas of the South, came to a spectacular and rather embarrassing head in July 1925 at the Rhea County courthouse in the eastern Tennessee mountain town of Dayton. For it was in this remote county halfway between Knoxville and Chattanooga, from which my grandmother Mary Smith’s family had migrated to Missouri a generation or two before, that the Scopes “Monkey” trial—also known as the Trial of the Century—was held.