Devil Sent the Rain (6 page)

“Well,” he says, “singing is to preaching what gravy is to steak. Gravy is not steak, but it makes the steak taste better. Singing is not preaching, but you can sing and soften the heart of an individual, and while the heart is softened you can inject the gospel in. There are a lot of things that, you know, you tell your children, and the way you tell them, it makes a difference how they react. You can say to your son [
harshly
], ‘Go out there, boy, and mow that lawn.' He knows he's supposed to be obedient, he'll go out there and mow the lawn, but he'll break the mower. You wish you hadn't told him. But if you say, ‘Son, would you like to mow the lawn for your daddy?' That's a different spirit. He says, ‘Yeah, I'll do it.' He'll go out there, and if the mower looks like it's fixin' to break, he'll stop and fix it. Because of the way you told him.

“So the sound does make a difference. You can sing a song one way”—he starts singing the gospel standard “Precious Lord” in a strong voice—“and another person sings it this way”—he sings the same words as if he's falling asleep.

“It makes a difference in the feeling of the person that's playing it,” he continues. “That person that plays it or sings it, that feeling is within them, and that can be injected into the people by it. People know the difference when you puttin' on and when you not. A lot of people are not really sincere. See, the devil tell you to take ‘Amazing Grace' and pick up the tempo and you get more recognition. But you taken the spirit out of it. Music is designed, as I said, to praise God. If you play music just because you love music, I don't see anything wrong with it. But if you play it to try to get a certain point over for your benefit . . . that's selfishness.

“Now, I listen to blues, like I do any other. I don't turn my radio off just 'cause it come out . . .”

“If you hear blues on the radio,” I ask, “do you enjoy it?”

“Not necessarily,” he says. “What I do is I listen to any record for the point that's tryin' to be made on it. If I don't get the point, then I don't get anything out of it. You know, I listen to country and western—I like music, period—and I heard this guy sing, ‘Who stole the train off the railroad track? / Whoever stole it sure better put it back.' I don't know what he meant by that [
laughs
]—you understand what I'm saying?—but it sounds good. So this is the way it is with music—sometimes the music give you more enlightenment than the words.”

“Can the lyrics of a song have one message and the music have another?”

“Uh-huh,” he says. “Yep. But, see, your lyrics is what really makes your song, where I'm concerned. It's not the music; it's the lyrics. What does it mean? What are you trying to convey? What are you trying to make folks see? Even if you sing rock and roll you ought to have a meaning behind it, or else you're really not going to get it over like it should be.

“Like, one guy put out, ‘This is a man's world . . .' Well, the Bible say he a liar. The Twenty-fourth Psalm said that the earth is the Lord's. And the fullness thereof. The world is His and they that dwell therein. So that means this is not a man's world, it's God's world. Now, man has a certain amount of control, like a steward. You understand what I'm saying? But it doesn't belong to him. And if he doesn't use it in the right way, then when he go to give an account to the owner, then it's gonna be some flaws. Now, the Scripture said, in the twelfth chapter of Luke, verse forty-six, -seven, and -eight, ‘He that knoweth to do of his father, and don't do it, will be beaten with many stripes'—you know to do right, and won't do it?—‘but he that knoweth not, he'll be whipped with a few.'

“So what I'm saying is, if you know what's right, and do what's right, then you get a reward. Now, your reward don't necessarily have to be here . . .” He lights another cigarette.

“I talked with Muddy about it a lot of times,” he goes on. “I said, ‘Man, that stuff you singing ain't no good.' ”

“You would say that to him?”

“Uh-huh. Muddy said, ‘Look out there and see what I'm riding in.' His car. ‘If it ain't no good, I wouldn't be riding in that.' ”

“What do you think about someone like Ray Charles?” I ask him. “Someone who sings secular words to gospel tunes?”

“If you're not going to do it as a blues . . . If you read the Song of Solomon, you don't find nothing but romance there. He says that her breath is sweet as peaches, or something on that order. He said, ‘Love is strong as death, but jealousy cruel as the grave. . . . Many waters can't quench it, floods can't drown it.' So this is really romance, you know what I'm saying? He said, ‘I have virgins unnumbered,' you know, and it lets you know that he have a mind of romance, but he was talking about God. So this is what's important—that you know what you're saying, and what are you saying it about? You don't take the thing that Solomon said and try to make your girlfriend accept it.

“The question is, where do you want to spend eternity? There are certain criteria that's involved in either one of them. The Scripture said you don't want to be weighed in the balance and found wanting. So this is what I'm asking, in regards to what you like or dislike, where do you want to spend eternity? Now, you can't spend it in both places. Now, what you want to do? Do you want to live here and go to hell, if you want to use that, or live here and die and go where Jesus is? Now, wherever He is, I don't know, but He said, ‘Where I am, there you may be also.' Now, if we don't believe it, then we live any way we want to. But I believe it. I believe there's a hell and a heaven. And I don't want to go to hell. I catch enough hell here.” He laughs and puts out his cigarette.

It is getting late in the afternoon; outside the windows, long shadows cut across the parking lot. I ask him about a couple of recent revivals he has conducted. He warms at the memory, says they went well. “In Aliceville I sold five hundred dollars' worth of tapes. In Nashville I sold seven hundred—two hundred before I started singing!”

We walk toward the front of the restaurant; he has two of his cassette tapes for one of the cashiers. The owner comes over to say hello, a sleepy-eyed, pink-faced man in a white shirt. Reverend Morganfield introduces us, and the owner says, “Come around later and I'll give you the real story about him,” and everyone laughs appreciatively.

Outside in the glare of the low, late sun, as he gets out the keys for his midnight-blue Lincoln Town Car, he says, pensively, “I really started making more on the singing when I started preaching. The singing . . . I suffered with it, suffered with it, suffered with it, and then I suffered with it. But eventually it paid off. I don't know how it happened. But you know, God will put things on your mind. And if you don't do what He want done, you suffer for it. But if you go ahead and do it, He open up avenues for you. So that's what happened to me—when I went on and started preaching, I had no problem. Everything began to fall in place.” He opens the big car door.

“And it's okay if I come to service tomorrow morning?” I ask, double-checking.

He looks me in the eye and smiles faintly. “I'm looking for you,” he says, and gets in behind the wheel.

From the
Oxford American
's Second

Annual Music Issue, Summer 1998

 

The following is the first piece I wrote for the
Oxford American.
The magazine's editor, Marc Smirnoff, had been in touch with me after the publication of my story collection
Blues And Trouble,
inviting me to contribute something to an upcoming
OA
issue focusing on crime. I appreciated the invitation, but I was working on a novel and I had no special ideas about crime at the time, so I declined.

Some months later he got in touch again. They were planning their first music issue, and he wanted me in it. I wasn't in the mood, and I hit him with an idea that I doubted he would accept. If they would send me to Nashville to find the bluegrass legend Jimmy Martin, I'd do a piece for him. Unlike Bill Monroe or Ralph Stanley, Martin was more or less unknown outside the tightly knit world of bluegrass musicians and fans. To my surprise, Smirnoff said to go ahead and do it.

My reasons for wanting to write about Martin are explained in the piece. When “True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass” came out in the first
OA
music issue, it became a minor phenomenon in the country music world; musicians faxed it back and forth all over the country, and for years whenever I was around country musicians, somebody would ask me for more details on that night at the Opry. Jimmy was an amazing performer and a very difficult man, and I was very grateful to be able to catch him in action.

Following “True Adventures” is a short piece I wrote for the
OA
after Jimmy's death in 2005. He really was the last of a breed.

True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass

1.

It's pitch-dark and cold and I'm sitting in my car at the top of a driveway on a small hill outside Nashville, trying to decide what to do. In an hour and a half, the Grand Ole Opry starts, and I'm supposed to attend with the King of Bluegrass himself—or, rather, the King-In-Exile, the sixty-nine-year-old Black Sheep of the Great Dysfunctional Family of Country Music—Jimmy Martin, veteran of Bill Monroe's early-1950s Blue Grass Boys and one-time Decca recording star in his own right. Inside the nearby house, which is totally dark, Jimmy Martin is submerged in some advanced state of inebriation, waiting for me. Outside my car, two of Martin's hunting dogs are howling their heads off in the cold, black night air in a frenzy of bloodlust.

I've hit the horn a few times, but no lights have gone on, no doors have opened. The Dodge van and the Ford pickup are there, with the coon-hunting bumper stickers (“When the tailgate drops, the bullshit stops”), as is the midnight-blue 1985 Lincoln stretch limousine in which we took his garbage to the town incinerator yesterday, so I know he didn't run out on me. Finally, I tentatively open my door to see if I can make it to the house, but one of the dogs comes peeling around the front bumper and I close it again, fast. I decide to pull out and call him from the gas station on the corner of Old Hickory Boulevard.

It's kind of beautiful out here, actually. Hermitage is an eastern suburb of Nashville, about fifteen minutes out Interstate 40 from downtown. Rolling hills, shopping centers, subdivisions, plus the usual swelling of motels and fast-food joints around the highway interchange, like an infection around a puncture wound. The main attraction is President Andrew Jackson's house, the Hermitage, where historically minded Nashville tourists can go for a couple hours' respite from the Eternal Twang.

I have always wanted to meet Jimmy Martin. I'd heard that he was a difficult person, but I don't know if anything could have prepared me for the past two days. But you may not even know who Jimmy Martin is, so first things first . . .

One night in 1949, a completely unknown twenty-two-year-old singer-guitarist from Sneedville, Tennessee, walked up to Bill Monroe backstage at the Grand Ole Opry and asked if he could sing him a song. Monroe agreed, and before an hour had passed he invited the young man on the road with his band, the Blue Grass Boys. At that time, Monroe and his mandolin had already pioneered the sound that would become known as bluegrass, a form of country music reaching back to earlier mountain styles and adding an emphasis on instrumental precision and virtuosity. Monroe's two most famous sidemen of the 1940s, the guitarist-singer Lester Flatt and the banjoist Earl Scruggs, were as important in many ways to the music's development as Monroe; when they left the Blue Grass Boys in 1948, they were stars in their own right.

Martin's arrival brought another element into the group; his high, strong voice, stronger than Lester Flatt's, gave a new edge to the vocal blend, and his aggressive guitar added a stronger push to the rhythm as well. His early-1950s recordings with Monroe, including “Uncle Pen,” “River of Death,” and “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake,” are classics. After five years with Monroe, Martin went on his own, first teaming up with the very young Osborne Brothers and then forming his own group. The 1957–61 incarnation of the Sunny Mountain Boys, as he called them, with the mandolinist Paul Williams and the banjo prodigy J. D. Crowe, is widely regarded as one of the greatest bands in bluegrass history.

Martin had a string of hits in the late 1950s and early '60s, including “Ocean of Diamonds,” “Sophronie,” the truck-driving anthem “Widow Maker,” “You Don't Know My Mind,” and his signature tune, “Sunny Side of the Mountain.” Martin's vocals—high, plaintive, and lonesome—wrung every bit of meaning and feeling out of the lyrics. Like many country performers, he was capable of astonishing sentimentality, musical crocodile tears, like his duet with his young daughter on “Daddy, Will Santa Claus Ever Have to Die?” But at his best, his phrasing, the impact of the urgency behind his long, held notes, could be staggering.

Although his early recordings are considered bluegrass classics, to my ears he seemed to take more chances and gain in expressiveness as he got older. In 1973 he received a gold record, along with Roy Acuff, Doc Watson, Merle Travis, and Maybelle Carter, for his contribution to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's first
Will the Circle Be Unbroken
album; his performances are arguably the best thing about that record.

Despite all this, Martin has remained a kind of shadowy figure, with much less of a public profile than some of his bluegrass peers, like Ralph Stanley or the Osborne Brothers. He is seen in Rachel Liebling's excellent 1991 bluegrass documentary film
High Lonesome
, but the glimpses are only tantalizing. In some ways Martin doesn't fit into the categories that have evolved in the country music world. He is too raw for the commercial and slick Nashville establishment, and in a way too unapologetically country in the old sense—mixing sentiment and showmanship with George Jones– and Hank Williams–style barroom heartbreak—for the folk-revival types to whom bluegrass was, and is, essentially folk music. On top of that, the King of Bluegrass, as he called himself, had a reputation as a heavy drinker and a volatile personality. As I asked around, I began to realize that Nashville insiders traded Martin stories back and forth the way 1960s Washington insiders used to tell Lyndon Johnson stories.

Still, his obscurity was hard for me to fathom. When I got into bluegrass, after twenty-five years of listening to jazz, Martin seemed, and still seems, to be the greatest. On heartbreak songs he could tell it like it is, with no posing, only pure truth . . .

He sang to the hilt, as if the full weight of a human life hung on every line. His phrasing was alive with expressive turns, his voice breaking at times, or falling off a note he had held just long enough. His nasal, reedy tones reached back all the way to country music's deepest Scotch-Irish roots; at its highest and lonesomest, his voice conveyed the near-madness and absolutism of bagpipes in full cry. The only comparison in my experience was to the keening sound of certain jazz players, the altoist Jackie McLean or, especially, the tenor giant John Coltrane. Why, I always wondered, wasn't he everybody's favorite?

I did some digging and got his phone number and in early October of last year called to try and set up an interview. From the first he was guarded, suspicious, and it was clear that he was in no rush to have me visit. His voice was unmistakable from his records—high, nasal, and deep country—and he spoke loud and in italics much of the time. After some confusion over my name (“
Tom T. Hall?
”), he gave a series of grunted, grudging responses to my initial comments about why I was calling. When I told him he was my favorite bluegrass singer he shifted gears a little, thanking me and saying, “I can't
tell
you how many thousands of people have told me that over the years. When did you want to come up and see me?” I suggested a date in November, and he began hedging, saying that he would be spending a lot of time out of town coon hunting. We agreed that I'd call him in a week or two to see how his plans were shaping up.

A week and a half later I called him again to try and zero in on a date. It was immediately obvious not only that he didn't remember our previous conversation (“Tom T.
WHAT
?”), but that he was drunk. I started explaining that I wanted to write a piece on him, but he cut me off in mid-sentence.

“
Whut
. . .” he began, dramatically. “Is
in
this . . .” Another dramatic pause. “For
Jimmy Martin
?” His speech was heavy and overdeliberate, rather than slurred.

Before I could answer, he broke in and said, “Pub
lic
ity?”

“Well, yeah . . .” I began.

“I mean,” he said, “what kind . . . of
money
. . . is in it?”

“Well,” I began, again, realizing that he probably hadn't had a lot of magazine articles done on him lately, “magazines don't really do that. They don't pay the subjects of—” And here he broke in again—

“
You're
. . .” he said, “telling
me
. . . what
magazines
do?”

Uh-oh, I thought.

“I've had
all kinds
of write-ups,” he went on, cranking up, his voice suddenly seething with a weirdly intimate rage. “I'm the
KING OF BLUEGRASS
, and
you're
. . . telling
me
. . . what
magazines
do?”

I wasn't sure what I was supposed to say to this, so I kept quiet.

“I'm just saying,” he went on, picking up a little speed now, as if there were a response expected of me that he could see I was going to be too dim to get, so he was going to have to lob me the serve one more time, “is there gonna be a
few dollars
in it for Jimmy Martin to buy himself a
fifth
of
whiskey
?”

This, I began to sense, was some kind of test. Feeling my way, I said, “I tell you what . . . If you want to do the interview . . . I'll bring you the fifth of whiskey
myself
. ”

“
ALL
-right,” he hollered, sounding hugely pleased. “
COME 'n' see me
. When you wanna come up?”

I suggested a date in mid-November, and he said it would be fine. Then he said, “Listen . . . I gotta go. I got a black girl here tryin' to talk to me. You know what . . . every white girl I ever went with, she got a
home
offa me. Now I'm gonna see about a
black
one and tell the others to
kiss my ass
. How does
that
sound to you?”

I said it made sense, and he said, “Good. Call me closer to the time,” then he hung up and I sat at my desk, shaking my head. After that call I had a pang of misgiving about the whole idea, as if I might be getting myself into something I'd prefer to stay out of, but I was too curious to give up. Boy, I thought. Whatever you do, don't forget that whiskey.

Over the next month we talked two more times. The first time, he sounded sober and friendly, even asking me one or two questions about myself. He had a happy memory of New Orleans, where I live (“I played down there when Johnny Horton had his hit on ‘Battle of New Orleans.' We played ‘Ocean of Diamonds' and ‘Sophronie' and tore his ass to pieces”), and we were able to set a date of November 20, a Wednesday, for me to come up, but there was only one hitch. What I had to do, he said, was call the weather report for Richmond, Indiana, that week and see what the temperature was going to be. If it was going to be in the thirties up there, it would be too cold to go coon hunting and I could come see him in Nashville. But if it was going to be in the forties or fifties, then I might as well stay home because he'd be in Indiana, hunting. I had no intention of calling the weather report in Indiana; I decided to just call Martin again a few days beforehand.

On November 17, the Sunday before I was to go up, I called him to confirm, and he was the old Jimmy again; he grumbled, chafed (“Now, that's
how
many days you're taking up?”), but I finally got him to agree that I would drive up on Wednesday, we would visit on Thursday, and then we could take it from there. Thursday, right? Yep. Okay. See you then. Hang up.

That's it. I was going.

The drive from New Orleans took ten hours. As soon as I arrived at the Holiday Inn in Hermitage that Wednesday night, I called Martin.

“Oh, hell,” he said, gloomily. “I was fixing to spend tomorrow rabbit hunting. But I guess I'll spend it with you . . .” He sounded like a teenager forced to bring his kid brother along on a date. We agreed that I'd come over at ten in the morning; he gave me directions to his house, and that was it.

Thursday dawned grey and raw; yellow leaves blew around the motel parking lot. I had breakfast and ran through some of the things I wanted to ask Martin, but I was already realizing that the questions I wanted to ask him weren't really the point of this trip. Whatever I was looking for I probably wouldn't find by asking him a bunch of questions. But it was a place to start, at least.

His house, it turned out, was closer than I realized, and five minutes before ten a.m. I pulled up to the big iron gates he had described, at the foot of a long blacktop driveway leading up to a large, ochre-colored ranch house on several hilly acres of land. At the top of the driveway I could see a figure moving. I made my way up the driveway and parked in some mud off to the right, the only paved spots being taken up by a couple of vans and a long, midnight-blue stretch limousine, the rear license plate of which read
KING JM
. Across the lip of the limo's trunk, yellow and orange letters spelled out the title of his best-known hit,
SUNNY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN
. The moving figure was, of course, Martin, attended by two dogs that bayed lustily at my approach. Martin didn't stop what he was doing or register my arrival in any way; by the time I opened the door of my car he had disappeared into the limo, and as I got out his taillights squeezed bright and the limo started to back up.

I grabbed my stuff and approached the limo, the tinted driver's-side window rolled down halfway, and there was Jimmy Martin looking up at me, unsmiling, suspicion in his red and slightly watery eyes, his head as big as a large ham and very jowly, with long grey sideburns and thin grey hair combed straight back and left a little bit long by the collar of his black nylon windbreaker.