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Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music

Tekijä: Dana Jennings

JäseniäKirja-arvostelujaSuosituimmuussijaKeskimääräinen arvioKeskustelut
444569,666 (4)-
The years from about 1950 to 1970 were the golden age of twang. Country music's giants all strode the earth in those years: Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, George Jones and Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. And many of the standards that still define country were recorded then. Author Jennings pushes past the iconic voices and images to get at what classic country music truly means to us today. Yes, country tells the story of rural America in the twentieth century--but the obsessions of classic country were obsessions of America as a whole: drinking and cheating, class and the yearning for home, God and death. Jennings knows all of this firsthand: his people lived their lives by country music. This book is about a vanished world in which the Depression never ended and the sixties never arrived.--From publisher description.… (lisätietoja)
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näyttää 4/4
I really wanted to like this book and some of it is very moving and some of it is a good introduction to basic facts about country music, but mostly I think Jennings had a chance to write a unique first person testament to working class poor people and the way our society doesn't "see" them and blew it. I guess he told me one time too many how poor, hungry and mean his people were instead of showing me through their stories. ( )
  nmele | Apr 6, 2013 |
All this time I've thought I was a swamp Yankee. After all, my parents grew up fairly poor, with no electricity until after World War II; I visited and even lived in houses with outhouses as recently as 1966; and my parents certainly listened to country music. Well, compared to Dana Jennings' folks, mine were upper middle class!
Jennings was born in 1957 to a shotgun marriage of two eighth-grade graduates, both of whom came from pretty dysfunctional families. Violence, alcoholism, depression, and multiple partners legal and otherwise, were the norm -- as was hard, ill-paid work. And, this all took place in southern New Hampshire. Somehow I can't see would-be Presidential candidates spending much time with Jennings' kin, although maybe they should have.
The one thing that helps his people get through their lives, and doesn't harm them in the process, is country music. Woven through Jennings' memoir of his hardscrabble childhood are the songs of Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Faron Young, Hank Snow, Johnny Cash, and many more. This book is as much an appreciation of country music as it is a memoir. Therein lies its biggest fault as a book -- Jennings never quite decides which he wants it to be. The memoir portion leaves the reader unsatisfied, with many questions -- how did a boy, however bright, from this background make it out to become a New York Times editor? What became of his siblings? What was the outcome of the apparent cancer that struck him at 12 years old? Perhaps he will write a sequel.
Jennings writes in an odd combination of Yankee dialect, lyrical descriptions of nature, journalistic singer-songwriter bios, and crude language describing rough lives. Somehow it all works, and though this book had its imperfections, I had a hard time putting it down. ( )
  auntieknickers | Apr 3, 2013 |
An interesting book that explores country music during the period 1950-1970. It is also autobiographical in part as Mr. Jennings tells of his childhood during this time and the poor, country folk he grew up with who took this music to heart. Well written with some excellent insights as well as a smarmy comment or two concerning the commercial and political situation in place when he wrote.
  WhitmelB | Jul 22, 2008 |
OK, I admit it. When it comes to real country music, and those whom I believe truly appreciate it as the art form that it is, I am prejudiced. Never in a million years would I believe that some guy from New Hampshire, a writer and editor for the New York Times, of all the newspapers in the word, for crying out loud, would know much about the real thing; no way would someone with that background actually understand the music and those who created it. Well, that was before I read Sing Me Back Home, by Dana Jennings, who is exactly the guy I just described.

I want to apologize, Mr. Jennings, and I salute you, sir.

Sing Me Back Home is not a straight forward history of country music. Books like those serve their purpose, certainly, and there are many worthy ones out there already that take that approach. Jennings, on the other hand, turns the history of country music into something very personal: a way to share his own family story.

As most country music historians (and knowledgeable fans) agree, the years from the late forties to the very end of the sixties mark the period of classic country music. The music reached its peak during those years and has faced a steady, downhill slide since 1970 with the exception of a small (and poorly rewarded) group of pickers and singers that refuses to let classic country music completely disappear. But, overall, country music has probably never been in a sorrier state than it is in today. According to Jenkins, in fact, “It can be entertaining, but the difference between today’s country and the summits of the 1950s and ‘60s is the difference between the lightning and the lighting bug.”

As Jennings puts it, “country music was made by poor people for poor people.” At its best, country music reflected, and maybe even justified, the lives endured by the rural poor who lived all around the United States, not just those from the South or the mountains and coal-producing regions of the Southeast. It is the history of working people, those who made livings with their hands, often at the sacrifice of their health or even their lives, during those two decades. Nothing for them came easy and, when they finally made it to Saturday night, they became walking, talking country songs themselves. They lived the cheating songs and the drinking songs; they spent time in prison, went hungry in the bad times, hit the road out of desperation or despair, had love affairs end badly, and repented on Sunday mornings with the full knowledge that they would backslide again come the very next Saturday night.

But what makes Sing Me Back Home so memorable is the way that Dana Jennings readily fits a member of his own family to every kind of classic country song there is. He lived it – and he remembers it because it made him the man that he is today despite the fact that he sits behind a desk at the New York Times. Song by song, the reader meets members of Jennings’ family who could easily have been the inspirations for those same songs because, not only did these folks love and surround themselves with country music, they lived the lifestyle at its heart.

For those of us of a certain age, and of a certain upbringing, this book is like preaching to the choir. We already knew this deep down in our souls. But having someone as frank, and just as importantly, as articulate, as Dana Jennings come along to tell the real story of country music’s golden age and how its listeners related to those songs, is a real bonus.

Sing Me Back Home fits longtime country music fans like an old glove. But the book is also a perfect primer for those newer fans who wonder about the country music legends that are barely more than names to them today. In fact, the discography at the end of the book is worth its whole $24 dollar cover price. Those willing to spend the money and time required to surround themselves with the albums and box sets listed by Jennings in that discography will learn more about the history of America’s working class than they could ever learn from any textbook.

Despite what David Allan Coe says to the contrary, I do not believe in the perfect country music song. But there just might be a perfect country music book. If so, this is it.

Rated at: 5.0 ( )
1 ääni SamSattler | Jun 13, 2008 |
näyttää 4/4
ei arvosteluja | lisää arvostelu
Sinun täytyy kirjautua sisään voidaksesi muokata Yhteistä tietoa
Katso lisäohjeita Common Knowledge -sivuilta (englanniksi).
Teoksen kanoninen nimi
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Alkuteoksen nimi
Teoksen muut nimet
Alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi
Henkilöt/hahmot
Tärkeät paikat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
Tärkeät tapahtumat
Kirjaan liittyvät elokuvat
Epigrafi (motto tai mietelause kirjan alussa)
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
For we need more barnyard poets.
-THEODORE ROETHKE

You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure
before you can sing like a hillbilly.
-HANK WILLIAMS
Omistuskirjoitus
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
For my sons, Drew and Owen.

Country music belonged to their great-great-grandparents,
their great-grandparents, their grandparents, and then me, their father.
And now it belongs to them.
Ensimmäiset sanat
Tiedot englanninkielisestä Yhteisestä tiedosta. Muokkaa kotoistaaksesi se omalle kielellesi.
These are the liner notes to my childhood:
Sitaatit
Viimeiset sanat
Erotteluhuomautus
Julkaisutoimittajat
Kirjan kehujat
Alkuteoksen kieli
Kanoninen DDC/MDS
Kanoninen LCC

Viittaukset tähän teokseen muissa lähteissä.

Englanninkielinen Wikipedia (1)

The years from about 1950 to 1970 were the golden age of twang. Country music's giants all strode the earth in those years: Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, George Jones and Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. And many of the standards that still define country were recorded then. Author Jennings pushes past the iconic voices and images to get at what classic country music truly means to us today. Yes, country tells the story of rural America in the twentieth century--but the obsessions of classic country were obsessions of America as a whole: drinking and cheating, class and the yearning for home, God and death. Jennings knows all of this firsthand: his people lived their lives by country music. This book is about a vanished world in which the Depression never ended and the sixties never arrived.--From publisher description.

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