Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?

February 1959. Buddy Holly and the Crickets are touring with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. Holly hires a four-seat airplane to take his band to Fargo, North Dakota. The Big Bopper has a cold, so one of the Crickets, Waylon Jennings, offers him his seat on the plane. A few minutes later, Holly, Valens and the Big Bopper would be dead, the plane crashing in snow shortly after take-off.

In 1965, after struggling a few years with grief and guilt, Jennings headed to Nashville, where he eventually made it as a country singer. But he grew increasingly frustrated with the stuffy attitudes and limited artistic freedom in Music City USA. Along with another rebellious Texan named Willie Nelson, he rejected the "rhinestone suits and new shiny cars" of the slick Nashville scene and began experimenting with a new sound.

By the early 1970s, Jennings and Nelson had started blending a rock and roll sensibility with the country tradition of Hank Williams, Bob Wills and Johnny Cash. It was an edgier form of country, musically stripped down and lyrically more complex, and it became known as "progressive country" or the Outlaw movement. One of the influences on the new sound was Johnny Cash's own friendship and musical exploration with Bob Dylan in the late 1960s. Dylan wrote "Wanted Man" for Cash, who included it on his 1969 live album, At San Quentin. (Real outlaw music.) And, of course, Dylan himself was greatly inspired by Hank Williams. So, it shouldn't have been a surprise when Dylan went country. Or when country went Dylan.

Or when one of Buddy Holly's Crickets dug back into his rock and roll roots to lament what Nashville had become.

Here's Waylon in 1975, singing what became a kind of anthem for the outlaw country movement: "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way?"


Lord, it's the same old tune, fiddle and guitar
Where do we take it from here?
Rhinestone suits and new shiny cars
It's been the same way for years
We need to change

Somebody told me when I came to Nashville
Son, you finally got it made
Old Hank made it here; we’re all sure that you will
But I don't think Hank done it this way
I don't think Hank done it this way

Ten years on the road, making one night stands
Speeding my young life away
Tell me one more time just so I'll understand
Are you sure Hank done it this way?
Did Ol' Hank really do it this way?

Lord, I've seen the world with a five piece band
Looking at the back side of me
Singing my songs and one of his now and then
But I don't think Hank done 'em this a'way
I don't think Hank done 'em this a'way

Gone To Texas

I've journeyed back to mi tierra this week, visiting family out in West Texas. Won't be able to blog again until I return.

Meanwhile, here are some morsels from the Lone Star State . . .

Roy Orbison hailed from nearby Wink, Texas, which is just the other side of Notrees, Texas. (No, there are no trees in Notrees, Texas.) My father and aunt saw Roy play at their high school dances back before he became famous. Here he's doing "Only the Lonely," which goes out to La Reina, who I cry out for like a coyote when she's so far away.

A genuine Texas tumbleweed.

We saw one on the road from the airport to the house. Felt like a cosmic, "Welcome Back, Son."



Another West Texas boy, Buddy Holly (from Lubbock), sings "Peggy Sue." (Ah, Buddy, you died too soon.)

And just to show the range of Texas culture, here's a clip of Kilgore boy Van Cliburn playing Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No.12. In 1958, at the heighth of the Cold War, Cliburn won the First International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, a stunning accomplishment at the time. He was welcomed back to the USA with a ticker-tape parade in New York City and made the cover of Time, with the headline: "The Texan Who Conquered Russia." According to Wikipedia, Cliburn's "subsequent recording of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, became the first classical album to sell a million copies. It was the best-selling classical album in the world for more than a decade, eventually going triple-platinum."

Since my own experience is a Tex-Mex one, I thought I'd include some Tejano music, courtesy of Flaco Jimenez, Freddy Fender, Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers, better known as the Texas Tornadoes: "Hey, Baby, Que Paso?"

Gonna go heat up some tamales and open a Shiner Bock. See y'all real soon. . . .