The Tennessee Waltz

tnsilThe Shadow Waltz

It’s hard to deny that Pee Wee King’s melody for “Tennessee Waltz” is haunting, mournful, not quite “Wayfaring Stranger,” but similar in its registration of heart-riving sorrow. It makes me lonesome just to listen to an instrumental version, and I’m not musicologist enough to offer a convincing explanation. I know it has darkness in it, a somber tempo and the nip of whiskey we like to imagine will temper loss but which often amplifies all the shivery yearning. The stately pace, repeated chords and weepy strings resist any attempt to buck dance, shag or hully-gully with that tune in the air.

TN authorsOther melodies have similar affects, but it’s Redd Stewart’s lyrics that really twist and wrench the listener, and not just for the narrative they unspool. The song offers an enigma as Mobius-like, trompe l’oeil and slight-of-hand as Wallace Stevens’s “I placed a jar in Tennessee.” Why is that?

Various artists have offered their renditions, most of them pretty similar (though I don’t really need Leonard Cohen’s spin on the story or Emmylou Harris’s more explicit version, especially the “it’s stronger than drink and deeper than sorrow”). It was written (partly on a matchbook, if Google has it right) in a limousine en route to Nashville in 1946 after the collaborators heard Monroe’s “Kentucky Waltz” on the radio, and you have to reckon timing and place played a substantial role. It was producer Fred Rose’s change from “O the Tennessee Waltz, O the Tennessee Waltz” to “I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz” that intensified the nostalgia/regret theme and made the darkness explicit, and the song was recorded the next year by both King and Stewart’s Golden West Cowboys and Cowboy Copas (can you believe spellcheck doesn’t recognize “Copas”?). Both versions became C & W top 10 hits.

But it’s really with us and in us because Patti Page recorded it on the flip side of “Boogie Woogie Santa Claus” for Mercury near the close of 1950. Off and running. Page’s version ran for 30 weeks on Billboard’s pop chart and stayed at number 1 for 9 weeks. Legions of other musicians covered it and had hits (Kitty Wells, Pat Boone, Emmylou, James Brown, Elvis, college bands, African Ray Dylan on his album “Goeie Ou Country,” Tom Jones backed by the Chieftains!).

The standard version is Page’s, which follows, with two little changes [indicated by brackets] which we hear in Patsy Cline’s more desperate and achy (at least as I hear it) version. I recommend a visit to You Tube to listen to the exquisite pain.cline
*
Tennessee Waltz (note the lack of an article in the title)

I was dancing [waltzing] with my darling to the Tennessee Waltz
When an old friend I happened to see
I introduced her {or him} to my loved one
And while they were dancing
My friend stole my sweetheart from me

I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz
Now I [Only you] know just how much [what] I have [‘ve] lost
Yes, I lost my little darling the night they were playing
The [That] beautiful Tennessee Waltz

I was dancing with my darling to the Tennessee Waltz
When an old friend I happened to see
I introduced her [him] to my loved one
And while they were dancing
My friend stole my sweetheart from me

I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz
Now I [Only you] know just how much [what] I have lost
Yes, I lost my little darling the night they were playing
The beautiful Tennessee Waltz

*
A terrible beauty is born? Brevity is the soul of wit?
Some small change: * why, after “darling” and “sweetheart,” the demeaning or endearing “little darling,” back to “darling,” back to “sweetheart,” to end with “little darling”? Is this just the way that songwriters who say, “You decorated my life” or “You are the magnet; I am steel” differ from poets, who want to consider (some would say “micromanage”) ramifications and options, nuances and undertones? Call it “genre differences”; say musical accompaniment relaxes lexical responsibility; I can’t puzzle it out.
*Twice we’re told that the “old friend” (no comment) STOLE the sweetheart, but also twice we hear “I lost.” Sounds as if the narrator is torn between believing that the friend is a culprit, but four times there’s a suggestion of some blame for the narrator, two each in the four line stanzas. Ain’t that just the way of things? We can’t wholly resist the temptation to blame the victim, even if we’re the victim. Maybe especially.
* With Patsy’s preferred lyrics, we get implicated. “You” do. The “you” brings it all home, identifies the listener as a fellow sufferer, knowing and probably wounded kindred. It makes me feel buttonholed and drawn into the drama, a little like the wedding guest in Coleridge’s “Rime.” I mean, I’m just trying to get a beer here and rejoin my own sweetheart; why did you pick me to share this sad story? Which makes this song a cautionary tale, as well as a plaint. Maybe the “you know” is a little arch, faux-polite for “you’d better know, because those who don’t find out from hearing the story will have to live it.” Maybe we’re all really walking around in a country song and ought to remember what stuff happens in that free-fire zone.
*But my favorite aspect of the lyrics is that they name a song called “the Tennessee Waltz” which has no reality outside the song that names it. When I was younger, I was desperate to hear the song they were dancing to, because how could they be dancing to a song that already contains the narrative of the impending betrayal and torturous memories? But I’d never heard of Borges or seen a Renaissance painting of the artist painting that painting. Probably Pee Wee and Redd hadn’t either, but the air inside a limousine can have strange effects on people, pickers especially. Given the “you” in the Cline version, the singer’s not only in the song, but so am I. All makes me hear a lonesome whip-poor-will and feel I need to respond.TN sheet

But my responses are always somewhat tangled, and every thoughtful effort eventually overridden by a need to hum or sing the song, which dogs me like nothing else in Tennessee, Virginia, Carolina, Georgia, Alabama . . . Verona, Paris, the Forest of Arden.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Who Was Ginny Hensley?

A Little Riff on Patsy Cline, Beginning in Lexington, VA

PatsyClineartIn Honky Tonk Angel, the Intimate Story of Patsy Cline (St. Martin’s, 1993, a reprint from a 1981 Leisure Book), the earlier of the two Cline biographies I’ve recently become familiar with, Ellis Nassour devotes one sentence to the time Virginia Paterson Hensley (later to marry a Cline and promote a version of her middle name on the way to “Midnight”and “I Fall” and “Crazy”) spent in Lexington, Virginia, and claims her father was a fireman for the boiler room of Virginia Military Institute.  In the newer book, Douglas Gomery’s typographically flawed Patsy Cline: The Making of an Icon (Trafford, 2011) , the author devotes eleven pages to Ginny’s life in the Lost Cause capital from 1937 to 1942 and speculates considerably on what music she might have heard during those years, all based on extensive research on which musicians actually performed at VMI and Washington and Lee (Sam Hensley’s actual employer during that spell).

Not everything is speculation for Gomery.  The Hensleys lived just above Woods Creek in a house owned by WLU and featuring electricity and indoor plumbing.  While they lived there, Ginny attended school, treasured her radio and for a spell had a piano, on which she learned to play songs she heard on the radio.  She attended West Lexington School for three years, lived above the poverty line and was already known to have musical ambitions.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Gomery’s book is the detail in which he reveals the bands, leaders, singers and hits that flowed through Lexington, as WLU and VLI competed for prestige big bands for their various (and many) social events, especially WLU’s Fancy Dress Ball.  Visitors included Whiteman, Kemp, Krupa, Sinatra, Harry James, Ozzie Nelson and most notably, for Gomery’s money, the vocalist Dolly Dawn, whom he credits as Ginny/Patsy’s primary model and who, from all I can figure, previously sang as Loretta Lee but may have been born Theresa Anna Maria Stabile in Newark.

One thing that fascinates me about this biography (almost a hagiography, as the author’s current title is “Official Historian for Celebrating Patsy Cline”) is the meticulous research into the music scene in Lexington and the (feasible) link to the little girl on Woods Creek.  Gomery is certain that hearing all these amazing arrangers, musicians and crooners (along with the radio, of course) provides the bedrock of all Cline’s musical appetites and aptitudes.  However, he scarcely even claims that Ginny actually attended a dance or a concert, that proximity, permission and acoustics allowed her to actually eavesdrop on the goings on of the “white elite paradise,” as Gomery calls Lexington.  Granted, once he says, she “may actually have heard Glenn Miller if her parents allowed her to walk the hundred yards from her house to sit across from the VMI gym and listen.  But geography is a strange thing — Gomery has Hollins College 70 miles from Lexington — today it’s about twenty miles closer.  And his caution here suggests either that Ginny’s musical “allowance” was not generous or that the WLU dance sites were much closer and listening in an easy matter.  However, he does not say it.

But I do want to believe.  I want to have some testimony to aid my imagination — either the small girl lurks in the shadows of the musical venues or she just eases open the sash of her bedroom window and listens as blues, boogie-woogie and swing fill the atmosphere.  Because I desperately want to picture her breathing the night air and trying to accompany the music that may have come from a source invisible to her, I’d be an easy sell.  But Gomery never bothers with the mechanism. Does the Boilerman’s Daughter get a courtesy pass to attend events?  Does she have to steal out the window to get close to the tremelo and glissando and blaring horns, the mercury of Ginny Simms’ and Dolly Dawn’s voices?  Perhaps I’ll never know, but I relish the thought, even if I have to invent the details.

Why do we need two biographies of the now-iconic and legend-shrouded Grand Ole Opry star who did not sound country and made her reputation with bluesy pop songs before she was killed in a plane crash at 30?  My answer’s simple.  We need Gomery for the early life, the encyclopedic accounts of who, when, where and why concerning every Moose Hall concert, recording session, Arthur Godfrey TV appearance, costume decision.  We also need read him for the chapter entitled “Patsy Cline’s Musical Heritage,” which explores how pitch, tempo, instrumentation, phrasing and bending or flatting toward blue notes made Cline’s vocal performances remarkable, original and complex in ways she, who could not read music, might have been able to explain emotionally but not musically.

Not that Nassour is a slouch in following the narrative.  And he is the better (more correct, less cliched, less repetitious) writer of the two.  But he also exposes the dark, battling side of Patsy, her two hard marriages (to Gerald Cline and Charlie Dick) and attendant C & W lifestyle, which Gomery soft-pedals.  It is in Honky-Tonk Angel that I became familiar with the tough gal who called most men and some women “Hoss” and who cusses like a sailor and (during her first marriage) displays an unrestrained, unapologetic and wild sexual appetite, at times selecting her “victim” at first sight and at others laying siege to a fellow performer until he gives in.  This is the “rough south” Patsy, who balances out the generous, chatty, fiercely professional woman the keepers of her reputation would emphasize.

Patsy Cline came to maturity in the fifties and was not immune to the allure of housewifery, but she was also a competitive, ambitious and confident vocal artist who negotiated a remarkable path between the cowgal singer in fringe and Stetson and the cocktail pop smooth torch singer, but either she internalized the hurt songs and heart songs like “Sweet Dreams” and “She’s Got You,” or she was a remarkable actress.  Either way, her life story makes a fascinating appendix to the songs which she inscribed on the American psyche, and one accessible and valuable introduction I keep close at hand is the MCA Records CD “The Patsy Cline Story,”  which includes a quarter of her approximately 100 recorded songs.  YouTube’s not a bad place to start, either.  Happy trails.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.