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
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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.