Encore: The King of Tears

22:58A dull, aching pain I watched you suffer a dull, aching pain Now you've decided to show me the same No sweeping exit or offstage lines Could make me feel bitter or treat you unkind Wild horses couldn't drag me away Wild wild horses couldn't drag me away Wild horses was recorded first by the legendary Graham Parsons Not long afterwards, Parsons died of an overdose And his friend and protege, the country music singer Emmylou Harris made a song in his memory She wrote it with Bill Danoff. It's called From Boulder to Birmingham.

24:09And I don't want to hear a sad story Someone who has suffered a terrible loss has gotten on a plane, and she's so numbed by grief that she can no longer see those around her. The last time I felt like this I was in the wilderness And the canyon was on fire From Boulder to Birmingham and Wild Horses are both beautiful, melancholy. They're about the same thing. The ties, the living, and the healthy have to those in pain. But which is the sadder song? I don't think there's any question. Wild Horses is generic. Listen to how it starts. Childhood living is easy to do. The things you wanted, I bought them for you.

25:00Graceless lady, you know who I am. you know I can't let you slide through my hands. What's going on? Any idea? What is Mick yammering on about? Now compare that to the specificity of looking down from the airplane and seeing nothing but prairie, then standing on a mountain and watching a canyon burn. I watched it burn I would rock my soul In the bosom of Abraham I would hold my life in a saving grace I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham If I thought I could see, I could see your face First she references the great black spiritual, Rock My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham. The bosom of Abraham is where the righteous dead go while awaiting judgment.

26:04Then she sings, And I would also walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham. Now she's locating her grief. I would make a pilgrimage from progressive, hippie, liberal, remember this is 1973, dope-smoking Colorado back to the repressive heart of the Old South, just to see your face. Two completely different, specific images, each with its own set of emotional triggers and she's piled one on top of another. Mark Vornan, the music director of the choir in my hometown says that there's a part in Annalise that does the same thing. Anne is, they're in hiding already and she starts singing and the composer has set these words in kind of a style of an American Sousa march.

26:52And so she's talking about being in the bathtub and being scrubbed in the bathtub and it's this Sousa, we'll scrub, scrub, scrub ourselves in the tin tub. Very happy and optimistic music.

27:08Anne Frank in the bathtub, to the tune of a Sousa march with the horrors of the Holocaust outside her door. Three absolutely concrete images in merciless combination. It just floored me every time I heard it because it was so close to, you know, our own daughter, you know, to think that she would have to create this kind of fiction in order to just get through the day. That's how you get tears. You make the story so real and the details so sharp and you add in so many emotional triggers that the listener cannot escape. But it's a risky thing to do, right? If you aren't a talented composer and you don't do a sensitive rendition of those lyrics, they could fall flat, could seem forced, even offensive.

27:56Far easier just to fall back on the bland cliché that wild horses couldn't drag you away. Country music makes people cry because it's not afraid to be specific. You know, she came to see him one last time. Oh, and we all wondered if she were.

28:23And it kept running through my mind. This time, he's over her.

28:41Bobby Braddock was born in Auburndale, Florida, a little town between Tampa and Orlando. His father grew citrus. They were Church of Christ, just about the most fundamentalist of fundamentalist Christians. Braddock moved to Nashville in 1964, just after getting married, to seek his fortune in the music business. He wrote his memoirs a few years ago. It's called A Life on Nashville's Music Row. I read it before I went to see him. And the best way to describe the book is that it's exhausting. I don't mean that in a bad way, because I couldn't put it down. But so much happens. You've lived this incredibly tumultuous, emotionally tumultuous life.

29:23I have, yeah. And in the book, it sounds like the first precipitating event is the death of your son. Braddock was touring with the country music legend Marty Robbins at the time. He and his wife Sue had a baby. The child was just a few months old when he died. Whenever I was in town, not on the road with Marty Robbins, every single day we'd buy fresh flowers, go put it on his grave. We were just pathetic. He and Sue fight. She cheats on him. He cheats on her. They break up. They get back together. They have a daughter. They divorce. His ex-wife mysteriously vanishes. He drinks a lot. Gets into fights.

29:59Ows enormous sums to the IRS. Has a major bout with depression. Smokes a lot of pot. Lurches from one volcanic event to the next. And through it all, Braddock writes songs. Hundreds of them. Your kind of tolerance for emotional volatility seems extraordinary.

30:24I guess.

30:28Tolerance is probably a pretty good word for it. Braddock walks over to the keyboard on the other side of the room. He begins to talk about an old girlfriend named Angela who committed suicide by driving her car into the river. when Angela died her mother took her baby to raise it and she sent me a picture of the little girl Angela's child when she was about 4 or 5 years old looked just like her mom pictured her standing out in the yard and boy it did a number on me

31:16He wrote a song about that in 20 minutes. He played it for me. Then he played his favorite bit of a sad Randy Newman song. He played me a heartbreaking song he wrote once after getting up in the middle of the night and passing his lover in the hallway. And as he played one weeper after another, I realized that that thing I'd said about Braddock's tolerance for emotional volatility, tolerance was the wrong word. That was just me projecting my uptight Canadian self onto Braddock. But Braddock is from the musical side of the United States where emotion is not something to be endured, it's something to be embraced.

31:54At one point, when cell phones were still analog, you could buy a scanner and listen in to other people's conversations. And that's what Braddock does. He can't help himself. A woman complains to her husband for an hour about his lack of affection from the parking lot of the grocery store, then asks him what he wants, and he says, maybe Apple Newton's? And then, this is my favorite part. I'm quoting now from Braddock's memoir. The conversation that truly touched me was between a man, perhaps 40, and his mother, maybe late 60s, in which the sun opened up about sexual problems he was having with his wife, and I envied the sprinkling of profanities and the mother's invitation to come over to the house, son, and let's open a bottle of whiskey and talk about it, wishing I had that kind of easy and open communication with my mom, then learning that the guy's mother was terminally ill with cancer.

32:47If you're keeping track, that's marital difficulty, sex, profanity, whiskey, mom, and terminal cancer in one conversation, and it truly touched him.

33:01Do you know what Braddock's favorite song is? Vince Gill's Go Rest High on That Mountain, which Gill wrote in memory both of his brother, who died young of a heart attack, and fellow country star Keith Whitley, who drank himself to death. Go rest high on that mountain Son, your work on earth is done Oh my God, when Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs and Patty Loveless are singing harmony on that thing, I go nuts. It still tears me up. Knowing that it's about death and that Vince wrote it about Keith Whitley and then about his own brother and just the emotion that's in that song, It's just powerful.

34:13It's heartbreaking. Listening to that song makes me wonder if some portion of what we call ideological division in America actually isn't ideological at all. How big are the political differences between red and blue states anyway? In the grand scheme of things, not that big. Maybe what we're seeing instead is a difference of emotional opinion. Because if your principal form of cultural expression has drinking, sex, suicide, heart attacks, mom, and terminal cancer all on the table for public discussion, then the other half of the country is going to seem really chilly and uncaring. And if you're from the rock and roll half, clinging semi-ironically to Tutti Frutti O 'Rutti, when you listen to a song written about a guy's brother who died young of a heart attack and another guy who drank himself to death, you're going to think, who are these people?

35:11Here's another way to think about the sad song line.

35:17Let me read you the list of the birthplaces of the performers of the top 20 country songs of all time. Again, I'm going to use the Rolling Stone magazine list. Ready? Arkansas, Virginia, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, Mississippi, Georgia, California, Central Valley, by the way, not Los Angeles, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Texas, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Texas, Kentucky, Texas. I could do the top 50 or the top 100 or the top 200 and you get the same pattern. Basically, you cannot be a successful country singer or songwriter if you're not from the South. It's impossible. There's one exception, which is the great songwriter Harlan Howard, who was born in Detroit.

36:01But almost immediately thereafter, his family moves to a farm in rural Kentucky. It's like the five-second rule when you drop a piece of food on the floor. If it's not on the ground long enough, it doesn't count. As far as I can tell, there are no Jews on the country list, almost no Catholics, only two black people. It's white, southern Protestants all the way down. Now, compare that to the rock and roll list. You've got Jews from Minnesota, black people from Detroit, Catholics from New Jersey, middle-class British art school dropouts, Canadians, Jamaicans. Rock and roll is the rainbow coalition.

36:41That diversity is a good thing. It's why there's so much innovation in rock and roll, but you pay a price for that.

36:52There was a very clever bit of research published recently by Colin Morris in the magazine The Pudding. He analyzed 15 ,000 popular songs using an algorithm that compresses digital files. So if you take out the repetitive bits in a song, how much of it is left? Morris' big finding is that rock and roll, as a genre, is really, really repetitive. Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, The Beatles, if you take out the duplicative parts, their music shrinks by 60%. That's what happens when everyone is from somewhere different. Nobody speaks the same language, so you have to use cliché, the same phrases over and over again.

37:35Because if you go deeper or try to get more specific, you start to lose people. Country music, on the other hand, is not nearly as repetitive. When Morris ran the lyrics of popular country singers through his algorithm, they only shrank by about 40%, a third less than the rock and rollers. Nor is hip-hop repetitive, which makes sense. The birthplaces of everyone on Rolling Stone's list of greatest rap songs reads like an urban version of the country list. Queens, South Central LA, Brooklyn, Long Island, South Central, Long Beach, Houston, Queens, the Bronx, Englewood, New Jersey, the Bronx. Hip-hop and country are both tightly knit musical communities.

38:17And when you're speaking to people who understand your world and your culture and your language, you can tell much more complicated stories. You can use much more precise imagery. You can lay yourself bare because you're among your own.

38:37In the book, it sounds like your relationship with Sparky was the one that seemed the most creatively fruitful. It was. It was. Sparky was a beautiful blonde from northern Alabama. the great love of Bobby Braddock's life. Why was that? I think because my feelings about her are so strong. I mean, it was sort of a visceral thing. I think that's why I found Bobby Braddock's book so exhausting. It's because everything is felt. Everything is a mountain peak. And Sparky? Sparky was Everest. high-altitude infatuation. That's the sort of thing that makes people go absolutely crazy, you know. And that was the case with her, you know.

39:30That's what gets the animal instinct of people maybe who haven't evolved as much as they should and causes them to go out and get a gun and blow somebody's brains out of them. Some gun can't stand the thought of someone having sex with a person that he loves. Braddock and Sparky were on and off lovers for years. It was intense, painful, euphoric. When it ended, Braddock was in pieces. He kept her picture on the wall Went half crazy now and then That's Braddock in the original demo he made of He Stopped Loving Her Today. He still loved her through it all

40:19Hoping she'd come back again I said, I'm not sure where it came from. It may have come from Sparky, you know. I honestly don't know. It'd be interesting. How could it not? Yeah, well, I think it probably did, but I can't say that for any certainty. Tomorrow they'll carry him away I felt like Braddock shrink at that moment, listening to his tangled dreams, and then wanting to shake him at the end of the session. It's sparky, sparky. They found some letters by his beard. I mean, you wrote a song in the middle of the great defining love affair of your life. The relationship ends and you write a song about the heartbreak that a man carries to his grave.

41:09I mean, could it be more clear? I went to see him one last time. Bobby Braddock wrote he stopped loving her today with his friend Curly in 1977. They took it to the singer George Jones. Jones was then at his lowest ebb, a wreck, strung out on cocaine and whiskey. He'd just checked out of a psychiatric hospital. The great love of his life, Tammy Wynette, had embodied her hit song D-I-V-O-R-C-E and left him. Jones had just nearly shot and killed one of his best friends. The heartbroken Bobby Braddock has written a song about a man who cannot stop loving a woman, and it's sung by the heartbroken George Jones, who cannot stop loving a woman.

41:56Kept some letters by his bed

42:03Dead in 1962

42:09He had underlined in red Underlined in red Every single I love you Every single I love you I went to see him just today Oh, but I didn't see no tears

42:37All dressed up to go away First time I'd seen him smile in years Why did he finally turn his back on his great love? Why is this the first time he's smiled in years? Because he's dead. Only death could end his love. It placed a reef upon his door And soon they'll carry him away

43:10He stopped loving her today It's totally over the top. Maudlin, sentimental, kitschy. Call it whatever you want. Just don't fight it. One thing that Bobby Braddock told me in passing that I think about a lot is that he thought of the character in his song as a bad role model. The man was obsessed. He couldn't let go. But that's the point, right? That's why we cry. Because the song manages to find beauty and even a little bit of grandeur in someone's frailty. And soon they'll carry him away He stopped loving her today Wild horses, please.

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47:00Whether you're gearing up for fall events or simply planning ahead for the season, 4imprint helps your brand show up, stay useful, and make connections that last. Explore the possibilities at 4imprint.com. 4imprint for certain. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Grand Ole Opry House, to the celebration of life of George Glenn Jones, one of the most important people ever, of all time and of any time, in the history of country music. George Jones died in 2013. Everyone who was anyone in country music came to his memorial service. You should watch it if you get the chance. It's on YouTube, all two hours and 41 minutes of it, because it's everything I've been talking about.

47:47Vince Gill stands up with Patti Loveless and sings Go Rest High on That Mountain and breaks down halfway through. Go rest high on that mountain Son, you work on earth as dark Travis Tritt remembers a conversation he once had with Chris Christopherson about how they expected George Jones to have died years before. And I looked at Chris and I made the comment, you know, with all the years of hard living that George had, who would have ever thought that he would outlive Tammy? And Chris looked at me and said, had it not been for Nancy, he would not have.

48:50Nancy Jones, George Jones' fourth and final wife, the real love of his life, his soulmate and companion. Travis Tritt holds out his hand towards Nancy, who's sitting right in the front row. George said it many times. She's my angel, and she saved my life. And so we owe you a debt of gratitude for that. Then comes the crowning moment of the day, the final performance. Alan Jackson strides out onto the stage, a big, rangy guy, craggy features, cowboy boots, jeans, long coat, white Stetson. He looks squarely at Nancy Jones and without introduction launches into He Stopped Loving Her Today. He said, I'll love you till I die She told him you'll forget time

49:51As the years went slow and by And you realize, as he sings, that Braddock's song has gotten even more specific. It's no longer about a long-ago love affair. It's about right now. This is the day George Jones stopped loving Nancy Jones.

50:15Alan Jackson takes off his hat and places it over his heart. He stopped loving her today.

50:30And if you aren't crying, I can't help you. We love you, George.

50:40One of the three greats of our time, ladies and gentlemen, at all times. That's Alan Jackson. Thank you so much, Alan.

51:11Revisions History is produced by Mia LaBelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Silmara Martinez-White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flan Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg of Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

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