Buy "Sing Me Back Home" by Dana Jennings

By Joe Samuel Starnes

In Hank Williams, Jr.’s anthem “A Country Boy Can Survive,” he lays down the parameters of the rural man’s turf: “We’re from North California and we’re from South Alabam and little towns all across this land.” It confused me growing up in the foothills of Georgia as I did that Hank Jr. would stretch the border so far up and west, well beyond what I then considered the boundaries of rural America. I marked it down as either the old Confederacy or the states represented in the Southeastern Conference. It wasn’t until I moved north to New Jersey and then Philadelphia that I learned that some folks here like country music too, and not all of them grow up in penthouses. Some of them, people like Dana Jennings from New Hampshire, author of Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music, in fact, grew up using outhouses. And like Jennings, they revere country music as much as anyone.

Jennings, an editor at The New York Times who wrote three fine but largely forgotten novels in the eighties and nineties, has written a country music memoir unlike any book about country music and/or memoir I’ve ever read. It deftly intertwines the hardscrabble stories of the Jennings clan in gritty New Hampshire with the music that they loved and lived by: Johnny Cash, Hank Williams Sr., Merle Haggard, Webb Pierce, Patsy Cline, The Stanley Brothers, and many others that recorded in the golden age of country music from 1950-1970. His writing about music is sometimes frantic and often poetic, cutting loose like a stock car on a dirt track. It is at times hilarious and at times heartbreaking, and sometimes, like great country songs and literature can be, both at once. For example, here’s how his Uncle Lloyd managed $270,000 he won in a lawsuit against a landlord after a house fire killed his wife and three of their children:

With that money, Uncle Lloyd bought a $600 parrot that then keeled over and died; put down $10,000 down on a house, which he then lost; spent $5,000 on a lunch-wagon franchise, then managed to go out of business between Memorial Day and the first of August—the busiest time of year—not even gasping through till Labor Day; bought thousands of dollars’ worth of hard liquor; paid $2,000 for a $100 pickup truck; and threw away $200 on some godawful painting of the White Mountains, gave it to Grammy Jennings, then told her he wanted it back when she died. Nobody objected.

Jennings writes personally about all the main themes infused into country music of that era: love, lust, drinking, cheating, fighting, family work, prison, poverty, God. This is not one of those cultural book about the coolness of the beatniks or the free love of hippies or the glamour of the good life or the heyday of Hollywood, but a musical ode to all things real and difficult and wonderful along the backroads, a long way from the big buildings and the traffic lights, in places where the Great Depression still lingered into the sixties. Although, as Jennings writes, he now works in a fancy Manhattan tower designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, that swampy rural background is what formed him, where he worked his first jobs. His white-trash credentials are authentic. He writes:

Me and the old man know what work is, though, because we both did time at Kingston Steel Drum.

Kingston Steel Drum skulked in a sandpit off Route 125 and poisoned my hometown for decades. The factory handled paint drums and insecticide drums, peanut butter drums and shampoo drums, acids and solvents, oil and raw alcohol, which some of the men would cut with Sprite or ginger ale, and then drink. There were drums foul with chemicals whose names we couldn’t begin to pronounce, but we all understood the skull-and-crossbones stickers plastered on the sides.

Later in life, when he’d moved up in the working world, Jennings had another encounter with the place where he and his father had toiled.

The Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency shut the place down in the early 1980s, and it was named one of the one hundred most dangerous Superfund waste sites in the country. I covered the closing as a local newspaper reporter. When I worked at Kingston Steel Drum, I used to wear dungarees and a T-shirt, rubber gloves, and steel-toed boots. Before the EPA let me on the site, I had to put on a hard hat, goggles, a respirator, and an impermeable Tyvek suit.

There are scenes in Jennings’ 1996 novel, Lonesome Standard Time, the story of a New Hampshire town ravaged by a toxic waste dump, clearly inspired by this real life experience. You could and should look that novel up.

I could go on quoting sections from Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music at length here the same way I can sing Willie Nelson’s rendition of “Whiskey River” over and over. Suffice it to say, though, that Jennings has written a book that will resonate like a piercing steel guitar with classic country music fans all the way from New Hampshire to South Georgia and beyond.

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