known simply as Sam to friends and family, and has worked in newspapers and media relations in Athens, Milledgeville and Atlanta, Georgia; Bradenton, Florida; Houston, Texas; and New York and New Jersey.
His essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Sam now lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Saint Joseph's University.
Buy "Sing Me Back Home" by Dana Jennings
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
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
I could go on quoting sections from Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death and Country Music
I grew up near Cedartown, Georgia, in a white clapboard farmhouse that had been in my mother’s family for generations, sitting on a low hill at the end of a red dirt driveway about half a mile from the paved road, not too far from the Alabama state line. We were so far out in the country that if anyone drove up our road you knew that they were: a) coming to see you; b) lost; c) hunting for somewhere out of the way to drink and smoke something illegal and/or consummate an illicit relationship that would have brought worlds of hurt down on their heads if they had taken it into their bedrooms at home.
Today I live in a Philadelphia row house where the sidewalk passes right by my living room window and in the afternoon Catholic school kids pass by cussing at each other like demented sailors and expectorating loudly in the street. Sometimes late at night from our third floor bedroom with the windows closed tight and the curtains drawn we can hear drunks caterwauling, either singing if they are happy or cursing up a hell storm if they are not. There aren’t enough letters in the alphabet to list the possible intentions of people walking past my door.
It has been a quarter of a century since I called that house out in the country home. For the past eight years I’ve been in the Northeast, but that vast space of pine trees and 
hardwoods and fields where in the summertime the whippoorwills and bobwhites called all night still resonates deep inside me. Cedartown was a place where I knew just about everybody and everybody knew me and my parents, and if they were old enough, they knew my mother’s parents before (often that familiarity was a good thing; other times, when people were up in your business, not so much). I think about my home there all the time, the good and the bad. And I’ve never heard a band that takes me back to that place and captures that world, the vivid stories of small town southern lives, as the Drive-By Truckers do in their songs. These two divergent worlds of mine merged happily Thursday night, March 27, when DBT played Philadelphia, packing the spacious Fillmore at the TLA (formerly the Theatre of the Living Arts) on South Street and kicking out a great show of songs both old and new.
I could write a long string of fat sentences about how damn good the band sounded, how tight the guitars, smooth the keyboards and strong the drums, as well as the juxtaposition of Patterson’s high, slightly raspy voice and Mike Cooley’s deep tone, a voice that somehow manages to mix humor, lonesomeness and a little bit of threat into one sound. Shonna Tucker’s sweet voice often comes in and rounds it all out. They are a fantastic rock band with streaks of the best elements of country music; imagine if the Rolling Stones were from North Alabama and had a touch of Johnny Cash. But instead I want to focus on the stories in the songs, the great attention to detail and rhyme that bring these stories to life as much as any poem, fiction or movie. A lot of bands write songs that have lyrics that sound pretty and paint you an image or two—a DBT song, however, takes you somewhere, and you enjoy the ride. They know how to write a line, and they know how to tell a story as well as anyone recording today.
They opened the show Thursday with “Goode’s Field Road,” Hood’s song from the near the end of their new record, “Brighter than Creation’s Dark.” It’s a relentless rhythm in the voice of a man in serious trouble about to meet his maker in a murky deal that has gone bad, or more likely he’s planning to end his life to avoid going to prison, but the listener is never told exactly “what went down on Goode’s Field Road.”
Keeping in sequence from the album, they played “A Ghost to Most,” a Cooley specialty with one of his many unforgettable lines: “But skeletons ain’t got nowhere to put their money/nobody makes britches that size/and besides you’re a ghost to most before they notice/that you ever had a hair or a hide.” Literary critics could write long articles about this one and never quite decipher the ultimate meaning, concluding, if they are honest, that it’s cryptically fascinating, not to mention a little dark but also funny as hell. According to Hood’s liner notes on their web site, he overheard a friend ask Cooley what the song meant and he replied, “It's really hard for me to find a suit that fits me right." Ultimately, asking the band what some of their songs mean is like asking Cormac McCarthy to explain what happens to The Kid at the end of “Blood Meridian.”You got to come to your own conclusion.
Patterson followed with a new song that is getting a lot of airplay in Philly on WXPN-FM, the alternative station at the University of Pennsylvania where David Dye’s show World Café is hosted. “Righteous Path” is about a family man trying to stay on the straight and narrow in spite of all the temptations life presents. It’s a grown up rock’n’roll song. During this tune, of course, was when an overly-endowed young woman riding on the shoulders of an apparently very strong man chose to pull up her shirt and reveal her abundance to the band. If they noticed her, they didn’t act like they did. And she was hard to miss, bless her heart.
The new album which they are touring in support of is the first since the departure last year of Jason Isbell, the talented young songwriter, singer and guitarist who laid claim to a number of songs, including the brilliant “Outfit” and “Never Going to Change,” one song poignant and the other downright defiant. Isbell, who recorded with the band from the albums “Decoration Day” in 2003 through “A Blessing and a Curse” in 2006, was certainly no slouch. But most bands don’t have one songwriter on par with Hood, Cooley and Isbell, and I doubt any band has room for three for the long-term. It sounds unkind to Isbell to say I didn’t miss him because I greatly admire his work, but I didn’t miss him Thursday night. Hood and Cooley who have been playing together since the eighties have more than enough material to crank out long shows like they did, digging all the way back into the albums of the late nineties, “Pizza Deliverance” and, still my personal favorite, “Gangstabilly.”
While Isbell is gone, David Barbe continues to work with DBT, producing, engineering and mixing “Brighter than Creation’s Dark,” as well as playing on a few tracks. Barbe was at one time bass player for Bob Mould’s band Sugar, but for me he will always be the front man for Mercyland, my all-time favorite Athens, Georgia group. Mercyland is easily the most underappreciated rock trio of the last century.
DBT on Thursday played a long, strong opening set of about two hours—you always get more than your money’s worth—and returned after a quick break for their encore, kicking it off with what may be my favorite song, Cooley’s “Marry Me.” This song definitely has what I think is their best opening line: “Well, my daddy didn’t pull out, but he never apologized.” I once saw Maya Angelou on TV say that George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” has more story than most writers can get into a 300-page novel, and the same sentiment goes for many DBT songs, especially this one. “Marry Me” manages to tell one man’s entire life from conception to his own pending unplanned fatherhood and conveys his perspective on the world in only five stanzas, including this declaration on his desire to stay in his hometown: “This old town’s all right with me, there’s nowhere I’d rather be.”
The encore concluded with Hood’s contrary “Buttholeville,” a song that shows while some folks love their humble hometowns and would never leave, others are dying to get away, are flat out “tired of living in Buttholeville.” Unlike the narrator in Cooley’s “Marry Me,” the dude in this song is one day going to put the town in his rearview mirror and is “never going back to Buttholeville.”
Thursday night’s show was the first time I’ve seen The Drive-By Truckers in my four years of following the band that they didn’t finish with Jim Carroll’s dark rocker “People Who Died,” but instead ended with a medley that wove a souped-up version of Bruce Springsteen’s haunting “State Trooper” embedded in the middle of “Buttholeville.” I thought DBT’s ending each show with Carroll’s song might be a tradition that would last like Willie Nelson’s thirty-year run of starting every concert with “Whiskey River,” but I guess not. It doesn’t matter. Like Springsteen whose repertoire is so intertwined with his home turf in New Jersey that for some it defines the state, DBT has carved out a marvelous body of work over the past ten years that paints a vast canvas of the hardships and joys of life in the modern, rural South. Covering Springsteen, who in my mind Hood and Cooley are up on par with at the highest level of songwriting, seems just right by me.
Buy Sam's 1st Novel "Calling
