“To tell a story or sum up an attitude in a handful of sung verses,” said music critic Jon Pareles in the New York Times, “and to unite them with music that lodges those words in memory -- and, at best, also summons the feeling behind them -- is a songwriter’s job description.”
Country music legend Rodney Crowell’s songs have long fulfilled that promise. Introspective, personal, often autobiographical, they are masterpieces of concision and simplicity that have earned him a string of top-10 hits, a Grammy Award and a permanent niche in the Nashville Hall of Fame.
Too bad he had to unlearn all those skills for his new memoir, “Chinaberry Sidewalks.”
In a recent interview, Crowell admitted that being released from the confines of songwriting left him “drunk on words.” While drunk may not exactly describe Crowell’s style in his revealing debut, his exuberance is plain: similes and metaphors pile up on every page, making for mouthfuls of chewy prose that, though sometimes clunky and quaint, add up to a distinctive voice.
The book begins in 1955, with Crowell, at 5 years old, noting the rising sexual tension at his parents’ New Year’s Eve party: “The four beer-blitzed couples dancing in the cramped living room of my parents’ shotgun duplex were wearing on my nerves. In particular, I didn’t like the sound of their singing along with my prized Hank Williams 78s. Coon hunting with my grandfather, I’d heard bluetick hounds howl with more intonation than this nasal pack of yahoos.”
To forestall the inevitable ugly end of the drunk couples “swapping two steps,” Crowell unearths the .22 his father taught him to shoot months earlier. The resulting blast luckily misses the partyers, but sets the tone for this long backward gaze at a childhood spent at the mercy of two of the most lovable, and scary, yahoos you’ll ever meet: his parents, J.W. and Cauzette.
“I come from a long line of live and love in vain,” Crowell once sang, and his memoir backtracks several generations to zero in on this illustrious line, describing his paternal great-grandfather as “the meanest, most racist white trash in all of western Kentucky” and his mother’s “no-account daddy” as being “as highly motivated at drinking as he was disinterested in sharecropping.”
Add domestic abuse and little more than a sixth-grade education, and both J.W. and Cauzette were left with a “crippling sense of disentitlement” that haunted them for the rest of their lives, as well as a tendency to settle all scores with violence.
J.W. routinely terrorized Cauzette; Cauzette whipped Rodney until she drew blood, using switches cut from the chinaberry trees of the book’s title. They brawled at home, in the car and at the “ice houses” where J.W.’s band played on weekends. But far from feeling bitter, Crowell, who admits “there were times when I was mad enough to kill them both,” bears his parents no ill will.
On the contrary, his memoir is a loving, affectionate tribute to J.W. and Cauzette: to their dreams, limitations, slugfests, and undying love for each other. “These were eight-year-olds in drunken thirty-something bodies powered by pent-up rage,” he writes of one episode; sadly, we see who’s responsible for the parenting skills when Crowell smashes a Dr. Pepper bottle over his own head to break up his parents’ fight.
Fans of Crowell’s music will recognize the mosquito trucks and the kids running behind them from 2001’s “The Houston Kid,” here expanded to chapter length. Colorful neighborhood characters, bow-and-arrow fights, fishing and harmless mischief-making suggest a 1950s childhood not so different from any other -- well, except for the exorcist scenes involving Cauzette’s epilepsy and maybe the next-door neighbor and champion hogcaller threatening to gut her 8-year-old son with his daddy’s buck knife.
Fans looking for Crowell’s musical coming-of-age story won’t find it here. Rather, he singles out his father, an undiscovered country singer, for long overdue credit. He recalls J.W.’s most treasured legacy: the day he took his son to one of Hank Williams’s last concerts. “Knowing he’d exposed his only son to the greatness in another man that he imagined in himself, served to soften the hard fact that his own dreams would never materialize,” Crowell writes.
J.W.’s vast repertoire of songs -- not just the predictable Hank Williams-Jimmy Rodgers-Roy Acuff tunes, but “Appalachian dead-baby songs, folk songs, cowboy ballads, Negro blues, gospel songs, talkin’ songs, train songs, songs about cocaine and murder, jailhouses, froggies that went a-courtin’” -- provided the musical credibility Crowell would use to launch his own career years later.
And as the drummer in his father's band, The Rhythmaires, at age 11, one of Crowell's proudest moments is a night at the local honky-tonk when his downtrodden mother finally snatches a rival bald-headed on the dance floor for boogieing too close to J.W.
Indeed, these two “sometime connoisseurs of privation and domestic disturbance” probably never sparkled finer than they do in “Chinaberry Sidewalks.” Crowell’s parents remain his heroes not in spite of their flaws, but because of them,and because of their son’s proud refusal to sugarcoat the truth. Instead, this honest, forgiving and self-assured memoir brings all the skeletons out of the closet and invites them to dance.
Chinaberry Sidewalks
Rodney Crowell
Knopf, $24.95, 256 pages
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