August 27, 2005
Lost Highway
I managed to watch an episode of Lost Highway: The Story Of Country Music called 'The Road to Nashville' on ABC free-to-air. Lost Highway is a four-part series made by the BBC with archival footage, which explores the big shifts in style in country music the last century. It has no connection with the David Lynch film of the same name.
I missed the earlier episode, "Down from the Mountain", which was about The Carter Family, the music halls radio, the depression of the 30s and the rise of bluegrass. I presume that is the old weird Americia music Greil Marcus refers to in his book on Dylan's Basement Tapes.
I watched 'The Road to Nashville' primarily because it was about Hank Williams, with its roots in the regional honkey tonk bars of the 1930s, with its ethos of live fast, love hard, and die young.
I had no time or interest for the smooth schmaaltz of the Nashville Sound. I concur with the program's argument: that country music lost its way through squandering the heritage of Hank Williams with the conservative Nashville hegemony. "Nashville" has become synonymous with syrupy strings and backing vocals through the '60s and into the early '70s that signified putrefaction and commodification of a rich tradition of folk artistry.
William's music is about loss, heartbreak, despair, cutting pathos from the perspective of a rambling man with agony in his voice.