Over the past century or so, Country music has passed through a number of epochs. In some of those eras, the genre offers listeners little more than rancid recombinations of tired and tiresome tropes. (We live, alas, in such a time.) In others, however, the blessed boys who make the noise on 16th Avenue treat their fans to proper poetry. Better yet, they help the writers among their aficionados jazz up the products of their word processors.
I enjoyed the great good fortune to attain my musical majority in one of the golden ages of the Nashville sound. Thus, soon after I started to shave, I stumbled upon ‘What’s Your Mama’s Name’. Raised to fame by Tanya Tucker, this radio-friendly song recounted, in the course of three short stanzas and two (or three) iterations of a four-line refrain, the lachrymatory saga of a fallen father’s life-long quest for the green-eyed daughter he had never met.
The first of the load-bearing verses introduces listeners to Buford Wilson, a young man, who ‘forty some odd years ago’ asked about ‘a rose that used to blossom in his world’. The second gives us a snapshot of the same man who, after two decades of fruitless searching, and a great deal of drinking, ‘lost a month of life and labor to the county jail’. The third, set in the recent past, mentions the passing of ‘just another wayward soul the county had to claim’ before delivering the punchline of the piece:
Inside the old man's ragged coat, they found a faded letter.
It said, 'You have a daughter and ... her eyes are Wilson green.'
A few days ago, I ran into an especially soulful cover of ‘What’s Your Mama’s Name’. When I stopped crying (which took a while) I realized that the writers of the libretto (Nashville stalwarts Dallas Frazier and Earl Montgomery) had provided careful listeners with,, inter lots of alia, a wee master class in the way of the ink-stained wretch.
Here follow the main points of that curriculum in parvo.
Lesson 1: Old-fashioned beats new-fangled.
‘Drunkard’ and ‘county jail’ paint a more powerful picture than ‘alcoholic’ and ‘correctional facility’.
Lesson 2: Alliterate.
Twenty some odd years ago a drunkard down in Memphis
Lost a month of life and labor to the county jail
Lesson 3: Set the story in storied settings.
New Orleans tempts a well-bred lad like the young Mr. Wilson to stray from the strait-and-narrow and the ‘rose that used to blossom in his world’ to let her hair down.
Memphis offers people from small towns throughout the American South with opportunities to start new lives. Thus, it is not surprising that a woman who had born a child to an absent father might try to make a home there.
Lesson 4: Set up the punchline (without giving it away).
Before they are treated to the great reveal, listeners to ‘What’s Your Mama’s Name’ enjoy two opportunities to learn the eye-color of the child at the heart of the saga. Thus, when Miss Tucker (or, more recently, Miss Louisa) sings ‘it said you have a daughter and her eyes are Wilson green’, they are fully primed for the surprise-that-shouldn’t-be in the last line of the last verse.
Lesson 5: List towards Germanic words.
The shorter version of ‘What’s Your Mama’s Name’, with but two iterations of the refrain, weighs in at 208 words. Of these, 200 come from Old English, Old Norse, or one of the MUGGLE tongues. Of the rest, merveilleux à dire, all eight come from French. The words of Gallic origin, moreover, entered English close to a thousand years ago and, as a result, have been thoroughly domesticated.
Lesson 6: Play with tropes.
A couple of years before ‘What’s Your Mama’s Name’ made its maiden voyage, Steve Goodman wrote the most memorable verse of a tune that, with tongue firmly planted in his cheek, he called ‘the perfect Country and Western song’.
I was drunk the day my mom got out of prison.
And I went to pick her in the rain.
But before I could get to the station in the pickup truck
She got run over by a damned old train.
Like this bit of good-natured self-satire, the ballad of Buford Wilson deals with maternity, inebriation, and incarceration. However, where the tropes in the former take on a painfully familiar form, those in the latter display a greater degree of originality.
Lesson 7: Hint at deeper questions.
Limited to twelve lines of verse and four of refrain, Messrs. Frazier and Montgomery were obliged to economize on details. Nonetheless, they chose their words in ways that raised a number of intriguing questions.
For example, the name ‘Buford Wilson’ tells us that the protagonist came from the sort of family where surnames do double duty. This suggests that he may have spurned the woman carrying his child for fear of losing caste. At also makes the hero’s fate all the more poignant, for the declassement he ended up with proved more deeper than any loss of status that might have resulted from a hurried wedding to a girl from the wrong side of the tracks.
At the same time, the failure of the middle-aged Buford Wilson to make allowance for the passage of time raises the possibility of an earlier onset of his deterioration. In that scenario, some combination of mental illness and heavy drinking may have convinced the young woman in question to reject the father of her child.
For Further Reading:
Good analysis. Country music lyrics are often, at their best, ingenious, compact, poetic narratives, often with humor, or pathos, and sometimes both in one song. Merle Haggard, my favorite, has many sterling examples.
You're the reason our kids are ugly.