Vince Gill
Gill captures that moment in every country star’s career when the stylistic vogue shifts and the slide from the top begins–a process that gets short shrift in country-music discourse even though it’s been going on ever since the music’s commercial beginnings in the 1920s. Songs about the changing of the guard tend to be superficial laments that conveniently avoid the messy facts of history. The Dixie Chicks’ “Long Time Gone,” written by Darrell Scott, voices the party line when it complains about country radio: “Now they sound tired but they don’t sound Haggard / They got money but they don’t have Cash / They got Junior but they don’t have Hank.”
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The Chicks aren’t alone in bewailing how antiseptic artistry has replaced a roots sound in modern country music, but their blanket assessment ignores the fact that Cash, Haggard, and Hank, at their heights, were stylistic innovators who drastically changed country music. All three were young once, and each, in his way, helped drive an earlier generation of legends off the charts and into the dustbin. Gill’s “Young Man’s Town,” by contrast, takes in the complexity of the situation. Its most striking quality is its generosity in the face of utter annihilation, a near Elisabeth Kubler-Ross-ian acceptance of events that cannot be changed: “Sometimes you gotta stand back and watch ’em burn it to the ground / Even though you built it it’s a young man’s town.”
Frizzell was young once too. During his glory days in the early 1950s, he was a massive hit maker; it’s no overstatement to say that he remains the single greatest influence on contemporary male country singers. If not for the leavening effect of Lefty’s style, the young George Jones might have fallen by the wayside as just one more Hank Williams imitator. Mel Street, Keith Whitley, George Strait, Randy Travis, Alan Jackson–all bear the deep and unmistakable imprint of Frizzell’s heartbreaking, vowel-caressing croon. But how many of today’s country fans even know who Lefty Frizzell was, much less lament his absence from the airwaves? It was Merle Haggard, Frizzell’s greatest acolyte, who absorbed Lefty’s style, passed it down to future generations, and inadvertently helped end his hero’s career. By the time Hag’s star was ascending, Frizzell had slid into a painful cycle of sporadic comebacks and bitter, boozy retreats.
Writing a song about the much-mocked “midlife crisis” is a gamble. Artistically, middle age is often treated as lukewarm water, lacking the visceral angst of youth and the twilight intensities of old age. Today it’s generally caricatured as a pathetic flurry of comb-overs and sucked-in guts and desperate dates with the Botox needle. But the midpoint is never so simple. Gill confronts this complicated, misunderstood juncture head-on. Ironically, by recognizing the need to step aside, Gill presents Exhibit A in defense of our need for mature performers in country music. Only a seasoned artist could have such a clear view of the past–and such a realistic view of the future.
