The Low-Down High Art of Steve Earle's "Copperhead Road"

The Low-Down High Art of Steve Earle's "Copperhead Road" David Huddle Copperhead Road Copperhead Road Copperhead Road Any song I love I listen to so much that I get tired of it. Soon enough I'm ready to take up with another. But "Copperhead Road" has stuck with me now for at least a couple hundred hearings. I go through phases with it, sometimes listening once a week, sometimes once a month. Right now I'm into hearing it a couple of times a day. I particularly go for it in my last waking hour, when I'm up in my attic study, zoning out playing Freecell at the computer with the speakers about a foot and a halfaway from my ears. Since I don't like headphones, that's about the most intimate way for me to listen to music; it lets me catch the nuances and grace notes better than I can on the car stereo. Up there on the third floor, sometimes "Copperhead Road" takes hold ofme, so that I have to turn it up loud, which then makes my wife or one of my daughters yell up at me to turn it down. "They don't understand," I whisper into the diminishing song-blast. Then I wallow in the pleasure of having that beautiful nasty thing all to myself. I don't sing along, but I holler, I chant, I shout with those gunshot drum beats: "Better stay away / (from) Copperhead Road." It embarrasses me that I didn't find out about Steve Earle until I did— about three years ago; on the other hand, by the time my older daughter's boyfriend had put her onto Steve and she had brought him to my attention, there were several albums out. I hold maybe half a dozen Steven Earle songs in extremely high regard. At first, "Copperhead Road" wasn't my favorite—and it still might not be myfavorite, but it's far and away the one I'm most passionate about. If you 11 12Fourth Genre wanted to sample one Steve Earle song, I wouldn't play that one for you— "Tom Ames' Prayer" is funnier and tougher; "Can't Remember" is prettier and ultimately more pleasurable to hear. "Tom Ames' Prayer" is what persuaded me to induct Steve Earle into my personal pantheon of great American singer/songwriters, right up there with Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, Johnny Cash, Rodney Crowell, Bob Dylan, HankWilliams,Willie Nelson, and Cole Porter. "Copperhead Road" is tribal. It's more than a little bit crazy—it articulates this prideful mountain-boy hostility to the rest of the world. You hear it, and it's like you've snuck up through the woods at night on a bunch of hillbilly bootlegger good old boys drinking moonshine and raising hell around a bonfire in some isolated mountain holler. "Copperhead Road" is the opposite of a feel-good sing-along. It's an outlaw battle hymn—it's the national anthem of the hillbilly nation—and it is deeply, deeply politically incorrect. Hearing it the first time, you're likely to shake your head and say, "Whoa, what is thaPA" At the same time, you feel this tremendous reliefthat you're not like those ignorant people in the song. Two nights ago, listening to "Copperhead Road" cranked up about as high as I could stand it, there came along that instrumental break Steve kicks off with a barbaric yowl, the kind of noise a young warrior might make leading a charge ofhis comrades into a hail ofgunfire. The instruments raging behind his scream are an eerily plinking mandolin, guitars, of course, and drums, but there's also—if you can feature it—a bagpipe. (Once you hear the song, you can't not feature it.) And this bagpipe's shrill is rising up out of the din of drum-and-guitar driving rhythm. I got the chills. And then I confess that I laughed. Up there facing my genius of a computer , I understood that I had been called. It shocked—and then amused— me that some deeply primitive part of my spiritual innards, a little tartan swatch ofmy soul...