Looking Back to See: A Country Music Memoir

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Everyone this side of Fabor Robinson’s ghost should welcome Maxine Brown’s memoir.“Looking BackTo See” was the title of the Browns’first hit song (it went to number eight in 1954),and a perfect title for this volume, indicating both retrospective tone and music business focus.What most distinguishes it from other country music autobiographies is its voice—strong, consistent, wholly idiosyncratic. From the first pages it’s clear that Maxine Brown is now,and was then, a formidable personality—she was the one, after all, who started the whole show by entering her younger brother Jim Ed in a talent contest in 1952—and she comes across here as a woman capable of both enduring rancor and no less enduring gratitude.There’s no middle;she almost never says a record is pretty good, or a person just OK. She burns hot, a rhetorical extremist—if she likes you you’re a wonderful person,best the world’s ever known.If her decision goes the other way you’re a snake, a devil in suit and tie. She expresses both feelings fulsomely , and readers will surely be both informed and entertained. There’s a sweeping history here, of the country music business as it boomed from radio into television, flirted with crossover pop success, and dealt with the threat of rock and roll. But the panorama is built with anecdotal blocks,stories told from the perspective of one family group at the heart of these big events,and the anecdotes themselves are vivid and compelling.Sometimes they’re hilarious,as when Maxine and Jim Reeves steal a load of Hitler’s personal beer steins. Stardom’s downtime is a bonegrinding trek,filled with relentless and often dangerous travel, but there are parties aplenty, riotous with booze and sexual escapades. At other times the anecdotes are petty and sordid—tawdry tales of music industry chicanery starring a huge cast of scumbag promoters, managers, and other company types. Fabor Robinson—a fellow Arkansan, by the way—stars in Maxine Brown’s memories as a peculiarly loathsome gargoyle,but he’s simply the most prominent of a huge squadron of trolls. (It’s reassuring, somehow, when one suspects that Robinson simply couldn’t have beenTHAT bad,to find other accounts confirming her portrait.Colin Escott,for example,interviewed scores xv of musicians, DJs, and promoters for his 2002 Roadkill On the ThreeChord Highway. The summary report on Robinson is a chilling one: “they all came to despise him,and left as soon as they could.”Robinson did have one “apologist,” a one-time business partner, but the best he could say was that Robinson was “a good man and a Christian man who lost God and became angry and twisted.”1 ) At their most harrowing Maxine Brown’s stories are simply devastating . Many hard tales are told in Looking Back To See—two near rapes, the deaths of beloved parents and siblings, battles with cancer and alcoholism, fires and fatal car wrecks and plane crashes, children left too much alone, parents ravaged by guilt and despair. But these stories, too, for all their horror, are a part of the saga.When Maxine Brown looks back, what she sees is a very mixed scene.At her worst the narrative can almost degenerate into an exhaustive catalogue of unforgotten and unforgiven wrongs. But at her best she manifests a remarkable resilience and generosity of spirit, and surely her narrative gains credibility from its unblinking gaze and unsparing tone. The story of the Browns has deep ties to Arkansas. From their Sparkman roots to their Little Rock debut on KLRA’s Barnyard Frolic and later appearances at Robinson Auditorium, to the family restaurant in Pine Bluff,Arkansas places and Arkansas people play central roles in their history.The Browns’ sound, featuring smooth closeharmony vocals, appealed across many genres, and was perfect for the great explosion of “crossover” music in the 1950s. Moving outward and upward from their beginnings on the Barnyard Frolic and Shreveport’s Louisiana Hayride, they appeared on American Bandstand and the Ed Sullivan Show as well as the Grand Ole Opry, the Ozark Jubilee (in Springfield,Missouri) and the Town Hall Party (in Bakersfield, California).They were at the heart of the so-called“Nashville Sound” era, and their biggest hit, 1959’s “The Three Bells,” is often listed as a “folk revival”piece.Three years after their first record they were singing in Europe (and a Japanese tour...