When Country Was Country

Floyd Tillman died not long ago at the age of eighty-eight, and the year before, at the remarkable age of a hundred and one, so did Jimmie Davis—two titans of country music, gone now to that great Louisiana Hayride in the sky. And with them, two frail reminders—quite possibly the last—of the way country music used to be.

In the small-town east Texas of my boyhood these two men were a tremendous presence. They were bigger than Crosby, bigger than Sinatra. They put Glenn Miller in the shade. One of my first memories involves Jimmie Davis’s “You Are My Sunshine.” I must have been three or four years old at the time and had recently gotten badly entangled while trying to crawl through a barbed-wire fence. The Davis song was constantly on the radio in those days, and when whoever the singer of the moment was came to the part, “When I awoke dear I was mistaken / and I hung my head and I cried,” I would instantly flash on that little boy with his head hung up in barbed wire. I carried that image around for years, triggered every time I heard the Davis song, which must have numbered eventually in the hundreds. Similarly, when I heard in those days the Ernest Tubb song “Walkin’ the Floor Over You,” having at my command at the time only one definition of the word over, I always imagined someone stomping around upstairs, on the floor above me.

My father died when I was five. He was a long-haul trucker and was killed when his rig, loaded down with roofing materials, slid off a rain-slick highway near Woodville, close to Houston, and hit a tree. Driving a truck had been his day job. In his youth, before moving to Texas and meeting the girl who would become my mother, he had had his own country band, Les Lacy and His Alabama Ramblers, and he still picked and sang for the neighbors and whoever else would listen in the series of little sawmill towns we lived in those Depression-bedeviled days.

Because I was so young when he died I have few memories of my father. What I remember centers mostly on his music. Three songs in particular I associate with him. They were the ones, it seems to me in memory, that showcased him at his best, the ones he most often liked to play and sing. First and foremost of these was Floyd Tillman’s “It Makes No Difference Now.” For years, well into high school and beyond, the surest way for me to resurrect my father’s memory was to begin to sing to myself, either aloud or under my breath, depending on where I was, the lyrics to this Tillman classic: “Makes no difference now what kind of life fate hands me, / I’ll get along without you now that’s plain to see, / I don’t care what happens next, ’cause I’ll still get by somehow. / I don’t worry ’cause it makes no difference now.” It’s a song about the stoic acceptance of the way things are, and although the second verse (“It was just a year ago when I first met you”) makes it clear that what’s being sung about is a broken love affair, the words coupled with the music would seem to support a broader application: that of a son determined to get used to the fact of a departed father, say, or even of a whole class of people striving to keep their chins up and keep on going despite the poverty of their circumstances.

The other two songs evoke similar feelings from me: “Be Honest with Me,” the old Gene Autry and Fred Rose favorite, and Jimmie Davis’s “Nobody’s Darling But Mine.” Like the Tillman song, each of these is simple, straightforward, and to the point. Each addresses the listener directly with no frills and no digressions. All three seem to have been crafted expressly for a lone male singer and a lone acoustic guitar. You can hear...