Speaker 1: Pushkin In Nashville, Tennessee. There's a songwriter named Bobby Braddock.
Speaker 1: He's in his seventies, maybe five foot seven, bald head,
Speaker 1: scruffy beard, wiry, like if you messed them in a bar,
Speaker 1: you'd probably lose. The most striking thing about him is
Speaker 1: his eyes, which are the palest and most intense shade
Speaker 1: of blue. He wears sunglasses a lot, and it's almost
Speaker 1: as if he needs to protect the world from that look.
Speaker 1: I met him on a music row in Nashville. We
Speaker 1: had lunch, and then we sat in one of the
Speaker 1: writer's rooms in the Sony Building, piano in the corner,
Speaker 1: couches to one side, and he talked about his education
Speaker 1: in the music business. I think I always had the
Speaker 1: reputation as Ben kind of a quirky rider, maybe a
Speaker 1: little left field. The turning point in Braddock's career was
Speaker 1: a song you've probably heard of. He was performed by
Speaker 1: Tammy white Net back when she was the reigning Queen
Speaker 1: of country music nineteen sixty eight, about a mom who
Speaker 1: had to spell out the word d I v O
Speaker 1: r ce so her kids wouldn't know their parents were
Speaker 1: splitting up. So dr ce Yeah. Brote this did a
Speaker 1: demo on it, and no tigers, nobody did it. Nobody
Speaker 1: would recording. D I v o r CE was a
Speaker 1: song with a gimmick. Braddock did a lot of gimmicky
Speaker 1: songs back then. No one wanted this one. So Braddock
Speaker 1: went to a friend and longtime collaborator, Curly Putman. So,
Speaker 1: I said, well, why is nobody recording? He said, I
Speaker 1: think around the important part of your song said, sad song,
Speaker 1: and your melodies on that part is too happy. What
Speaker 1: I was doing was, oh, I wish that I could
Speaker 1: stop this a little bit like a soap commercial. I said, well,
Speaker 1: what would you do? And he guys a guitar and
Speaker 1: he had this really mournful singing style. Tammy Wynette was
Speaker 1: a big fan of Curly sing and she loved his
Speaker 1: singing because he had I mean it just you singing
Speaker 1: was just so sad. He oh, I wish that we
Speaker 1: gets drop this d So I said, get your guitar,
Speaker 1: let's let's put it on tape. Right then, you know,
Speaker 1: d I v O r CE went to number one.
Speaker 1: It was Bobby Braddock's first great exercise in how to
Speaker 1: make people cry, and from then on things just got sadder.
Speaker 1: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
Speaker 1: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
Speaker 1: about something that has never made sense to me. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's because I'm a Canadian, or maybe Americans puzzle about
Speaker 1: this too. I'm talking about the bright line that divides
Speaker 1: American society, not the color line or the ideological line.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about the sad song line. I don't know
Speaker 1: why people don't talk about this more because it's weird.
Speaker 1: For the sake of argument, let's use the rock magazine
Speaker 1: Rolling Stones list to the best songs of all time,
Speaker 1: the top fifty. These are the critics choices. Hotel California
Speaker 1: by the Eagles comes in up forty nine, which, as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, is a song about drugs.
Speaker 1: Tutti Fruity by Little Richard at forty three Tutti Fruity,
Speaker 1: which I remind you has as its signature lyric Tutti
Speaker 1: fruity O rudy tutti fruiti O rudy tutti fruity O
Speaker 1: rudy tutti FRUITI rudy wop bop A loop bop, A
Speaker 1: loop bam Boom, there's Dancing in the Street at forty Light,
Speaker 1: My Fire Be My Baby, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit,
Speaker 1: Derek and the Domino's Leila. There are songs about wanting
Speaker 1: to have sex, songs about having sex, songs about getting high,
Speaker 1: presumably after having sex. Number one song on the list,
Speaker 1: Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan A You've gone
Speaker 1: to the finest schools, all right, miss Lonely, but you
Speaker 1: know you only used to get juiced in it. Nobody's
Speaker 1: ever taught you how to live out on the street,
Speaker 1: and now you're gonna have to get used to it.
Speaker 1: I think that's a song about someone who dropped out
Speaker 1: of Harvard. The number one rock song of all time
Speaker 1: is about dropping out of Harvard. In all of those
Speaker 1: fifty songs, nobody dies after a long illness, no marriage disintegrates,
Speaker 1: nobody's killed on a battlefield, no mother grieves for a on.
Speaker 1: The closest that any song and Rolling Stones list comes
Speaker 1: to being truly sad is Smokey Robinson's Tracks of My Tears,
Speaker 1: which is first of all number fifty, so they put
Speaker 1: the sad song at the bottom of the list. And secondly,
Speaker 1: it's about a guy at a party in their moments
Speaker 1: of greatest travail. The protagonists of rock and roll's sad
Speaker 1: songs still get to go to parties now. Just turn
Speaker 1: on a country music station, especially at traditional country music station,
Speaker 1: and listen. It's like a different universe. Marriage is going
Speaker 1: to hell, people staring into their shot glass in a
Speaker 1: honky tonk, people dying young. Have you ever heard John
Speaker 1: Prine's Unwed Fathers. It's a devastating bit of songwriting about
Speaker 1: a teenage mom fleeing town. He sings it with his
Speaker 1: wife Rachel. Also wearier man, smoking man, she bother and
Speaker 1: all a bad Your daddy meant to hurt youever? It
Speaker 1: just don't love but you got his e Those last
Speaker 1: two lines, your daddy never meant to hurt you ever.
Speaker 1: He just don't live here, but you've got his eyes.
Speaker 1: That's brutal black some bad dream all on with Bob
Speaker 1: one half of the country, the rock music part, wants
Speaker 1: to music to be hymns to extra version. The other
Speaker 1: half wants to talk about real life dramas and have
Speaker 1: a good cry. I don't get it, By the way,
Speaker 1: you know who wrote that Unwd Father's song? With John
Speaker 1: Bryan Bobby Braddock or maybe you've heard this another classic
Speaker 1: recorded by Tammy way Natt Long Time, So Long, Golden Ring.
Speaker 1: It follows a couple from first love to the break
Speaker 1: up of their marriage by tracing the journey of their
Speaker 1: wedding ring from pawnshop to pawnshop. It's a weeper who
Speaker 1: wrote it, Bobby Braddock, and today, forty years after he
Speaker 1: wrote it, Braddock is still mad about a one word
Speaker 1: change made by the song's producer, Billy Sheryl, because that
Speaker 1: made his song one crucial degree less sad what we had.
Speaker 1: He says, you won't admit it about who you're running
Speaker 1: around and Billy changed it too. He says, you won't
Speaker 1: admit it, but I know you're leaving town. That's that's
Speaker 1: not as powerful as you're right now right. He says,
Speaker 1: you won't admit it, but I know leave town. She
Speaker 1: says one. Thanks for certain I don't love you anymore.
Speaker 1: It throws down the ring ash She walks out of
Speaker 1: the door. And country music is supposed to be about
Speaker 1: real life, you know, and I try to reflect that
Speaker 1: and bo all right, Golden Ring, which brings us to
Speaker 1: maybe the greatest country song of all time, certainly the
Speaker 1: saddest country song of all time, the song that made
Speaker 1: me get on a plane and go to Nashville. It
Speaker 1: was recorded by the great George Jones, one of the
Speaker 1: half dozen or so most iconic figures in the history
Speaker 1: of country music. You just heard him singing in Golden Ring.
Speaker 1: Jones was famously the husband of Tammy Wynette for a time,
Speaker 1: a hard living, dissolute megastar. Once, in the midst of
Speaker 1: an epic bender, jones family took his keys away, so
Speaker 1: we got on his riding mower and drove eight miles
Speaker 1: to the liquor store to get some whiskey. This was
Speaker 1: a man who could pour his fractured heart into his
Speaker 1: music like no one else. A half dozen times in
Speaker 1: his career, Jones found a song truly worthy of his talents,
Speaker 1: but it never got better than he stopped loving her. Today,
Speaker 1: I still remember when I first heard that song, and
Speaker 1: from the day I started thinking about this episode, I
Speaker 1: haven't been able to get it out of my head.
Speaker 1: He said, I'll love you till I've done. She told
Speaker 1: him you for getting time. As the years went slowly by,
Speaker 1: she still prayed upon him. He kept her pictures on
Speaker 1: his wall do I need to tell you who wrote
Speaker 1: that song? Bobby Braddock. Bobby Braddock is the king of tears.
Speaker 1: He's still after through it all, hoping she ain't come
Speaker 1: back again. Oh man. One of the things that got
Speaker 1: me interested in sad songs was a story my sister
Speaker 1: in law, Bev told me. She and my brother live
Speaker 1: in the same area I grew up in Waterloo County
Speaker 1: in southern Ontario, and a while ago she went to
Speaker 1: a performance by a local chamber choir thirty singers. They
Speaker 1: sang a cantata called Annalise by the British composer James Whitbourne,
Speaker 1: a choral composition which puts the words of Anne Frank's
Speaker 1: diary to music. I know this seems like a little
Speaker 1: bit of a digression from country music, but it's a
Speaker 1: really useful case study in understanding why some songs make
Speaker 1: us cry. The performance Bev told me about out was
Speaker 1: on a Sunday afternoon, a free performance of the Public Library,
Speaker 1: which is a very utilitarian, very nineteen sixties building on
Speaker 1: Queen Street in downtown Kitchener. I've been to many times
Speaker 1: Waldo wald Carpet, that old book's library smell, which I
Speaker 1: have to admit, I love how many people are there.
Speaker 1: It's in their main reading room. They moved around all
Speaker 1: the tables and one hundred one hundred twentieth full, pretty
Speaker 1: much standing room only. Why as they're singing, I think,
Speaker 1: why is that alto not singing? And then I look
Speaker 1: over and I think somebody else so prime I'm not singing?
Speaker 1: That's all because everybody else in their parts is singing,
Speaker 1: and I realized they were crying and they couldn't sing.
Speaker 1: Bev says, she cried pretty much through the entire performance.
Speaker 1: She was looking straight ahead because she didn't want people
Speaker 1: to see she was crying, but it didn't matter because
Speaker 1: everyone was crying. When the performance was over, Bev approached
Speaker 1: the stage to talk to the soloist, the woman singing
Speaker 1: Anne Frank's words, I just went up to her afterwards
Speaker 1: and congratulated her on the beauty of the piece then
Speaker 1: and her singing, and I said, and how did you
Speaker 1: manage to sing without crying? And she said, well, I
Speaker 1: couldn't look at Mark, the conductor, because he was wiping
Speaker 1: tears from his eyes, and I had my back to
Speaker 1: the choir, so that was good, and I didn't look
Speaker 1: at anybody in the audience because they were crying. So
Speaker 1: I just looked up in the middle distance and I sang,
Speaker 1: it was a good thing. I hadn't memorized. I was
Speaker 1: at home in Canada when Bev told me that story,
Speaker 1: so I called up Mark, the conductor and the soloist,
Speaker 1: whose name is Natasha. They're actually husband and wife. They
Speaker 1: only live a few minutes away from my brother, so
Speaker 1: they came over. Mark sat at the piano in the
Speaker 1: living room and Natasha stood behind him, and they performed
Speaker 1: one of the pieces from Annale's they did that day
Speaker 1: in the library. This is the last moment and called
Speaker 1: it's called Anne's Meditation. I see the world. I see
Speaker 1: the world being slowly turned turned into a wilderness. Now
Speaker 1: I realized this is a crazy question, because we're hearing
Speaker 1: a piece based in the diary of Anne Frank, which
Speaker 1: is one of the most heartbreaking stories from one of
Speaker 1: the most horrific moments in recent history. But why was
Speaker 1: everyone crying that day at the Kitchener library. The obvious
Speaker 1: reason is that the music is beautiful, so is Natasha's singing.
Speaker 1: The performance is also authentic. There's nothing contrived about it.
Speaker 1: It wasn't at Carnegie Hall. People weren't wearing suits and
Speaker 1: evening gowns. They were at the Kitchener library and whose
Speaker 1: families getting books and kids running around, and everyone's on
Speaker 1: stacking chairs with the tables pushed off to the side.
Speaker 1: But here's the most important thing. Analise is specific It's
Speaker 1: a cantata about the actual experiences of a real person.
Speaker 1: In her own words, Bev says that when she cried,
Speaker 1: she started thinking about her own family, Mennonites, who escaped
Speaker 1: terrible persecution in Russia. Natasha says that as she sang
Speaker 1: about twelve year old Anne Frank, she was thinking about
Speaker 1: her own daughter, who was ten and who was sitting
Speaker 1: right next to Bev in the audience. Beauty and authenticity
Speaker 1: can create a mood. They set the stage, But I
Speaker 1: think the thing that pushes us over the top into
Speaker 1: tears is details. We cry when melancholy collides with specificity,
Speaker 1: and specificity is not something every genre does well. Wild
Speaker 1: Horses by the Rolling Stones written by Keith Richards and
Speaker 1: Mick Jagger. It's a song about a conversation a man
Speaker 1: is having with a silent, suffering loved one. The story
Speaker 1: goes that Mick Jagger dreamt up the verses while sitting
Speaker 1: at the bedside of his then girlfriend Mary and Faithful,
Speaker 1: as she recovered from an overdose. I watched you suffer
Speaker 1: a dull, aching pain. Now you've decided to show me
Speaker 1: the same. No sweeping exit or off stage lines could
Speaker 1: make me feel bitter or treat you unkind. Wild Horses
Speaker 1: couldn't drag me away. Wild Wild Horses couldn't drag me away.
Speaker 1: Wild Horses was recorded first by the legendary Graham Parsons.
Speaker 1: Not long afterwards, Parsons died of an overdose, and his
Speaker 1: friend in protege, the country music singer Emmy Lou Harris,
Speaker 1: made a song in his memory. She wrote it with
Speaker 1: Bill Danoff. It's called from Boulder to Birmingham. I don't
Speaker 1: own he I got on the sab plane just to
Speaker 1: fly down the other's love. But all that you can
Speaker 1: show me a Briian sky, and I don't want to hear,
Speaker 1: says story. Someone who has suffered a terrible loss has
Speaker 1: gotten on a plane and she's so numbed by grief
Speaker 1: that she could no longer see those around her. The
Speaker 1: last time I feel like this, I was in the wilderness,
Speaker 1: and the canon was on fine from Boulder to Birmingham
Speaker 1: and wild horses are both beautiful melancholy. They're about the
Speaker 1: same thing, the ties the living and the healthy have
Speaker 1: to those in pain. But which is the sadder song?
Speaker 1: I don't think there's any question. Wild horses is generic.
Speaker 1: Listen to how it starts. Childhood. Living is easy to
Speaker 1: do the things you wanted, I bought them for you.
Speaker 1: Graceless lady, you know who I am. You know I
Speaker 1: can't let you slide through my hands. What's going on?
Speaker 1: Any idea? What is Mickey hammering on about? Now? Compare
Speaker 1: that to the specificity of looking down from the airplane
Speaker 1: and seeing nothing but prairie, then standing on a mountain
Speaker 1: and watching a canyon burn I watched in the buzz
Speaker 1: of Babor. I would holding grace I could see. First,
Speaker 1: she references the great black spiritual rocked my soul in
Speaker 1: the bosom of Abraham. The bosom of Abraham is where
Speaker 1: the righteous dead go while awaiting judgment. Then she sings,
Speaker 1: and I would also walk all the way from Boulder
Speaker 1: to Birmingham. Now she's locating her grief. I would make
Speaker 1: a pilgrimage from progressive hippie liberal Remember this is nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three, dope smoking Colorado, back to the repressive heart
Speaker 1: of the Old South. Just to see your face. Two
Speaker 1: completely different specific images, each with its own set of
Speaker 1: emotional triggers, and she's piled one on top of another.
Speaker 1: Mark Varnen, the music director of the choir in my hometown,
Speaker 1: says that there's a part in analys that does the
Speaker 1: same thing, and is they're in hiding already. And she
Speaker 1: starts singing, and the composer has set these words in
Speaker 1: kind of a style of an American Susa March, and
Speaker 1: so she's talking about being in the bathtub and being
Speaker 1: scrubbed in the bathtub, and it's a Susa We'll scrub, scrub,
Speaker 1: scrub ourselves in the tinta right, very happy and optimistic music.
Speaker 1: And Frank in the bathtub to the tune of a
Speaker 1: Susan March with the horrors of the Holocaust outside her door.
Speaker 1: Three absolutely concrete images in merciless combination. It just floored
Speaker 1: me every every time I heard it, because it was
Speaker 1: so close to, you know, our own daughter, you know,
Speaker 1: to think that she would have to create this kind
Speaker 1: of fiction in order to just get through the day.
Speaker 1: That's how you get tears. You make the story so
Speaker 1: real and the details so sharp, and you add in
Speaker 1: so many emotional triggers that the listener cannot escape. But
Speaker 1: it's a risky thing to do. Right If you aren't
Speaker 1: a talented composer, and you don't do a sensitive rendition
Speaker 1: of those lyrics, they could fall flat, could seem forced,
Speaker 1: even offensive. Far easier just to fall back on the
Speaker 1: bland cliche that wild horses couldn't drag you away. Country
Speaker 1: music makes people cry because it's not afraid to be specific.
Speaker 1: You know, she came to see him one last time
Speaker 1: all and we all wondered if she were and it
Speaker 1: kept running through my mind this time. Bobby Braddock was
Speaker 1: born in Auburndale, Florida, a little town between Tampa and Orlando.
Speaker 1: His father grew Citrus. They were Church of Christ, just
Speaker 1: about the most fundamentalist of fundamentalist Christians. Braddock moved to
Speaker 1: Nashville in nineteen sixty four, just after getting married, to
Speaker 1: seek his fortune in the music business. He wrote his
Speaker 1: memoirs a few years ago. It's called A Life on
Speaker 1: Nashville's Music Row. I read it before I went to
Speaker 1: see him, and the best way to describe the book
Speaker 1: is that it's exhausting. I don't mean that in a
Speaker 1: bad way, because I couldn't put it down. But so
Speaker 1: much happens. You've lived this incredibly tumultuous, emotionally tumultuous life. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And in the book it sounds like the first precipitating
Speaker 1: event as the death of your son. Braddock was touring
Speaker 1: with the country music legend Marty Robbins at the time.
Speaker 1: He and his wife, Sue had a baby. The child
Speaker 1: was just a few months old when he died. Whenever
Speaker 1: I was in town, not on the road with Marty Robins,
Speaker 1: every single day we'd buy fresh flowers to put it
Speaker 1: on it's gray. We were just pathetic. He and Sue fight,
Speaker 1: She cheats on him, he cheats on her. They break up,
Speaker 1: they get back together, they have a daughter, They divorce.
Speaker 1: His ex wife mysteriously vanishes. He drinks a lot, gets
Speaker 1: into fights, owes enormous sums to the irs, has a
Speaker 1: major bout with depression, smokes a lot of pot, lurches
Speaker 1: from one volcanic event to the next, and threw it all.
Speaker 1: Braddock writes songs, hundreds of them. You're kind of tolerance
Speaker 1: for emotional volatility seems extraordinary. I guess tolerance is probably
Speaker 1: a pretty good word for it. Braddock walks over to
Speaker 1: the keyboard on the other side of the room. He
Speaker 1: begins to talk about an old girlfriend named Angela who
Speaker 1: committed suicide by driving her car into the river. When
Speaker 1: Angela died, her mother took her baby to raise it.
Speaker 1: And she sent me a picture of the little girl,
Speaker 1: Angela's child, who about four or five years old, look
Speaker 1: just like her mom. Picture her standing out in the
Speaker 1: arm and boy did a number on me spid distance.
Speaker 1: He wrote a song about that in twenty minutes. He
Speaker 1: played it for me. Then he played his favorite bit
Speaker 1: of a sad Randy Newan song. He played me a
Speaker 1: heartbreaking song he wrote once after getting up in the
Speaker 1: middle of the night and passing his lover in the hallway.
Speaker 1: And as he played one weeper after another, I realized
Speaker 1: that that thing I'd said about Braddock's tolerance for emotional volatility,
Speaker 1: tolerance was the wrong word. That was just me projecting
Speaker 1: my upti Canadian self onto Braddock. But Braddock is from
Speaker 1: the musical side of the United States, where emotion is
Speaker 1: not something to be endured it's something to be embraced.
Speaker 1: At one point, when cell phones were still analog, you
Speaker 1: could buy a scanner and listen in to other people's conversations,
Speaker 1: and that's what Braddock does. He can't help himself. A
Speaker 1: woman complains to her husband for an hour about its
Speaker 1: lack of affection from the parking lot of the grocery store.
Speaker 1: Then ask him what he wants, and he says, may
Speaker 1: be Apple Newton's. And then this is my favorite part
Speaker 1: I'm quoting now from Braddock's memoir. The conversation that truly
Speaker 1: touched me was between a man perhaps forty and his mother,
Speaker 1: may be late sixties, in which the son opened up
Speaker 1: about sexual problems he was having with his wife. And
Speaker 1: I envied the sprinkling of profanities and the mother's invitation
Speaker 1: to come over to the house, son, and let's open
Speaker 1: a bottle of whisky and talk about it. Wishing I
Speaker 1: had that kind of easy and open communication with my mom.
Speaker 1: Then learning that the guy's mother was terminally ill with cancer.
Speaker 1: If you're keeping track, that's marital difficulty, sex, profanity, whiskey mom,
Speaker 1: and terminal cancer in one conversation, and it truly touched him.
Speaker 1: Do you know what. Bradditt's favorite song is Vince Gills
Speaker 1: Go Rest High on that Mountain, which Gill wrote in
Speaker 1: memory both of his brother who died young of a
Speaker 1: heart attack and fellow country star Keith Whitley, who drank
Speaker 1: himself to death. Son you done, Oh my God. When
Speaker 1: Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs and Patty Lovelace are singing
Speaker 1: harmony on that thing, I go to nuts. It still
Speaker 1: tears me up. Northern. It's about death, and Vince wrote
Speaker 1: it about Keith Whitland, then about his own brother, and
Speaker 1: just the emotion that's in that song. It's just it's
Speaker 1: just powerful. Days gathered r green, we shot goody face.
Speaker 1: It's heartbreaking. Listening to that song makes me wonder if
Speaker 1: some portion of what we call ideological division in America
Speaker 1: actually isn't ideological at all. How big are the political
Speaker 1: differences between red and blue states anyway, in the grand
Speaker 1: scheme of things, not that big. Maybe what we're seeing
Speaker 1: instead is a difference of emotional opinion. Because if your
Speaker 1: principal form of cultural expression has drinking, sex, suicide, heart attacks,
Speaker 1: mom and terminal cancer all on the table for public discussion,
Speaker 1: then the other half of the country is going to
Speaker 1: seem really chilly and uncaring, and if you're from the
Speaker 1: rock and roll half clinging semi ironically to tutty fruity
Speaker 1: O Rudy, when you listen to a song written about
Speaker 1: a guy's brother who died young of a heart attack
Speaker 1: and another guy who drank himself to death, you're going
Speaker 1: to think, who are these people? Here's another way to
Speaker 1: think about the sad songline. Let me read you the
Speaker 1: list of the birthplaces of the performers of the top
Speaker 1: twenty country songs of all time Again. I'm going to
Speaker 1: use a Rolling Stone magazine list ready, Arkansas, Virginia, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, Mississippi, Georgia, California,
Speaker 1: Central Valley, by the way, not Los Angeles, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Texas, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Texas, Kentucky, Texas.
Speaker 1: I could do the top fifty, or the top one hundred,
Speaker 1: or the top two hundred, and you get the same pattern. Basically,
Speaker 1: you cannot be a successful country singer or songwriter if
Speaker 1: you're not from the South. It's impossible. There's one exception,
Speaker 1: which is the great songwriter Harlan Howard, who was born
Speaker 1: in Detroit, but almost immediately thereafter his family moves to
Speaker 1: a farm in rural Kentucky. It's like the five second
Speaker 1: roll when you drop a piece of food on the floor.
Speaker 1: If it's not on the ground long enough, it doesn't count.
Speaker 1: As far as I can tell, there are no Jews
Speaker 1: on the country list, almost no Catholics, only two black people.
Speaker 1: It's white Southern Protestants all the way down. Now compare
Speaker 1: that to the rock and roll list. You've got Jews
Speaker 1: from Minnesota, black people from Detroit, Catholics from New Jersey,
Speaker 1: middle class British art school dropouts, Canadians, Jamaicans. Rock and
Speaker 1: roll is the rainbow coalition that diversity is a good thing.
Speaker 1: It's why there's so much innovation in rock and roll.
Speaker 1: But you pay a price for that. There was a
Speaker 1: very clever bit of research published recently by Colin Morris
Speaker 1: in the magazine The Pudding. He analyzed fifteen thousand popular
Speaker 1: songs using an algorithm that can presses digital files. So
Speaker 1: if you take out the repetitive bits in a song,
Speaker 1: how much of it is left. Morris's big finding is
Speaker 1: that rock and roll as a genre is really, really repetitive.
Speaker 1: Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, the Beatles. If you take out
Speaker 1: the Duke bookative parts, their music shrinks by sixty percent.
Speaker 1: That's what happens when everyone is from somewhere different. Nobody
Speaker 1: speaks the same language, so you have to use cliche,
Speaker 1: the same phrases over and over again, because if you
Speaker 1: go deeper or try to get more specific, you start
Speaker 1: to lose people. Country music, on the other hand, is
Speaker 1: not nearly as repetitive. When Morris ran the lyrics of
Speaker 1: popular country singers through his algorithm, they only shrank by
Speaker 1: about forty percent, a third less than the rock and
Speaker 1: roll nor is hip hop repetitive, which makes sense. The
Speaker 1: birthplaces of everyone on Rolling Stones list of Greatest rap
Speaker 1: songs reads like an urban version of the country list. Queens,
Speaker 1: South Central lay Brooklyn, Long Island, South Central Long Beach, Houston, Queens,
Speaker 1: The Bronx, Englewood, New Jersey, The Bronx. Hip hop and
Speaker 1: country are both tightly knit musical communities, and when you're
Speaker 1: speaking to people who understand your world and your culture
Speaker 1: and your language, you can tell much more complicated stories.
Speaker 1: You can use much more precise imagery. You can lay
Speaker 1: yourself bare because you're among your own. In the book,
Speaker 1: it sounds like your relationship with Sparky was the one
Speaker 1: that seemed the most creatively fruitful. It was it was
Speaker 1: Sparky was a beautiful blonde from northern Alabama, the great
Speaker 1: love of Bobby Braddock's life. Why was that? I think
Speaker 1: because my family her are so strong, I mean, sort
Speaker 1: of a virtual thing. I think that's why I found
Speaker 1: Bobby Braddock's book so exhausting. It's because everything is felt,
Speaker 1: everything is a mountain peak, and Sparky, Sparky was everest
Speaker 1: high altitude infatuation. That's the kind of short thing that
Speaker 1: made people go absolutely crazy, you know, And that was
Speaker 1: the case with her. You know, that's what gets the
Speaker 1: animal instinct of people maybe who haven't evolved as much
Speaker 1: as they should, and cause them to go out and
Speaker 1: get a gun. Blow somebody's brains out over some gun.
Speaker 1: Not mean it can't stand the thought or someone you know,
Speaker 1: having sex with a person that he loves. Braddock and
Speaker 1: Sparky were on and off lovers for years. It was intense, painful, euphoric.
Speaker 1: When it ended, Braddock was in pieces. He kept her
Speaker 1: picture on the wall, went half crazy now in the
Speaker 1: that's Braddock in the original demo he made of he
Speaker 1: Stopped Loving Her Today. He still loved her through it all,
Speaker 1: hoping she come back again. So I'm not sure where
Speaker 1: it came from. It may have come sparky, you know, honestly,
Speaker 1: not now be interesting? How could it not? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: if I think it probably I think it probably did.
Speaker 1: But I just I can't see it. I can't see
Speaker 1: that for certainty. Tomorrow they'll carry him away. I felt
Speaker 1: like Braddock shrink at that moment, listening to his tangled
Speaker 1: dreams and then wanting to shake him at the end
Speaker 1: of the session. It's sparky, sparky. They found some letters
Speaker 1: by his being. I mean, you wrote a song in
Speaker 1: the middle of the great defining love affair of your life,
Speaker 1: the relationship ends, and you write a song about the
Speaker 1: heartbreak of that a man carries to his grave. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's could it be? Could it be more clear? I
Speaker 1: went to see him one last time, Bobby Braddock wrote
Speaker 1: he Stopped Loving Her Today with his friend Curly. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, they took it to the singer George Jones.
Speaker 1: Jones was then at his lowest Ebb a wreck, strung
Speaker 1: out on cocaine and whiskey. He just checked out of
Speaker 1: a psychiatric hospital. The great love of his life, Tammy Wynett,
Speaker 1: had embodied her hit song d I V O r
Speaker 1: Ce and left him. Jones had just nearly shot and
Speaker 1: killed one of his best friends. The Heartbroken Bobby Braddock
Speaker 1: has written a song about a man who cannot stop
Speaker 1: loving a woman, and it's sung by the heartbroken George Jones.
Speaker 1: Cannot stop loving a woman keept some letters by bid
Speaker 1: it in nineteen sixty two. He had underlined and ran,
Speaker 1: underlined and read every single I love you, every single
Speaker 1: I love you. I went to see him just today.
Speaker 1: Oh but I didn't seen old tears, all dressed up
Speaker 1: to go away. First time I'd seen him smiling. You.
Speaker 1: Why did he finally turn his back on his great love?
Speaker 1: Why is this the first time he smiled in years?
Speaker 1: Because he's dead. Only death could end his love. It
Speaker 1: plays to read I'm soon thout carry he stopped loving Harday.
Speaker 1: It's totally over the top, modeling sentimental, Kitchie. Call it
Speaker 1: whatever you want, just don't fight it. One thing that
Speaker 1: Bobby Braddock told me in passing that I think about
Speaker 1: a lot is that he thought of the character in
Speaker 1: his song as a bad role model. The man was obsessed.
Speaker 1: He couldn't let go. But that's the point, right, That's
Speaker 1: why we cry, because the song manages to find beauty
Speaker 1: and even a little bit of grandeur in someone's frailty.
Speaker 1: I'm soon thout caring. He stopped Hi today, wild horses, please,
Speaker 1: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Grand
Speaker 1: Ole Opry House, to the celebration of life of George
Speaker 1: Glenn Jones. One of the most important people ever, of
Speaker 1: all time and of any time in the history of
Speaker 1: country music. George Jones died in twenty thirteen. Everyone who
Speaker 1: was anyone in country music came to his memorial service.
Speaker 1: You should watch it if you get the chance. It's
Speaker 1: on YouTube, all two hours and forty one minutes of it,
Speaker 1: because it's everything I've been talking about. Vince Gill stands
Speaker 1: up with Patty Lovelace and sings, go rest Hyghenete Mountain
Speaker 1: and breaks down halfway through. Oh. Travis Tritt remembers a
Speaker 1: conversation he once had with Chris Christofferson about how they
Speaker 1: expected George Jones to have died years before, and I
Speaker 1: looked at Chris and I made the comment, you know,
Speaker 1: with all the years of hard living that George had,
Speaker 1: who would have ever thought that he would outlive Tammy?
Speaker 1: And Chris looked at me and said, had it not
Speaker 1: been for Nancy, he would not have. Nancy Jones, George
Speaker 1: Jones's fourth and final wife, the real love of his life.
Speaker 1: His soulmate and companion, Travis Tritt holds out his hand
Speaker 1: towards Nancy, who's sitting right in the front row. George
Speaker 1: it many times, she's my angel, and she saved my life,
Speaker 1: and so we owe you a debt of gratitude for that.
Speaker 1: Then comes the crowning moment of the day, the final performance.
Speaker 1: Alan Jackson strides out onto the stage a big, rangy guy,
Speaker 1: craggy features, cowboy boots, jeans, long coat, white stetson. He
Speaker 1: looks squarely at Dancy Jones and without introduction, launches into
Speaker 1: he stopped loving her today, He said, all love you
Speaker 1: till I live. She told him you more good time
Speaker 1: as your years when flu and you realize as he
Speaker 1: sings that Braddock's song has gotten even more specific. It's
Speaker 1: no longer about a long ago love affair. It's about
Speaker 1: right now. This is the day George Jones stopped loving
Speaker 1: Nancy Jones. Alan Jackson takes off his hat and places
Speaker 1: it over his heart. He stopped loving her today. And
Speaker 1: if you aren't crying, I can't help you. I love you, George.
Speaker 1: All the three breaks of our time, ladies and gentlemen,
Speaker 1: at all time. That's Alan Jackson. Thank you so, Mark Jolan.
Speaker 1: Revisionist History is produced by Meil Lobelle and Jacob Smith,
Speaker 1: with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Silmarra Martinez White. Our
Speaker 1: editor is Julia Barton. Flawn Williams is our engineer. Original
Speaker 1: music by Luis Guera. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and
Speaker 1: Jacob Weisberg of Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gradwell