It’s Father’s Day. It’s also the birthday of the man who had
a hit in 1968 with a song called “The Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line.” I
thought of posting about that song as a tribute to Waylon Jennings, one of the
original outlaw rebels of Country music, but it’s not really a song about being
a father. It’s about being a “daddy” in the sense of the guy who makes it all
happen for a certain girl. She seems to be straying from the position of
sufficient adulation and he’s trying to bring her back in line. It’s probably a
deliberate recollection of Johnny Cash’s “because you’re mine, I walk the line.”
Walking the line, I assume, has something to do with not straying, not doing
hound dog and wild cat things. Keeping it real, we say now, sometimes.
I chose instead the second track from an album from 1973,
when Waylon was well launched on his maverick course, and was one of the albums
that established him as an ornery cuss, supposedly. All the songs are by Billy
Joe Shaver, who was unknown at the time, mostly. And the band on the record is
Waylon’s performing band rather than Nashville studio studs. Unheard of! So it’s
a real record, in the rock artist manner of putting together a band and
striving for a sound. And though these aren’t songs penned by Waylon, he goes
about making them his own in a big way.
Today’s song is one of those songs that seems to sum up an
entire life and an entire approach to life. It’s not morose or bluesy, so much
as it’s clear about its attitude toward its subject. And its subject is what
the singer has to say about himself, characterizing himself as “an old five and
dimer”—which means, in essence “two-bit,” or “small potatoes,” or no big deal.
He’s not the be-all and end-all, he’s just a guy getting by, barely. And it’s
not just in economic terms, we understand. It’s in terms of everything he’s
expected life to be—in terms of love and fame and recognition and remuneration
and even his sense of his own status and accomplishment. “Good times and fast
bucks are too few and too far between.” It’s just a level statement.
But there’s rueful wisdom here right from the start: “I’ve
spent a lifetime of making up my mind to be / More than the measure of what I
thought others could see.” There you have it. A suggestion of “that within
which passeth show,” as Hamlet says. To be more than what others judge you to
be—for that you must have some inner resources. And Waylon’s vocal walks the
line, alright. He’s got an immense gravitas and a mournful quality too, letting
us know that “a lifetime” is right enough, and a lifetime of not being measured
fairly—well, it’s enough to make someone stick with the five-and-dime and buying
from catalogs (a slur in the era of Sears and Roebuck, when it was largely
hayseeds who bought from catalogs because they didn’t live near any towns that actually
stocked desirable goods).
Then too, Waylon delivers a wink when it suits, as in “Fenced
yards ain’t hole cards and like as not never will be.” This comes after a few
lines reflecting on a “she” who was expected to be (or hoped to be) there when
things ran thin, but that little glimpse at a home and a “spread”—the prereq
for the happy domestic life, of course—sees that it ain’t something you can
keep in reserve. It’s not going to pay off like a hole card might. A five and
dimer is playing a weak hand in that regard.
And the playing on the steel guitar is so tasteful on this
song, just hinting at the kind of comfort one might find with the right woman
or the right bottle, but this dude is not likely to trust in either for long.
“It’s taking me so long and now that I know I believe / All
that I do or say is all that I ever will be”—there’s a statement of clear-eyed
assessment. Kinda like Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, right, from an album that came
out the same year as Honky Tonk Heroes:
“For all you touch and all you see / Is all your live will ever be.” We are
what we do and say; our lives are based on what we see and touch. It’s all experiential,
in the end. Then the lines about “too far and too high and too deep”—with Waylon,
who was not above growing long hair and a beard and smoking pot like his
Country rebel buddy, Willie Nelson, letting us catch the innuendo where “a
nickel” and “a dime” are weights of bags of grass or coke or what have you. “Too
much ain’t enough” for a hell-raising hard-liver like Waylon Jennings, who despite
all that managed to last to 64, dying in 2002.
This entire album is a classic and I’m glad to have a
reissued vinyl copy. And on a father’s day spent with my daughter—some of it in
Delaware at my brother Jerry’s house (the old family homestead), much of it in
New Jersey on the Turnpike and the Garden State, and some of it in Connecticut
at Christopher Durang’s skewering of America and “father knows best”
assertions, among other things, Why Torture
is Wrong and the People Who Love Them—I’m glad to pay tribute to the place
where Country meets rock in the music and attitude of Waylon Jennings, the only
daddy that’ll walk that line.
An old five and dimer
is all I intended to be.
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