Lyle Lovett & Vince Gill: Across the Country Humor Divide
Country comedy sometimes serves to connect urban audiences with the music—sometimes, not so much
By Barry Mazor
Hard core country music fans everywhere mourned the loss, earlier this month, of Little Jimmie Dickens, a long-time standard-bearer and public face of the Grand Ole Opry. At 94, the beloved “little but loud” honky tonk singer was still hosting and doing stand-up on the Opry broadcasts, singing songs much as he had when his buddy Hank Williams was writing numbers for him in the late 1940s. A moving ballad singer, he was nevertheless best known for hit novelty numbers like “Out Behind the Barn” and “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose.” The latter got him onto a pop Dick Clark TV broadcast in 1965, but the simple fact was, his humor, spoken or sung, sly and close to raunchy as it could be, was from country culture, for the country audience, and he stayed within bounds of the genre and format sphere, happily amusing fans for nearly 75 years.
Some Jimmie Dickens hit titles, however, have appeared on lists of the “Twenty Dumbass Country Song Titles You Won’t Believe” sort that some web wag regularly comes up with, thinking the idea fresh and clever, blissfully unaware that the titles derided (often, from songs they’d obviously never heard) were written as knowing comedy in the first place. There was nothing at all dumbass about Paul Craft’s “Drop Kick Me Jesus,” as sung by the forever hip Bobby Bare, or Roger Miller’s “You Can’t Rollerskate in a Buffalo Herd,” but they appear on some of those lists, too, as do a panoply of titles from today’s country charts. The question becomes, who’s being provincial when they’re blindly mocked?
Performers with their country wits about them have often used that hook to reach out to audiences beyond country’s. Sometimes it works. Dolly Parton’s regular appearances with Johnny Carson, for example, were built on her sharp awareness of what the late night TV audience would assume she was innocent about or wasn’t, and playing on it, which Carson would enable perfectly. More recent appearances by Nashville and digital radio’s Elizabeth Cook on Letterman’s show have worked in pretty much the same way.
The room for country/city mutual misunderstanding, though, can be huge—even in small rooms. In March 1973, Gram Parsons was booked into Manhattan’s uber-urban Max’s Kansas City, with his new backup band the Fallen Angels, including the then-unknown Emmylou Harris, continuing his quest to bring his country-Southern soul amalgam to rock audiences everywhere. Forty people, at most, showed up for the show. How many of them came to see this country band, and how many were the regular polymorphous perverse Glam Rock Warhol-Velvets crowd who frequented the place, is unclear.
As a recording of the event documents, though, when Parsons started to introduce a ballad with the perfectly typical country intro “We’d like to do a song now that’s dedicated to everyone in the audience,” you can hear the disdain in the “Awwww!” that comes back at him. So Gram snaps, “Wait till you hear what it is; it could be ‘Wreck on the Highway!’” and he sounds pretty pleased with himself for coming up with the quip. But questions hang there: How many of those who signified their contempt for his show of sentiment got his reference to Roy Acuff’s sullen 1942 reprimand about drunk driving, or as a song title at all? How satisfied should he have been with the joke if it slid by the audience without traction?
Late this month, January 27 to 30, Vince Gill and Lyle Lovett, friends for over thirty years and both broadly appreciated performers with acknowledged, cheeky wit, will tour together, for the first time, playing clubs in Glenside PA, Englewood NJ, Norfolk VA and North Charleston SC. Comedy’s had notably different effect on their careers trajectories—Gill’s contributing to his long stand as the amiable, wisecracking host of the CMA Awards, and to his eventual induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and Lovett’s right out of mainstream country to the Adult Alternative and Americana radio formats, and to Hollywood. I recently spoke with both of them about those routes.
Lovett, more often compared to Randy Newman than Little Jimmie Dickens today, first gained attention as an oddball outlier country act. A songwriter who was surprised to find himself with a performing contract, at all, he went on to include the likes of jazz man Clifford Brown’s “The Blues Walk” in his virtually unclassifiable “Large Band” recordings. It’s not so well remembered now that he charted fourteen country singles from 1986 to 1997, if mainly lower down on the charts.
“I went from being a ‘folksinger,’ which was anybody who couldn’t afford a band and played an acoustic guitar,” Lyle recalls, “to all of a sudden being a country guy, but with weird hair, because the records were released from Nashville. I’m opening shows for the Judds, and Reba McIntyre, and Merle Haggard. The audiences were… polite. My entire experience in country music was epitomized by one of my first shows with Reba, where graciously, at the end her show, she asked me to join her on stage to sign autographs for folks who’d bought her 8x10s and posters and things. I didn’t have any merch, so I sat right next to her and she’d sign something and hand it to me, and I’d sign it, too. Finally, after about a dozen people had gone by, this really nice lady that Reba signed a poster for said ‘’Scuse me; would you mind signing that on the back!’ And I did, and I said to Reba, ‘Thank you—but I’m gonna go.’”
Around Houston, where Lyle grew up, honky tonk bands were designed to keep people dancing, didn’t engage in a whole lot of patter, and certainly never explained or placed a song. While he might well set up and explain a song as a folksinger, he wasn’t likely to do that in country mode, even with his fresh and revealing readings of other people’s songs, from “Stand By Your Man” to “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.” The edgiest songs he wrote and sang in his country performer years, at once outrageously funny and touching, were bound to be deemed about as weird as his mile high hair stylings by many. “Fat Babies Have No Pride,” or “Church,” in which a great white dove landing on the church windowsill is taken by a famished congregation not for an eternal symbol, but as a fowl with fricassee potential, were not exactly Top Ten country chart material. His “She’s Leaving Me Because She Really Wants To” avoided every single excuse for the leaving that a country song, or any roots music song, for that matter, would typically provide. It could have functioned as the last country song.
“I never, ever set out to make fun of the idiom,” he says. “When I write a song that sounds country, I’m really trying to write a country song! I was always supported in just being myself, by Tony Brown and the whole forward-looking bunch at MCA in Nashville, but even early on they realized that my audience wasn’t just the country audience—and so they started trying to get my music to other people, too, with help from MCA in Los Angeles. After the third album, Tony said, ‘Why don’t you go out there and talk to them and see how you like it.’ They never discouraged me from doing the sort of thing I did. They just moved me.”
Lyle would, of course, find appreciative audiences out there in the Texas singer-songwriter Americana borderlands, and he agrees that to some extent, his dry wit and commentary made it easier for that audience to accept his country side, too: “Yeah; it gave them an excuse. I can appreciate that. It gave them something to hide behind, that there was something I might say that would be off the wall!”
With all of the wit in his own arsenal, Lovett sees himself likely to wind up playing straight man to Vince Gill, whose quick wit is mainly encountered in live comments between tunes. Gill’s songs are more likely to be honky tonk heartbreakers like “When I Call Your Name,” or his riveting version of the classic “A Six Pack to Go,” which he performs with the Time Jumpers western swing band these days. He did, however, along with his buddy Rodney Crowell, come up with the memorable but less touching “It’s Hard to Kiss the Lips at Night That Chew Your Ass Out All Day Long.”
Aspects of Gill’s life have earned him both good will and comic leeway—both his broad civic and music industry contributions, and the regular proof that he’s simply a stand-up guy, sticking up for the Dixie Chicks’ freedom of speech and musical ability when it was tough in some Nashville quarters to do that, confronting the Westboro hate group protestors directly, with talk of learning about forgiveness. He has no need to self-censor much.
“I think that’s right,” Vince agreed, in a separate conversation. “Though every now and then, unfortunately, I’m the guy who says what everybody else is thinking, but won’t say! I know for a fact that I can get away with a lot more than a lot of other people can, just because of whatever I’ve been—and the same with Jimmie Dickens. The beauty of his humor, to me, was that it was always kind of pointed at him. That gives you the freedom to cross lines a little bit, because it’s not mean-spirited. If I’m pointing it at myself, how could I offend you?”
If it’s Gill’s voice that made him a country star, and his guitar dexterity that makes him the go-to country guy for the likes of Eric Clapton’s Crossroads festival, it’s spontaneous, self-deprecating wit that made him the choice for the CMA Awards host twelve times—mocking his own tenor vocals as “sounding like a girl,” or introducing himself a few weeks ago, about to sing a duet with soul singer Sam Moore, as “a lighter shade of Dave.”
Lovett and Gill can both anticipate off-the-cuff wit from each other on their tour, the kind that, as Vince emphasizes, can’t be planned or forced: “I never thought I could sit down and write something that was funny,” he says, “whether writing a song or entertaining a crowd. Humor usually just comes to me in the moment, because of the moment. After a few years they changed writers on the CMA Awards, and the new guy tried to write in ad libs. And I said ‘Man, you can’t write ‘em in; they just kind of have to happen.’”
Real-time self-revelation has always worked as entertainment for country audiences, who even in this maximally strategized and rehearsed, pitch-correcting era, often respond most positively of all to an honest mistake calmly admitted, to live signs of humanity—and to a good joke. Country artists who can take that a step further, showing, in their way, the spontaneous playfulness of a jazz musician stepping up for a solo, can cross the old country/urban comedy divide.
If you enjoyed reading this, please click “Recommend” below.
This will help to share the story with others.
Barry Mazor is the author of Ralph Peer and the Making of Popular Roots Music and Meeting Jimmie Rodgers, and he is a regular contributor to
Wall Street Journal
