Book Review: Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music by Dana Jennings

It begins with a fitting quote from Hank Williams, “You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly.” Part memoir, part history, part analysis, Dana Jennings sometimes waxes poetic about the country music he loves in Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music. Specifically, country music made between 1950 to 1970, or a time period he still refers to as The Great Depression. The Great Depression we know from the history books had ended by then, but poor people—Jennings’ people—didn’t see much difference in being dirt in the ‘30s and being dirt in the ‘60s. And that’s who the music was made for by people who had been there.

“Country music knows broader and deeper truths about the twentieth-century American Dream, universal truths that resonate well beyond the music’s original audience. […] If you truly want to understand the whole United States of America in the twentieth century, you need to understand country music and the working people who lived their lives by it.”

Dana Jennings was born eight days after his parents married at the age of seventeen in the fall of 1957 in New Hampshire, where he “came of age in some rogue northeastern extension of Appalachia.” Today, he serves as an editor for The New York Times.

No holds are barred as Jennings spills his family’s secrets with language that’ll offend the easily offended; it’s both intelligent and profane. The language helps paint reality and without it, you’d receive an incomplete picture of the poor and their conditions. Of their conditions, Jennings writes, “We were country people, you know. We had no expectations except that life was hard. All we needed was music that understood that harshness, music that leavened it.”

When Jennings addresses modern country in the final chapter, he leaves you with the impression that it just can’t tap into the primal psyche the same way the classics that served as his nursery rhymes did. Despite his decrying the era of Corporate Country and his affection for the classics, he realizes that the music was a product of times and circumstances that mercifully no longer exist. Bittersweet indeed.

Reading the book is a like boarding a train for the first time, pumped with the excitement of something new and the possibilities of where it’ll take you, but pretty soon, the scenery begins to blur and the hum of the train eventually lulls you to sleep. After a couple of chapters that drag on, it settles into a steady pace as Jennings seamlessly blends his interpretation of classic country songs in the context of his life and the lives of the rural working poor. The music provides a way for them to escape their lives a few minutes at a time and they’re able to relate to it fully; it serves as a soundtrack to their lives.

As Jennings writes in the opening line, Sing Me Back Home is the liner notes to his life. It’s a fascinating read, if not a bit wordy at times.