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

Brady Vercher | June 2nd, 2008 Email Share

Sing Me Back Home 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.

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  1. [...] Jennings, author of Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music (read Brady’s review), shares a playlist of songs and with the exception of one song, they all hail from between 1950 [...]

  1. CRAIG R.
    June 2, 2008 at 5:41 pm Permalink

    I haven’t read this book yet. But the review reminds me something my mother told me about a year ago. I was bitchin’ about how old country( 1930-1980) was better in everyway because it was about real people,their real problems, real life, and real desires. I also said that all working people ( whites,blacks,Latins) influenced and could connect to the true stories. My mother said that real problem between old and new country is that old country came from the hills, hollers and farms. And new country comes from the suburbs and the coldersacks. I miss old country because the voices were real. I miss real voices.

  2. Mike Parker
    June 2, 2008 at 6:01 pm Permalink

    So does that mean country music has nowhere to go? There are hardships in the “coldersacks,” they’re just different hardships. Real human stories still exist. From run down farms to city skyscrapers, there are stories to tell. Country music should be the genre to tell those stories. That’s what I think of when I hear “Highwayman.” Country music has stories to be told from the old west to outer space. Just please, oh God please, don’t anyone remake Planet Texas…

  3. CRAIG R.
    June 3, 2008 at 4:12 pm Permalink

    Mike I have no doubt that the suburbs can open up great country songs. Songs about want and need- songs about how marriage can change when you have made it, and you aren’t living in the hills anymore- songs about past desires and future hopes. One of the problems with country music today is that those issues are sung about too little. Also the lyrics are missing depth and storylines- which to me is what makes country music unique. These hats acts rarely rise to the merit of the attention they get. It takes more- at least it should-to sing a great country song than a twang, a fiddle, and a few country cliches. Some of these country acts aren’t even country. They are just poorly placed pop acts that are supported by teenagers. Country music use to be the domian of adults. Now it is filled with pretty boys, macho idiots, and female shakers without one lick of a twang. (ask Faith,Kenny and Tim where their twang went)
    Finally I spelled cul-de-sac wrong. Sorry I am one bad speller, and I should be far more careful.

  4. Baron Lane
    June 4, 2008 at 4:45 am Permalink

    Great book. I enjoyed it very much.

  5. Chip
    June 11, 2008 at 10:11 pm Permalink

    I loved this book. It really resonated with me. On the contrary, I didn’t think it was wordy at all. I coudn’t put it down.

  6. james
    September 2, 2009 at 9:00 pm Permalink

    This book COULD have been so good!! The characters, the songs, the memories, if only it had been written in plain english.In it , Mr Jennings talks about “getting above your raising”, and that’s just what he did here. It would have much more enjoyable to read if it had been kept on a simpler, more country level……

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