
          Figures of Speech--Can a Country Boy Survive?
          By Tullos, AllenAllen Tullos
          Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 1-3
          
          You have to stay up awful late in Alabama nowadays to put nostalgia
and melancholy under the table. In cahoots, Action News and the
jukebox are blowing the null breath of extinction. Some of the good ol'
boys feel the hair rising on the backs of their necks. They even have
a tune: "Who's Going to Sing the Last Country Song?"
          But it is the NAACP's Benjamin Hooks who asks the musical
question. Blacks, he says, have lived so long with hard times and
thwarted hopes that they know the territory. What will the white folk
do? Spook and go off halfcocked, he fears. Realize a common plight?
Not likely. Hooks is familiar with the shape and color of banty
messiahs and traditional scapegoats.
          As I drive a car-full of friends across Birmingham's Red Mountain
one night this May, the signals come clear. Vulcan, the iron man,
holds high a red torch to show a death on the highway. The familiar
cracks about his near-nakedness are more biting: how the Vulcan forgot
to cover his ass, how Birmingham is mooning the affluent, over
the-mountain community of Homewood for its failed merger vote. Looking
down upon miles of city lights, we hear the car radio offering Lynyrd
Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama. Down home this song is always in revival
but tonight I hear, in a new way, the line "In Birmingham they love the
Governor . . ." For the last twenty years, Alabama has really had only
one Governor.
          The news in Birmingham, bad for months, got worse in May and
June. Magic City unemployment hung around twelve percent even before
word came that U.S. Steel (a major employer for three-quarters of a
century) was closing its Fairfield Works and even before local schools
turned out for the summer. As a state, Alabama s jobless rate is
second only to that of Michigan. The Governor, who carried Michigan in
the 1972 Presidential primary, insists that he left the Heart of Dixie
a different legacy. "When I was Governor the last eight years," he
proclaims, "we were first in the Southeast in new and expanded
industries."
          On the radio, some Fairfield workers are interviewed. 

Twelve
thousand steelworkers punched in at Fairfield just five years
ago. Now, their numbers cut to nothing, their feelings are variously
strong and resigned. Almost all of them resent the secrecy and
hard-heartedness of U.S. Steel. Some blame the Japanese, some the
"business cycle." The district's Congressman, Republican Albert Lee
Smith, audaciously blames the workers themselves.
          "I'd be willing to take a cut in pay," says one veteran, "if we
could keep the plant open. But the big man has to do some giving back
too." The Big Mules at U.S. Steel refuse comment. They check their
digital watches and have their secretaries dust decades of fly ash and
tailings off of ancient carpetbags.
          Such were the Steel City's ironies this May that among all the
layoffs and rumors of layoffs, the AFLCIO was holding its Southeastern
labor conference. Union officials heard the growing rank and file
anger, noted the increasing toll that Reagonomics was taking on
industrial membership and speculated. that momentum, continuing to
build from Solidarity Day, would bring some election results this
fall. The Southern union leaders pledged stronger organizing campaigns
among service workers. Black and white women working in hospital,
office and food service jobs may help shape labor's direction in the
l980s.
          Meanwhile, a quarter gets you only two plays: Merle Haggard ringing
the jingo bell with his latest "Okie From Muskogee" spinoff, one
called "Are the Good Times Really Over For Good?" and George Jones
singing "It's the Same Ole Me" as he fails to show for a performance
at Boutwell Auditorium.
          Birmingham's Post-Herald observes that as of January
1982, more than 45,000 people, about seven percent of the Jefferson
County population, take their guns to town. Thousands more keep them
handy at work or at play.
          Guns take the worry out of being close. "Knowing what's going on in
this town," says one citizen, "you need a gun."
          No matter how early you wake up in Alabama nowadays, a mean taste
whispers in your mouth. A whisper that sometimes rises to a
scream. Lately, it has found voice in Hank Williams, Jr., providing
an unauthorized campaign anthem for a re-tuned George Wallace, The
Governor:
          
            I live back in the woods, you see,
            My woman and the kids and the dogs and me. 
            I got a shotgun, rifle, and a four-wheel drive 
            And a country boy can survive.*
          
          * A Country Boy Can Survive," copyright, Bocephus Music, 1981.
          It hurts that Hank Jr. has chosen this tact that country boys will
be boys. For several years his considerable musical gifts and poignant
Iyricism have shadowboxed his father's awesome legacy and struggled
against country music cliche. But his toughest opponents remain the
sexism and the half-snarling, half-plaintive, go-it-alone stance which
plagues the genre, the culture and the family tradition of which he
sings. On his recent album, The Pressure Is On, Hank
Jr.'s antagonisms too often invoke the emotions of reaction. Codewords
are just a shot away. He sings in his powerful solo voice, while the
electric guitar drives in dead earnest:
          
            I had a good friend in New York City 
            He never
called me by my name, just "Hillbilly.'  
            My grandpa taught me how
to live off the land 
            And his taught him to he a businessman.
          
          
            He used to send me pictures of the Broadway nights

            And I'd send him some homemade wine.  
            But he was killed by a man
with a switchblade knife 
            For forty-three dollars my friend lost his
life.
          
          
            I'd love to spit some Beech Nut in that dude's eyes

            And shoot him with my ol', forty-five.  
            Cause a country boy can
survive.  
            Country folks can survive.*
          
          * A Country Boy Can Survive," copyright, Bocephus Music, 1981.
          Hank Jr. turned thirty-three in May and allowed the photographers
to snap him hunkering at his daddy's graveside in Montgomery. Yet
along with the new confidence that he gives off, it is as if at the
entrance to his country-rock domain in Cullman, Ala., Bocephus has
thrown up a guardhouse and razor wire fence. Here, the passwords--"We
say grace and we say ma'am"--give clues to the same fierce anger
which, in part, propels the Wallace candidacy--"if you ain't into
that, we don't give a damn."*
          * A Country Boy Can Survive," copyright, Bocephus Music, 1981.
          Behind the swagger, and despite the worthy call to more
self-sufficiency, the message is one of romantic retreat and
retrenchment. And this in a state where country boys' farm debts now
total more than two billion dollars, a rise of eighty-four percent
since 1977. What happens when the bank comes to repossess the
four-wheel drive? The romance of outlawry is thin solipsism to pour
over the hard biscuits of attrition. Perhaps country boys can
survive. Can they grow up?
          For George Wallace, May brought another sort of commemoration and a
resurrection--that most miraculous of survival tactics. First elected
Governor in 1962, Wallace has served three terms, four really, if you
count 

the time his late wife Lurleen sat in for him until her death by
cancer. Now, after a self-imposed four-year "retirement," and with a
new wife, Lisa, who once sang country songs with her sister (Mona and
Lisa) in the 1968 Wallace For President campaign, The Governor is
ready to honor the state again with his service. Ten years to the
month after he had been shot and partially paralyzed, he made the
announcement. As of today, his chances for election seem
excellent. Much depends on whether he can maintain the appearances of
strength, stamina and coherence. It's hard for anyone to campaign
against a man come back from the grave with an electorate desperate to
prevail with ah' its myths intact.
          "So hell," The Governor told a Post-Herald interviewer, "I nearly
died ten times after I was shot. I'd get well and peritonitis would
develop. I would never do anything that would injure my health because
I have a God-given instinct to want to survive as long as I can."
          In June, as he hops about the state from barbecue fundraiser to
television studio, it is not George Wallace who appears immobilized,
but many of Alabama's voters and politicos. The spectrum of opposition
appears ideologically narrow, tentative and uninspired. A few black
leaders, most prominently Montgomery's E. D. Nixon (the bus boycott
leader) and Tuskegee Mayor-Johnny Ford, have even made horse trades
with The Governor and are willing to swallow their history lessons in
exchange for the promise of small leverages and front seats on the
early-rolling bandwagon.
          So back to the jukebox and one more play. This time however, it's
Tammy Wynette singing, not "Stand By Your Man," or "Take Me To Your
World," but a different story. In it, a woman begins to find herself
only after her man has moved out. She is glad to be rid of his
hang-ups, gives his favorite chair to charity, wears her jeans a
little tighter, changes her hair style and learns how to dance. Then,
when her used-to-be wants to do her the favor of moving back in, Tammy
sings, "Maybe you better wait a little bit longer, before you come
back and give me another chance." It is a promising tune which
Alabamians ought to consider in this season of survival.
        