Encore: The King of Tears

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Speaker 1 Bushkin

Speaker 18 I started listening to country music when I was about 12 or 13.

Speaker 28 This was rural Ontario in the 1970s.

Speaker 24 Everyone else my age was listening to the Eagles or Fleetwood Mac, or some properly Canadian rock band like Rush.

Speaker 32 But for some inexplicable reason, I, a British Jamaican kid marooned in the Canadian heartland, found solace in the music coming out of Nashville.

Speaker 30 Lots of Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings. I can still sing almost all of Good Hearted Woman from Memory.

Speaker 35 And of course, George Jones.

Speaker 34 I still remember the first time I heard the Grand Tour.

Speaker 32 Step right up, come on in, if you'd like to take the grand tour of a lonely house that once was home, sweet home.

Speaker 35 And then the amazing lines, I have nothing here to sell you, just some things that I will tell you, some things I know will chill you to the bone.

Speaker 37 To my maudlin thirteen-year-old heart, the line, Some things I know will chill you to the bone was so fantastic, so over the top, so bonkers, and just thinking about that lonely house that was once home, sweet home brought tears to my eyes.

Speaker 37 Pop music, particularly the pop music of that era, just couldn't compete with that.

Speaker 30 I carried George Jones in my heart for a very long time until the point that I decided it was time to revisit the question.

Speaker 24 What exactly is country music doing when it makes you cry?

Speaker 43 In Nashville, Tennessee, there's a songwriter named Bobby Braddock.

Speaker 45 He's in his 70s, maybe 5'7, bald head, scruffy beard, wiry, like if you messed with him in a bar, you'd probably lose.

Speaker 47 The most striking thing about him is his eyes, which are the palest and most intense shade of blue.

Speaker 31 He wears sunglasses a lot, and it's almost as if he needs to protect the world from that look.

Speaker 32 Hello there.

Speaker 7 I met him on a music row in Nashville.

Speaker 31 We had lunch, and then we sat in one of the writers' rooms in the Sony building.

Speaker 31 Piano in the corner, couches to one side, and he talked about his education in the music business.

Speaker 53 I think I always had the reputation as being kind of a quirky writer, maybe a little left-field.

Speaker 50 The turning point in Braddock's career was a song you've probably heard of.

Speaker 44 It was performed by Tammy Wynette back when she was the reigning queen of country music, 1968, about a mom who had to spell out the word DIVORCE so her kids wouldn't know their parents were splitting up.

Speaker 53 So, D-I-V-O-R-C-E,

Speaker 58 yeah,

Speaker 53 wrote this, did a demo on it, and no checkers. Nobody did it.

Speaker 39 Nobody recorded.

Speaker 13 D-I-V-O-R-C-E was a song with a gimmick.

Speaker 7 Braddock did a lot of gimmicky songs back then.

Speaker 17 No one wanted this one. So Braddock went to a friend and longtime collaborator, Curly Putman.

Speaker 53 So I said, Well, why is nobody recording? He said, I think around the important part of your song,

Speaker 53 it's such a sad song, and your melodies on that part is too happy.

Speaker 53 And what I was doing was,

Speaker 60 oh I wish that we could stop this

Speaker 53 a little bit like a like a soap commercial I said well what would you do and he gave his guitar and he had this really mournful singing style Tammy Winnette was a big fan of Curly's singing she loved his singing because he had I mean, he just, his singing was just so sad.

Speaker 53 He gave his guitar and he said,

Speaker 58 oh, I wish that we could stop this DIVORCE.

Speaker 61 So I said,

Speaker 53 get your guitar. Let's put it on tape like that.

Speaker 13 DIVORCE went to number one.

Speaker 57 It was Bobby Braddock's first great exercise in how to make people cry.

Speaker 47 And from then on, things just got sadder.

Speaker 59 My name is Malcolm Gladwell.

Speaker 50 You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

Speaker 23 This episode is about something that has never made sense to me.

Speaker 42 Maybe it's because I'm a Canadian, or maybe Americans puzzle about this too.

Speaker 44 I'm talking about the bright line that divides American society.

Speaker 62 Not the color line or the ideological line.

Speaker 50 I'm talking about the sad song line.

Speaker 50 I don't know why people don't talk about this more, because it's weird.

Speaker 7 For the sake of argument, let's use the rock magazine Rolling Stone's list of the best songs of all time, the top 50.

Speaker 57 These are the critics' choices.

Speaker 27 Hotel California by the Eagles comes in at 49, which, as far as I can tell, is a song about drugs.

Speaker 64 Toottie Fruity by Little Richard at 43.

Speaker 64 Toottie Fruity, which I remind you has as its signature lyric: Tooty Fruity, O Rudy, Tooty Fruity, O Rudy, Tooty Fruity, O Rudy, Tooty Frutty, O Rudy, Wop, Bop, Aloo, Bop, Alop, Bam, Boom.

Speaker 17 There's Dancing in the Street at 40, Light My Fire, Be My Baby, Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, Derek and the Domino's Layla.

Speaker 38 There are songs about wanting to have sex, songs about having sex, songs about getting high, presumably after having sex.

Speaker 9 Number one song on the list, Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan.

Speaker 44 Ah, you've gone to the finest schools, all right, Miss Lonely, but you know you only used to get juiced in it.

Speaker 31 Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street, and now you're gonna have to get used to it.

Speaker 23 I think that's a song about someone who dropped out of Harvard.

Speaker 31 The number one rock song of all time is about dropping out of Harvard.

Speaker 63 In all of those 50 songs, nobody dies after a long illness.

Speaker 29 No marriage disintegrates.

Speaker 41 Nobody's killed on a battlefield.

Speaker 57 No mother grieves for a son.

Speaker 72 The closest that any song in Rolling Stone's list comes to being truly sad is Smokey Robinson's Tracts of My Tears, which is, first of all, number 50, so they put the sad song at the bottom of the list.

Speaker 62 And secondly, it's about a guy at a party.

Speaker 42 In their moments of greatest travail, the protagonists of Rock and Roll's sad songs still get to go to parties.

Speaker 54 Now just turn on a country music station, especially a traditional country music station, and listen.

Speaker 72 It's like a different universe.

Speaker 23 Marriages going to hell, people staring into their shot glass in a honky-tonk, people dying young.

Speaker 7 Have you ever heard John Prine's Unwed Fathers? It's a devastating bit of songwriting about a teenage mom fleeing town.

Speaker 74 He sings it with his wife, Rachel.

Speaker 57 On

Speaker 76 She bows her head down,

Speaker 48 humming lullabies.

Speaker 77 Your daddy never

Speaker 60 meant to hurt you ever.

Speaker 58 He just don't live here,

Speaker 78 but you got his eyes.

Speaker 44 Those last two lines, your daddy never meant to hurt you ever.

Speaker 31 He just don't live here, but you've got his eyes.

Speaker 58 That's brutal.

Speaker 31 One half of the country, the rock music part, wants their music to be hymns to extroversion. The other half wants to talk about real-life dramas and have a good cry.

Speaker 16 I don't get it.

Speaker 23 By the way, you know who wrote that Unwed Father song with John Prine?

Speaker 48 Bobby Braddock.

Speaker 26 Or maybe you've heard this, another classic recorded by Tammy Wynette.

Speaker 26 Golden Ring, Golden Ring. With one time and little stone.
Next to side,

Speaker 58 Golden Ring.

Speaker 54 It follows a couple from first love to the breakup of their marriage by tracing the journey of their wedding ring from pawn shop to pawn shop.

Speaker 80 It's a weeper.

Speaker 40 Who wrote it?

Speaker 48 Bobby Braddock.

Speaker 67 And today, 40 years after he wrote it, Braddock is still mad about a one-word change made by the song's producer Billy Sherrill because that made his song one crucial degree less sad.

Speaker 53 What we had was, he says you won't admit it, but I know you're running around.

Speaker 53 And Billy changed it to, he says you won't admit it, but I know you're leaving town.

Speaker 53 That's not as powerful as you're running around.

Speaker 58 He says you won't admit it, but I know you're leaving town.

Speaker 58 She says one thing's for certain, I don't love you anymore, and throws down the ring as she walks out the door.

Speaker 53 I think country music is supposed to be about real life, you know, and I try to reflect that in about all right.

Speaker 60 Golden

Speaker 60 Rings.

Speaker 31 Which brings us to maybe the greatest country song of all time.

Speaker 50 Certainly, the saddest country song of all time.

Speaker 59 The song that made me get on a plane and go to Nashville.

Speaker 57 It was recorded by the great George Jones, one of the half-dozen or so most iconic figures in the history of country music.

Speaker 43 You just heard him singing in Golden Ring. Jones was famously the husband of Tammy Wynnette for a time, a hard-living, dissolute megastar.

Speaker 74 Once, in the midst of an epic bender, Jones' family took his keys away, so he got on his riding mower and drove eight miles to the liquor store to get some whiskey.

Speaker 31 This was a man who could pour his fractured heart into his music like no one else.

Speaker 42 A half dozen times in his career, Jones found a song truly worthy of his talents.

Speaker 31 But it never got better than He Stopped Loving Her Today.

Speaker 50 I still remember when I first heard that song.

Speaker 16 And from the day I started thinking about this episode, I haven't been able to get it out of my head.

Speaker 76 He said, I'll love you till I die.

Speaker 58 She told him, You'll forget in time

Speaker 76 as the years went slowly by,

Speaker 58 she still prayed upon his his mind.

Speaker 61 He kept her picture on his wall.

Speaker 2 Do I need to tell you who wrote that song?

Speaker 48 Bobby Braddock.

Speaker 72 Bobby Braddock is the king of tears.

Speaker 61 But he still loved her through it all,

Speaker 61 hoping she'd come back again.

Speaker 52 Oh, man.

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Speaker 35 The year is 776 BC.

Speaker 18 Imagine you're an athlete who's traveled to Athens for the first Olympic Games.

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Speaker 10 Coincidence?

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Speaker 26 Hey there, Malcolm Gladwell here.

Speaker 22 I was just in London, and I spent most of my time doing what I love most there, walking, miles and miles.

Speaker 52 Through Clerkenwell and Covent Garden and Shoreditch, stopping for Espresso, thinking, writing, hanging out in Proofrock Coffee, my favorite coffee shop in the city.

Speaker 23 Then I had dinner at my favorite restaurant in Clerkenwell.

Speaker 50 It's been open for about 150 years.

Speaker 80 You can feel the history in the floorboards.

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Speaker 63 One of the things that got me interested in Sad Songs was a story my sister-in-law Bev told me.

Speaker 29 She and my brother live in the same area I grew up in, Waterloo County in southern Ontario.

Speaker 72 And a while ago she went to a performance by a local chamber choir, 30 singers.

Speaker 28 They sang a cantata called Annalise by the British composer James Whitbourne, a choral composition which puts the words of Anne Frank's diary to music.

Speaker 64 I know this seems like a little bit of a digression from country music, but it's a really useful case study in understanding why some songs make us cry.

Speaker 23 The performance Bev told me about was on a Sunday afternoon, a free performance at the Public Library, which is a very utilitarian, very 1960s building on Queen Street in downtown Kitchener.

Speaker 7 I've been there many times.

Speaker 45 Wall-to-wall carpet, that old books library smell, which I have to admit I love.

Speaker 32 How many people are there?

Speaker 87 It's in their main reading room.

Speaker 39 They've moved around all the tables and

Speaker 58 100?

Speaker 88 120? It's full, pretty much standing room only.

Speaker 39 As they're singing, I think, why is that alto not singing?

Speaker 88 And then I look over and I think, somebody else, a soprano not singing, that's odd, because everybody else in their parts is singing.

Speaker 39 And I realized they were crying.

Speaker 88 and they couldn't sing.

Speaker 41 Bev says she cried pretty much through the entire performance.

Speaker 31 She was looking straight ahead because she didn't want people to see she was crying, but it didn't matter because everyone was crying.

Speaker 70 When the performance was over, Bev approached the stage to talk to the soloist, the woman singing Anne Frank's words.

Speaker 88 I just went up to her afterwards and congratulated her on the beauty of the piece and then her singing. And I said, and how did you manage to sing without crying? And she said,

Speaker 88 well, I couldn't look at Mark,

Speaker 88 the conductor, because he was wiping tears from his eyes. And I had my back to the choir, so that was good.
And I didn't look at anybody in the audience, because they were crying.

Speaker 88 So I just looked up in the middle distance, and I sang. It was a good thing I had it memorized.

Speaker 31 I was at home in Canada when Bev told me that story.

Speaker 17 So I called up Mark, the conductor, and the soloist, whose name is Natasha.

Speaker 41 They're actually husband and wife.

Speaker 7 They only live a few minutes away from my brother.

Speaker 49 So they came over.

Speaker 7 Mark sat at the piano in the living room, and Natasha stood behind him, and they performed one of the pieces from Annalise that they did that day in the library.

Speaker 32 This is the last movement,

Speaker 89 it's called Anne's Meditation. I see the world, I see the world being slowly turned, turned into a wilderness.

Speaker 89 And yet,

Speaker 89 when I look

Speaker 89 at the sky,

Speaker 89 I feel

Speaker 89 everything

Speaker 89 which

Speaker 89 for

Speaker 89 all

Speaker 89 the

Speaker 89 time.

Speaker 23 Now, I realize this is a crazy question because we're hearing a piece based on the Diary of Anne Frank, which is one of the most heartbreaking stories from one of the most horrific moments in recent history.

Speaker 16 But why was everyone crying that day at at the Kitchener Library?

Speaker 57 The obvious reason is that the music is beautiful.

Speaker 29 So is Natasha's singing.

Speaker 41 The performance is also authentic.

Speaker 67 There's nothing contrived about it.

Speaker 16 It wasn't at Carnegie Hall.

Speaker 47 People weren't wearing suits and evening gowns.

Speaker 62 They were at the Kitchener Library.

Speaker 7 And there's families getting books and kids running around and everyone's on stacking chairs with the tables pushed off to the side.

Speaker 79 But here's the most important thing.

Speaker 63 Annalise is specific.

Speaker 49 It's a cantata about the actual experiences of a real person in her own words.

Speaker 29 Bev says that when she cried, she started thinking about her own family, Mennonites who escaped terrible persecution in Russia.

Speaker 79 Natasha says that as she sang about 12-year-old Anne Frank, she was thinking about her own daughter, who was 10, and who was sitting right next to Bev in the audience.

Speaker 49 Beauty and authenticity can create a mood, they set the stage, but I think the thing that pushes us over the top into tears is details.

Speaker 33 We cry when melancholy collides with specificity.

Speaker 47 And specificity is not something every genre does well.

Speaker 47 Wild

Speaker 47 horses

Speaker 47 could pray me a worry.

Speaker 31 Wild Horses by the Rolling Stones, written by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. It's a song about a conversation a man is having with a silent, suffering loved one.

Speaker 31 The story goes that Mick Jagger dreamt up the verses while sitting at the bedside of his then-girlfriend Marianne Faithful as she recovered from an overdose.

Speaker 49 I watched you suffer a dull aching pain.

Speaker 31 Now you've decided to show me the same. No sweeping exit or off-stage lines could make me feel bitter or treat you unkind.

Speaker 57 Wild horses couldn't drag me away.

Speaker 50 Wild, wild horses couldn't drag me away.

Speaker 57 Wild Horses was recorded first by the legendary Graham Parsons.

Speaker 29 Not long afterwards, Parsons died of an overdose, and his friend and protégé, the country music singer Emilou Harris, made a song in his memory.

Speaker 44 She wrote it with Bill Danoff.

Speaker 16 It's called From Boulder to Birmingham.

Speaker 60 I don't wanna hear a love song.

Speaker 60 I got on this airplane just to fly.

Speaker 60 And I know there's light below me.

Speaker 60 But all that you can show me is a prairie and the sky.

Speaker 76 And I don't want to hear a sad story.

Speaker 31 Someone who has suffered a terrible loss has gotten on a plane.

Speaker 29 And she's so numbed by grief that she can no longer see those around her.

Speaker 29 The last time I felt like this,

Speaker 29 I was in the wilderness

Speaker 29 and the canyon was on fire.

Speaker 62 From Boulder to Birmingham and Wild Horses are both beautiful, melancholy.

Speaker 7 They're about the same thing, the ties the living and the healthy have to those in pain.

Speaker 41 But which is the sadder song?

Speaker 31 I don't think there's any question.

Speaker 38 Wild horses is generic.

Speaker 41 Listen to how it starts.

Speaker 67 Childhood living is easy to do.

Speaker 7 The things you wanted, I bought them for you. Graceless lady, you know who I am.

Speaker 31 You know I can't let you slide through my hands.

Speaker 7 What's going on? Any idea?

Speaker 17 What is Mick yammering on about?

Speaker 46 Now compare that to the specificity of looking down from the airplane and seeing nothing but prairie, then standing on a mountain and watching a canyon burn.

Speaker 46 I would hold my life

Speaker 46 in his saving grace.

Speaker 46 I would walk all

Speaker 46 the way

Speaker 46 from boulder to Beringen.

Speaker 46 If I thought I could see,

Speaker 51 First she references the great black spiritual, Rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham.

Speaker 31 The bosom of Abraham is where the righteous dead go while awaiting judgment.

Speaker 73 Then she sings, and I would also walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham.

Speaker 64 Now she's locating her grief.

Speaker 44 I would make a pilgrimage from progressive, hippie, liberal, remember this is 1973, dope-smoking Colorado back to the repressive heart of the old South, just to see your face.

Speaker 23 Two completely different, specific images, each with its own set of emotional triggers, and she's piled one on top of another.

Speaker 59 Mark Vorinen, the music director of the choir in my hometown, says that there's a part in Annalise that does the same thing.

Speaker 89 Anne is, they're in hiding already, and she starts singing, and the composer has set these words in kind of a style of an American Sousa march

Speaker 89 And so she's talking about being in the bathtub and being scrubbed in the bathtub and it's this Sousa we'll scrub scrub scrub ourselves in the tinta

Speaker 89 Right very happy and optimistic music

Speaker 31 And Frank in the bathtub to the tune of a Sousa march with the horrors of the Holocaust outside her door three absolutely concrete images in merciless combination.

Speaker 89 It just floored me every time I heard it

Speaker 89 because it was so close to our own daughter,

Speaker 89 to think that she would have to create this kind of fiction in order to just get through the day.

Speaker 41 That's how you get tears.

Speaker 49 You make the story so real and the details so sharp and you add in so many emotional triggers that the listener cannot escape.

Speaker 80 But it's a risky thing to do, right?

Speaker 7 If you aren't a talented composer and you don't do a sensitive rendition of those lyrics, they could fall flat, could seem forced, even offensive.

Speaker 62 Far easier just to fall back on the bland cliché that wild horses couldn't drag you away.

Speaker 57 Country music makes people cry because it's not afraid to be specific.

Speaker 61 You know, she came to see him one last time.

Speaker 61 Oh, and we all wondered if she

Speaker 61 And it kept running through my mind.

Speaker 61 This time, he's over her forever.

Speaker 29 Bobby Braddock was born in Auburnale, Florida, a little town between Tampa and Orlando.

Speaker 70 His father grew citrus.

Speaker 46 They were Church of Christ, just about the most fundamentalist of fundamentalist Christians.

Speaker 18 Braddock moved to Nashville in 1964, just after getting married, to seek his fortune in the music business.

Speaker 23 He wrote his memoirs a few years ago.

Speaker 44 It's called A Life on Nashville's Music Row.

Speaker 23 I read it before I went to see him.

Speaker 74 And the best way to describe the book is that it's exhausting.

Speaker 36 I don't mean that in a bad way, because I couldn't put it down, but so much happens.

Speaker 85 You've lived this incredibly tumultuous, emotionally tumultuous life.

Speaker 53 I have, yeah.

Speaker 11 And in the book, it sounds like the first

Speaker 24 precipitating event is the death of your son.

Speaker 29 Braddock was touring with the country music legend Marty Robbins at the time.

Speaker 31 He and his wife Sue had a baby.

Speaker 67 The child was just a few months old when he died.

Speaker 53 Whenever I was in town, not on the road with Marty Robbins, Every single day we'd buy fresh flowers, go put it on his grave.

Speaker 76 He was just pathetic.

Speaker 80 He and Sue fight.

Speaker 75 She cheats on him.

Speaker 25 He cheats on her.

Speaker 62 They break up.

Speaker 45 They get back together.

Speaker 41 They have a daughter.

Speaker 57 They divorce.

Speaker 63 His ex-wife mysteriously vanishes.

Speaker 65 He drinks a lot, gets into fights, owes enormous sums to the IRS, has a major bout with depression, smokes a lot of pot, lurches from one volcanic event to the next.

Speaker 50 And through it all, Braddock writes songs, hundreds of them.

Speaker 32 Your kind of tolerance for

Speaker 18 emotional volatility seems

Speaker 80 extraordinary.

Speaker 53 I guess.

Speaker 53 Tolerance is

Speaker 53 probably a pretty good word for it.

Speaker 23 Braddock walks over to the keyboard on the other side of the room.

Speaker 47 He begins to talk about an old girlfriend named Angela, who committed suicide by driving her car into the river.

Speaker 53 When Angela died,

Speaker 53 her mother took her baby to raise it.

Speaker 53 And she sent me a picture of the little girl, Angela's child, when she was about four or five years old. Looked just like her mom.

Speaker 53 A picture of her standing out in the yard.

Speaker 53 And boy, it did a number on me.

Speaker 50 He wrote a song about that that in 20 minutes.

Speaker 45 He played it for me.

Speaker 31 Then he played his favorite bit of a sad Randy Newman song.

Speaker 7 He played me a heartbreaking song he wrote once after getting up in the middle of the night and passing his lover in the hallway.

Speaker 16 And as he played one weeper after another, I realized that that thing I'd said about Braddock's tolerance for emotional volatility, tolerance was the wrong word.

Speaker 31 That was just me projecting my uptight Canadian self onto Braddock.

Speaker 63 But Braddock is from the musical side of the United States where emotion is not something to be endured, it's something to be embraced.

Speaker 72 At one point, when cell phones were still analog, you could buy a scanner and listen in to other people's conversations.

Speaker 27 And that's what Braddock does.

Speaker 47 He can't help himself.

Speaker 57 A woman complains to her husband for an hour about his lack of affection from the parking lot of the grocery store, then asks him what he wants, and he says, maybe Apple Newton's.

Speaker 17 And then, this is my favorite part. I'm quoting now from Braddock's memoir.

Speaker 31 The conversation that truly touched me was between a man, perhaps forty, and his mother, maybe late sixties, in which the son opened up about sexual problems he was having with his wife.

Speaker 29 And I envied the sprinkling of profanities and the mother's invitation to come over to the house, son, and let's open a bottle of whiskey and talk about it, wishing I had that kind of easy and open communication with my mom, then learning that the guy's mother was terminally ill with cancer.

Speaker 75 If you're keeping track, that's marital difficulty, sex, profanity, whiskey, mom, and terminal cancer in one conversation, and it truly touched him.

Speaker 29 Do you know what Braddock's favorite song is?

Speaker 23 Vince Gill's Go Rest High on That Mountain, which Gill wrote in memory both of his brother, who died young of a heart attack, and fellow country star Keith Whitley, who drank himself to death.

Speaker 53 Oh my God, when Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs and Patty Lovelace are singing harmony on that thing, I go nuts. It still tears me up.
Knowing that it's about death,

Speaker 53 Vince wrote it about Keith Whitland, then about his own brother, and just the emotion that's in that song. It's just

Speaker 53 powerful.

Speaker 79 It's heartbreaking.

Speaker 29 Listening to that song makes me wonder if some portion of what we call ideological division in America actually isn't ideological at all.

Speaker 31 How big are the political differences between red and blue states anyway?

Speaker 43 In the grand scheme of things, not that big. Maybe what we're seeing instead is a difference of emotional opinion.

Speaker 16 Because if your principal form of cultural expression has drinking, sex, suicide, heart attacks, mom, and terminal cancer all on the table for public discussion, then the other half of the country is going to seem really chilly and uncaring.

Speaker 44 And if you're from the rock and roll half, clinging semi-ironically to Tootie Frutty O Rudy, when you listen to a song written about a guy's brother who died young of a heart attack and another guy who drank himself to death, you're going to think, who are these people?

Speaker 7 Here's another way to think about the sad song line.

Speaker 74 Let me read you the list of the birthplaces of the performers of the top 20 country songs of all time.

Speaker 31 Again, I'm going to use the Rolling Stone magazine list.

Speaker 48 Ready?

Speaker 50 Arkansas, Virginia, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, Mississippi, Georgia, California, Central Valley, by the way, not Los Angeles, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Texas, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Texas, Kentucky, Texas.

Speaker 23 I could do the top 50 or the top 100 or the top 200 and you get the same pattern.

Speaker 82 Basically, you cannot be a successful country singer or songwriter if you're not from the South.

Speaker 38 It's impossible.

Speaker 44 There's one exception, which is the great songwriter Harlan Howard, who was born in Detroit.

Speaker 43 But almost immediately thereafter, his family moves to a farm in rural Kentucky.

Speaker 42 It's like the five-second rule when you drop a piece of food on the floor.

Speaker 44 If it's not on the ground long enough, it doesn't count.

Speaker 67 As far as I can tell, there are no Jews on the country list, almost no Catholics, only two black people.

Speaker 31 It's white southern Protestants all the way down.

Speaker 17 Now, compare that to the rock and roll list.

Speaker 54 You've got Jews from Minnesota, black people from Detroit, Catholics from New Jersey, middle-class British art school dropouts, Canadians, Jamaicans.

Speaker 69 Rock and Roll is the Rainbow Coalition.

Speaker 49 That diversity is a good thing. It's why there's so much innovation in Rock and Roll, but you pay a price for that.

Speaker 57 There was a very clever bit of research published recently by Colin Morris in the magazine The Pudding.

Speaker 29 He analyzed 15,000 popular songs using an algorithm that compresses digital files.

Speaker 31 So if you take out the repetitive bits in a song, how much of it is left?

Speaker 67 Morris's big finding is that rock and roll, as a genre, is really, really repetitive.

Speaker 13 Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, the Beatles, if you take out the duplicative parts, their music shrinks by 60%.

Speaker 43 That's what happens when everyone is from somewhere different.

Speaker 62 Nobody speaks the same language, so you have to use cliché, the same phrases over and over again.

Speaker 82 Because if you go deeper or try to get more specific, you start to lose people.

Speaker 29 Country music, on the other hand, is not nearly as repetitive.

Speaker 31 When Morris ran the lyrics of popular country singers through his algorithm, they only shrank by about 40%,

Speaker 50 a third less than the rock and rollers.

Speaker 41 Nor is hip-hop repetitive, which makes sense.

Speaker 47 The birthplaces of everyone on Rolling Stone's list of greatest rap songs reads like an urban version of the country list.

Speaker 36 Queens, South Central LA, Brooklyn, Long Island, South Central, Long Beach, Houston, Queens, the Bronx, Englewood, New Jersey, the Bronx.

Speaker 36 Hip-hop and country are both tightly knit musical communities.

Speaker 65 And And when you're speaking to people who understand your world and your culture and your language, you can tell much more complicated stories.

Speaker 80 You can use much more precise imagery.

Speaker 13 You can lay yourself bare because you're among your own.

Speaker 70 In the book, it sounds like your relationship with Sparky was the one that seemed the most creatively fruitful.

Speaker 39 It was. It was.

Speaker 48 Sparky was was a beautiful blonde from northern Alabama, the great love of Bobby Braddock's life.

Speaker 85 Why was that?

Speaker 53 I think because

Speaker 53 my feelings about her are so strong. I mean, it was

Speaker 53 sort of a visceral thing.

Speaker 36 I think that's why I found Bobby Braddock's book so exhausting.

Speaker 41 It's because everything is felt.

Speaker 43 Everything is a mountain peak.

Speaker 49 And Sparky, Sparky was Everest, High-altitude infatuation.

Speaker 53 That's the sort of thing that make people go absolutely crazy, you know.

Speaker 53 And that was the case with her, you know.

Speaker 53 That's what gets the animal instinct of people maybe who haven't evolved as much as they should and causes them to go out and get a gun and blow somebody's brains out over some gun not being able.

Speaker 53 They can't stand the thought of someone having sex with a person that he loves.

Speaker 44 Braddock and Sparky were on and off lovers for years.

Speaker 32 It was intense, painful, euphoric.

Speaker 36 When it ended, Braddock was in pieces.

Speaker 90 He kept her picture on the wall.

Speaker 90 Went half crazy now and then.

Speaker 7 That's Braddock in the original demo he made of He Stopped Loving Her Today.

Speaker 58 He still loved her through it all.

Speaker 90 Hoping she'd come back again.

Speaker 53 I said, I'm not sure where it came from. It may have come from Sparky, you know.
I honestly don't know. It'd be interesting.

Speaker 39 How could it not? Yeah, well,

Speaker 53 I think it probably did, but I just, I can't see it. I can't say that for any certainty.

Speaker 58 Tomorrow they'll carry him away.

Speaker 15 I felt like Braddock shrink at that moment.

Speaker 29 listening to his tangled dreams and then wanting to shake him at the end of the session.

Speaker 49 It's Sparky, sparky.

Speaker 90 They found some letters by his bed.

Speaker 69 I mean, you wrote a song in the middle of the great

Speaker 27 defining love affair of your life.

Speaker 27 The relationship ends, and you write a song about the heartbreak

Speaker 85 that a man carries to his grave.

Speaker 53 I mean, it's

Speaker 32 true.

Speaker 28 Could it be more clear?

Speaker 44 I went to see him one last time.

Speaker 49 Bobby Braddock wrote He Stopped Loving Her Today with his friend Curly in 1977.

Speaker 54 They took it to the singer George Jones.

Speaker 41 Jones was then at his lowest ebb, a wreck, strung out on cocaine and whiskey.

Speaker 49 He'd just checked out of a psychiatric hospital.

Speaker 29 The great love of his life, Tammy Wynette, had embodied her hit song, D-I-V-O-R-C-E, and left him.

Speaker 49 Jones had just nearly shot and killed one of his best friends.

Speaker 72 The heartbroken Bobby Braddock has written a song about a man who cannot stop loving a woman, and it's sung by the heartbroken George Jones, who cannot stop loving a woman.

Speaker 61 Kept some letters by his bed

Speaker 61 in 1962.

Speaker 61 He had underlined in red.

Speaker 59 Underlined in red.

Speaker 61 Every single I love you.

Speaker 48 Every single I love you.

Speaker 61 I went to see him just today.

Speaker 61 Oh, but I didn't see no tears.

Speaker 58 All dressed up to go away.

Speaker 61 First time I'd seen him smiling years.

Speaker 43 Why did he finally turn his back on his great love?

Speaker 72 Why is this the first time he's smiled in years?

Speaker 57 Because he's dead.

Speaker 62 Only death could end his love.

Speaker 41 It's totally over the top.

Speaker 68 Maudlin, sentimental, kitschy.

Speaker 40 Call it whatever you want.

Speaker 63 Just don't fight it.

Speaker 50 One thing that Bobby Braddock told me in passing that I think about a lot is that he thought of the character in his song as a bad role model. The man was obsessed.

Speaker 16 He couldn't let go.

Speaker 36 But that's the point, right?

Speaker 45 That's why we cry.

Speaker 42 Because the song manages to find beauty and even a little bit of grandeur in someone's frailty.

Speaker 42 Handsome Mel Carrie her away.

Speaker 57 He stopped loving her

Speaker 58 today.

Speaker 57 Wild horses, please.

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Speaker 91 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Grand Ole Opry House, to the celebration of life of George Glenn Jones, one of the most important people ever of all time and of any time in the history of country music.

Speaker 55 George Jones died in 2013.

Speaker 46 Everyone who was anyone in country music came to his memorial service.

Speaker 31 You should watch it if you get the chance.

Speaker 7 It's on YouTube, all two hours and 41 minutes of it, because it's everything I've been talking about.

Speaker 50 Vince Gill stands up with Patty Lovelace and sings, Go Rest High on That Mountain, and breaks down halfway through.

Speaker 57 Travis Tritt remembers a conversation he once had with Chris Christopherson about how they expected George Jones to have died years before.

Speaker 92 And I looked at Chris and I made the comment,

Speaker 92 you know, with all the years of hard living that George had,

Speaker 92 who would have ever thought that he would outlive Tammy?

Speaker 91 And Chris

Speaker 92 looked at me and said, Had it not been for Nancy,

Speaker 92 he would not have.

Speaker 44 Nancy Jones, George Jones' fourth and final wife, the real love of his life, his soulmate and companion.

Speaker 29 Travis Tritt holds out his hand towards Nancy, who's sitting right in the front row.

Speaker 92 George said it many times.

Speaker 83 She's my angel, and she saved my life.

Speaker 92 And so we owe you a debt of gratitude for that.

Speaker 68 Then comes the crowning moment of the day, the final performance.

Speaker 79 Alan Jackson strides out onto the stage, a big rangy guy, craggy features, cowboy boots, jeans, long coat, white Stetson.

Speaker 49 He looks squarely at Nancy Jones.

Speaker 56 and without introduction launches into he stopped loving her today

Speaker 76 he said I'll love you till I die.

Speaker 58 She told him you'll bore and get tired.

Speaker 78 As the years went so

Speaker 60 by.

Speaker 50 And you realize as he sings that Braddock's song has gotten even more specific.

Speaker 44 It's no longer about a long-ago love affair.

Speaker 62 It's about right now.

Speaker 47 This is the the day George Jones stopped loving Nancy Jones.

Speaker 42 Alan Jackson takes off his hat and places it over his heart.

Speaker 5 He stopped loving her

Speaker 76 today.

Speaker 44 And if you aren't crying, I can't help you.

Speaker 61 We love you, George.

Speaker 91 One of the three greats of our time, ladies and gentlemen, at all time.

Speaker 91 That's Alan Jackson. Thank you for my channel.

Speaker 31 Revisionist History is produced by Mia LaBelle and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and Siomara Martinez-White.

Speaker 62 Our editor is Julia Barton.

Speaker 31 Flawn Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Guerra.
Special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg of Panoply.

Speaker 48 I'm Malcolm Gradwell.

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