Hurtin', Leavin' and Longin' (42)—Fightin' Words

Click here to read the introduction to the Round and Square series "Hurtin', Leavin', and Longin'..."

[a] Gendered argumentation RF

Loretta Lynn is fightin' mad, and her fury is focused, terrifying, and gendered. Up walks a stranger who tells her (so goes the narrative) that it's time to step aside. Loretta is dumbfounded, but not in the way we ordinarily might think. She can't believe how dumb and unfounded this little plan seems to be. Listen to the whole story and check out the lyrics. They are not especially "deep," but they are memorable. 

You Ain't Woman Enough 2:15 

You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man) 

[b] Roar RF

Artist: Loretta Lynn 
Songwriter: Loretta Lynn
        You've come to tell me something

You say I ought to know
That he don't love me any more
And I'll have to let him go

You say you're gonna take him
Oh, but I don't think you can
'Cause you ain't woman enough
To take my man

Women like you they're a dime a dozen
You can buy 'em anywhere
For you to get to him
I'd have to move over
And I'm gonna stand right here

It'll be over my dead body
So get out while you can
'Cause you ain't woman enough
To take my man

(Instrumental)

Sometimes a man's caught lookin'
At things that he don't need
He took a second look at you
But he's in love with me
Well, I don't know where that leaves you
Ah, but I know where I stand
And you ain't woman enough
To take my man

Women like you they're a dime a dozen
You can buy 'em anywhere
For you to get to him
I'd have to move over
And I'm gonna stand right here

It'll be over my dead body
So get out while you can
'Cause you ain't woman enough
To take my man
No, you ain't woman enough
To take my man

***  ***

[c] Confrontation RF

It'll be over her dead body...and it's time to leave. What I find fascinating about this song is its confident and dismissive tone during what ordinarily would be thought of as a worst-case relationship scenario. The rival shows up with the dreaded words—she has dropped a pitchfork into the tender hay of a fine relationship. Loretta Lynn doesn't focus on the rift (he did take "a second look," after all). She knows where she stands, though, and even more importantly knows where the man stands. She sizes up the competition, worries not about water under the bridge, and moves forward—with venom.

The gendered anger is the last point I wish to consider here. "You ain't woman enough..." What, exactly, does that mean? Does it imply that someone might, with a bit more "woman cred," be a real threat? Or does it mean that, supremely confident in her sense of self and worth, Loretta brooks no competition? The most interesting line of argument for me, though, is the appropriation of male pugilism in this particular struggle. On the one hand, the rhetorical power grab is pretty straightforward. "Man enough to x" is about as old as campfire arguments after mastodon hunts.

          Grog not Neanderthal enough lift my spear.
          Am too.
          Are not.
          I go paint in cave. Relieve frustration.

[d] Painted argumentation RF

This gendered argumentation has woven its adversarial path through Eurasia and beyond, to all of the continents and most every group of testosterone producers with opposable thumbs the world has ever known. Is that all this is about for Loretta Lynn? I don't think so. Lynn is just too gosh darned good a songwriter for the lyrics to hinge on a tired old line. On the other hand, she is such a gosh darned good songwriter that she will cast a nylon cord into the water that screams "tired old line"...and then catch some new fish with it. That's what I think is going on here. I think Loretta Lynn is playing with us, luring us into yin-yang familiarity (and reversal) before providing a strange and original portrait of relationship confidence.

That what Grogrob think.

Whether or not you buy it (I hope such an interpretation is not "a dime a dozen," in any case), we have a poem to conjure this week. In rather stark contrast to the last few Hurtin' posts, this one has not been easy. Let's just say that there are not very many poems detailing porch front confrontations between two rivals for a single (so to speak) man. Reverse the genders and there is plenty (all times, all places, all cultures—this one goes back to Grog and Gerta, too).

Gendered female fightin' words are to be found—and quite prominently at that—in the novel, The Plum in the Golden Vase, we have considered here several times during the last few months. I just want it to be known that this scenario does appear in East Asian literature (not a few Japanese narratives have a hints of this theme, too).

[e] Flower Mountain RL

Not so much in the poetic traditions, though, and that is what I would like to consider today. We are looking for juxtaposition, and it is in the full flowering of the Tang dynasty (618-906) poem (詩) that I wish to dwell. This particular poem, "The Girl From Flower Mountain," has all the elements of a fight on the porch between Chinese faiths. Its author, Han Yu (768-824), was a vociferous opponent of Buddhism and its "foreign" influences on China. This poem has a bit of a "you ain't Chinese/Han enough to take my indigenous religion" quality to it. Think through Loretta Lynn's lyrics and then read "The Girl From Flower Mountain." The juxtaposition will do you good, as we say back home. Photos e, f, and g are from my personal collection—taken on research trips to Flower Mountain (華山) in Shaanxi Province.

The Girl From Flower Mountain
Han Yu (768-824)
       On street corners east and west
            they teach the Buddhist sutras
       Banging bells, blowing horns
            rattling the court
       Much is made of sins and blessings
            to seduce and awe
       the listening crowd shoving
            —floating waterweeds pressed—
       A yellow-robed Taoist also
            preaches his texts,
       below his pulpit people are scarce
            like morning stars

       The girl from Flower Mountain
            (her family follows the tao)
       wants to dispel the strange teaching
            and return people to the immortal Spirit
       She washes makeup away, scrubs her face
            puts cap and mantle on,
       white neck, red cheeks
            long black eyebrows
       come then to climb the pulpit,
            explain the true mysteries

[f] Flower Mountain RL

       It's not allowed to open the bolt
            on the temple door
       yet unknown someone leaked
            leaked the news around,
       now crashing, a shaking
            like thundering lightning
       sweeping clean the Buddhist temples 
            empty of human tracks,
       thoroughbred horses block the street,
            strings of covered carriages,
       people inside fill the temple
            others sit outside,
       latecomers have no space,
            no way to hear
       They take out hairpins, pull off bracelets,
            undo jade pendants,
       heaped gold piled up jade
            gleaming a green light
       Worthies from the portals of Heaven
            convey the imperial command—
       The Inner Palace desires to learn
            the teachers face and form

       The Jade Emperor nods his head
            allows her return
       riding dragons mounting cranes
            she reaches the blue void
       Young lords of noble houses
             know little of the tao
       come circling a hundred turns
           with ceaseless feet
      Clouded windows misted belvederes
            these enraptured affairs
       double-folded kingfisher curtains
            deep golden screens
       The immortal ladder is hard to climb
            worldly ties are heavy
       idly they trust the blue birds
            to carry their youthful regards. 
                                  —Translated by Charles Hartman
Notes
[1]  Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo, Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1974), 173-175.

Bibliography
Liu Wu-chi and Irving Yucheng Lo. Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1974.

[g] True mystery RL

NEXT
Sunday, March 11th
Don't Cheat In Our Hometown
We'll receive some excellent advice from Ricky Scaggs next week. Join us for the next painful installment on Hurtin', Leavin', and Longin'. 

Hurtin', Leavin' and Longin' (34)—Country-Western Holiday

Click here to read the introduction to the Round and Square series "Hurtin', Leavin', and Longin'..."

[a] Jagged RF

In the spirit of the holidays, I have chosen five songs by country-western artists (the last has been featured on this blog before, but certainly went far beyond the genre as the 1950s turned into the 1960s). The number five is hardly here by chance. Classical Chinese cosmology teaches that everything is made up of fives. When I teach students how to think about this challenging concept, I always stress the way in which the "five directions" (add "center"), the "five mountains," or the "five colors" are meant to represent the whole—everything. I would be getting just a little too technical if I spent much time stressing that they do more than "represent" everything. In a special sort of cosmic way, they are meant to be everything. The five mountains are the mountains. The five colors are color. And so forth.

[b] Cosmology RF

If you are wondering where this is going, I want to stress the ancient Chinese idea of the "five seasons." The five seasons (add "center") are the year, and each is its own little self-contained whole of wonder. That is the theme for today's holiday songs. They're all country...sort of. They're all about the holidays...sort of. And they're all, well, cosmic. Sort of.

Take a listen to my pentalogy of songs. They aren't particularly sad, and you should be grateful that I left out a few miserable gems that would have broken your holiday spirit and left your celebrations in tatters (not taters). I have a heart, it turns out (just search "Merle Haggard December") if you want to know where this could have gone).

In any case, we head from Tex to Gene to Loretta, and wrap it up with Patty and the King. They are all about seasonality and a little about Christmas. It is perhaps not going to shock readers of Round and Square that a certain "approach" to the season dominates (there are not very many songs about the holidays that focus on, let us say, other world religious traditions).

Still, these songs should be an enjoyable mix of everything (the "five holiday songs"), and give a pretty good feel for the whole of this time of year.

Tex Williams

The Winter Song 2:07

Gene Autry, on the other hand, has a distinctly regional and cultural form of merriment to share. Note, as well, that there is nary a hint of "y'all" in the lyrics. Gene went Hollywood with his enunciation, it seems.

Gene Autry 

Merry Texas Christmas, You All 2:42

Since Gene Autry brought up one of the major holidays of the season, we'll keep the focus briefly there but zoom out, as it were, to a distinctly wider spatial configuration. "Country" is a lot bigger than "Texas," at least unless you look at the map on Autry's song on the video you just watched. There, the Texas panhandle stretches ever northward, and Amarillo makes it (by morning) into Manitoba. Loretta Lynn channels Coal Miner's Daughter as she tells us all about what Christmas is like in "country."

[c] Frozen RF

Loretta Lynn

Country Christmas 2:16

We vault forward and backward with our last two songs. Patty Loveless plays upon color imagery and seasonality in a way that would make a Chinese fortune-teller envious. The combination of blue, white, grass, snow, and bluegrass is perfect, and never has there been a better country singer surname than Patty's.

Patty Loveless

Bluegrass, White Snow 3:23

We bring it home on this holiday season of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Islamic New Year (actually in November this year) with the incomparable King. There is a double-coated veneer of sadness in this song, and I always like to think that it is transferable to any holiday tradition, anywhere in the world (it'll be a blue...lunar New Year...without you). In China, they might have called Elvis the "Son of Heaven" (天子) instead of "king" (王) but the idea is basically the same. He's big, and he crosses musical genres.

Elvis Presley

Blue Christmas 2:14

Elvis Presley

Blue Christmas (Live, 1968) 2:38

NEXT
Sunday, January 1, 2012
We'll start the year out right with a nice dose of measured misery. We'll work back cautiously into full-scale emotional pain, so next week will require only a half-box or so of tissue.

[d] Blue RF

Hurtin', Leavin' and Longin' (24)—Don't Come Home A-Drinkin'

Click here to read the introduction to the Round and Square series "Hurtin', Leavin', and Longin'..."

[a] Drinking RF

[b] Icons RF

Except for "old Hank," nothing says "country music" like Loretta Lynn. Nothing. She has been a force in Nashville since the 1960s, and has managed a fifty year career as artist, author, and (this is difficult) icon. Several years ago, my sister, who was then a country music DJ, received a handwritten letter from Loretta Lynn, urging the station to play her music. Loretta Lynn pays attention to the details, and that is also one of the reasons why she has been successful, and not only in the "business" of music.

Lynn's attention to detail is also what made her one of the finest ethnographers of married life ever to write...and sing. The hits of her heyday (sixteen of which went to number one on the Billboard charts) read like an ethnography of rural America in the 1960s. This was not the world of demonstrations, teach-ins, and a certain music festival in New York. No, this was a world of poverty in youth, marriage at thirteen, and close observation of the details that led, at twenty-four, to a career as an entertainer. Perhaps no song provides as strong a contrast with "the rest of the sixties" than Loretta Lynn's "One's on the Way." It is not our song for the day, but I include it as a bonus to make a point about a storied ethnographer of rural America.

Today's song deals with a peculiarity of married life that particularly caught Lynn's ethnographic eye. It takes an acute sense of observation of a particular set of (in her telling, male) foibles and then adds an artistry that I doubt any writer has caught as well as she has. Thousands of songs (and Chinese poems, not to mention novels) discuss the issue of male drinkin'. Loretta Lynn adds lovin' to the analytical mix, though, and we have a brilliant portrait of dysfunction that is as memorable as it is alliterative. Take a listen, and read the lyrics (watch the video later; it is good, and provides an excellent glimpse of the bluegrass master Bill Monroe).

Don't Come Home A-Drinkin'  2:26

For advice on how best to "engage" the lyrics, click here.

               Don't Come Home A-Drinkin'
               Songwriter: Loretta Lynn
               Artist: Loretta Lynn

[c] Belted RF

Well you thought I'd be waitin' up
When you came home last night
You'd been out with all the boys
And ended up half tight
 
But liquor and love
They just don't mix
Leave the bottle or me behind
And don't come home a drinkin'
With lovin' on your mind

 
Chorus

No don't come home a drinkin'
With lovin' on your mind
Just stay out there on the town
And see what you can find
'Cause if you want that kind of love
Well you don't need none of mine
So don't come home a drinkin'
With lovin' on your mind

Instrumental

You never take me anywhere
Because you're always gone
And many a night I've laid awake
And cried here all alone
 
Then you come in, a kissin' on me
It happens every time
No don't come home a drinkin'
With lovin' on your mind

Repeat Chorus

So don't come home a drinkin'
With lovin' on your mind
No don't come home a drinkin'
With lovin' on your mind

Drinking and loving. It's a combination Loretta wants no part of. She was definitely testing the interpretive waters with lines such as "that kind of love," and it is a small wonder that country music radio in the 1960s did not flinch. There is no mistaking her meaning, though, and it is the kind of gendered anger that gives me a strong feeling of feminist satisfaction. One of the comments on the YouTube® video hits the nail on the head, and I quote it here: "Loretta Lynn is a badass." I take this to be a positive statement, and am confirmed in my estimation of her toughness by several other songs of hers, such as "Fist City," and "The Pill." 

Loretta's lyrical rage is not confined to men, though, and that complicates any easy "feminist" picture of her. Life is complicated, and so are Loretta Lynn's songs (at least one of which really tests the limits of my anthropologically-informed Native American cultural-studying patience). So, in addition to "Coal Miner's Daughter" and "You're Looking at Country," we have "You Ain't Woman Enough to Take My Man." Indeed, Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty brought all of the themes together in a lighthearted duet that explores teeming, underlying marital tension. It's called "You're the Reason Our Kids Are So Ugly." Life is complicated.

[d] Traditional RF

So, how do we follow "Don't Come Home A-Drinkin" with Chinese poetry? If we wanted to echo the themes, we could open the Ming dynasty novel The Plum in the Golden Vase (金瓶梅) to almost any of its 2,000 or so pages. The protagonist of the novel is notorious for coming home a-drinkin' with loving on his mind (both recent past and future tenses, if you get my drift). I have already quoted from that "racy" novel on these pages, and the comparison is just too easy. Instead, we'll look to the Song dynasty (my own "homeland" for historical study), and a poet who was still predominantly writing in the Tang shi (詩) style. This poem provides a few lines that take Loretta's verses in a new direction. Here we have a sad poem about marital happiness (and loss). Poems about happy marriages in Chinese history are about as common as blissful-marriage country songs. They exist, to be sure, but the vast majority tend to go "the other way." Tolstoy was onto something here.

          Second Marriage
          Mei Yaochen (梅堯臣; 1002-1060)

          I married a second time the other day,
          happy about the present, still grieving for the past.
          Once more there is someone to take care of the household;
          my shadow is no longer alone in the moonlight.
          Yet from force of habit I still call old wife's name—
          my heart is just as troubled as before.
          Luckily both women are kind and gentle
          and I have married again the best of wives.
                                             —Translated by Jonathan Chaves

[1]  Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo, Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1974),316.

Bibliography
Liu Wu-chi and Irving Yucheng Lo. Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press, 1974.

NEXT
Sunday, October 23rd
He Stopped Loving Her Today
The classic of the classics. This song was listed in the early-1990s as the greatest country song of all time. I have played it during lectures about country music and East Asian poetry (people actually attend them). Grown men and women cry. Younger people sometimes laugh, and not in a rude way. This is the song's brilliance. Prepare yourself for misery mixed with a little irony and reflexivity...next week on Hurtin', Leavin', and Longin'.