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True to the Roots
Americana Music Revealed
By Monte Dutton University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2006 University of Nebraska Press
All right reserved.
Chapter One
Waiting for Jack Ingram FORT WORTH, TEXAS | DECEMBER 2003
The interview is supposed to be sometime around 4:00 p.m. at the sound check. Onstage at Billy Bob's Texas, the Fort Worth honky-tonk that includes, among other things, honest-to-gosh bull riding on the side.
Jack Ingram packs them in at Billy Bob's. That's because Texas has a musical culture all its own. Ingram's big in Texas but virtually unknown in the rest of the country. That's really a shame because Jack Ingram rocks.
There's a delay while the swarthy guy manning the entrance checks to see if anyone back in the concert venue knows who the hell I am or whether the hell I'm supposed to be here. Apparently, someone thinks, yeah, maybe somebody wants to interview Jack. I think I heard something about that, man. Let the dude back.
So, I'm there. But Jack isn't. Supposedly, he missed a plane from El Paso. Or maybe there was a delay. Something went wrong. Turns out he'll be here in time for the show. The road manager says we'll work something out. For a while I watch Ingram's Beat-Up Ford Band complete the sound check. They do Ingram songs-"Hey You," "Mustang Burn"-with someone else filling in on lead vocals, but then they just start screwing around, checking the sound with songs by AC/DC and God knows who else.
My grandmother raisedme to be inherently cheap in a nitpicky sort of way, and I already paid to park outside Billy Bob's, and there's no way I'm going to leave and fork over five bucks for nothing again. So, I wind up wandering the Stockyards. For five hours.
There's a lot to amuse a person. A big horse show is going on at the "historic" rodeo arena. I grew up around horses, and even though I haven't ridden a horse in a decade or two, I sit around on this review stand and watch all the cowboys and cowgirls loping around, making sure their quarter horses are in the right leads, which is horse show lingo for the inside foot falling first at every stride of a canter. I guess you have to be in that world to understand the crucial importance of such things.
There are many women, dressed up in their cowgirl suits, pink hats, and sequined jackets and the like, and it strikes me that relatively few of them really know how to ride. Many of them are holding the reins too tightly. All the poor horse needs is the slightest flick of the wrist, but some of these girls seem intent on yanking the poor animal's teeth out. Too many of them are would-be beauty queens-I guarantee the teenage ones enter or have entered pageants at the local armadillo festival (Armadillo Days!)-and trophy wives. Some of them know what they're doing. I bet I can pick who wins based on the way they hold their reins, but I didn't come here to watch a horse show, so after an hour or so, I move on.
I look at the menus of a dozen restaurants, all posted behind glass outside the front door. I take a look at who's playing at the various clubs. I even hang out in one for a while, watching the afternoon act play to a mostly empty house and eventually leaving a couple of dollars in the mayonnaise jar at the front of the bandstand. It's a big mayonnaise jar, restaurant sized, but there's not much in it.
I browse in a bunch of shops and am mildly inclined to buy a piece of cowboy art to put up on the wall of my house. What dissuades me is the thought of trying to get it back to South Carolina. Too complicated. But I chuckle to think of the scene at the airline counter, in which I'm trying to explain myself. I guess they'd plaster a FRAGILE sticker on the back, which wouldn't prevent the harried employees of us Airways from "taking infield" with it out on the tarmac.
For a while-a long while, actually-I sit outside in the evening air, listening to classic country tunes being played over the PA system. God, how long has it been since I heard Cal Smith's "Country Bumpkin"? When did music reach the point where rhyming bumpkin with pumpkin became passé? I mean, once you accept the premise of writing a song about a bumpkin, what else could you do but contrive a rhyme with pumpkin? Guess that's why there aren't nearly enough bumpkin songs.
I have a steak at the Cattleman, where, since I was too lazy to go back to the car and pick up a book to read, I basically consider all the overdeveloped bulls, steers, and heifers that won awards at the nearby cattle shows and thus had photographs taken with their dour owners, eventually to be hung on the Cattleman walls and pondered by lonely diners. I wonder if any part of Clara Belle II ever ended up being served in this very steakhouse. Probably not. One would hope award-winning beef would earn a better fate.
I'm wearing tennis shoes, which sort of stigmatizes me, but I'm glad I've got them because after wandering around for hours, my feet are hurting. Eventually, I return to Billy Bob's, where I have a beer and watch the house acts over in front of the dance floor. One of the things that would surely be different if I lived in Texas is that I would eventually be able to two-step. It looks so simple, yet I can attest from experience that it's not so easy. Then again, I reckon I've never tried it when I'm sober. It's one dance that defies any gap between generations-it's practiced by aging couples and fresh-faced youngsters alike. The older two-steppers do it with a relaxed professionalism, smiling at each other in an old-time, romantic way, while the young whippersnappers gyrate around and wonder about "gettin' some." It's second nature to all of them.
Eventually, I move down into the concert hall, and there, freshly arrived from somewhere like El Paso, is Jack Ingram. Sure enough, he doesn't show up until there are only minutes to spare. The interview will have to wait until after the show, but, yeah, the road manager tells me, just hang around-Jack wants to talk to you.
I don't know that I've ever seen anyone connect more intimately with an audience than Ingram, who is intense and charismatic. He works his ass off up there, but the guy with the really demanding job is the young man who must constantly restring and retune Ingram's guitars, for he is truly a string-busting sonovagun.
And Jack has his dreams. He's a damn fine fish in a pond that's too damn small. Not that Texas is small. Oh, no. Them's fightin' words. But Jack Ingram ought to be playing coliseums, not dance halls, and packing them in ought to mean twenty thousand, not three. This man is truly what Jimmy Buffett many years ago referred to as "a hot Roman candle from the Texas Panhandle," even though Ingram isn't from Lubbock or, a late plane flight notwithstanding, El Paso.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from True to the Roots by Monte Dutton Copyright © 2006 by University of Nebraska Press. Excerpted by permission.
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