Bob Proehl, I Shake My Head at You

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine about book-writing and I said that there’s no reason to NOT try to get published, if you want to, because lord knows, any damn fool can get a book contract.

Take as a case in point Bob Proehl over at PopMatters.  He’s “operating No Radio Records, an independent record store and performance space, as well as DJing under the name AutoMatic Buffalo. His first book, The Gilded Palace of Sin, on the slight rise and quick fall of the Flying Burrito Brothers, is due out later this year from Continuum Press.”

Wow.  A book about a somewhat country group.  A column over at PopMatters where he writes about music.  Dude must know what he’s talking about, right?

Keeping in mind that I’m no country music expert, I found these mildly shocking errors in his piece today about murder ballads.

1.  Proehl: “The War of the Sexes in music has historically been a call and response affair, regardless of genre. Hank Williams records “Honky Tonkin’”, Kitty Wells fires back with “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”.”

Truth: “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” was in response to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life.”  Even if you didn’t know this, a 3-second search on the internet would tell you.  But more than that, if you have any familiarity with Hank Williams’s “Honky Tonkin’,” you’d have to know that such a claim makes no sense.  “Honky Tonkin’” is a feel-good ditty with no heart-breaking woman in it.  Even Williams’s “Honky Tonk Blues” contains no nefarious females.  Is this some kind of bizarro Hank mix-up?  I don’t know, but it’s pretty weird.  Especially considering that Proehl seems to know a little bit about Hank Williams.

2.  Proehl: “In the early days of hip-hop, status of male performers was denoted by skill-based naming honorifics like Grandmaster, a tradition going back to soul musicians like King Curtis as well as Jamaican performers like King Tubby and Prince Buster. Early female rappers took similarly constructed names, like Queen Latifah and MC Lyte, forming personas that stressed their technical prowess.”

Truth: While “King,” “Prince,” and “Queen” certainly are honorifics that indicate that the person so named is worthy of respect, in no way are those honorifics “skill-based.”  Unless I’m not understanding what he’s saying.  “MC Lyte” is a skill-based honorific because she is indeed an MC who is good at it.  But King Tubby, Prince Buster, and Queen Latifah are not actually royalty, and, even if they were, being royality is not something that takes special skill.  It’s an accident of birth.

3.  Proehl:

Case, Welch or Cantrell may present the image of their country predecessors, but they have no intention of resigning themselves to the limited roles women have previously been allowed in country music. While she presents the image of herself tagged with a blue ribbon, Case’s first album also asserts the singer’s new role: Tammy Wynette may have been willing to take second billing behind George Jones and stand by her man, but Neko Case is backed by an anonymous group she tags as “Her Boyfriends”.

While they began their careers by mimicking the imagery of older days, both performers also opted to reiterate some elements of the murder ballad tradition in their live sets, in both cases by dipping a toe into the traditional “Long Black Veil”, which interesting enough is about an innocent man and a victim of indeterminate sex. Both singers take on the male narrator role and deliver the song “straight”.

Truth #1: “Case” + “Welch” + “Cantrell” = 3.  “Both” =2.  So, who knows which two sang “Long Black Veil” or if all three did.

Truth #2: “Long Black Veil” is not “traditional” in any sense of the word as people who write about music usually use it.  A song is “traditional” when it’s old and no one knows for sure who wrote it.  “Long Black Veil” was written in 1959 by Danny Dill and Marijon Wilkin and then recorded by the man who made it famous–Lefty Frizzell–in that same year.

Truth #3: Well, not a truth exactly, but let me just say I raise my eyebrows in suspicion of anyone who’s trying to draw a line called “country music history” that goes from Kitty Wells to Neko Case in such a way that it seems to completely write out of existance any actual country music stars.  And I say that as someone who likes Neko Case.

4.  Proehl: “Both ‘Long Black Veil’ and ‘Poor Ellen Smith’ share one major characteristic: in both songs’ narratives, the male narrator, here embodied by a female singer, is imprisoned despite being innocent and in both cases, the body is punished while the soul goes free.”

Truth: Not exactly.  In some versions of the song, the narrator is indeed unjustly convicted of the death of “Poor Ellen Smith,” but in other versions of the song, the narrator did indeed kill her. And, if I remember correctly, Case’s version is ambiguous at best.  In one part, the narrator seems to be innocent and dead, and then in the next part, s/he’s alive enough to receive mail and be let out of jail and her guilty status seems implied.

So, listen, yes, a lot of these thing (except the “both” and “three” thing) an ordinary person isn’t going to catch.  But anyone who listens to and writes about music should kind of know some of this stuff or look it up before passing the wrong stuff off as the truth.  And yet, here we are.  Bob Proehl wrote this column and he has a book contract.

Keep that in mind.