Presidential address: high lonesome. From the Southern Association for Vascular Surgery.

Abstract

Let me begin by saying what an honor it has been for me to serve as the President of the Southern Association for Vascular Surgery. During my professional career I have seen the birth, the childhood, the early adolescence, and now the adult years of vascular surgery. Someone once said that a presidential address is like a body at a funeral—you can't have it without one, but nobody expects you to say anything. In a 1959 essay in Esquire, Alan Lomax,1Tichi C High lonesome: the American culture of country music.in: University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill1994: 102Google Scholar the song collector and folklorist, argued that the Appalachian Mountains had engendered a “vigorous pioneer music,” vitalized by “a century of isolation in the lonesome hollows.” He identified the sound of this American music, bluegrass music, as the “high lonesome.” Bluegrass music audiences know this sound well and know that it originated with Bill Monroe, the founder of bluegrass. Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass music, died in September 1996. He said of his early life that it was a hard life to grow up with no money.2Pareles J Obituaries.New York Times. 1996 Sep. 10; Sect. B: 14Google Scholar He said you'd sing a lot of sad lonesome songs. In his high, lonesome tenor voice he created one of the most durable idioms in American music. His music became the bedrock of a tradition that survives among enthusiasts around the world. His influence echoes down, not just through country music, but from Elvis Presley, who recorded his “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” to the Grateful Dead and the Eagles. Cecilia Tischy, in her exploration of country music entitled High Lonesome begins by saying that in the car, that's where this book begins.3Tichi C High lonesome: the American culture of country music. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill1994Google Scholar For me, the subject for this talk began in the car, one Sunday morning returning from early morning hospital rounds. I heard Cecilia Tischy interviewed on my favorite country music station. I knew that America's music was going to be my topic for this presidential address today. As she says, country music is really about the country, the United States, as the nation has been represented in its literature and its visual arts. Chet Atkins said “Country music is our heritage; they ought to teach it in the schools.”4Tichi C High lonesome: the American culture of country music.in: University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill1994: 1Google Scholar Country music is a distinctively American, commercial, popular music whose roots reflect a storied melting pot, a blending and mixing of the diversity of musical traditions.5V Country Music. A brief history: Country Music Foundation, Pugh, Ronnie.Google Scholar Most important is the Anglo-American folk music heritage. Transplanted to the Southern United States and living there in relative isolation for centuries, British ballads like “Barbara Allen” and “Pretty Polly” became staples of the rural musician's repertoire. The American experience added new themes to traditions' stock of tunes, with songs from the cowboy, the farmer, the railroader, the coal miner and, as always, the lover. Other music roots joined this country music trunk from the African-American, Cajun, and Latin American cultures as settlements spread from Southeast to Southwest across the U.S. landscape, and these brought new instruments and new songs to the traditional base. Rural musicians added even more songs, styles, and instruments from the passing popular music of the late Victorian era and early twentieth century America. These influences literally passed through the hinterlands in traveling shows, minstrels, vaudevilles, medicine and tent shows—leaving their marks on amateur rural pickers and singers who entertained themselves, family, or friends at typical gatherings such as house parties and fairs. The fiddle was America's most popular frontier musical instrument, and as time passed the better fiddlers began competing for prize money at a growing array of fiddler's conventions. The talented band leader or string band picker could always hope to find work with the traveling shows, and some did. Roy Acuff and Gene Autry first honed their talents in medicine shows. As a larger entertainment industry grew, southern rural music was tough to name and to classify; it was ready to carve a niche for itself. In 1925, which is only 5 years into radio's commercial history, WSM in Nashville was one of four stations that had pioneered the use of live country talent on barn dances of the air. It was just a few years later that country music also became a staple of the powerful Mexican border radio stations, which blanketed North America with live or recorded rural talent from the 1930s into the 1950s. I was born and raised in Nashville, “Music City USA.” My first recollection of country music was in 1940 when I was away in summer camp in North Carolina. I was never a camper; I much preferred home and that's probably why I remember. It was Saturday night in the large pavilion where the entire camp gathered for vespers. In the background on the radio was the music of the Grand Ole Opry emanating from radio station WSM in Nashville, Tenn. Country music and I both grew, but it was a good many years before I returned to my roots and allowed country music to be a regular part of my life. It was during my fellowship in Houston with Dr. DeBakey that I was first introduced to music in the operating room. I don't recall that the music we listened to was country music; it was whatever Dr. DeBakey felt was appropriate and what he wanted to hear. I do remember that one of the more popular songs during 1959 and 1960 was “Mac the Knife,” and I could relate to that very well. There was a hiatus as I established practice before I came back to music in the operating room. When St. Thomas Hospital built its new facility and we moved into my new operating suites, the music was piped in. Not country music, but at least it was music. However, when the good sisters decided we had to have a quiet hour in the morning and in the afternoon, some of us brought our own sound systems into the operating room, and they have remained there since then. There was an article in JAMA in September 1994 on the effects of music on reactivity among cardiovascular surgeons.6Blascovich AK Effects of music on cardiovascular reactitity among surgeons.JAMA. 1994; 272: 882-884Crossref PubMed Scopus (141) Google Scholar A beneficial autonomic effect of music was demonstrated in this study. It was, therefore, with a great deal of delight that I read this article because I wholeheartedly endorsed the concept of music in the operating room. I felt that it was beneficial to have background music and never felt that it interfered with the surgical procedure. There were many times when as the tension increased, as problems developed, my reaction was “turn up the music.” Nietzsche wrote in 1889, “Without music life would be a mistake.” The authors in the JAMA article speculated that “without music, surgery would be a mistake.” It was Jimmie Rodgers, a tubercular ex-brakeman from Mississippi, and the Carter Family from Virginia who were discovered by Victor Records in 1927 in Bristol, Tenn., and began to forge careers in country music. Rodgers symbolized and sang about the rounder, the rambler, the roustabout. The Carters stood for home, God, mother, family, and faith. It was in the 1920s that the record companies used Atlanta and Memphis as their centers for recording. It was not until 1928 that Nashville hosted a recording session, and it was some 20 years later that music recording came to Nashville to stay. Let's step back a minute and look at the mother church of Nashville music, the Ryman Auditorium. The Ryman was constructed as a tabernacle as a result of a revival by Samuel Porter Jones in 1885.7Eiland WO Nashville mother church: the history of the Ryman Auditorium.in: Thomas-Parris Printing, Old Hickory, Tenn1992: 8Google Scholar Thomas Green Ryman, who was a steamboat captain and had made money on building and plying steamboats on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers, heard Jones at one of his revivals and was “converted.” It occurred to Ryman along with Jones that a tabernacle for all denominations that would be large enough to accommodate a crowd was something Nashville needed. Finally, in May 1899, the tabernacle was completed at an approximate cost of $100,000 and had the capacity for 3755 people.8Eiland WO Nashville mother church: the history of the Ryman Auditorium.in: Thomas-Parris Printing, Old Hickory, Tenn1992: 18Google Scholar The Grand Ole Opry began on Nov. 28, 1925, as the WSM radio barn dance.9Hemphill P The Nashville sound.in: Simon and Schuster, New York1970: 38Google Scholar The show was broadcast from the WSM studios. The featured performer that night was an 80-year-old fiddler, Uncle Jimmy Thompson, who boasted he could fiddle the “taters” off the vine. Others must have agreed, because before the hour-long program was over telegrams were pouring in requesting that he play the listeners' favorites. The barn dance became a hit, but there was also another program that preceded the barn dance on WSM radio that was called the “Music Appreciation Hour.”10Hurst J Nashville's Grand Ole Opry.in: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, New York1975: 78Google Scholar It was a program of classical music directed by Dr. Walter Damroch, who was at one time the leader of the New York Symphony. George D. Hay, the solemn old judge of the Barn dance, followed the “fine lace” of Dr. Damroch's classical hour. It was in 1927, the year of my birth, that the solemn old judge introduced his program, “Friends, the program which just came to a close was devoted to the classics. Dr. Damroch told us that it was generally agreed that there is no place in the classics for realism. However, from here on out, for the next 3 hours we will present nothing but realism. It will be down to earth for the earthy.” Judge Hay then uttered the words that still reverberate in the national music consciousness: “For the past hour we have been listening to music taken largely from grand opera. From now on, we will present the grand ole opry.” Thus WSM found an “official name” for the program that has continued uninterrupted every Saturday night since 1925. There seems to be some disagreement as to exactly when the Opry moved to the Ryman, but historians at the Country Music Foundation feel that they have the documentary evidence that the move to the Ryman Auditorium occurred June 5, 1943. The move to the Ryman Auditorium firmly established country music as a form of entertainment. A portion of the Grand Ole Opry was sold to the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in 1939, so that by 1943 there was an endorsement of Prince Albert Smoking Tobacco during the show. Jimmie Rodgers was as Southern as you can get. He was born in Meridian, Miss., in 1897.11Hemphill P The Nashville sound.in: Simon and Schuster, New York1970: 132Google Scholar His mother died when he was 4 years old, and he hit the road with his father, who was a gang foreman on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad. That did not leave much time for school, but he was going to a school of another kind. He road the rails and lived in towns all over the South. He learned a lot about music from the black work gangs along the way. He saw honky tonks, hobo camps, and train wrecks. By the time he was 14 years old he was fully employed by the railroad, and although he had a deep interest in music, he never gave it much consideration as a career until tuberculosis forced him to retire from the railroad at the age of 28. Rodgers had a style that was to lead him in great prominence. It was a mournful technique derived in part from his listening to the blacks and their music—it was called a “blue yodel,” and it became the hottest act in country music. For 6 years, Jimmie Rodgers was the leading entertainer in vaudeville shows, school houses, tent shows, and radio shows. He sang the songs of the people of the South. He was known as the singing brakeman. His singing left an indelible impression on the country that was in the early days of the depression and soon to suffer the ravages of the dust bowl of the Midwest. He died in 1933 at the age of 36. I graduated from medical school in June 1953. It was on Jan. 1, 1953, that Hank Williams died in the back seat of his pink Cadillac convertible on the way to a concert in West Virginia. Those early years of the Fifties had seen the birth of vascular surgery: the first aortic replacement in 1951, carotid endarterectomies in 1953 and 1954. Hank Williams was born in Georgiana, Ala., in 1923. At the age of 7 years, his mother gave him a $3.50 guitar, and the “hillbilly Shakespeare” was taking his first music lessons. His teacher was a black street singer, who instructed Hank while the boy was shining shoes and selling peanuts on the curbstones of Alabama towns. Hank Williams went on to be a song writer with a variety of veins: weepers (“Cold, Cold Heart”), happy songs (“Hey, Good Looking”), philosophic pieces in monologues under the name of Luke the Drifter, and sacred songs (“I Saw the Light”), but none that touched so many as “I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry.” He was playing a medicine show when he met and married his wife, Audrey Shepherd. She was to have a major influence on his short life. Ernest Tubb was impressed with Hank Williams and recommended to the manager of the Grand Ole Opry, Jim Denny, that Hank be given a chance on the Opry. He was, at the time, on another country show, Louisiana Hayride. Hank Williams came to Nashville for an audition at WSM, where he met Fred Rose. Hank sang several songs for Mr. Rose, but to prove that he could write music it is recounted that Fred Rose gave him an imaginary situation and sent him in a room to write a song.12Kingsburry P The Grand Ole Opry: history of country music.in: Villand Books, New York1995: 82Google Scholar He emerged with “Mansion on the Hill.” It was June 11, 1949, that Hank Williams sang “Lovesick Blues” on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. Years after his death it was written, “He stopped the show colder than it has ever been stopped before or since in its 31 years.” After Hank had gone through six encores, Red Foley had to make a little speech to quiet the place down and get the show back on schedule. The next 2 years, Hank held his drinking in check and his music popularity soared. Minnie Pearl characterized him as a strange man. Trying to cope with him was like riding a tiger—you couldn't ride it and you couldn't get off. Hank Williams shared the fundamental beliefs of his audiences. He had respect for his religion, his roots, and his upbringing and liked the old shouting country gospel music. 1951 was a high point and a low point in Hank Williams' short life. During that year, he had hit after hit on the top ten charts. His drinking was under control, but unfortunately he fell under the influence of Toby Marshall, a man who had obtained a $50 medical degree by mail. Marshall's concept of treating alcoholism was to give the patient injections of morphine, phenobarbital, and hydrates. Hank was receiving these and drinking as well. Also, in December 1951 his chronic back problem was exacerbated, and he required surgery. Early in 1952 all of his problems got the best of him. He fired a gun at Audrey. She left him, and they were divorced for the second time. In August 1952 he was fired from the Grand Ole Opry. His fame was short-lived, and it was on Jan. 1, 1953, at the age of 29 that he was found dead in his Cadillac on the way to Oak Hill, W.Va. Hank Williams' body lay in state at Montgomery's Municipal Auditorium. It is said that there has never been a funeral in Montgomery to match.13Kingsburry P The Grand Ole Opry: history of country music.in: Viiland Books, New York1995: 86Google Scholar “Luke the Drifter” lay in a silver casket as Ernest Tubb sang “Beyond the Sunset.” Roy Acuff sang “I Saw the Light,” and Red Foley sang “Peace in the Valley.” It was in the year of his death in 1953 that his song “I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive” outsold all other records. If the Ryman Auditorium was the mother church of music, then Minnie Pearl was its minister of humor. She was born in Centerville, Tenn., on Oct. 25, 1912. She became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 1940 and was the first woman to be a part of the Opry.14Oermann RK America's music: the roots of country.in: Turner Publishing, Inc, Atlanta1996: 96Google Scholar In her humor, she constantly talked about Grinders Switch, a railroad switching site near Centerville, Tenn. She attended Ward Belmont College in Nashville and taught dance in Atlanta for a while, but at the age of 28 she joined the Grand Ole Opry. The world recognized her as Minnie Pearl, the comic with a $1.98 flowered hat. After her first show on the Opry, she received more than 300 cards and letters regarding her performance. Minnie Pearl was an invented role for Sarah Ophelia Collie Cannon. Having attended Ward Belmont College in Nashville, she described the origin of her comedy character role: “I was city broke, having graduated from a finishing school. For 6 years after leaving Ward Belmont, I worked in rural areas producing amateur musical comedies out of Atlanta. It gave me a chance to really make a study of country girls. I became Minnie Pearl in 1936 in Bailey Town, Ala., at a show. I was staying in a mountain cabin and met a fine old mountain woman who told so many tales and funny stories. After spending 10 days with her, I began to quote her and people would laugh. She was like Granny on Beverly Hillbillies, a sprightly, brittle, hardy woman with a bun of hair on the top of her head.” The city of Nashville recognized Minnie as a cultured, sophisticated woman, married to a businessman and friend to many local citizens other than her audience. She was deeply involved in the community, sincerely caring for people and giving. In 1971, Sarah Cannon underwent double mastectomy for breast cancer. In 1987, she was awarded the National Cancer Society's award for bravery of the year. In 1991, she lent her name and the money to create the Sarah Cannon Cancer Center at Centennial Hospital in Nashville. Amy Grant, whose father cared for Minnie Pearl during her many trying years, named her oldest daughter Sarah Cannon Chapman. Sarah Cannon died in May 1996. The father figure of country music was a thin, wispy man with a warm smile, a deeply lined face, and a yo-yo that he played with on stage. Roy Acuff was born in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee. His first love was baseball, and he hoped to become a professional baseball player. An accident, however, prevented him from continuing his dream, and he learned to play the fiddle. It was in 1938 that his first great hit, “The Great Speckled Bird,” was played on the Grand Ole Opry and became his trademark.15Oermann RK America's music: the roots of country.in: Turner Publishing, Inc, Atlanta1996: 52Google Scholar During the war years, this song along with the “Wabash Cannon Ball” and “A Wreck on the Highway” were the country music songs listened to throughout this country and abroad by men of the South in the service. In 1981, Roy Acuff became the first living musician elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame. The citation read “Roy Acuff, the Smokey Mountain boy.” He fiddled and sang his way into the hearts of millions the world over, oftentimes bringing country music to areas where it had never been before. The king of country music carried his troupe of performers overseas to entertain his country's armed forces at Christmas time for more than 20 years. Many successful artists credit their success to a helping hand and an encouraging word from Roy Acuff. The first 10 years of the Opry were dominated by instrumental music rather than vocal music. It was not until the rise of Roy Acuff that the show had a singing star. By 1943, Roy Acuff was undisputedly the biggest figure in country music. As far as the hillbilly record business was concerned, before 1952 women were the primary source of the blessings or afflictions that male hillbilly stars sang about, but that was about all. The principle subjects of hillbilly song, women were people to be loved (sweethearts, mothers, or wives), complained about (wives or sweethearts), scorned (all others), or wary of (all of the above). They could add some visual appeal or comedy to the live performance of the male stars, but they were not supposed to aspire to singing stardom for themselves. It was in 1952 that a talent scout for Mercury Records signed a teenage female drummer to a recording contract.16Hemphill P The Nashville sound.in: Simon and Schuster, New York1970: 38Google Scholar His superiors were not particularly enthusiastic. They said girl hillbillies don't sell, everybody knows that. His response was they don't sell because we don't know how to sell them. The reason we don't know how to sell them is because the hillbilly record business has been too long dominated by men. If you get just one girl singer really started, look at the business she would do—there wouldn't be any competition. The superiors won out, and that teenage drummer, Oklahoma born and California raised, would find another recording label and become the matriarch of the Opry's female vocalists, Jean Shepard. In 1949, RCA had recorded eight songs by Kitty Wells, the wife of hillbilly singer Johnny Wright of the Johnny and Jack team. The songs were all religious or semireligious, and none of the records were ever distributed. Johnny Wright, however, believed in his wife's potential popularity. He had seen how the audience responded to her frequent appearances as a gospel singer with the Johnny and Jack troupe. In 1952, when a Hank Thompson recording on Capital called “Wild Side of Life” began to look like a huge hit, Decca Records, Johnny and Jack's label asked Kitty to record an answer to the Thompson song. The song was “It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.”17Oermann RK America's music: the roots of country.in: Turner Publishing, Inc, Atlanta1996: 99Google Scholar This was the answer to the “Wild Side of Life.” It was sung with a high, forceful, lilting quaver. The recording sounded as if it had been recorded by a female Acuff. It disproved all previous theories about female hillbilly records, quickly became the top song in hillbilly music, and led the way for many other female hillbilly classics. The next was Jean Shepard's “The Dear John Letter,” on which she was aided by a Ferlin Husky monologue. This song was recorded during the Korean War and stayed on the top of the hillbilly music popularity poll for 28 weeks. Kitty Wells was to reign as the queen of country music for the next decade. In his memoirs Cronkite Remembers, Walter Cronkite said that Gore Vidal described the decades of the Sixties as the slum decade. It was the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the cesspool of Vietnam that were to embitter this country for years to come. In medicine, however, it was the beginning of the golden years—coronary artery bypass, extracorporeal circulation, and the first heart transplant by Christian Barnard in 1969. It was also the decade of man's breaking the bonds of earth and venturing into space. In country music, two significant style-setting changes were made at the beginning of the Sixties. First, Patsy Cline, a singer with a powerful voice, became a star after winning an Arthur Godfrey Talent Scout contest.18Oermann RK America's music: the roots of country.in: Turner Publishing, Inc, Atlanta1996: 129Google Scholar This showed that country girls could sing songs in a smoother, more pop-oriented style and sell to both country and pop audiences. Joining the Opry in the early Sixties, she recorded “I Fall to Pieces” and “Walking After Midnight,” which briefly made her the leading female country vocalist in America before she died in a plane crash. The second was Loretta Lynn replacing Patsy Cline, with a different approach to country music.19Oermann RK America's music: the roots of country.in: Turner Publishing, Inc, Atlanta1996: 173Google Scholar Loretta, a coal miner's daughter, began her singing career in a Custer, Wash., grange hall one evening when her husband Mooney, a rodeo rider, got up before an amateur-night crowd and announced that his wife could outsing any girl singer besides Kitty Wells. Still a teenager, not then quite 14, Loretta proved him right. She and Mooney traveled across the country stopping at radio stations. In her twangy, Kentucky voice, she asked the DJs to play her songs. They did, and she became a star. Loretta joined the Opry in 1962. Loretta was probably aided by a change in the times. The Sixties were not nearly as naive as the Fifties. People had become more broad-minded. If a woman had sung a song like “Don't Come Home A-Drinking (With Loving on Your Mind)” 20 years before, she would have been taken out and tarred and feathered. With “Don't Come Home A-Drinking” and “You Ain't Woman Enough (To Take My Man),” Loretta Lynn made an important contribution to the image and the confidence of the country girl. These songs and others like them that she wrote reflected her inclination to fight for her rights rather than meekly accept her lot. Many other female artists who followed owe a lot to the pioneers of the Fifties; Crystal Gayle (Loretta Lynn's sister), Tammy Wynette, Brenda Lee, Dolly Parton, and, of course, the stars of today; Reba McIntyre, Cathy Matteau, Tanya Tucker, Pam Tillis, and the list goes on and on. The styles of Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills were heavily laced with blues. So, it was a long-simmering pot that boiled over when hillbillies began to rock. Rock-a-billy's trouper place was Memphis, the home of the Burnette brothers and Sun Records. Rock-a-billy, so the story goes, originated from the Burnette brothers, Johnny and Dorsey.20Oermann RK America's music: the roots of country.in: Turner Publishing, Inc, Atlanta1996: 103Google Scholar They had sons, Rocky and Billy, and one night they dedicated songs to their sons Rocky and Billy and wrote “Rock-A-Billy Boogie.” On the scene at Sun Records in Memphis at about that time were Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash. Four giants and artists in the field of music in one small studio in Memphis. Elvis was the king of rock, but with his talent, his charisma, and his manager, Colonel Parker from Nashville, he was also a part of country. He toured with Ferron Young, Ferlin Husky, the Carter Sisters, Hank Snow, the Duke of Paducah, Marty Robbins, and on down the list. He performed for the first time on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry in December 1957. It was inevitable that rock-a-billy would hit the top of the pop charts with the Everly Brothers “Dream,” Marty Robbins with “The White Sport Coat,” Elvis with “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Don't Be Cruel,” and “Hound Dog.” The seventies found this country embroiled in the Vietnam War, Watergate occurred, and President Nixon was forced to resign. The Southern Association for Vascular Surgery was founded and held its first meeting in 1976 in Nashville. It was the golden era of medicine, as the government had given us Medicare with a platinum American Express card and an unlimited credit. Robert Allman's film, Nashville, filmed on location in Music City, made its debut on Aug. 8, 1975. It was an attempt to portray something of Music City's style and in doing so reflect on America as a whole. Some viewers thought the movie wickedly insightful, others found it extremely condescending. Brenda Lee's statement is probably as good as anyone's: “The only way it will be a big movie is for it to play a long time in the North. That's what the people up there think we look like, anyway.” Another rather prophetic statement was made by Ronnie Milsap, who said “I could say I didn't see a thing in the film, but that wouldn't be fair.” On March 15, 1974, the Grand Ole Opry played its last performance in the Ryman Auditorium. The closing number was a stage full of performers singing “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Plans for a new opry house had begun in 1968, when the president of WSM did not feel that the Ryman Auditorium could be renovated and decided that it was time for a new home for the Opry. The first performance in the new opry house was March 16, 1974. Present were President Richard M. Nixon and his wife, Pat. Ironically, it was on August 8, 1974, that Nixon resigned his presidency. Country music had its new home, but it still had its problems. It was during this same period of time that Buddy Holly had risen to stardom. Waylon Jennings played bass for Buddy Holly. He had been with Holly for only 2 weeks as they were on a Midwestern tour but fortunately was not on the plane that crashed, taking Buddy's life. Shortly thereafter, Waylon fell in with a key singer/songwriter, Tompall Glaser. Glaser had grown dissatisfied with the Nashville sound, and in 1967 he and his brother dared to publish a song that broached the subject of “free love”; John Hartford's hobo song for the counterculture “Gentle On My Mind.” This, of course, launched Glenn Campbell's career. It also staked Tompall and his brothers to an independent recording studio and production company. They called their music “progressive country”—a couple of guitars, a bass, drums, steel, maybe a harmonica, but no strings, no horns, and no carefully harmonized background choruses. By making his own kind of driving music, Waylon Jennings began to click on the charts as he never had before. In 1973, a North Carolina disc jockey needed a handle to explain grouping together the music of Waylon, Kris Kristophers