Jordan James
HOW TO WRITE A COUNTRY SONG
Class
The good writers, the ones with dynamite up their sleeves, get by on three chords. Three. Anything more and you’re playing jazz or soul or bubblegum. Funk. And the black artists are always going to do those a little bit better, so y’all are better off just sticking to country.
That’s what I tell the room full of mostly white inmates at Stone County Correctional who signed up for what I now realize should have been called How to Write a Song. In theory, the class doesn’t make much sense, as this is a state facility full of people without ready access to guitars or keyboards or even harmonicas. But my lawyer tells me volunteering to teach a class like this will look good on my record, something to make the parole board feel like their little facility is making a positive change in the world. As it stands, my lawyer said, they wouldn’t let you past the Coke machines.
In class, the men buzz about the rigged and smuggled instruments they’ve seen over the years.
Ripcord made him a guitar out of a bed spring and his toothbrush, says a fellow named Judd. C.O. Bryan lets him keep it because he can whip “Smoke on the Water” right out of that thing.
I say, Tell him to bring it to class next time.
Oh, Ripcord killed about three of his cousins with a tire iron, Judd says. He don’t get out much.
Another piece of lawyerly advice I received: get out more. Pat some backs and make nice with the new guys. My lawyer says, Old wizened kicker like you, especially one who’s a little cripple. You could be a mentor. And stop writing that damn memoir.
Hey, Rev, one of the guys says from the back of the small rec rooms they’ve lent us for the class, we only going to write country songs here?
I know how to write country songs, I say. And I do it better than anyone in south Mississippi—there’s a Billboard number one under my belt—but the same rules apply to gospel or the blues, any music that trades flash for truth.
Gospel, blues, country, fucking zydeco, Jerry, another inmate, says. Whatever it is, they only give us a half hour in here so let’s get on with it. Tell us, Reverend, Jerry continues, his voice now calm and attentive, How do we write us a country song?
Kris Kris-fuckin-tofferson
Before Stone County, long before the arthritis curled what few fingers I had left, before my Margie, and before I made a few fans as the Reverend, I wrote a number one song on the Billboard charts—Country. Hit number sixteen on the Hot 100. I called it “The Kindness You’ve Shown” and it was the sweetest little two-and-a-half-minute slice I ever cut from my soul. Kris Kristofferson must have thought so, too, because he stole it right out from under me, called it “Why Me,” and had the biggest hit of his whole Hollywood life.
He came in the Nashville bar that night with the four-p.m. crowd, the folks with fume halos who were just fired a week ago and hadn’t yet told their wives, or had enough money to avoid working a real job entirely. It was 1971, and I was the only joker in town who wasn’t sucking on his pants leg—he wore those spendy jeans right off the rack that looked like Cowboy but smelled like Dude—so, of course, I’m the one he saddles up next to at the bar.
His eyes were swollen raw. This man had been crying. Years later he’d weave a great yarn about a church service led by Reverend Jimmie Rodgers Snow that spun his head around and opened his eyes to all that shooting and snorting and fucking he’d been doing with Janis Joplin the year before. The sixties were the euphoric peak of civilization, man, the last dying cum-shot of America. That’s what he sat there and told me.
And you know what? He probably had just left church, been touched by His healing hand, cried half a saltwater river. A man decides to turn a new leaf after soaking the old one in a quart of LSD. Good for him. Bully. He might have been forgiven, but he wasn’t inspired to write a Number One. That was me, and I wasn’t even inspired; I was just trying to prove a point.
He must have known it, Kristofferson. We songwriters have the power to sense and suss out others of our kind. He said, You mind? and pulled out a neighboring stool, knowing he was the Guy and could sit anywhere he wanted. He smelled like butterscotch or the inside of a deodorant can. Man smelled like he gave a damn about personal hygiene, which I’ve always appreciated.
What’s your name? said Kris Kristofferson.
Andy, I said.
Andrew—mind if I call you Andrew?—what are we drinking?
Olympia.
Isn’t God good?
Pardon?
Pitcher of Olympia, Webb.
I said, Cut the game up, will you?
Nothing but gospel from here on out, Andrew.
Kris Kristofferson’s Revival Hour.
Shit, son. Put you on payroll. Johnny already lent me some of his gospel records—Carter Family, The Bells of Joy, the Brother Cecil Show.
The Man in Black’s name plastered to the side of my skull. I almost missed everything Kristofferson was saying.
Give me a week, he said, and I’ll have this gospel formula figured out.
What’s to figure out?
This job ain’t easy.
Same structure as those country tunes you sell all over town.
How you figure?
Christ. Christine. What’s it matter? It’s all the same.
Mmm. Christine Schutt. That was a girl.
Love’s love, right?
I’m not sure I should do to Jesus what I did to Chrstine Schutt.
You’re going about it wrong, I said. Joke, but it’s the truth.
They’re all love songs, huh?
Every last one.
God’s just a woman?
God’s all the women. Every last one.
Now you’re talking.
The Song
A couple pitchers in I found my way into his limousine. He was fumbling in a crate hidden underneath one of the long bench seats. He pulled out a Martin guitar worth three months of my rent and tossed it over—threw it like a watermelon. I held it, flipped it around, got my eye right up there on those pearl inlays—K R I S, frets three, four, five, and six. Those three chords I play sounded alive. My chord hand vibrating with the power of sound. A symphony sausaged into a baseball bat.
A proposition, Andrew. That’s what he said as he poured him a whiskey from the limo’s mini bar. Prove your theory. Write me a gospel song and you’ll take that box home with you.
It’s like my luck had been hibernating for two decades and all of a sudden decided to crash out all mean and hungry one day in the back of Kris Kristofferson’s limousine. I said, You got a deal.
Forgive me if I don’t go in too deep on the line-by-lines of writing the song, my Number One. Every note and word is a trigger cocked. Singing it would be like driving my old sciatica down a knotty, backwoods road. You’re a liar. You old lying fool. That’s what I usually hear about this point in the story, as if every plot turn preceding the part where I write a song they might have heard was a bite they could swallow. Bull shit, old man.
A detail I’ve always omitted: he cried after, head in hands, elbows on knees. I wrote that song; took me fifteen minutes and all three of my chords. I sang my song and made Kristofferson leak all over his brand new jeans. I wonder if that’s when he had the idea. All those tears saying I am sorry. Andrew, forgive me. I am so so sorry, but that’s mine now.
I kept that Martin for fifteen years until I was relieved of it. More on that later.
Stubs
I lost two of my fingers the day I bought my first guitar, a Silvertone Jumbo I could only play with three fingers but a guitar all the same. A snarling rotary belt picked a fight with me and took as its prize my bird and pinky finger. Pulled a sheath of skin off the digit meant for a wedding band, but the Lord saw fit to save it. He probably signed off on the salvage of my ring finger and got right to molding Marge out of sweet, Puerto Rican clay. I let the hand recuperate, then put that Silvertone to work.
I tell folks you only need two chords because it’s the truth and however I came to that truth is my own business. In the seventies and eighties, a man couldn’t admit he only needed two because two’s all he could play. Nowadays, I can afford to be sensitive. Parole board will eat that shit up. And then I’ll fix things. And then I’ll set things right.
My stubs were a scapegoat of mine for years—when I wasn’t raging on over Kris Kristofferson. Country went pop so fast. Bubblegum sugar wrapped its long, scaly body around this beautiful art and python’d the life out of it. And you know what pop music demands? Chords. All minor sevenths and suspended seconds and chunky bar chords my hand was never able to provide.
Class
I like the verse because, once you got your chords and the intro, you finally get to start telling a story. This is me in front of a packed class of inmates, twice as many as the first session. I tell them I brought an exercise to help write the perfect country song.
Nobody tells a story better than me, says Craig. I got the formula.
Trucks says, Craig, If you could tell a story you’d be sucking the white off some lot lizard instead of stealing my soap every night.
First thing, I say, you need to do is make a few lists for me. Use the markers. Listen, here’s what I need: give me the three things you love most about your mama, the two things you hate most about your old man, and one childhood memory of nature—trees, possums, whatever. You find a way to rope in a dog, I’ll throw in extra credit, but don’t play the pooch unless you can sell it.
We had this one dog, Judd says. Went to church every Sunday. Even took communion.
Holly J. says, Got me a blue-nose pit waiting at the foot of my bed right now.
My old Rhubarb could bark “You Shook Me All Night Long,” says C.O. Bryan.
I say, Maybe in the final verse you introduce a woman.
And one ZZ Top song.
A new beginning.
Maybe “La Grange.”
A bright hope.
Margie
Marge owned a bar in Ocean Springs, right off the Mississippi coast before the wealthy men and women of the world rebuilt downtown in the image of chai tea and gluten-free doughnuts. She did this in the mid-seventies, just before I said Fuck this rhinestone town and drove my truck back to the Gulf Coast. Margie Perez built that place out of plyboard and clay and ran it like a Spartan. By the time I had settled into a brand-new-but-somehow-rusting mobile home, The Jungle Bird was an establishment for a certain crowd—my crowd—of people.
The first night Marge gave in and let me take her out, she made us boozy Bailey milkshakes and we never actually made it to the restaurant. She knew I’d never set foot out of the U.S., but sang along anyway when I’d strum a serviceable a-minor and say, I learned this one in San Juan from the mouth of the master.
Let me see you dance, I’d shout.
And damn that woman would shake.
After five years and as many proposals, we got married. She simply ran out of ways to say No. I got a bar to run. You’re fun but what’s real. Kiss kiss, sure, but I cannot hear anymore about this Kristofferson. Fine, Andy, dios mio, yes, sí, please, I have customers, go. My one and only wife, a true love and a proud bitch of a woman. This was 1984.
When Margie got the Holy Ghost a couple years later at the Pentecostal Tabernacle, she sold the bar to some boys who tore it down and replaced it with a used-car lot. I would haul myself out there just about every evening and prop a foldable chair in the bed of a for-sale truck. I’d sip Ten High from the bottle until them boys ran me off or called the law one.
Blackouts and Bonfires
One morning—this would be around 1986, after the baby was born—Margie paid my bail and drove my sorry ass to the trailer our small family had long outgrown. She was never meaner than she was on drunk-tank mornings. I never blamed her much, as I was the one doing the drinking and the tanking. Normally, I’d just lay back on the couch as Marge lobbed her woes like bricks. I’d mumble something like Yu-wana wak the bubee? and boy that set her off fresh.
It was all routine until the afternoon I woke up in time to see my wife heave the first of my record bins on a bonfire. The green plastic siding turned black and dripped drops of jelly fire on the ground. I remember the center of one of the containers caving and spurting vinyl wax like magma.
And it wasn’t just my records; that pile grew tall with jeans and boots and video tapes and lyric books and even my beanbag chair. She saved Kristofferson’s Martin for last, the only proof I ever had of that bastard thieving my song. That guitar was here today, I’d be set up, vindicated. New life.
Loving you means loving myths, she screamed at my slack face. Means knowing you’ll love this ash more than you’ll ever love me and the baby.
I had her, my glorious wife of two years, on the dying grass with one palmed slap.
The baby? I don’t care to write about her. She’s grown now and I can at least spare her from this account. You don’t need to know anything about her to deem me rehabilitated.
All you need to know is the worst thing I ever did didn’t happen in some parking lot three years ago, but in a field where I stumbled with a stinging hand, dragging a charred Martin through a cow field while my wife caught her breath in the dirt.
Emperor King Kong Rock Hard Banana
Maybe it was the liquor or the new state of living—wifeless, homeless, songless, proofless—I had found myself in that made the booze lose its potency and had me scrambling for alternatives. Maybe it was the lickin’ I took after insulting a ballcap suburbanite trying to have a quiet night. Or maybe the Benzodiazepine I bought off Teddy C after picking gravel out from my cheek. Teddy C can pick a mean guitar, which is besides the point. Something made me black out. It was probably the pills.
I woke up with the sun somewhere out in the Escatawpa woods with blistered hands and a dull Bowie knife. Every trunk on the walk out was scarred with words. Here, greazy-with-a-Z baaaad motherfucker. There, Emperor King Kong rock hard banana. Another, choke all the fatty life from my neck. Each one signed The Reverend.
Class
You’re telling a story. You’ve set up all the who’s and when’s and where’s and now you’re getting to the good part, the sugar-sweet moment when you’re leading lady has one leg in your pickup. She managed to sneak out without waking her husband and the kids and sky’s the limit from here on until the sun rises. And just about that moment in your story some sorry drunk chimes in and asks, Hey, you, what’s this story even about? Why am I even listening?
And it doesn’t matter that this old rum sponge isn’t even one of your pals and wasn’t invited to listen in the first place—you still have to answer.
That answer, boys, is your chorus.
The inmates of Stone County look either confused or annoyed that I just wasted three minutes of their life saying something I could have said in one, and I realize none of these clowns are ever going to write a country song. I tell myself It’s for the parole hearing for the seven hundredth time and open the floor for questions.
Are we ever gonna sing?
You ever met Marty Stuart, Rev?
What are they feeding us tonight?
I got at least nineteen Fucks in my song. (Not a question.)
The class groans when I pull out a stack of worksheets the sweet lady from the front office offered to type up and copy. Everyone agrees that today is for singing. I demand we only sing choruses and open the floor.
The class bursts into a clamor of sounds, amidst which I hear “Crazy” and “Country Boy Can Survive” and what I can only assume is Whitney Houston’s cover of “I Will Always Love You.” Before long the majority of the student inmates start singing about how in Birmingham they love the governor and I shut that down because that one has way too many guitar solos to be true country; and, besides, that’s not even the chorus.
The worksheets, the silver bullet that would have neutralized the unfettered enthusiasm of the class, remain blank and uncreased on the desk in a pile I’ve decided to leave undisturbed. One of the guards will eventually get annoyed and put a stop to the fun and who am I to do his job for him.
I realize I could say anything in the world right now and it would be suffocated into nothing. Sing it with me, I yell.
Maize and corn, Lysol and Sprite
Days of yore, hacksaw a knight
Lazy whores take off the night
Raise your sword, see-saw dog bite
I might have said, Class, choruses shouldn’t be too brainy. Not too silly. Ride that center line and avoid cliches. Maybe I could have broken down the rambling magic of Willie, the way “City of New Orleans” is somehow a celebration of a city, a country, and the desperate need to escape both. If you can’t come up with something that genius, I’d say, and you won’t, just remember Don Schlitz scribbled down some gambling advice, called it a chorus, and made Kenny Rodgers immortal.
Look at this worksheet, I should have said. Write me a chorus that’s only one line. What does your grandmother shout when she stubs her toe? When she feels the Lord? Write that down and sing it over and over and over from deep in your belly.
Mississippi Sound
I almost made it, you know? an engineer told me the day I booked my first studio session. He and his grey ponytail were sidelined by the birth of his kid or his crippling cocaine habit. I can’t recall. I had done it. I had played enough shows to convince some cashed up widow to finance a few sessions, lay down a few of my tunes. She just wanted some company, a nice set of white teeth to funnel down the cash her dead oil man of a husband left her. I rubbed her feet a few nights a week while the going was good.
After Margie I met Johnny Pecan—look it up, you think I’m lying—who told me he runs a recording studio out in Biloxi. He called it Mississippi Sound, opened it in the mid-seventies and built himself a modest reputation as a guy who produced demos that went on to be big hits after being rerecorded in Nashville. Said he had Jimmy Buffett’s personal phone number. He was a nice guy who let me crash in a loft above the isolation booth. Nice guy, but he wouldn’t let me near the microphone unless I had enough for at least three hours worth of time. Son of a bitch. He was all right. Made a mean corn salad.
Johnny let the engineer go after setting up the mics that first day. He was boss hog and was impressed by the small-but-enthusiastic crowds I had been drawing along the Gulf Coast.
The Rev could be someone, he said. You listened to me and changed your name; stopped asking people to pay to see a honky-tonker named Anthony.
Andrew.
Even worse. Listen, since The Highwaymen, outlaw country is back. Sing about beer and your ex-old lady—Manda?—some more and you won’t be recording in this dump town long.
Marge.
Say what? Andy, The Reverend. You got it, buddy. Write songs that bite. Shut the hell up about Kris Kristofferson. He’s a Highwayman and a personal friend. He’s helping you out.
Then out of nowhere, Johnny says:
All I want is to hear the perfect voice. I want it to walk into Mississippi Sound and turn the sheetrock to powder, rip the foundation up from the slab and toss all this junk in the gulf.
It won’t be yours, Rev. No offense.
One day I’m gonna sell this place. That voice, whoever has it, can come after I’ve gone. I don’t mind. Really. I’ll know either way.
The Reverend
I was the Reverend. I was a greazy-with-a-Z bad motherfucker. I could strum my chords and tell those crowds, growing all the time, to hear my voice: I have brought along the word of Christlord, but my songs’ll only take you so far down the river. You’ll hear some words tonight that may not make you feel soft and warm, that’ll rub your conscious raw. I’d tell them Open wide, babies. Trains a-comin’.
Johnny said there’s a market for folks who want the Word in song but can’t listen to Tammy Faye’s candy cane ass one more minute; and I figured the one hit I actually wrote was technically spiritual in nature, so why the shit not, Johnny Pecan.
In my business there is a window of opportunity through which to throw yourself and it doesn’t come along twice. Kristofferson, a man established, saw my window before I did and decided he missed how it felt to jump both legs through a needle’s eye. He tasted that success twice, and a third time in the movies, and a fourth with the Highwaymen. To have a second chance come my way was nothing less than a miracle—at my age?—almost got me drinking the hocus-poke Jesus shots I was pouring everyone.
I was The Reverend. We billed ourselves Outlaw Gospel. The love we were selling wasn’t pretty. Wouldn’t get you rich. We played barbed-wire worship for folks who gagged on prosperity Jesus. The Swaggarts and the Bakers never phased us, though we blew out just the same. It was almost admirable.
Kristofferson Cash
To say I remember how I got ahold of the damn thing would be a lie—the ivory-handled .38. But there I was holding it. Finger arched around the trigger. Hand to cash-cow Jesus I thought I was aiming at the sky. But this account isn’t meant for excuses or denials about shooting Kris Jr. in the thigh, bullet though those same worn Levi’s his daddy wore in the back of that limo a quarter century ago. I can remember almost every minute of that day. I can remember almost every minute up until I emptied the contents of my crucifix pill box down my throat. My instinct was to leave the uppers for later. Take the ones that zone you out, Rev, pray they last until Kris Jr. has picked up his pa’s award. Come on, Junior, time to kick this pig. But I took them all, the Klonopin and Ritalin, the Seconal and Adderall, hoping I would strike that magic mix, that flush up-down roll that produces magic. After all, I wrote that fucking song. That award is my award; that money, mine. And he has so much of it.
I should have known the old man himself wasn’t going to show, that he’d send his namesake to Mississippi Sound, the Gulf Coast’s premier demo recording studio. It’s all Johnny Pecan talked about for months: he was finally selling the place and wanted to commemorate his success by giving out handmade awards to all the folks who’d made hits out of his demos. He and his new engineer—a babyface who went by J and had secured enough cash to buy the Sound—licked stamps until the studio’s office space sounded like a hundred cats going after a salt block. Half the invitations came back as thanks-but-no-thanks rejections, and a quarter were ignored all together, and the rest accepted the offer to be wined and dined and given an award an aging redneck producer had made with his twenty-dollar wood burner. To all of our surprise Jimmy Buffett rolled in cool as Mai Tai honey and gave Johnny a big ole hug.
To be poor and hungry at Heaven’s door, Buffett said, reciting my own lyrics back to me, and soon dine with the King.
Glad someone bought that record.
Johnny sent me a copy.
Too country for church, I said. Too church for country.
Your time’s coming.
That’s what I’m afraid of.
Outside the parking lot festered with sound, sea birds singing and Air Force jets and 18-wheelers cutting short the lives of love bugs: two, four, six. I might have already been carrying around that pistol in the concealed carry holster Johnny bought me. Other days I think No way, it simply appeared to me like Excalibur in an hour of amphetamine need. Either way, Kris Jr. pulled up in an old pickup like the one I used to sit in the bed of and drink Ten High. Same truck but blue, and Boy, I should’ve stayed home with Margie those nights, cooed scripture into my little girl’s head. Road I chose led to a confrontation that went something like this:
Accounts differ but the one I remember (most days) involve me and a half-dozen chemical marionettes marching up to Kris Jr. and demanding my cut of the “Why Me” profits. Everything inside me was yelling Shoot this joker! Shoot him and watch all that Kristofferson Cash ooze out of his swiss cheese holes. I want to pull the trigger like I never got to in the big leagues. I aim for the sky, but I guess I didn’t and BAM. What was that- Holy shit, he just shot someone! Rev what the fu- Is that Kris Kristoffe- Fuck me, Rev. He’s bleeding good. All over the pavement, and I’m trying to sell this place and I can see everything going up in flames, Goddamn it.
You and me both, Johnny Pecan.
The cops threw me cuffed in the car, I swear, so hard it busted my front tooth, but I spit and it was only a spent .38 shell.
Kris. How’d your daddy do it? How did he? Slip the trap? Again and again? Like me, but winning.
Class
I cancel today’s class, tell the guards to put a sign on the board saying there’d be no further sessions of How to Write a Country Song. It’s just not something a man wants to do after being denied parole. Your lawyer failed to submit the necessary paperwork, they said. Your songwriting class routinely broke into calamitous song, they said. And, The submitted manuscript revealed the character of a man unable to accept the consequences of his violent past. It is our professional opinion that yada yada flim flam.
Spending at least two more years inside because of a braindead lawyer.
He did tell me to nix my memoirs.
I sulk and pout and flex my left hand’s stubby digits until lights out and I wish I could do anything else but snore in this goddamn cell. I pull out a letter from Marge saying she’s glad to hear about my class and progress. Sometimes she’ll listen to those old Reverend cassettes and think about how much of a devil I used to be, but I’m glad to hear you found the Lord, Andy. She even agreed to pick me up from Stone County once the hearings come to their inevitable conclusion.
By my cot grows a stack of letters from the inmates who attended my class—Judd, Holland, even C.O. Bryan.
I put off reading and responding until the stack gets too tall to stand on its own. My mustache gets so long it starts to tickle my bottom lip and while I’m out renting a razor I might as well pick up pen and paper, respond to my students and stop acting so sour.
The first:
Dear Reverend Andy,
Please get the class up again because if I’m not thinkin about writin country songs than I’m thinkin about stabbing Jerry in the neck with the rent-a-razor. As you know Jerry is about as useful as a sack of cigarette butts. I hope to god we go back to class.
Please,
Inmate 42733 (AKA Scoot)
Scoot,
Sorry about the class. I’d be happy to read whatever you write and give you notes. Jerry is nice enough, but you gotta do what you gotta do. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life w/ old shits like me, so there’s something to think about.
Andy
p.s. I have the razor at the moment.
* * *
Rev,
Sorry to hear about the hearing. Doesn’t make a lick of sense. You didn’t even kill the guy! This generation of kombucha pussies can’t take a shot. I WISH you’d shoot me, Rev. Wouldn’t let the doctor remove the bullet if he tried. I’d leave it there forever.
Judd
Judd,
That’s very kind of you to say. Kris Jr.’s a bit older than you. He definitely loves kombucha, though. You could tell.
Andy
* * *
Reverend,
I know I was a bad student I’ve always been a bad student and I apologize for singing Skynyrd so loud it’s just my song, you know? Here’s the homework I forgot to hand in:
She’s nonstop serving others. Mom sweats herself to sleep.
Jalapeño hushpuppies and sweet corn.
The smell of her SPF 50 banana boat.
All that godda GD Bible talk
He works nonstop like Momma but in the worst way.
This one time Mikey took so many shrooms the wild ones you find under cow patties and robbed all three of the town’s credit unions. Mikey lost movement in the left side of his face after that and when the law finally caught up to him I took the fall because Mikey has paid enough and he’ll never kiss a girl or keep his chew in for the rest of his life.
Holland J.
Now that’s a song I hope to hear one day.
Andy
Jordan James has been published in The Westchester Review, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Periphery Journal, Kalopsia, The Song Between our Stars, The Robert Frost Review, and Poet’s Choice, with work forthcoming in Juked. He earned his PhD in Creative Writing from The University of Southern Mississippi.