0:15

Pushkin In

0:19

Nashville, Tennessee. There's a songwriter

0:21

named Bobby Braddock. He's in his seventies,

0:24

maybe five foot seven, bald head,

0:26

scruffy beard, wiry, like if

0:28

you messed them in a bar, you'd probably lose.

0:31

The most striking thing about him is his eyes,

0:34

which are the palest and most intense shade

0:36

of blue. He wears sunglasses

0:39

a lot, and it's almost as if he needs to protect

0:41

the world from that look. I

0:44

met him on a music row in Nashville. We

0:47

had lunch, and then we sat in one of the writer's

0:49

rooms in the Sony Building, piano

0:51

in the corner, couches to one side,

0:54

and he talked about his education in the music

0:56

business. I think I always had the reputation

0:59

as Ben kind of a quirky rider, maybe

1:01

a little left field. The

1:04

turning point in Braddock's career was a song you've

1:06

probably heard of. He was performed

1:08

by Tammy white Net back when she was

1:10

the reigning Queen of country music nineteen

1:12

sixty eight, about a mom who had to

1:15

spell out the word d I v O r

1:17

ce so her kids wouldn't

1:19

know their parents were splitting up. So

1:22

dr ce Yeah.

1:25

Brote this did a demo on it, and no

1:28

tigers, nobody did it. Nobody would recording.

1:31

D I v o r CE was a song

1:33

with a gimmick. Braddock did a lot

1:35

of gimmicky songs back then. No

1:38

one wanted this one. So Braddock

1:40

went to a friend and longtime collaborator,

1:42

Curly Putman. So, I said, well,

1:45

why is nobody recording? He said, I think

1:47

around the important part of your song said,

1:51

sad song, and your melodies on

1:53

that part is too happy. What

1:56

I was doing was, oh,

2:00

I wish that I

2:02

could stop this a

2:08

little bit like a soap commercial.

2:11

I said, well, what would you do? And

2:13

he guys a guitar and he had

2:15

this really mournful singing

2:17

style. Tammy Wynette was

2:19

a big fan of Curly sing and she loved

2:21

his singing because he had I mean it just

2:24

you singing was just so sad. He

2:29

oh, I wish that we gets

2:32

drop this d So

2:38

I said, get your guitar,

2:40

let's let's put it on tape. Right then, you know, d

2:44

I v O r CE went to number one. It

2:46

was Bobby Braddock's first great exercise

2:49

in how to make people cry, and

2:51

from then on things just got

2:53

sadder. My

2:58

name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening

3:00

to Revisionist History, my podcast

3:03

about things overlooked and misunderstood.

3:10

This episode is about something that has never

3:12

made sense to me. Maybe it's

3:14

because I'm a Canadian, or maybe Americans

3:17

puzzle about this too. I'm talking

3:19

about the bright line that divides American

3:21

society, not the color

3:23

line or the ideological line.

3:26

I'm talking about the sad song line.

3:35

I don't know why people don't talk about this more

3:37

because it's weird. For

3:39

the sake of argument, let's use the rock magazine

3:42

Rolling Stones list to the best songs of all time,

3:44

the top fifty. These are the critics

3:46

choices. Hotel California

3:49

by the Eagles comes in up forty nine, which,

3:51

as far as I can tell, is a song about drugs.

3:54

Tutti Fruity by Little Richard at

3:56

forty three Tutti Fruity,

3:59

which I remind you has as its signature

4:01

lyric Tutti fruity O rudy

4:04

tutti fruiti O rudy tutti

4:06

fruity O rudy tutti FRUITI

4:09

rudy wop bop A loop bop,

4:11

A loop bam Boom, there's

4:15

Dancing in the Street at forty Light,

4:17

My Fire Be My Baby, Nirvana's

4:20

Smells Like Teen Spirit, Derek

4:22

and the Domino's Leila. There are songs

4:24

about wanting to have sex, songs

4:26

about having sex, songs about

4:29

getting high, presumably after having

4:31

sex. Number one song on the list,

4:33

Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan

4:36

A You've gone to the finest schools, all

4:38

right, miss Lonely, but you know you

4:40

only used to get juiced in it. Nobody's

4:43

ever taught you how to live out on the street, and

4:45

now you're gonna have to get used to it. I

4:48

think that's a song about someone who dropped out of Harvard.

4:51

The number one rock song of all time is

4:53

about dropping out of Harvard. In

5:00

all of those fifty songs, nobody

5:02

dies after a long illness, no marriage

5:04

disintegrates, nobody's killed on a

5:06

battlefield, no mother grieves for

5:08

a on. The closest

5:11

that any song and Rolling Stones list comes

5:13

to being truly sad is Smokey Robinson's

5:15

Tracks of My Tears, which is first

5:17

of all number fifty, so they put

5:19

the sad song at the bottom of the list. And

5:22

secondly, it's about a guy at a party

5:25

in their moments of greatest travail.

5:27

The protagonists of rock and roll's sad songs

5:30

still get to go to parties now.

5:33

Just turn on a country music station, especially

5:35

at traditional country music station, and

5:37

listen. It's like a different universe.

5:41

Marriage is going to hell, people

5:43

staring into their shot glass in a honky tonk,

5:45

people dying young. Have you ever heard

5:48

John Prine's Unwed Fathers. It's

5:51

a devastating bit of songwriting about

5:53

a teenage mom fleeing town. He

5:55

sings it with his wife Rachel. Also

5:58

wearier man, smoking

6:01

man, she

6:05

bother and

6:09

all a bad Your

6:12

daddy meant

6:16

to hurt youever? It

6:19

just don't love but

6:23

you got his e Those

6:27

last two lines, your daddy

6:30

never meant to hurt you ever. He

6:32

just don't live here, but you've got his eyes. That's

6:35

brutal black

6:37

some bad dream

6:40

all on with Bob one

6:45

half of the country, the rock music part,

6:48

wants to music to be hymns to extra

6:50

version. The other half wants

6:52

to talk about real life dramas and

6:54

have a good cry. I don't get

6:57

it, By the way, you

6:59

know who wrote that Unwd Father's song? With John

7:01

Bryan Bobby Braddock

7:07

or maybe you've heard this another classic

7:10

recorded by Tammy way Natt Long

7:16

Time, So

7:23

Long, Golden

7:25

Ring. It follows a couple from

7:27

first love to the break up of their marriage by

7:30

tracing the journey of their wedding ring from

7:32

pawnshop to pawnshop. It's

7:35

a weeper who wrote it,

7:37

Bobby Braddock, and

7:40

today, forty years after

7:42

he wrote it, Braddock is still mad

7:44

about a one word change made by the

7:46

song's producer, Billy Sheryl, because

7:48

that made his song one crucial

7:50

degree less sad what we

7:52

had. He says, you won't admit it

7:54

about who you're running around and

7:57

Billy changed it too. He

7:59

says, you won't admit it, but I know you're leaving

8:01

town. That's that's not as

8:03

powerful as you're right now right. He

8:05

says, you won't admit it, but

8:08

I know leave town. She

8:11

says one. Thanks for certain I

8:13

don't love you anymore.

8:16

It throws down the ring ash She walks

8:19

out of the door. And

8:21

country music is supposed to be about real life,

8:23

you know, and I try to reflect that and bo all right,

8:26

Golden Ring,

8:37

which brings us to maybe the greatest country song

8:39

of all time, certainly the saddest

8:41

country song of all time, the song that

8:43

made me get on a plane and go to Nashville.

8:46

It was recorded by the great George Jones,

8:49

one of the half dozen or so most iconic

8:51

figures in the history of country music. You

8:54

just heard him singing in Golden Ring. Jones

8:57

was famously the husband of Tammy Wynette

8:59

for a time, a hard living, dissolute

9:01

megastar. Once, in

9:03

the midst of an epic bender, jones

9:05

family took his keys away, so we got

9:08

on his riding mower and drove eight miles

9:10

to the liquor store to get some whiskey. This

9:12

was a man who could pour his fractured heart

9:15

into his music like no one else. A

9:18

half dozen times in his career, Jones

9:20

found a song truly worthy of his talents,

9:23

but it never got better than he stopped

9:26

loving her. Today, I still remember

9:28

when I first heard that song, and from

9:30

the day I started thinking about this episode,

9:33

I haven't been able to get it out of my head. He

9:36

said, I'll love you till

9:38

I've done. She

9:42

told him you for getting

9:45

time. As

9:50

the years went slowly

9:52

by,

9:56

she still prayed upon him.

10:02

He kept her pictures on

10:05

his wall do

10:07

I need to tell you who wrote that song? Bobby

10:10

Braddock. Bobby Braddock

10:12

is the king of tears. He's

10:16

still after through

10:18

it all, hoping

10:23

she ain't come back again. Oh

10:28

man. One

10:31

of the things that got me interested in sad

10:33

songs was a story my sister in law,

10:35

Bev told me. She and my brother live in

10:37

the same area I grew up in Waterloo County

10:40

in southern Ontario, and a while

10:42

ago she went to a performance by a

10:44

local chamber choir thirty

10:46

singers. They sang a cantata

10:48

called Annalise by the British

10:50

composer James Whitbourne, a choral

10:53

composition which puts the words of

10:55

Anne Frank's diary to music. I

10:58

know this seems like a little bit of a digression from

11:00

country music, but it's a really

11:02

useful case study in understanding why

11:04

some songs make us cry. The

11:07

performance Bev told me about out was on a Sunday

11:10

afternoon, a free performance of the

11:12

Public Library, which is a very utilitarian,

11:14

very nineteen sixties building on Queen Street

11:17

in downtown Kitchener. I've been to many

11:19

times Waldo wald Carpet,

11:21

that old book's library smell, which

11:23

I have to admit, I love how

11:25

many people are there. It's in their main reading

11:27

room. They moved around all the tables

11:30

and one

11:33

hundred one hundred twentieth full, pretty

11:35

much standing room only. Why

11:48

as they're singing, I think, why

11:50

is that alto not singing? And

11:53

then I look over and I think somebody

11:56

else so prime I'm not singing? That's all because

11:58

everybody else in their parts is singing, and

12:01

I realized they were crying and they

12:03

couldn't sing. Bev says,

12:05

she cried pretty much through the entire performance.

12:08

She was looking straight ahead because she didn't

12:10

want people to see she was crying, but it didn't

12:12

matter because everyone was crying. When

12:15

the performance was over, Bev approached

12:17

the stage to talk to the soloist, the

12:19

woman singing Anne Frank's words, I

12:22

just went up to her afterwards and congratulated

12:25

her on the beauty of the piece then and her

12:27

singing, and I said, and how did you manage

12:30

to sing without crying? And

12:32

she said, well,

12:35

I couldn't look at Mark, the

12:37

conductor, because he was wiping

12:39

tears from his eyes, and I had my back

12:41

to the choir, so that was good, and

12:43

I didn't look at anybody in the audience because

12:46

they were crying. So I just looked up in the middle

12:48

distance and I sang, it was a good

12:50

thing. I hadn't memorized. I

12:53

was at home in Canada when Bev told me that story,

12:56

so I called up Mark, the conductor and

12:58

the soloist, whose name is Natasha. They're

13:00

actually husband and wife. They only live

13:03

a few minutes away from my brother, so

13:05

they came over. Mark sat

13:07

at the piano in the living room and Natasha stood

13:09

behind him, and they performed one

13:11

of the pieces from Annale's they did that day

13:13

in the library. This is the last moment

13:15

and called it's called Anne's Meditation.

13:18

I see the world. I see the world being slowly

13:20

turned turned into a wilderness.

13:54

Now I realized this is a crazy question,

13:56

because we're hearing a piece based in the diary of

13:58

Anne Frank, which is one of the most heartbreaking

14:01

stories from one of the most horrific moments

14:03

in recent history. But why

14:05

was everyone crying that day at the Kitchener library.

14:19

The obvious reason is that the music is

14:21

beautiful, so is Natasha's

14:24

singing. The performance is

14:26

also authentic. There's nothing contrived

14:28

about it. It wasn't at Carnegie Hall. People

14:31

weren't wearing suits and evening gowns.

14:34

They were at the Kitchener library and whose

14:36

families getting books and kids running around,

14:38

and everyone's on stacking chairs with the tables

14:40

pushed off to the side. But

14:42

here's the most important thing. Analise

14:45

is specific It's

14:47

a cantata about the actual experiences

14:50

of a real person. In her own words,

15:01

Bev says that when she cried, she started

15:03

thinking about her own family, Mennonites,

15:05

who escaped terrible persecution in Russia.

15:08

Natasha says that as she sang about twelve

15:10

year old Anne Frank, she was thinking about

15:12

her own daughter, who was ten and who

15:14

was sitting right next to Bev in the audience.

15:19

Beauty and authenticity can

15:21

create a mood. They set the stage,

15:24

But I think the thing that pushes us

15:26

over the top into tears is details.

15:29

We cry when melancholy collides

15:31

with specificity, and

15:33

specificity is not something every

15:36

genre does well.

15:40

Wild

15:50

Horses by the Rolling Stones written

15:53

by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. It's

15:55

a song about a conversation a man is having

15:57

with a silent, suffering loved one. The

16:00

story goes that Mick Jagger dreamt up the verses

16:02

while sitting at the bedside of his then girlfriend

16:05

Mary and Faithful, as she recovered from

16:07

an overdose. I

16:19

watched you suffer a dull, aching pain.

16:22

Now you've decided to show me the same. No

16:24

sweeping exit or off stage lines could

16:27

make me feel bitter or treat you unkind.

16:29

Wild Horses couldn't drag me away.

16:32

Wild Wild Horses couldn't drag me

16:34

away. Wild

16:38

Horses was recorded first by the legendary

16:40

Graham Parsons. Not long afterwards,

16:43

Parsons died of an overdose, and his

16:45

friend in protege, the country music

16:47

singer Emmy Lou Harris, made a song in

16:49

his memory. She wrote it with Bill Danoff.

16:52

It's called from Boulder to Birmingham.

16:57

I don't own he I

17:03

got on the sab plane

17:05

just to fly down

17:10

the other's love. But

17:14

all that you can show

17:16

me a Briian

17:19

sky, and

17:25

I don't want to hear, says

17:27

story. Someone who has

17:29

suffered a terrible loss has gotten on a plane

17:32

and she's so numbed by grief that she could no

17:34

longer see those around her. The

17:37

last time I feel like this,

17:41

I was in the wilderness,

17:45

and the canon was on

17:47

fine

17:50

from Boulder to Birmingham and wild horses

17:53

are both beautiful melancholy.

17:56

They're about the same thing, the ties

17:58

the living and the healthy have to those in pain.

18:01

But which is the sadder song? I

18:04

don't think there's any question. Wild

18:06

horses is generic. Listen

18:09

to how it starts. Childhood.

18:11

Living is easy to do the things

18:13

you wanted, I bought them for you. Graceless

18:16

lady, you know who I am. You know I

18:18

can't let you slide through my hands. What's

18:21

going on? Any idea? What is Mickey hammering

18:23

on about? Now? Compare

18:26

that to the specificity of looking down

18:28

from the airplane and seeing nothing but prairie,

18:31

then standing on a mountain and watching

18:33

a canyon burn I watched

18:42

in the buzz of Babor. I

18:46

would holding

18:51

grace I

19:05

could see.

19:09

First, she references the great black spiritual

19:12

rocked my soul in the bosom of Abraham. The

19:15

bosom of Abraham is where the righteous

19:17

dead go while awaiting judgment. Then

19:19

she sings, and I would also walk

19:22

all the way from Boulder to Birmingham.

19:24

Now she's locating her grief. I

19:26

would make a pilgrimage from progressive

19:29

hippie liberal Remember this is nineteen

19:31

seventy three, dope smoking Colorado,

19:34

back to the repressive heart of the Old South.

19:37

Just to see your face. Two

19:39

completely different specific

19:42

images, each with its own set

19:44

of emotional triggers, and she's piled

19:46

one on top of another. Mark

19:50

Varnen, the music director of the choir

19:52

in my hometown, says that there's a part

19:54

in analys that does the same thing, and

19:57

is they're in hiding already.

19:59

And she starts singing, and the composer has

20:01

set these words in kind of a style

20:04

of an American Susa March, and

20:08

so she's talking about being in the bathtub and being scrubbed

20:10

in the bathtub, and it's a Susa We'll

20:13

scrub, scrub, scrub ourselves in the tinta

20:17

right, very happy and optimistic music.

20:23

And Frank in the bathtub to

20:25

the tune of a Susan March with the

20:27

horrors of the Holocaust outside her door.

20:30

Three absolutely concrete images

20:33

in merciless combination. It just

20:36

floored me every every time I heard it, because

20:39

it was so close to, you know, our own daughter, you

20:42

know, to think that she would have to create

20:44

this kind of fiction

20:47

in order to just get through the day. That's

20:49

how you get tears. You make the story

20:52

so real and the details so sharp,

20:54

and you add in so many emotional triggers

20:57

that the listener cannot escape. But

20:59

it's a risky thing to do. Right If

21:02

you aren't a talented composer, and you

21:04

don't do a sensitive rendition of those lyrics,

21:07

they could fall flat, could seem forced,

21:10

even offensive. Far easier

21:12

just to fall back on the bland cliche

21:15

that wild horses couldn't drag you away.

21:18

Country music makes people cry because

21:20

it's not afraid to be specific. You

21:25

know, she came to see him one last

21:27

time all

21:31

and we all wondered if she were and

21:39

it kept running through my mind this

21:44

time. Bobby

21:57

Braddock was born in Auburndale, Florida,

22:00

a little town between Tampa and Orlando.

22:02

His father grew Citrus. They were Church

22:05

of Christ, just about the most fundamentalist

22:07

of fundamentalist Christians. Braddock

22:10

moved to Nashville in nineteen sixty four, just

22:12

after getting married, to seek his fortune

22:15

in the music business. He wrote

22:17

his memoirs a few years ago. It's called

22:19

A Life on Nashville's Music Row.

22:21

I read it before I went to see him, and

22:24

the best way to describe the book is

22:26

that it's exhausting. I

22:28

don't mean that in a bad way, because I couldn't

22:30

put it down. But so much

22:33

happens. You've lived this

22:35

incredibly tumultuous, emotionally

22:37

tumultuous life. Yeah. Yeah,

22:40

And in the book it sounds like the first

22:43

precipitating event as the death of your son.

22:46

Braddock was touring with the country music legend

22:48

Marty Robbins at the time. He and

22:50

his wife, Sue had a baby. The child

22:52

was just a few months old when he died. Whenever

22:55

I was in town, not on the road with Marty Robins,

22:58

every single day we'd buy fresh flowers

22:59

to put it on it's gray. We were just pathetic.

23:02

He and Sue fight, She cheats on him,

23:05

he cheats on her. They break up, they

23:07

get back together, they have a daughter, They

23:09

divorce. His ex wife mysteriously

23:11

vanishes. He drinks a lot, gets

23:13

into fights, owes enormous sums

23:15

to the irs, has a major bout with

23:17

depression, smokes a lot of pot, lurches

23:21

from one volcanic event to the next, and

23:23

threw it all. Braddock writes songs,

23:26

hundreds of them.

23:28

You're kind of tolerance for

23:32

emotional volatility seems

23:35

extraordinary. I

23:40

guess tolerance

23:44

is probably a pretty good word

23:47

for it. Braddock

23:49

walks over to the keyboard on the other side of the room.

23:51

He begins to talk about an old girlfriend

23:53

named Angela who committed suicide

23:55

by driving her car into the river. When

23:58

Angela died, her

24:00

mother took her baby

24:03

to raise it. And

24:05

she sent me a picture of the little girl,

24:08

Angela's child, who about

24:10

four or five years old, look just like her

24:12

mom. Picture her

24:14

standing out in the arm and

24:17

boy did a number on me spid

24:27

distance. He

24:32

wrote a song about that in twenty minutes. He

24:34

played it for me. Then he played his favorite

24:36

bit of a sad Randy Newan song. He

24:39

played me a heartbreaking song he wrote once

24:41

after getting up in the middle of the night and passing

24:44

his lover in the hallway. And as

24:46

he played one weeper after another,

24:48

I realized that that thing I'd said about

24:51

Braddock's tolerance for emotional volatility,

24:54

tolerance was the wrong word. That

24:57

was just me projecting my upti Canadian

24:59

self onto Braddock. But Braddock

25:01

is from the musical side of the United States,

25:04

where emotion is not something to be endured

25:07

it's something to be embraced. At

25:10

one point, when cell phones were still

25:12

analog, you could buy a scanner and listen

25:14

in to other people's conversations, and

25:16

that's what Braddock does. He can't help

25:18

himself. A woman complains

25:21

to her husband for an hour about its lack

25:23

of affection from the parking lot of

25:25

the grocery store. Then ask him

25:27

what he wants, and he says, may

25:29

be Apple Newton's. And then this

25:31

is my favorite part I'm quoting now from Braddock's

25:34

memoir. The conversation that truly

25:36

touched me was between a man perhaps

25:38

forty and his mother, may be late sixties,

25:41

in which the son opened up about sexual

25:43

problems he was having with his wife. And

25:46

I envied the sprinkling of profanities

25:48

and the mother's invitation to come over

25:50

to the house, son, and let's open a bottle

25:52

of whisky and talk about it. Wishing

25:54

I had that kind of easy and open communication

25:57

with my mom. Then learning that the

25:59

guy's mother was terminally ill with cancer.

26:02

If you're keeping track, that's

26:05

marital difficulty, sex, profanity, whiskey

26:07

mom, and terminal cancer in one

26:10

conversation, and it truly touched

26:12

him.

26:17

Do you know what. Bradditt's favorite song is Vince

26:19

Gills Go Rest High on that Mountain, which

26:22

Gill wrote in memory both of his brother who

26:24

died young of a heart attack and fellow

26:26

country star Keith Whitley, who drank

26:28

himself to death. Son

26:39

you done,

26:48

Oh my God. When Vince Gill and

26:51

Ricky Skaggs and Patty Lovelace are

26:53

singing harmony on that thing, I go to nuts.

26:56

It still tears me up. Northern.

26:58

It's about death, and Vince

27:00

wrote it about Keith Whitland,

27:02

then about his own brother, and just

27:04

the emotion that's in that song. It's just it's

27:06

just powerful.

27:09

Days gathered

27:14

r green,

27:22

we shot goody

27:28

face. It's

27:31

heartbreaking. Listening

27:33

to that song makes me wonder if some portion

27:36

of what we call ideological division in

27:38

America actually isn't ideological

27:40

at all. How big are

27:42

the political differences between red and blue states

27:44

anyway, in the grand scheme of things,

27:47

not that big. Maybe what we're seeing

27:49

instead is a difference of emotional

27:51

opinion. Because if your

27:53

principal form of cultural expression has

27:55

drinking, sex, suicide, heart attacks,

27:58

mom and terminal cancer all on the table

28:00

for public discussion, then the other half

28:02

of the country is going to seem really chilly and uncaring,

28:06

and if you're from the rock and roll half clinging

28:09

semi ironically to tutty fruity O

28:11

Rudy, when you listen to a song

28:13

written about a guy's brother who died young of

28:15

a heart attack and another guy who

28:17

drank himself to death, you're going to think,

28:20

who are these people? Here's

28:27

another way to think about the sad songline.

28:33

Let me read you the list of the birthplaces

28:35

of the performers of the top twenty country

28:37

songs of all time Again. I'm going to use

28:40

a Rolling Stone magazine list ready,

28:43

Arkansas, Virginia, Alabama,

28:45

Texas, Mississippi, Mississippi,

28:47

Georgia, California, Central Valley, by

28:49

the way, not Los Angeles, Tennessee,

28:52

Texas, Virginia, Texas, Kentucky,

28:54

Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Texas,

28:56

Kentucky, Texas. I

28:59

could do the top fifty, or the top

29:01

one hundred, or the top two hundred, and

29:03

you get the same pattern. Basically, you

29:05

cannot be a successful country singer or

29:07

songwriter if you're not from the South.

29:10

It's impossible. There's one exception,

29:12

which is the great songwriter Harlan Howard,

29:15

who was born in Detroit, but almost

29:17

immediately thereafter his family moves

29:19

to a farm in rural Kentucky. It's

29:22

like the five second roll when you drop a

29:24

piece of food on the floor. If it's not on

29:26

the ground long enough, it doesn't count. As

29:28

far as I can tell, there are no Jews

29:30

on the country list, almost no Catholics,

29:33

only two black people. It's white

29:36

Southern Protestants all the way

29:38

down. Now

29:41

compare that to the rock and roll list. You've

29:44

got Jews from Minnesota, black

29:46

people from Detroit, Catholics from

29:48

New Jersey, middle class British

29:50

art school dropouts, Canadians,

29:52

Jamaicans. Rock and roll

29:55

is the rainbow coalition that

29:57

diversity is a good thing. It's

30:00

why there's so much innovation in rock and roll.

30:02

But you pay a price for that. There

30:08

was a very clever bit of research published

30:10

recently by Colin Morris in the magazine The Pudding.

30:13

He analyzed fifteen thousand popular

30:15

songs using an algorithm that can

30:17

presses digital files. So

30:20

if you take out the repetitive bits in a

30:22

song, how much of it is left. Morris's

30:25

big finding is that rock and roll as

30:27

a genre is really, really

30:30

repetitive. Britney Spears,

30:32

Lady Gaga, the Beatles. If

30:34

you take out the Duke bookative parts,

30:36

their music shrinks by sixty percent.

30:39

That's what happens when everyone is from

30:42

somewhere different. Nobody

30:44

speaks the same language, so you have

30:46

to use cliche, the same phrases

30:48

over and over again, because

30:50

if you go deeper or try to get

30:53

more specific, you start to lose

30:55

people. Country music,

30:57

on the other hand, is not nearly as repetitive.

31:00

When Morris ran the lyrics of popular country

31:03

singers through his algorithm, they only

31:05

shrank by about forty percent, a

31:07

third less than the rock and roll nor

31:10

is hip hop repetitive, which makes sense.

31:12

The birthplaces of everyone on Rolling Stones

31:15

list of Greatest rap songs reads

31:17

like an urban version of the country list.

31:19

Queens, South Central lay Brooklyn,

31:22

Long Island, South Central Long Beach,

31:24

Houston, Queens, The Bronx, Englewood,

31:26

New Jersey, The Bronx. Hip

31:28

hop and country are both tightly

31:31

knit musical communities, and

31:33

when you're speaking to people who understand

31:35

your world and your culture and your

31:37

language, you can tell much more complicated

31:40

stories. You can use much more

31:42

precise imagery. You can

31:45

lay yourself bare because you're among

31:47

your own. In

31:52

the book, it sounds like your relationship

31:55

with Sparky was

31:57

the one that seemed the most creatively

31:59

fruitful. It was it was Sparky

32:03

was a beautiful blonde from northern Alabama,

32:05

the great love of Bobby Braddock's life.

32:08

Why was that? I

32:10

think because my

32:15

family her are so strong, I mean,

32:19

sort of a virtual thing. I

32:22

think that's why I found Bobby Braddock's book

32:24

so exhausting. It's because

32:26

everything is felt, everything

32:29

is a mountain peak, and Sparky,

32:31

Sparky was everest high altitude

32:34

infatuation. That's

32:36

the kind of short thing that made people go absolutely

32:38

crazy, you know, And

32:42

that was the case with her. You know, that's

32:46

what gets the animal instinct of people

32:49

maybe who haven't evolved as much as they should,

32:51

and cause them to go out and get

32:53

a gun. Blow somebody's brains out over some

32:56

gun. Not mean it can't stand

32:58

the thought or someone you know,

33:00

having sex with a person that he loves.

33:04

Braddock and Sparky were on and off lovers

33:06

for years. It was intense, painful,

33:10

euphoric. When it ended,

33:12

Braddock was in pieces. He

33:16

kept her picture on the

33:18

wall, went

33:22

half crazy now in the that's

33:25

Braddock in the original demo he made of he Stopped

33:27

Loving Her Today. He still loved her

33:30

through it all, hoping

33:35

she come back again. So

33:38

I'm not sure where it came from. It may have come sparky,

33:41

you know, honestly, not now be

33:43

interesting? How could it

33:45

not? Yeah, well, if I think it probably

33:48

I think it probably did. But I just I can't see

33:50

it. I can't see that for certainty.

33:52

Tomorrow they'll carry him away.

33:55

I felt like Braddock shrink at that moment,

33:58

listening to his tangled dreams and

34:00

then wanting to shake him at the end of the session. It's

34:02

sparky, sparky. They

34:05

found some letters by his being.

34:08

I mean, you wrote a song in the middle of the great

34:11

defining love affair of

34:14

your life, the

34:16

relationship ends, and you write a song

34:18

about the heartbreak of that

34:22

a man carries to his grave. I

34:25

mean, it's could it be? Could

34:27

it be more clear? I went to

34:29

see him one last time,

34:34

Bobby Braddock wrote he Stopped Loving Her Today

34:36

with his friend Curly. In nineteen seventy seven,

34:39

they took it to the singer George Jones. Jones

34:42

was then at his lowest Ebb a wreck,

34:44

strung out on cocaine and whiskey. He

34:47

just checked out of a psychiatric hospital.

34:49

The great love of his life, Tammy Wynett,

34:52

had embodied her hit song d I V O

34:54

r Ce and left him. Jones

34:57

had just nearly shot and killed one of his best friends.

35:00

The Heartbroken Bobby Braddock has

35:02

written a song about a man who cannot stop

35:05

loving a woman, and it's sung by the

35:07

heartbroken George Jones. Cannot

35:09

stop loving a woman keept

35:12

some letters by bid

35:19

it in nineteen sixty

35:21

two. He

35:26

had underlined and ran,

35:30

underlined and read every

35:33

single I love

35:35

you, every single I

35:37

love you. I went to

35:39

see him just today.

35:45

Oh but I didn't seen

35:48

old tears, all

35:53

dressed up to go away.

35:58

First time I'd seen him smiling.

36:01

You. Why did he finally

36:03

turn his back on his great love? Why

36:06

is this the first time he smiled in years?

36:08

Because he's dead. Only death

36:10

could end his love. It plays

36:13

to read I'm

36:19

soon thout carry he

36:26

stopped loving Harday.

36:30

It's totally over the top, modeling

36:32

sentimental, Kitchie. Call it whatever

36:34

you want, just don't fight it. One

36:38

thing that Bobby Braddock told me in passing

36:41

that I think about a lot is

36:43

that he thought of the character in his song as a bad

36:45

role model. The man was obsessed.

36:48

He couldn't let go. But that's

36:50

the point, right, That's why

36:52

we cry, because the song manages

36:54

to find beauty and even a little bit

36:57

of grandeur in someone's frailty.

37:00

I'm soon thout caring.

37:08

He stopped Hi

37:11

today, wild

37:13

horses, please, Good

37:22

morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome

37:24

to the Grand Ole Opry House, to the

37:26

celebration of life of George

37:29

Glenn Jones. One of the most important

37:31

people ever, of all time and of

37:33

any time in the history of country

37:35

music. George Jones died in twenty

37:38

thirteen. Everyone who

37:40

was anyone in country music came to his memorial

37:42

service. You should watch it if you get the

37:44

chance. It's on YouTube, all two hours

37:47

and forty one minutes of it, because it's

37:49

everything I've been talking about. Vince

37:51

Gill stands up with Patty Lovelace and sings,

37:54

go rest Hyghenete Mountain and

37:56

breaks down halfway through. Oh.

38:17

Travis Tritt remembers a conversation he

38:19

once had with Chris Christofferson about

38:22

how they expected George Jones to have died

38:24

years before, and

38:26

I looked at Chris and I made the comment,

38:30

you know, with all the years of

38:32

hard living that George

38:34

had, who

38:37

would have ever thought that

38:39

he would outlive Tammy? And

38:43

Chris looked at

38:45

me and said, had it not

38:47

been for Nancy, he

38:50

would not have. Nancy

38:55

Jones, George Jones's fourth

38:57

and final wife, the real love

38:59

of his life. His soulmate and

39:02

companion, Travis Tritt holds

39:04

out his hand towards Nancy, who's

39:06

sitting right in the front row. George

39:09

it many times, she's my angel,

39:12

and she saved my life, and

39:15

so we owe you a debt of gratitude for

39:18

that. Then

39:21

comes the crowning moment of the day, the final

39:24

performance. Alan Jackson

39:26

strides out onto the stage a big,

39:28

rangy guy, craggy features,

39:30

cowboy boots, jeans, long coat,

39:32

white stetson. He looks squarely

39:35

at Dancy Jones and without

39:37

introduction, launches into he stopped

39:39

loving her today, He

39:42

said, all love you till

39:44

I live. She

39:49

told him you more good

39:51

time as

39:56

your years when flu and

40:00

you realize as he sings

40:03

that Braddock's song has gotten even more

40:05

specific. It's no longer

40:08

about a long ago love affair. It's

40:10

about right now. This

40:12

is the day George Jones stopped loving Nancy

40:15

Jones. Alan

40:19

Jackson takes off his hat and places

40:21

it over his heart. He

40:24

stopped loving her today.

40:34

And if you aren't crying, I

40:36

can't help you. I love

40:39

you, George. All

40:44

the three breaks of our time, ladies and gentlemen,

40:47

at all time. That's

40:50

Alan Jackson. Thank you so, Mark Jolan. Revisionist

41:16

History is produced by Meil Lobelle and

41:18

Jacob Smith, with Camille Baptista,

41:20

Stephanie Daniel, and Silmarra Martinez

41:23

White. Our editor is Julia

41:25

Barton. Flawn Williams is our

41:27

engineer. Original music by Luis

41:29

Guera. Special thanks to Andy

41:32

Bowers and Jacob Weisberg of Panoply. I'm

41:34

Malcolm Gradwell