The Great Anti-LA Country Song

 Swiftly walk o‘er the western wave
                Spirit of Night!
    Out of the misty eastern cave,
    Where, all the long and lone daylight,
    Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,
    Which make thee terrible and dear,-
     Swiftly walk o‘er the western wave
                Swift be thy flight!

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Santa Monica Freeway
Sometimes makes a country girl blue

-Larry Collins and Sandy Pinkard

Boston, 1972. Springtime. A shaggy-haired boy calls his Tennessee girl and begs her to join him. I found us a place to stay, he tells her, and you can sell your paintings on the sidewalk.

Come winter, he’s in Denver. He might be on the lam or looking to get lost. He calls his girl again. 

Now he’s in LA, trying to build a life. He can’t do it alone. Again he calls his girl, again she says no. She adds:

Hey, ramblin’ boy, why don’t you settle down?
Boston [or Denver, or LA] ain’t your kind of town
There ain’t no gold and there ain’t nobody like me
I'm the number one fan of the man from Tennessee.

The Tennessee girl is not unfaithful to her ramblin’ man, but hers is a faith of a higher order, for she is true also to the land of their birth. Dottie West (b. Frog Pond TN, 1932) conjures her in 1973’s “Country Sunshine”:

You say you love me and it’s inviting to go where life is more exciting
But I was raised on country sunshine
I was raised on country sunshine, green grass beneath my feet
Running through the fields of daisies, wading through the creek.

“Please Come to Boston” was written in 1972 and released in 1974. The auteur was Dave Loggins (b. Mountain City TN, 1947), second cousin of perennial smashmaker Kenny. It spent two weeks at #5 on the coveted Billboard Hot 100 Chart, and hit #1 on the Billboard Easy Listening Chart. Dave was nominated for a Grammy and the song has been covered a million times, from Joan Baez to Babyface.

“Country Sunshine” began its life as a jingle for Coca-Cola (b. Atlanta GA, 1892). The original lyrics included “a bottle of Coke” among its list of simple things. The ad was so successful that West and RCA Victor (headquarters: New York) turned it into a single. Good move. It spent 15 weeks on the Billboard charts.

The template was set: California–especially Los Angeles–will break you, but the South–especially Tennessee–will welcome your prodigal soul back home to the land of contentment, enchantment, beauty, and love. 

As cocaine and sugar was a winning formula for Coca-Cola, “LA bad/Tennessee good” would be a winning formula for country music. Its heyday would last from the early ‘70s to the mid-1980s, and its echoes can be heard through the hollers and canyons of today.

A year after the release of “Please Come to Boston”, Glen Campbell (b. Billstown, AR, 1936) hit #1 hit on the Easy Listening charts and #11 on the Billboard Hot 100 with “Country Boy (You Got Your Feet in LA),” from the  album Rhinestone Cowboy. In “Country Boy,” Campbell has made it–at least financially–in LA. He’s got a house in the hills, he’s paying everyone’s bills. But in the back of his mind (he hears it time after time), the voice of conscience: is this who you really are? Is this what’s it all about?  He realizes, as so many of us must, that 

Livin’ in the city
Ain’t never been my ideal
Of gettin’ it on 

Western Wave, Eastern Cave

In 1977, a year after Campbell’s hit, George Jones (b. Saratoga TX, 1931) and Tammy Wynette (b. Itawamba MS, 1942) replayed the golden scenario from another angle. In “Southern California,” it’s the woman who has the ramblin’ itch. Over George’s pleading, Tammy lights out for SoCal, believing “silver screens and limousines” await her. The song switches–movielike–to a splitscreen, and we find that after five years of separation, Tammy’s dreams were dashed. She’s working the midnight shift doing God knows what and living in a room that looks out over a sign that just says…“Bar.” George, meanwhile, sits in his mansion and surveys the Smoky Mountains. He owns everything he sees. Like some biblical hero, his faith in his land and people is rewarded sevenfold, but he still misses that country girl-turned-Angeleno transplant. At song’s end, their voices come together in morose irony. “But the weather’s good…in Southern California.” The song hit #5 on the Hot Country singles chart.

Maybe Tammy ended up like Emmylou Harris (b. Birmingham AL, 1947) in next year’s chart topper, “Two More Bottles of Wine.” Emmylou’s character and her beau had come out west—sixteen hundred miles from the people they know—with a “a common desire [to] set the West Coast on fire,” but like Tammy she ended up working the graveyard shift and getting blasted. 

Or maybe she ended up in a darker place still, like the female character in Tompall Glaser (b. Spalding NE, 1933) and Harlan Howard’s (b. Detroit MI, 1927) 1966 classic “Streets of Baltimore,” in which a Tennessee man dutifully follows the wanderlust of his woman to the big city where she takes to walking the streets while her man heads back to safety. 

A year after “Two More Bottles of Wine”, we have “All the Gold in California”, Larry Gatlin’s (b. Seminole TX, 1948) workhorse and a  #1 Billboard Hot Country hit, in which the West Texas oilfield boy warns the Hollywood wannabes that “all the gold in California is in a bank in the middle of Beverly Hills in someone else’s name.” 

New decade, same song. “Smoky Mountain Rain” (1980) by Ronnie Milsap (b. Robbinsville NC, 1943 ) recounts an Appalachian boy hunting for, and not finding, the girl he lost when he moved to LA. The Tennessee legislature loved the song so much that in 2010 they made it an official Tennessee state song. Representative Johnny Shaw, Democrat of Bolivar TN, put up a fight, preferring “So I’ll Just Shine in Tennessee (I’m a Jackson, Tennessee Nugget),” written by former councilwoman Brenda Monroe-Moses, but Republican Tim “We’re Not Gonna Fix It” Burchett said “Shine” was “boring.” It was a fight for the ages.

Another Tennessee state song, ”Rocky Top”, by the indomitable songwriting couple Boudleaux (b. Shellman GA, 1920) and Felice Bryant (b. Detroit MI, 1925), is a paean to the state’s natural charms, but told from the perspective of one who is not there. We’re not told exactly where the speaker is, but he complains of “smoggy smoke” and “telephone bills,” so your guess is as good as mine. 

1981 brings us Shelly West’s (b. Cleveland OH, 1943) duet with David Frizzell (b. El Dorado AR, 1941) on 1981’s “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma”, made for the Clint Eastwood sequel Any Which Way You Can (the movie’s title track was performed by Glen Campbell). It was a huge hit, staying at #1 on the Hot Country Billboard chart for eleven weeks. The song tells the same tale as George and Tammy’s “Southern California” and uses the same filmic splitscreen. Like George and Tammy, Shelly and David are missing each other. Like Tammy, Shelly’s dreams turned not to gold but to “a calico cat and a two-room flat.” Unlike George, David’s character does not inherit the earth; he spends 10 hours a day on a John Deere tractor and remembers. “Remember is all I do,” he says. The song is a gem, even if its melody was deemed so close to “Rocky Top” that a judge made the songwriters give writing credits and royalties to Boudleaux and Felice Bryant. The song–and the absurd stretch of the lawsuit’s claims–could moisten the eyes of a pretty good cowboy.

David Frizzell is the son of country titan Lefty, and Shelly is the daughter Dottie West, the sweet girl of the Coke jingle “Country Sunshine,” the girl who loved running through those fields of daisies, the one who is 

….happy with the simple things
A Saturday night dance, a picture show,
And the joy that a bluebird brings.

Back in 1974, Tennessee governor Ray Blanton had made “Country Sunshine”, with new lyrics from West, his campaign song. The song’s catalog of simple joys and reasons to vote for Blanton does not include massive bar tabs, epic graft to political cronies, and selling pardons to prisoners, which were some of the the simple joys that caused Blanton’s downfall. Nor does the song mention some of Dottie’s other simple joys, like the bowling alley in her mansion, the mirror she had installed above her bed, or the stream of younger men who gazed up at that mirror and wondered at their luck. 

Two years later, in 1983, Shelly West returned to the mine with “Flight 309 to Tennessee”. Written by Ronnie Scott and originally released as an easy-listening track on Bell Records by Vicki Britton, it wasn’t a hit until Shelly made it so. The song finds Shelly heading back to Tennessee after her LA boy falls for “a Hollywood dream.”

“Flight 309” is an update to “LA International Airport.” Originally recorded in 1970 by none other than David Frizzell, Susan Raye (b. Eugene OR, 1944) may it a hit in 1971. The poor narrator is dumped at the start of the song. She has to make it through the big airport alone, accompanied only by her tears, a throng of hippies in leather shirts, and a starlet on her way to Naples. 

Also in 1983, the ballad “Tennessee Christmas” kicks off A Christmas Album by Amy Grant (b. Augusta GA, 1960, but relocated as a child to Nashville). The song is less of an ode to Christmas in Tennessee than an internal argument about whether Amy should go to the Rose Parade. She exhumes the “exciting/inviting” rhyme from “Country Sunshine” and decides to stay put. The album was certified Gold in ‘85 and Platinum in ‘89 and was covered by Alabama on their 1985 album Christmas. 

Alabama singing a song about Tennessee that’s really about Los Angeles? Where does Randy Owen (b. Fort Payne AL, 1949) really want to be? Charted, that’s where. The album was double platinum by 1996. But the album’s real hit was “Christmas in Dixie,” which lists what’s going down on Christmas day in New York City, California, Memphis, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Jackson, and Charlotte. Maybe it should have been called, “Where the Market Research Tells Us the Record Buyers Live.”

1984 gives us “Tennessee Homesick Blues” by Dolly Parton (b. scallop shell, Little Pigeon River TN, mists of time), from Rhinestone, the Sly Stallone-Bob Clark picture. Due to the location of the movie, “Tennessee Homesick Blues” is set in New York City, but the effect is the same. The song hit #1 on the Billboard Hot Country chart. Dolly seems to have gotten over the homesick blues, because by 1987 she was in LA collecting $44M for her variety show, Dolly.

1985 gives us the country-adjacent small town Indiana boy who “married an LA doll and brought her to this small town,” but we’d have to wait until 1987 for that other small town Indiana boy to tell us that LA will “bring you to your knees, [cause] you’re in the jungle, baby, and you’re gonna die.”

Dreams of Joy and Fear

If LA makes the country girls sad and sometimes tragic, tragedy studs the studs like rhinestones on a glen.

When Susan Raye flew on that 747 back east, she may have crossed Albert Hammond (b. London UK, 1944) on his 747 going the other way. In “It Never Rains in Southern California”, from 1972, Hammond’s road to “TV breaks and movies” gets him underloved and underfed, losing self-respect, and wanting to go back home. He cries,

It never rains in California
But, girl, don’t they warn ya
It pours
Man, it pours.

You don’t have to tell that to Jimmy Webb (b. Elk City OK, 1946). He found the cake in the rain in MacArthur Park, right in the belly of the beast on Wilshire Blvd. It almost broke that Oklahoma boy, but it also made him and Donna Summer (b. Boston MA, 1948) a mint.  

Toward the end of “It Never Rains in Southern California,” the failed aspirant begs the listener to lie about his lack of success to the folks back home. He says

Please don’t tell ‘em how you found me
Don’t tell ‘em how you found me

It’s too awful to contemplate. I think the character died. But its creator didn’t. He got rich and now his son is in the Strokes. 

LA is also killing the “Lonesome LA Cowboy” (1973) by New Riders of the Purple Sage. He’s “forgetting everything I know” and blowing his mind on weed, cocaine, and maybe heroin (or is that cabbage he’s “cooking”?). He notes that he’s met a lot of pretty people in the city and “I swear some of them are girls”. It’s a country joke, but it can’t conceal his desperation. He’s “hanging out, hanging on” to the window ledge, and he doesn’t know where he’ll be tomorrow. This theme of addled minds and poisoned blood runs through LA songs from country on down.

The great Tom T. Hall (b. Tick Ridge, KY, 1936) got there first. He sees it, but he ain’t havin’ it. In 1971’s “LA Blues,” he tells us, “All my California friends are searchin' for their minds and it's been right there in their heads all the time.” Always philosophical, Hall personifies LA as riven with the mimetic desire of a guru:

L.A. Blues, L.A. Blues, you want me to be just like you
Heh heh, well there ain’t no way

Ol’ T laughs in LA’s face and heads back southeast.

Fast forward to 2023. The character played by Luke Combs (b. Huntersville NC, 1990) takes a cue from Tom T., but his brother does not. “Where the Wild Things Are” is a doozy of a cautionary tale about a country boy and his motorcycle who falls for the abandon of the desert, the Sunset strip, the Hollywood Hills, and, of course, drugs, alcohol, and floozies.

That the song invokes Joshua Tree, and that the chorus features the phrase “hearts on fire” calls up the greatest real-life cautionary tale of them all. Inestimably talented, graced with the gift of a thousand moons, reformer of The Byrds and the Rolling Stones, discoverer of Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons (b. Winter Haven FL, 1946) is the ur-incarnation of the country boy ruined in Southern California. Gram spent most of his brief career out west, but all the while he was dreaming, pining for “a calico bonnet from Cheyenne to Tennessee” and for the wind that blows through the hickories. 

I don’t think we can blame Southern California for the real death of Gram Parsons or the imagined death of Luke Combs’s brother. The wind blows everywhere and it blows four ways. But Southern California is where they died, and that’s something.

Terrible and Dear

George and Tammy. The John Deere man and the girl with the cat. The ramblin’ man and his Tennessee painter. All the lovers torn apart by the Hollywood queens and amphetamine dreams. Can any love survive?

Thank the stars for “Meet Me in Montana,” the 1985 #1 hit by Dan Seals (b. Houston TX, 1948) and Marie Osmond (b. Ogden UT, 1959). The song imagines a pair of lovers separated by those great grasslands and deserts between Nashville and Los Angeles. He’s a Nashville singer who no one listens to and she’s another pretty face without a part to play, but “you’ll always be a movie star to me,” he tells her. They decide to ditch the dreams  and meet in the middle. I hope they’re making little musicals in the snow right now.

Thank the heavens for Guy Clark’s (b. Monahans TX, 1946) “L.A. Freeway”, first recorded by Jerry Jeff Walker in 1972, then by Guy himself in 1975. While not a hit at the time, it has had a blissful run lo this near-half century. It deserves it. It’s Clark’s goodbye to a failed stardom bid in SoCal, and it features the beautiful lines

Oh Susanna, don't you cry, babe
Love's a gift that's surely handmade
We got somethin' to believe in
Don't you think it's time we're leavin'?

Where did they go? Nashville. And there the real-life Guy and Susanna lived out the rest of their 40 years of marriage, and I hope they’re whooping it up in heaven with Johnny and June and Townes Van Zandt today.

And thank God herself for that other couple who wouldn’t let LA beat them. He came to LA to make it in the biz, but he gave more than he got. So he hung his hopes and steeled himself. He sold his old car and took himself to Union Station on Temple between Spring and Broadway at the edge of Chinatown and got on that midnight train to Georgia.

If his hopes were hung, his spirit was renewed, cause his lady, Gladys Knight (b. Atlanta GA, 1944), was right by his side (you know she was). It’s one of the greatest performances of all time, and I hope that train delivered those lovers to the “simpler place and time” they sought. I thank them for showing us all that when a city is ripping you apart, you should leave. 

Swift Be Thy Flight! 

Once upon a time, an American went to work in Australia for a year. One night at the pub, his Aussie pals got on a comical anti-American jag. It went on for hours. Lots of laughs. Finally, the Aussies turned to the American and said, “Alright, mate, what do you Americans say about us?” The American replied, “Well, you just don’t really come up.”

The story represents pretty well the regard most Angelenos have for Tennesseans. Let this doggerel stand as an exception. 

But this is not a story about petty town rivalries. This is a story about love.

In that forlorn year 1996, the woefully underappreciated “folk” (whatever that means) singer and songwriter, Dar Williams (b. Mt. Kisco NY, 1967), offered an insight presaged by Tom T. Hall. Her claim: “Southern California Wants to Be Western New York.” 

Come again, Dar? The land of silver screens and broken dreams wants to be someplace else? Something older? Something somehow more “real”?  Buffalo? Rochester? Ithaca?

Well, of course it does. Makes all the sense in the world. Maybe it takes an outsider to see it. Williams sees a SoCal longing to lie awake in a snowstorm wondering about “all the generations past who used to use that dripping sink,” a city with

 …a family business in sheet metal or power tools,
It wants to have a diner where the coffee tastes like diesel fuel,
And it wants to find the glory of a town they say has hit the skids,
And it wants to have a snow day that will turn its parents into kids,
And it's embarrassed but it's lusting after a SUNY student with mousy brown hair
Who is taking out the compost, making coffee in long underwear

She imagines Southern California building a theme park about a crumbling mill town with “waitresses who look like waitresses who want to leave for the coast.” She sings:

…I think that Southern California has more pain that we can say,
Cause it wants to travel back in time, but it just can't leave L. A.

This California kid knows that ache well. I see it and feel it in the town squares of South Pasadena, uptown Whittier, and Old Towne Orange. They all seem to still have one shop where you can get an old red sled, a vintage gasoline sign, or a Crystal Gayle record. I feel it in the snowmen on the green lawns and the Christmas Eve church services that end with the real wonder of fake snow. I feel it whenever somebody says “this ol’” whatever - “this ol’ house,” “this ol’ guitar,” “these ol’ blues.” Maybe having those ol’ blues would feel more legitimate in the midst of a Blue Norther, like the one David Frizzell felt in “You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma.”

But mostly I hear it in the country music pouring out of every other Camry or Beamer or Ford on the 405.

In Nashville or LA, Memphis or Manhattan, writers clutch pens and hope God writes something good, or at least gives ‘em some schlock to hock. “Tennessee” rhymes with the second most important word in country music and “Malibu” rhymes with the first.

Stories move on conflict, except when they don’t. The songsmiths and moviewrights must consider such things, but it’s the amateur dreamers–the rest of us–who devour the work, and we aren’t really thinking about Nashville or LA, are we? We’re thinking about the guy on the trailer and the gal in the two-room flat with the calico cat and the distance between them.

In 1996, Garth Brooks (b. Tulsa OK, 1962) made a ghost song called “Beaches of Cheyenne.” A Southern California man goes to Wyoming to fulfill a dream: to ride in a rodeo. But he got “a bull no man could ride” and was killed. When his SoCal woman learns of his death, she walks out into the ocean and never returns. They find her footprints in the sand on the “Beaches of Cheyenne.”

It’s metaphysical, another dimension, a dimension not of sight or sound, but of heart.

Back to 2023. A cowboy confronts that 2,000 mile distance between the two lands of our inquiry. He’s in Tennessee, his beloved has gone west. He knows he can’t grow wings, but he realizes that for his beloved there is “no place this cowboy heart won’t go”, so

I'll get in this old pickup truck and drive it west
'Til the sun comes up
'Cause I love you and the way you love your dreams
Just know I'd move these mountains for you
Every grain of desert sand
And if you ever want to settle down with me
Call it Nashville California or LA Tennessee
Call it Nashville California or LA Tennessee

The song recalls the bridge of “Please Come to Boston”:

The drifter’s world goes round and round and I doubt if it’s ever gonna stop
But of all the dreams I’ve lost or found…

From “Nashville, CA/LA, Tennessee”:

Dreamers dreams are never done
Gypsies songs never sung…

In the embrace of the ones who love, the world is transcended. Having loved, the lovers may return to the world and love it anew. Bluegrass in Burbank, tinsel in Tennessee. What matters first is that we’re together, and as soon as possible.

Tim McGraw (b. 1967, Delhi LA) wrote “Nashville, CA/LA, Tennessee” with guitarist Bob Minner (b. DeSoto MO 1966) and Lori McKenna. For my love and money, Lori McKenna is among the greatest country songwriters of all time. Which makes sense, cause she’s from Boston.

Performing and Songwriting Credits

“Country Sunshine”
Written by Dottie West, Billy Davis, and Dianne Whiles
Performed by Dottie West

“Please Come to Boston”
Written and Performed by Dave Loggins

“Country Boy (You Got Your Feet in L.A.)”
Written by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter
Performed by Glen Campbell

“Southern California”
Written by George Richey, Billy Sherrill, and Roger Bowling
Performed by George Jones and Tammy Wynette

“Two More Bottles of Wine”
Written by Delbert McClinton
Performed by Emmylou Harris

“Streets of Baltimore”
Written by Tompall Glaser and Harlan Howard
Performed by Bobby Bare

“All the Gold in California”
Written by Larry Gatlin
Performed by Larry Gatlin & The Gatlin Brothers Band

“Smoky Mountain Rain”
Written by Kye Fleming and Dennis Morgan
Performed by Ronnie Milsap

“Rocky Top”
Written by Boudleaux and Felice Bryant
Performed by the Osborne Brothers

“You’re the Reason God Made Oklahoma”
Written by Larry Collins, Sandy Pinkard, and Felice and Boudleaux Bryant
Performed by David Frizzell and Shelly West

“Flight 309 to Tennessee”
Written by Ronnie Scott
Performed by Shelly West

“LA International Airport”
Written by Leanne Scott
Performed by Susan Raye 

“Tennessee Christmas”
Written by Amy Grant and Gary Chapman
Performed by Amy Grant

“Fast Lanes and Country Roads”
Written by Roger Murrah and Steve Dean
Performed by Barbara Mandrell

“Tennessee Homesick Blues”
Written and performed by Dolly Parton

“It Never Rains in Southern California”
Written by Albert Hammond and Mike Hazlewood
Performed by Albert Hammond

“Lonesome LA Cowboy”
Written by Peter Rowan
Performed by New Riders of the Purple Sage

“LA Blues”
Written and performed by Tom T. Hall

“Where the Wild Things Are”
Written by Randy Montana and Dave Turnbull
Performed by Luke Combs

“Hickory Wind”
Written by Gram Parsons and Bob Buchanan
Performed by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris

“Meet Me in Montana”
Written by Paul David
Performed by Dan Seals and Marie Osmond

“L.A. Freeway”
Written and performed by Guy Clark

“Midnight Train to Georgia”
Written by Jim Weatherly
Performed by Gladys Knight and the Pips

“Southern California Wants to Be Western New York”
Written and performed by Dar Williams 

“The Beaches of Cheyenne”
Written by Garth Brooks, Dan Roberts, and Bryan Kennedy
Performed by Garth Brooks

“Nashville, CA/LA, Tennessee”
Written by Tim McGraw, Lori McKenna, and Bob Minner
Performed by Tim McGraw and Lori McKenna