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Rating: They are poor, losers, drunks, high on antidepressants, have lost wives/husbands and become obese, singing like sad carbon copies of the last Elvis's stand-in, sitting on a golden toilet with greasy hands in their hair, on miserable days like Christmas.
There is someone crying in the back of a low-class bar every time before going on stage, with makeup running down from tears and sequins on a ruined dress. They are like exploded stars, and systematically someone convinces them to go up and sing, infusing them with that stubborn idea of sui generis musical resistance that makes every common bluegrass dance floor slippery, dark, and dirty.
Shelby Singleton Jr. is an American citizen who has dedicated himself with unforgettable success to the art of music production. Hanging around the most notorious shacks of the '50s rockabilly music industry, he has transformed miserable underdogs into plausible ideal-typical manifestations of what we might, with physiological imprecision, define as "Country Music." But this is free enterprise, the pure American dream in action. Like a cowboy version of Meek, Singleton is the outlaw King Midas, mad scientist à la Jerry Lewis, a sort of missionary of country with an idea of song-based and socialist evangelization of the rough mass that populates the shacks across the country and an extraordinary sense of humor, a necessary derivative of the great artistic freedom he enjoyed in a country where, after all, it is not desecration to cover Terry Nelson songs with a sitar or give oneself nicknames like "Johnny Credit" or "Tom Sawyer."
Whatever the true meaning of all this, the fact remains that among 300 million people there are stories, aimed at connecting every misfortune to every misery as endless telegraph lines, and capable of clarifying the message of the true "popular" and egalitarian nature of music. It is the story of The King of Comedy, the fate that picks up sharecroppers, slackers, opossum hunters, children of war, hobos, obese girls who could take down a grizzly bear with a breath and turns them into desperate clones of Gene Vincent singing on second-hand cars, alter egos of Pate Ray as a child dressed as a landlord in the midst of a railway disaster taking the bus to school on a dusty morning in Virginia or Tommy Facenda "Bubba Clapper Boy" in a romantic '50s embrace with a permed girl wrapped in a jeans tube singing the school canteen's choruses. We are thousands of miles from the sparkling lights of Nashville and any romantic vision of rural America like Forrest Gump. Here there is dust, neon lights, and cheap beers against a post-atomic backdrop of the late '50s boom. There is neither bread nor butter but LSD, codeine, failed hedge funds, mortgages to pay, floods, and Long John's funds.
This is what happens when art has no strings and laces: it flows, like roads, cars, and even before, herds up and down the continent.
May these prayers go to those who spent the entire night trying to spy on their neighbor, writing love songs, crossing 10 states, drinking thousands of Budweisers, dressed as a chicken for baseball, writing letters, shooting imaginary enemies around the world, laughing and dying on the edge of the same miserable interstate.
In God we trust.
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