I swear, all I knew about THE LOUVIN BROTHERS
aside from their amazing country/harmony/bluegrass duets from the 50s &
60s, I learned from this Mark Dancey comic in Motorbooty some years back (you’ll
need to scroll at the bottom to read the comic’s four pages). Then I saw this
hardcover book by CHARLIE LOUVIN (née
Loudemilk) that recently came out, and the impulse to dig deeper into his
and his brother’s dirty hillbilly laundry was too much to resist. The two
brothers, who amassed a fantastic catalog of beautiful gospel and traditional
country music right up until the form commercialized and left its roots, are
ripe for all sorts of metaphors should you choose to apply them: Darkness and
Light, Heaven and Hell, Sobriety and Drunkenness and so on – at least if you
believe Charlie’s telling of their pained and somewhat tragic story. He wrote
this book just months before he died in 2011, so it will likely stand as the
final word on how these brothers climbed their way from poverty to show
business royalty, and the many troubles they encountered on the way.
The book’s core is very much about the
relationship of Charlie Louvin to his mandolin-playing brother Ira, and about
how Ira’s demons (alcohol, womanizing, a complete and utter lack of outward
humility and a paralyzing ego) did the duo in. It’s also, I think, Charlie’s
big catharsis. He obviously spent most of his life feeling a bit like a doormat
to his brother, who wrote most of their songs and who could easily command Charlie
to do his bidding, whether it was to chop down a persimmon tree and risk a
beating from their sadistic father, or to have Ira’s wife committed to a mental
institution. Charlie plays himself off as the strong, responsible and somewhat
silent half of the duo, who suffered much inner turmoil trying to keep his wild
and unpredictable drunken hypocrite of a brother in line and their career
going.
Funny enough, and yet totally appropriately,
the book is written in Southern dialect in many parts. After a while you get
used to this autobiography and its “We
was traveling to Memphis and I was fixing to eat a hamburger”-style
colloquialisms, and accept the deeper truths that are latent in the telling. Ira
Louvin left a long, dark scar on this poor man’s life, and loomed exceptionally
large in it until Ira’s death in 1965 (ironically, in a car accident in which
the other driver was drunk). Yet
you get the sense that Charlie, once freed of the burden of his
joined-at-the-hip brother, really got to experience growing up and the
liberating freedom that comes from embracing personal responsibility. I think
Charlie had to overcome a bit of an ego problem of his own, in that he’d always
been told by his brother that it was Ira
that made the duo what it was, that it was really Ira’s group – and thus toward the end Charlie makes it abundantly
clear how proud he is that he “had more Top 30 country hits” personally, in the
years after 1965, than the Louvin Brothers ever had when they were together.
Along the way there are many great anecdotes
told in short, 4-5 page chapters. There’s the famous one in which Ira calls
Elvis Presley a “white nigger” to his face in a weird fit of drunken pique, and
therefore cheats the band out millions of potential royalties had Elvis (a huge
Louvins fan) ever covered a song of theirs – which he didn’t, after Ira’s
unfortunate rant. There’s a bit about how they got on the Grand Old Opry after
years of trying through a clever bluff, and how Charlie hates the Opry people still
running the show in 2011. Their decision to “go secular” from their gospel
roots is interesting, as is the great story of how they created the record
cover (and now book cover) to the amazing “Satan Is Real” – one of two totally
essential records of theirs in my opinion (the other is “Tragic Songs of Life”;
you might want to pick up the “When I Stop Dreaming” collection as well).
One of the constants from so many memoirs I’ve
read is, unfortunately, parental or domestic abuse – see the recent memoirs I reviewed
by Alice Bag and Dan Fante. Well, the Louvins’ father beat the crap out of them
as well, especially Ira, and Charlie believes it cast a huge shadow on them
subsequently: why they left home to be musicians so early; why Ira was so
insecure; why Ira was such a hideous drunk, and so on. It reminds me of a
terrific Dan Carlin podcast from a couple years ago in which he theorized about
the cumulative effect on history, and on historical figures, from centuries of child
abuse and child neglect. In our slightly more enlightened age – which has
really only taken hold in the past 1-2 generations, in which, in the west at
least, child beatings are looked askance on – what will be the (presumably
positive) effect on the children of today as they grow into adults? It’s a
worthy aside, and one that I can’t help thinking about when I read about the torture
past generations of children such as the Louvins had to endure.
“Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers” is a quick and very straightforward read, and captures a snapshot of
Southern Americana as it existed in the 1930s, 40s, 50s and 60s. It’s certainly
fortunate, and not a little bit lucky, that Charlie Louvin completed this
memoir only just prior to his death, and we’re all the better for it because he
done did.
