Cookin' It Up Country

It's been quite a few years now since I first learned to love good old-fashioned country ham, cooked with grits and red-eye gravy. But it's only been a little while that I could even tolerate the wailing poignant sticky strains of country music.

Country ham doesn't have to come from the smoke house as it once did, whole, wrapped in muslin, and heady with curing spices. Now it comes sliced, in clear plastic, under marketing names--like Andy Griffith's, for instance. Andy Griffith also smiles and solicits for his chain of "old fashion" restaurants across the Carolinas: Y'all come see us.

Andy sells a lot of his "special recipe" barbecue in these restaurants. What his cooks are imitating is the barbecue they still sell out in the country at old converted gas stations with a little shed in back where they cook the pork in a pit, and a gravelled parking lot full of jacked-up Chevelles and the irresistible odor of the cooking. Inside the place, a couple of country boys beside the counter or the beer cooler are flirting with the waitresses who make the plates up from barbecue, potato salad, slaw, and hush-puppies, and put the take-outs in shiny paper bags. There's not even a juke box just a little radio playing Conway Twitty or Loretta Lynn or Donna Fargo.

Now Donna Fargo is a right pretty young country star who comes from Andy Griffith's own home country, up near Mt. Airy. She made a song a couple of years ago called "The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A." which since then has sold well over a million copies. She's a new kind of country star in several ways. Her songs sound a little bit different from anything that preceded her. (I can't tell you so awful much about that; you'll have to get them on the radio.) She started out not in Nashville but in a place called Covina, California, where she taught elementary school for five years under the unmusical name of Yvonne Vaughn, and started writing songs to make herself into Donna Fargo. Only when she made it big did she quit and come East live in Nashville.

Donna has been on tour down Sough, along with a number of other Nashville performers, and a couple of weeks ago, on a gray Sunday afternoon at home in North Carolina, me and an old boy I know decided to tool out to the local fairgrounds to get just a taste of those sweet sounds.

The arena there is a bizarre, show-offy thing originally built for cattle exhibitions and horse shows. It's made up of a couple of tremendous concrete horseshoes that interlock and support the hanging roof. Inside everything is the barest gray concrete, with dust in the corners, and a great wide concrete floor which that day was only about half filled with chairs. Up front a big American flag stretched above the stage.

Well, that happened was that Donna was pretty well upstaged. She was upstaged by something that said a lot more about the music and the people than she, in fire-engine red pants suit and pep talk tones, could say. What happened was that after Freddy Hart and the Heartbeats, with the lights glittering off their sequined seams and tapping patent leather boots had knocked out a few tunes, and after Freddy Hart had invoked the late great Hank Williams and the late great Tex Ritter, and told the audience, with the genuine feeling of the poor boy made good, all of you is real precious to me--then this black guy came out.

--Before I go any further you have to understand that the leading figure of country music last year was not Donna Fargo, nor even Merle Haggard, but a black man named Charlie Pride. That raised newsmagazine eyebrows and so pretty many people probably heard about it--

Then this black guy came out and started jumping an dancing and whipping the microphone cord around all over the stage. This, the ponderous yellow-jacketed m.c. announced, was O.B. McClinton.

O.B. McClinton is an extremely clever performer. Most of his act consists of imitations of other country singers and of a few who aren't country. And he knows how to talk to an audience. He told stories about how his brother done his wife wrong by staying too late in the Four-way Grill in Memphis and calling home and telling her he was working late, and she walked out on him taking all the furniture. He did his version of Conway Twitty, and damn if two blondes, with piled-up hair-dos like you see at Wallace rallies, didn't stand and shout Let me hear ya, O.B.! He did a couple more country tunes from other people and twisted and grinned and showed with his voice what the most doubtful of those lyrics really mean. He made jokes about how people didn't often get him confused with I forget what other (redneck) star who has a similar name. He led into his version of Elvis by telling how Elvis came up one day in a pick-up truck from Tupaloo and said "I wanna make a record," and now, he said, even Charlie Pride got to say MR. Elvis.

And then he broke into a wild, stomping version of the hardest thing in my act, me.--He shuffled back away from the mike, bending his knees and clapping with laughter at the joke--stomping around, belting it out and jumping Jim Crow all the way off stage, to tremendous applause. then he had to come right back out, panting, because he had promised to do Charlie Pride but I wouldn't want to get Charlie outta place for you, you gotta have him last. This time they stood up to applaud him off.

That was the most of the show. A tall guy with a Texas hat came on next and since he knew he couldn't follow that said Boy, ain't that O.B. something. I never I'd live to see the day. They're ganging up on us, him and Charlie Pride. I never thought I'd see a nigger imitatin' Elvis Presley. And then Donna Fargo who'd almost been forgotten, came out and sang well enough. A very fat girl and a very thin girl had been waling up together throughout the show to take pictures of the performers and now when the people saw Donna Fargo bend down to give them a better shot they all started coming up too with their Instamatics and there were flash cubes going off right and left while she kept singing and bending down.

We finally walked out past the tables where they were selling Donna Fargo albums and booklets with pictures of Donna Fargo in denim jacket and checkered shirt leaning against a tree. I over heard a guy there saying Yes sir that O.B. is mighty fine and let me tell you he knows where he is, too.

Afterwards we really threw it down getting out of the parking lot and drove out in the country to get some real old-fashioned barbecue for supper.