The Browns are siblings -- Jim Ed, Bonnie, and Maxine -- and, for a time in the 1950s and 60s, they were among the most popular recording artists in the world. The harmonic sound of their voices, stylized by Bass and others as “Nashville Chrome,” was not only their claim to fame, but is, in many ways, the lever Bass uses to pry open the novel’s dark secrets.
That the greatest voices, the greatest harmony in country music, should come from such a hardscrabble swamp -- Popular Creek, Arkansas -- and that fame should lavish itself upon the three of them, their voices braiding together to give the country the precise thing it most needed or desired -- silky polish, after so much raggedness, and a sound that would be referred to as Nashville Chrome -- makes an observer pause. Did their fabulous voices come from their own hungers within, or from thrice-in-a-lifetime coincidence? They were in the right place at the right time, and the wrong place at the right time.
So Much Raggedness
Bass’s novel, as beautiful and as evocative as it is, doesn’t lend itself to easy citation or explanation. There is a plot, but it is pleasantly subservient to the sparse tone and philosophic yearning of its prose.
Early on, the focus is very much on the ragged forest world from which the Browns are seemingly called.
The little sawmill was perched at the edge of the dark woods, resting atop the rich soil, with the workers gnawing their way slowly into the old forest. Some years the workers would bring the logs in to the mill, and other years -- depending on transportation logistics and contracts -- the mill would pack up and move a little farther into the woods. There were still panthers in the swamps and bears in the mountains, or what passed for mountains in those old worn-down hills.
This was another of the paths of their childhood, the physical and sensual sounds and odors of the mill, with the blades whirring on and off throughout the day -- the high whine of the spinning, waiting blade powering down to a deep groan as the blade accepted the timber, the blades sending out a different pitch for rough cut, planing, or finishing, and likewise a different tone based on size, density, even species of timber and time of year, and whether the tree grew on a north slope or a south slope.
Different smells, too, wafted through their lives in ribbons of scent -- the green odor of the living wood and the drier one of dead wood, the latter a scent like that of a campfire; the smell of the diesel engines as well as those of the mules and horses that sometimes skidded the logs out of the swamp when gasoline was scarce or could not be squandered; the scent and creaking sound of the leather harnesses and other tack of the mules and horses; the stale alcohol-sweat and the tobacco of the laborers, all of them missing fingers, even hands and arms, sometimes from the blade but more often from the logs themselves, thousand-pound rolling pins cascading off the truck, crushing and pinching anything in their way.
And where the workers had not lost some of the various parts of themselves -- where there was still a full complement of teeth and fingers and thumbs, hands, feet, arms, and legs -- there were internal injuries: broken bones, alcoholism, rage, and the mute desperation of a poverty unknown by several previous generations.
It is an ancient place, only recently occupied by man, with only a handful of generations to learn its dark secrets, not nearly enough to either master or transcend it. But...
The children knew no other world. The forest -- both the injured forest as well as the uninjured -- combined with the children’s spirits like the gold light that came down through the dense canopy of broad leaves in the morning: each pattern of leaf, each lobe and serration, already accommodated to the specificity of its time and place.
In that forest, the shady dapple of the leaves moderated the temperature of the soil and gave nutrition to the legions of meek insects, the lives of which also helped enrich and process the soil, and each morning in the spring and summer, the forest would begin to hiss with chlorophyllic excess -- a tremendous, thunderous, silent power, a silent energy shimmering above the leaves with such verve that it was almost audible.
The green light bathed the children, infiltrated their lungs, shimmered its golden way up into their minds. They could have stayed there forever -- as had the generations before them -- but the force that had come into them desired otherwise.
This is not the first mention of this force, and it will not be the last. But for now, let’s focus a moment on what happens when something as beautiful as Nashville Chrome enters this ragged world.
Floyd and Birdie [the parents of the Browns] continued to marvel at -- to revel in -- their children’s ability to make a living doing what everyone in their family had always done, playing music and singing -- and marveled too at the celebrity. Only Norma [a younger sister] remained behind now, still in school, but in some ways it was almost as if the others were still at home, for at almost any hour of the day or night, they could turn on their radio -- a gift from their children -- and, if they listened long enough, one of the Browns’ songs would always come on. It was almost like it had been when they were still living at home.
To Floyd, in such moments, lying on his back beneath the maw of a tractor, or mucking out the mules’ stalls, it was almost as if they were still right there, and occasionally he would stop in his labors and just listen: and though they were his children and it was a sound he had known all his life, even he, with his familiarity with their music, and his gruff demons, would in those moments know a balm. He would lie there looking up at the blue sky through the underside of the old engine, or would lean on his shovel and just listen, with a strange and wonderful mix of emotions; the old fevers draining away as if never to return, and pride swelling in him, and the core thing, the thing he didn’t even think about much: love.
One of the things I like so much about this book -- and, I think about Bass as a writer, is his ability to put us there, with Floyd, leaning on that shovel, remembering what love is. A moment of respite from a weary world.
When times were good like that, and Floyd was in his cups but not yet despondent or bitter or frightened, he had a saying, a little joke, that indicated how pleased he was with such rare moments of calm and cheer and fearlessness. He knew such confidence was foolish, which was why it amused him, on the occasions he felt it.
“We might get out of this alive after all,” he would say, grinning, enormously pleased with life, and the moment. Laughing at himself, mostly, knowing how quickly that moment of optimism was fading even as he briefly inhabited it.
Their Own Hungers Within
But Nashville Chrome has other effects -- effects both on those who hear it and on those who produce it. With the love, it awakens a deep and unsatisfiable hunger for more, more, more. And of the three Brown siblings, it is Maxine that feels this hunger the deepest of them all.
For a long time, things had been simple, and any hungers they ever had were physical, but once the world discovered their sound, they knew a different kind of hunger. The size and magnitude of it, she realizes now, was precisely the size of the world’s hunger, though for what, even now, she cannot say for sure.
This is told in the future, when Maxine is an old woman, living alone in a house with the memories of her youth and career.
Sometimes she goes into her tiny office, where all her memorabilia is stored neatly in cedar chests, and where framed photographs cover every inch of wall and occupy every portion of desk space: photos of her and her brother and sister with all of the old greats: Ernest Tubb, Vassar Clements, Doc Watson, Dolly Parton, Porter Wagoner. Elvis, of course, and the Beatles, and the Mamas and the Papas, even Dylan. Pictures of her with senators, governors, and presidents. A newspaper from London that reported them to be the number one musical act in all of England. Pictures of her throwing out the first pitch at the All-Star Game in 1956, when the Browns were at the top of both the country and pop charts simultaneously, the first time that had ever been done, and also the last. She was dating the Washington Senators’ third baseman, who was playing in the game; they were a couple in the era before the proliferation of tabloids dedicated to chronicling such movements. He suggested that she throw out the first pitch, and that the Browns sing the national anthem, which they did.
A clock somewhere ticking, melting away, back then, but they had no idea.
Maxine’s end is not a pretty one. A practical shut-in, she dreams of a return to her former glory, dreams even while her brother enjoys a semi-successful solo career and her younger sister -- after coming close to marrying Elvis Presley, settles down with another man and fades happily from the spotlight. Maxine, it seems, can do neither -- too proud to settle down and too frightened to put herself out and fail.
And in her end, Bass, I believe, wants us to see his, ours, everyone’s.
Restricted to the downstairs section of her house as she is, Maxine longs for the day when she can climb the steps again and shower in her own bathroom, can select clothes from her bedroom closet, rather than sleeping on the couch and living out of the cardboard box that Bonnie brought downstairs for her. No one ever thinks they will end up this way; yet neither are there any plans that can be laid to prevent such steady approach of darkness, when it is darkness’s time to come.
Only An Elemental Force
And Bass’s judgment, again and again, is that this story, all of it, both the raggedness that gave them birth and the hungers that compelled them, is all part of some fundamental force that shapes us and the way the world receives us. This “elemental force” is mentioned frequently, given as an explanation that of course explains nothing.
The girls didn’t get to sleep around. That was the boys’ task, the boys’ duty. Bonnie didn’t want to -- was saving herself for marriage -- and Maxine, though she wanted to, didn’t, mostly just because she wasn’t supposed to. More smoldering. So much waiting. Still believing she had a hand in this matter of her life -- in any of it.
In the morning the party-life would be gone entirely, passing like a wonderful storm for the boys, and they would all four reconvene for breakfast, bleary-eyes and wrung out, but filling back up, the well recharging from what was surely a limitless reservoir.
Did Maxine and Bonnie want their own partners, as enduring and steadfast as were the boys’ liaisons fleeting? Bonnie, certainly; Maxine, less so. By that point she would bury any ten lovers if it helped her get more of the drug she needed. She told Bonnie she was “horny as a two-peckered billy goat,” but her real hunger was for something far below.
Was it her fault that she was that way, or anyone’s fault that two sisters of the same parents could be so different? There was no right or wrong in it. It was all only an elemental force blowing through them. It was all requisite for the world to turn as it turned.
I think Bass is able to capture the poignancy of it all, even if his characters never really do. When it comes to Nashville Chrome -- both the sweet sound of the Browns and the metaphoric spirit that it represents -- there can never really be an explanation for why it comes and why it goes. The world produces it, the same way it produces both summer showers and raging hurricanes, either for reasons beyond our comprehension or for no reason at all. We, after all, are only the droplets of water that the world harnesses for its inscrutable purpose.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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