Family acts have long exerted a powerful pull on audiences. Whether it's a brother-and-sister musical duo like Yehudi and Hephzibah Menuhin or a husband-and-wife acting team like Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, it's irresistibly fascinating to see them perform together on stage. When they get along—and sometimes even when they don't—they very often give the uncanny impression of being able to think, move or sing like a single person. Alas, such acts are no longer as common in the music business as they used to be, perhaps because families aren't as close as they used to be. Nor have they ever been all that common in classical music. It is in the field of pop music that family members are far more likely to collaborate, and it is in country music that they have left the deepest mark. (click below to read more)
Why is this so? Because many country musicians were children of the Depression born into poor rural families. If they wanted to hear music, they usually had to make it themselves, and if they did it well enough, they had a chance to lift themselves out of poverty. What's more, it's natural enough for siblings who make music together as children to keep on doing so in adulthood. Not only do they know one another's musical ways intimately, but sometimes their voices blend together with an uncanny, even eerie unanimity.
Brother acts have usually been more popular in country music than sister or husband-and-wife acts, and none has been more admired or influential than the Louvin Brothers, who cut their first record in 1947. Like many sibling acts, they were a match made in hell, so much so that Ira Louvin's violent, alcohol-fueled temper finally led Charlie, his younger brother, to break up the duo in 1963, two years before Ira died in a car crash. But you'd never have guessed it from hearing them sing together, for their high, hard-bitten voices wound round one another in harmonies so closely woven that you couldn't always tell which brother was singing what part.
Two months before his own death in 2011, Charlie Louvin finished work on an autobiography that was published earlier this year. "Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers" (Igniter/HarperCollins), which has the rough-hewn sound of a real person swapping stories after hours, is one of the most important and illuminating memoirs ever written by a country singer. Not only is it as readable as a first-rate novel, but "Satan Is Real," which is named after the Louvin Brothers' best-known album, a 1959 collection of gospel songs, offers urbanites a joltingly vivid glimpse of what it was like to grow up on a Depression-era farm.
The Louvins were born in the Sand Mountain region of Alabama, a plateau where most people earn their living—such as it is—by farming. Ira and Charlie started working in their father's cotton fields when they were small children, a job that left their hands raw and bloody and made them determined to sing their way out as soon as they could. Because radios were few and far between on Sand Mountain, the Louvin clan got together every Saturday night to listen to the Grand Ole Opry at a neighbor's house, then went to church the next morning to sing Sacred Harp hymns. Add in the century-old murder ballads that the boys learned from their mother and you've got a recipe for a style of music with twin roots in the Bible and the gutter.
Flannery O'Connor observed in 1960 that "while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted." Ira Louvin, who could never reconcile his deep-seated religious convictions with his fleshly urges, would have known exactly what she was talking about. To listen to a Louvin Brothers song like "Are You Afraid to Die" is to be left in no doubt whatsoever that Ira was at least as Christ-haunted as any of Ms. O'Connor's fictional characters. According to Charlie, Ira believed that he had been called by God to preach the gospel, but was incapable of fulfilling his destiny: "It haunted him that he didn't do what he was put here on this earth to do."
Small wonder that after "Satan Is Real," the Louvin Brothers' greatest achievement was "Tragic Songs of Life," the 1956 album in which they sang some of the 19th-century ballads that they learned from their mother. One of them, "Mary of the Wild Moor," is the tale of a young girl who becomes pregnant and is disowned by her family: "I am now doomed to roam, without friends or a home, / And no one to take pity on me." Charlie devotes a whole chapter of "Satan Is Real" to this mournful song: "I can't hardly sing it now, because it's so possible. Because it happened then, and it could still happen now. And nobody should be that cruel, not to a child."
Small wonder, too, that a pair of poor boys who learned such ballads when they were too young to work in the fields later sang them with the heartbreaking eloquence that comes from learning in childhood that the world can be unsparingly cruel. Great art can come of such knowledge, but so, too, does what Thomas Mann called "disorder and early sorrow." I sometimes wonder how many artists might have chosen to go into another line of work had they known when young the price some adults pay in order to make art.
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