By Lawrence Everett Forbes
Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music
Faber & Faber, 272 pp., $24
Dana Jennings’ memoir, Sing Me Back Home: Love, Death, and Country Music, begins with a shotgun—wedding, that is. The author’s parents, all of 17, married eight days before his birth in Hampstead, New Hampshire. With the help of his parents grey-and-white Sylvania record player, “Rock and Rollin’ with Fats Domino” and “Johnny Cash with his Hot and Blue Guitar” (“…those two record albums [I am convinced] became my nursery rhymes, comforted me with as much as the soothing bass of my mother’s heart.”) Jennings begins his lifelong love affair with country music. Photo credit Fred Conrad
Dana Jennings, novelist and New York Times editor, offers up a memoir about his lifelong love of country music.
While the Yankee environs of Hampstead are a far cry from Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry and the heart of country music, Jennings’ memoir embodies themes that exemplify the the genre’s resonance. As is the isolation, yearning, and disappointment that define much of what is currently referred to as “classic country.” An editor of the New York Times’ Escapes section, Jennings waxed reminiscent during a recent interview. Blurring the line between memoirist and country music aficionado, the 50-year-old author contextualizes the turbulent backdrop against which both rest: postwar America and the ways in which those changes affected the country, his family and the music. Jennings has written three novels, but Sing Me Back Home is his first nonfiction book. Instead of writing about the fictional lives of rural people, he weaves an intriguing history of country music’s evolution from its humble beginnings to its current status as crossover pop behemoth. Said history is interspersed with Jennings’ recollections of his hardscrabble youth and family whose lives were punctuated by alcoholism (Jennings’ paternal great-aunt), adultery, abandonment (his maternal grandmother…for a spell), domestic abuse (his paternal grandmother) and the other things that classic country songs are made of. The Sanborn Regional High School valedictorian was the first of his working-class family to graduate high school. Fueled by the intellectual drive that led him to learn how to read before first grade, Jennings headed to the University of New Hampshire, where he entered the field of journalism. Within years, he moved to New York and served as a copy editor at the Wall Street Journal before moving on to his current post at the Times. The book reads with the shifting cadences of country music—driving hard driving and heavy like Jerry Lee Lewis, soft and sensuous like the ache in Patsy Cline’s voice, ragged, ruthless and raring to wail the blues like the Man in Black himself. Country music’s black music roots—Chuck Berry, Charley Pride, Ray Charles, et al.—are also given their due). Each chapter reads as its own track, and the tracks together make an album of Jennings’ life, as well as a revered music history imbued with such passion and personal history, the book is hard to put down. It’s like listening to a well-informed friend talk about a genre of music you know little of but have always been curious about. Sing Me Back Home also served as a form of catharsis for the author—but not in the spill-the-family-secrets way. The project helped the proud father of two Dartmouth undergrads reclaim his roots and reconcile his hardscrabble youth. Asked what he believes his now-deceased grandmother’s response to the book would be, he says, “Grandma would have been tickled that her grandson thought enough to write it for her.” Jennings’ own marriage to wife Deborah is not of the shotgun variety—and couldn’t be further from one if he’d tried; he converted to Judaism in 2004. In fact, the easygoing wordsmith joked that the title of his next book would be “Redneck Jew.”
