honky tonkin' in leeds, nashville, and chicago: the place of punk in alt. country

Honky Tonkin’ in Leeds, Nashville, and Chicago: The Place of Punkin Alt.Country

Play my song on the Nashville radio,My life will never be the same.…***They threw me off the Grand Ole Opry,Cuz I couldn’t behave.…***They don’t play my songs on the radio,It feels like I never was.

–“Nashville Radio,” Jonboy Langford

Rivers Run Through Them

Many commentators have long noticed the connections between

London punks and their West Indian reggae brethren in Brixton and

Notting Hill (Coon 71, 79, Gray 229, Hebdige 25–9, Marcus 1993,

30, and Savage 330, 398, 488–9). But what of the Northern branch

of punk rock with its roots in Liverpool, Manchester, and

especially the Leeds art school production line of the Gang of

Four, Delta 5, and the Mekons. Do they have a similar musical

wellspring? Or more interestingly a distinctly different one?

Both towns are sited by rivers. London exists at the first place

the Romans could successfully ford the Thames and through the

Second World War was England’s major commercial port. As Tom

O’Rage notes in Mekons United:

“Honky Tonkin’” - 1 -

Were it not for the river Leeds would not be there. At first

only a rough Celtic settlement in the marshes — Leeds simply

meaning a wet place — the conquering Germanic tribes from

Saxony built a settlement where the parish church now stands

and the river could be crossed. The a bridge was built

across the Aire and it became a place.… A cross current at

the heart of the heart of the country almost equidistant on

a north–south axis from London and Edinburgh, and east-west

from Liverpool and Hull, Leeds was made by the industrial

revolution (15).

Two rivers, two cities, two different yet linked economies.

Conversely, think of the potentially nice distinctions between

cosmopolitan southerners and their linkage to urban decay,

decades of immigration, and post-colonialism and provincial

northerners and their roots in post-industrial blight, centuries

of emigration, and the concomitant colonialism in the Americas

and beyond. Contrast the vastness of London that infernal wen

with the relative closeness of Leeds, which “is like a small town


with loads of industry.….[[and] a big, huge

university/polytechnic right in the center of the town” (Hargus).

These Northern punks then look to North America, specifically the

southern United States (not the Caribbean) and country (not

reggae) to express their outrage and politics musically. That’s

the kind of clever concoction Greil Marcus would make of Hank

Williams, Bob Wills, and the Mekons. But, as Jon Langford himself

might say in that South Wales accent whetted and hewn to a harder

edge with some West Yorkshire lime, that story is a “load of

shite!”1 Ever feel like you’ve been cheated?

Here are the two most obvious problems with this fantasy.

First, while the Clash clearly demonstrated some connection to

and consciousness of reggae on their very first record, covering

Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves,” the original “punk” Mekons

broke up in 1982. Only after reforming in 1984, and adding

guitarist Dick Taylor, violinist Susie Honeyman, and singer Sally

Timms did they venture into the country world featured on such

releases as 1985’s Fear and Whiskey. Second, the impetus to mine ore1 Just such facile comparisons and contrasts are still extant. The (formerly Manchester) Guardian even devotes an on-going section to the North-South divide (www.guardian.co.uk /northsouth).


from a country vein came from outside the group, outside Leeds,

and, yes, even outside the UK. As Jon Langford remembers it:

A DJ from Chicago [Terry Nelson of WZRD] came over to find

his two favorite bands, the Pretty Things and the Mekons,

and got us hooked up with [ex-Pretty Thing] Dick Taylor (who

would join the Mekons for a while) and told us we were a

country band... drinking songs, simple structures, bare-

bones approach, singing for your peers, politics through the

personal (Nickson).

So if there’s no direct spiritual connection between Northern

British punks and Southern US country muses, what then is the

connection between punk and the Mekons and the genre dubbed, for

now, alt.country.

As recently as 2001, Robert Christgau made the questionable

claim that the Mekons’ 1985 Sin release, “Fear and Whiskey invented

alt-country” (www.robertchristgau.com/xg/cdrev/mekons ro-

not.php). If you define the term "alt" as decade specific to the

1980s; there's some truth to the claim or, at least, the truth as


http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/cdrev/mekons%20ro-not.php

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/cdrev/mekons%20ro-not.php

Christgau states it is that "Fear and Whiskey does it [alt

country] right." Surely, however if you define the genre less

restrictively, it dates at least to the moment when Graham

Parsons left daddy’s citrus plantation and flew his burrito to

LALAland (Dolan; Malone 2002, 306–7, n.90; Peterson and Beall).

A contrarian might even argue that Alt.Country’s true roots lie

in early Sun 45s, especially those by Johnny Cash and Elvis

Presley. However, the notion of the late 1980s Mekons and various

later side projects as exemplifying either alt.country or the

Bloodshot label preferred “insurgent” country remains sound.

First, I will set some historical parameters for my narrative and

define some terms. Then, I will examine the connections between

the Mekons’ “country” records and the burgeoning alt.country

scene of the late 1980s as a response to the problematic nature

of “Nashville Radio.” Finally, I will focus on new side projects

for Jon Langford and Sally Timms as they move to Chicago in the

mid 1990s and join the anti-Nashville record label, Bloodshot.

This narrative will explain the connections between at least one

geographically significant branch of punk music and the current

day phenomenon of alt.country.


Alt.Country/Insurgency/No Depression—Some Terms and Historical Guidelines

One should tread lightly when defining terms; however, let

me make a few points, both definitional and historical, about

alt.country, No depression, and insurgent country. First and

foremost, although I will wander further back in time on

occasion, the subject matter of alt.country can loosely be

contained within the time period from the 1980s to the present.

Despite my previous one-upsmanship of moving alternative country,

whatever its rubric, into the 1950s, you really first need a

Nashville business model (focused on certain types of sounds and

a specific radio industry) before you can develop an alternative.

If we go pre-industrial, then I’m just writing a different take

on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and Greil Marcus’s

“Old, Weird America” (1997, 87). Second, the artists under

consideration must feel a palpable alienation from said music and

radio industry. This obviously works for Johnny Cash in the 1990s

(think of his famous one-finger-salute-to-Nashville ad on the

back page of Billboard after Unchained won a 1997 Grammy with

virtually no commercial Country airplay) but not so in the 1950s.


I doubt Graham Parsons gave a thought to what Nashville made of

his SoCal strummings. These artists needn’t necessarily self-

identify as a group, but it helps. Here I’m both buying into and

tweaking E.P. Thompson’s famous notion of “class struggle without

class.”2 It really is only at the nag’s end of the 1980s that

critics and fans began talking about a variety of musical

movements (many of which picked up steam in the 1990s and beyond)

that defined themselves against everything they saw wrong with

the whole Nashville ethos and consciously chose to avoid its

malign influence by forming their own record labels and producing

their own music elsewhere, whether in Chicago, the flatlands of

Southern Illinois, or Seattle. Thus the 1970s outlaw phenomenon

of the Highwaymen and what Barbara Ching calls “Hard Country” is

an altogether different beast than the horse whose teeth and gait

we are inspecting. Having thus limited our historical parameters,

what then are these things called “alt.country,” “insurgent

country, “and “No Depression”?

2 For a listener-focused study which reaches different conclusions about "class unconsciousness," see McLaurin and Peterson, 60.


Alt.country or alt-country or the more bombastic alternative

country is the most fraught term and I won’t have much to say

about it. Obviously it is an umbrella term that covers a variety

of musicians who seem to have similar feelings about the

Nashville system. Beyond that, I am pretty sure that any attempt

to define some kind of meaningful generic coherence in the

musical styles these allied artists produce is doomed to fail.

Jon Langford remains skeptical: "You have to have a box to put

things in.… it's a bit of a discredited term.… there's always

been people [making music] outside the mainstream" (Phone

Interview). There are a variety of related names: Americana,

Country Rock, twangcore, Roots Rock, y’all-ternative, and cow-

punk, to list but a few. I now focus on two terms by which major

figures in this essay choose to define themselves, negatively and

positively. “No Depression” of course takes its name from Uncle

Tupelo’s 1990 debut (which borrowed the title of an old Carter

Family gospel number they cover) and from a magazine founded in

1995 (which in turn borrows the Uncle Tupelo title).3 Jon

3 For two subtle but opposing viewpoints on No Depression’s significance, see Bartling and Hill.


Langford specifically distances himself and his band The Waco

Brothers from the “No Depression” label:

I don't think the No Depression movement sees the

Waco's fitting in to it very well. We're to brash, too

noisy, and possibly from the wrong background. I mean,

I have done things that people have accepted really

well over here (in the United States). I can't really

complain about that sort of thing, but I think the No

Depression thing is more about a singer songwriter-y

sort of thing. And it is very respectful towards

serious artists.… It's not really about the same sort

of thing. A lot of our content is very political and

it's sort of a brash and explosive live experience. I

think the No Depression scene is more represented by

technical expertise and introspection - things like

that (Gross).

In seeking rigor and specificity, Bloodshot records has coined

the term “Insurgent Country” for their acts. Since two of the


main players in this story, Jon Langford and Sally Timms, are

connected to the Bloodshot label, I thought we might spend a bit

of time on this one now. “Insurgent Country” is Bloodshot’s self-

created term for “music that is as informed by George Jones as it

is The Clash—if not in sonic content, then in aesthetic outlook”

(www.bloodshotrecords.com/ faq.html). A bit more should fully

define the idea and the attitude:

It is our reaction to the stagnation of the commercial

country establishment, as well as to "indie" rock's

recent willingness to be slopped at the corporate

troughs.… but all [our artists] are dedicated to

fighting the grim battle against line-dancing, smoke

machines, and 7th generation Nirvana rip-offs singing

earnest professions of emptiness. Also, we're all

probably in agreement that The Eagles should be

publicly flayed.


And with that manifesto it is time for us to cast our minds back

in time to Leeds (the one in England not Alabama) circa 1985: “In

a back street in Leeds, the rehearsal studio of the Mekons.”

Leeds

Punk music has always been about accommodating a variety of

musical styles: hard rock, reggae, metal, Northern Soul, and pub

rock, for starters. Hebdige has focused specifically on the

connections working class white youth (especially in London) felt

to West Indian Reggae culture (see esp. 25–9, 62–9).4 I would

argue culturally and geographically a similar link connects

Northern England’s punk scenes and the Celtic fringe to the

“folk” mountain music of the Appalachian spine, which

traditionally underlies notions of hard country music, non-

commercial, non-Nashville, alt.country. Another thing that

4 The standard narrative of these facts is somewhat contradicted by Mick Jones and Joe Strummer’s personal testimonies in The Clash—Westway to the World (Letts) which suggests that reggae was more of an alien and exotic interest than an organic part of their everyday experience. Granted Paul Simonon grew up in Brixton, but then he only ever wrote one notable Clash song, “Guns of Brixton,” even though he was the only original member throughout the band’sentire decade-long run.


connects the two musics is their innate sense of belonging to

something from which you want to escape knowing at the same time

you will eventually inevitably return. As Jeff Farrar and Jay

Tweedy wrote on “Chicakmauga” off Anodyne: “Appalachian, so

patient / The lessons we've traveled / As soon as we're out we're

kicking our way back in.” Finally both punk and country share

similar attitudes According to Jon Langford:

When I started listening to Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams,

Merle Haggard, George Jones, Ernest Tubbs and Buck Owens—

that stuff was amazing. It really made sense to me. It was

no-bullshit music. And there is absolutely a connection

between this music and punk. The good stuff, like good

punk, is stripped and raw and really trying to deal with

life directly and feels very sad. It’s not contrived. It’s

about defeat and pain in a really true-feeling way. It’s not

escapist pop music. Also, the stance of the performer in

great old country is like that in punk—he’s singing to his

peers about their lives. There is no gap between the


audience and the guy on stage. Everybody is coming from the

same place (Bottoms).

How Jonboy came to this realization and when he started listening

is where our narrative now takes us.

This essay focuses on one collective of art students cum

musicians who became the Mekons in 1976. Around the time of the

Miner’s Strike of 1984, the Mekons had ceased to exist as a going

concern (touring and recording), but they continued to jam

together. As Jon Langford told me, the music they tended to play

was traditional country: “We listened to a lot of Country music …

When the band did exist again, it was kinda like what will the

Mekons do.… We were just kinda steeped in it. We would just take

what seemed to fit for us: we recognized a lot things in country

music like the subject matter, the pool of lyrics.” Here both Jon

and I are agreeing with Marcus’ notion that "the question of

ancestry in culture is spurious” (1989, 21). Sally Timms

similarly sees the connections between punk and country thusly:


just the usual ones that have been made a million

times. that both are

blue collar, deal with the day to day and the harsh

reality of life rather

than just love songs. the chords are usually simple,

it's often protest

music in a low key way. as with folk music, it has a

functional purpose,

can be played in small rooms by pretty much anyone and

sometimes you can

dance to it.

They really had even hinted at such a turn on their earlier

compilation The Mekons Story, where the atypical instrumentation

gave a dadaist, pomo take to the traditional jug band of mountain

fame (itself a kind of found instruments experiment). Younger and

perhaps “hipper” readers might connect this phenomenon to the

Athens, GA Elephant 6 Collective and especially to Neutral Milk

Hotel’s masterpiece In the Aeroplane over the Sea.


From this starting point, the Mekons recorded three seminal

albums: Fear and Whiskey, (1985) The Edge of the World (1986), and The

Mekons Honky Tonkin’ (1987). In discussing Fear and Whiskey, I will

reference Original Sin, which is a 1989 reissue of said album with

contemporaneous e.p. sessions. The Mekons purposely named their

Sophie Bourbon-funded record label, Sin, and set out to parody

Sam Phillips every move. Unlike the reverential treatment accrued

Sun by such New South rockers as the Drive-By Truckers5, (see for

examples “Carl Perkins’ Cadillac” on The Dirty South), the Mekons

feel free to note the inherent contradictions in this Memphis

institution. They start with that most famous of record labels:

brown and yellow replacing it with pale pink and baby blue. The

edge of the label is a sequence of bucking bronco cowboys that

could either be a strip for a Zoetrope or the outside ring of a

Phenakistoscope. This sequence seemingly places a more country

spin on Eadweard Muybridge’s famous Stanford farm horse gait

sequence. The central rooster crowing at the rise of sun

(records) has been replaced by a lone gunslinger peering

curiously over his back shoulder as if fearing an ambush with 5 Themselves the progeny of the famous Muscle Shoals studio band


some sort of skyline in the distant right. To assure us further

that this isn’t a Sun record, there’s a quarter moon over the

skyline thrown in for good measure. Building on this contrast,

the one cover song on Fear

and Whiskey goes back beyond Sun records to the legendary 1947 MGM

Sessions of Hank Williams and his classic “Lost Highway.”

Tellingly their other covers from this era were Gram Parsons

“$1,000 Wedding,” which appears on the Slightly South of the Border e.p.

(1986) and Original Sin, and Merle Haggard’s “I Can’t Hold Myself in

Line.” The album cover itself seems to offer a road to somewhere,

but where isn't exactly clear.


From the album’s opening quartet, “I was out late the other

night / Fear and whiskey kept me going / I swore somebody held me

tight / But now there's just no way of knowing,” in a song

ironically titled “Chivalry,” we have entered a world of fear and

whiskey, of darkness and doubt, a place where it is hard to be

human. A central thematic of much of the Mekon’s oeuvre is

darkness/ doubt,/desperation, and they do seem to have a quarrel

with a pop culture history that does not garner them a larger

audience in the US; however, I think Greil Marcus overstates the

case for bitter sentimentality (1993, 300–1). I’d position their

desire in the same way Walter Benjamin was “to brush history

against the grain” (257), as a response to the apparent barbarity

of civilization where a man dies “While the witless upper classes

attended the boat race” (“Hey! Susan,” Original Sin).

Another reason the sentimentality argument does not wash is

the very rootedness of this disc in all kinds of collectivity:

the original T J Clarke/Guy Debord Situationist International-

inspired Leeds Art School collective as punk rock; the

contemporary connection with the great Dutch kollektiv and punk

band, The Ex; the multi-various collective instrumentation, which


resembles nothing so much as a cross between a shambolic Celtic

folk band and a traditional jug band.6 On one famous occasion, a

one-off gig at the late, lamented Kennel Club in San Francisco

during the F.U.N. 90/Curse of the Mekons era (January 7, 1991), the band

gained and shed members almost every song and seemed like they

were going to play all night long. I stopped counting the number

of “encores.” There is, of course, a less artistic, more

political angle to collectivity as well. It is the way of the

miners and other unionized British labor; it is the way of

hardscrabble miners in Appalachia, too. It’s also the only real

way for noncommercial combine farming to survive. And it is at

the intersection of those two related but distinct cultures

(farming and mining) that the truest marriage of punk and

alt.country exists.

In writing about The Edge of the World, Greil Marcus sees a

kindred spirit with The Band’s seminal Music from the Big Pink, itself

a work that figures importantly both in Mystery Train and Invisible

Republic. He notes the album’s dedication to Richard Manuel, a

rock and roll suicide that year. “Mekons records are …. A

6 For a fuller discussion of The Ex, see Light.


dramatization of the wish to make history, to live as if

something actually depended on what one says or does .:… the

Band’s music, out of old styles, out of what had endured, was

made as a way back into [the country]. The Mekons are a lot like

the Band in their seamless melding of rock ‘n’ roll, old country

music, and ancient British folk music” (Marcus, 1993, 334). This

disc masks Sally Timms emergence as a major player in the Mekons.

She had sung a joint lead with Tom Greenhalgh on “Hey! Susan”

recorded in late 1985 and originally released on the Crime and

Punishment ep (1986). Her first solo lead occurs on the disc's

third track "Oblivion"

For its first nine numbers, Honky Tonkin' appears a rather

straightforward country rock outing, but then magically it veers

HARD LEFT into "Danceband on the Edge of Time" territory. The

rest of the CD becomes a veritable encyclopedia of folk musics.

"Sympathy for the Mekons" is nothing less than a revelation from

the moment Jon Langford warbles "Here's to a band that deals in

the facts of life / In their ten short ugly years/ I wish the

Mekons good fortune." Really the song is nothing more than a

traditional Medieval vice parade of Pride, Lust Fever, Plague and


riding behind on a pig the devil hisself. A la Robert Johnson,

the Mekons apparently met Ol' Scratch at the crossroads where he

"sold them fame and riches—and good health." The song of course

alludes in its title and lyrics to the famous Stones' Altamont

death number. But unlike that tune, it's not at all clear who the

narrator of his song is. Surely not the Devil! Jon Langford then,

but he's a Mekon and the pronouns don't work? Some kind of Chief

Magistrate? Maybe that's what the last line business about "Chief

Constable back on your head now" is all about? God (and not

necessarily a benevolent one)? Trying to unravel the mysteries of

the Mekons apocalyptic edge-of-the-world vision is a bit like

untangling William Blake's mythography. Threads come apart but

where exactly does each one lead? The next song 'Spit" seems like

some kind of doxological benedictus. From there, we get amongst

other things Northern Industrial brass bands (see Brassed Off). a

traditional 19th century protest song–"Trimdon Grange Explosion,"

Music Hall/Tin Pan alley effects, waltz time, dirges, two steps,

reels, Honeyman hard fiddlin' not really heard again until The

Mekons Rock 'N" Roll, and, apropos Jimmy Rodgers, a West Yorkshire


yodel ("Please Don’t Let Me Love You"). Here endeth the Mekons

alt.country offertory.

Nashville

Like all the cities under consideration in this essay,

Nashville has its own river—the Cumberland. On high bluffs, the

original settlers were unknown ancient mound builders and then

Shawnee. Modern European settlement arrived in the form of Fort

Nashborough in 1779. By 1784, the name had been Americanized to

Nashville. It became Tennessee’s state capital in 1843. Its

position on the Cumberland which links to the Mississippi River

system plus its location at the crossroads of some major rail

lines insured Nashville’s importance both during and after the

Civil War. The Maxwell family set up their world famous coffee

business and in 1925 began broadcasting a barn dance from the

Grand Ole Opry which lead to Nashville’s eventually becoming “The

Country Music Capital of the World” and “Music City, USA”

(www.lonelyplanet.com/ destinations/ north_america/nashville/

history.htm). We should note that what alt.country despises about

the “Nashville Sound,” its poppy frivolity, is not just a late


http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/%20north_america/

1980s phenomenon of Big Hats, wireless wraparound mikes, and HNC.

The very move to Nashville as a centralized hegemonic location

for the production of country music limited regional

differentiation in musical styles and field recording techniques;

in other words, when country went to Nashville’s burgeoning Music

Row in the 1950s, it had always already gone pop (Malone, 1985,

256–7).

The real problems alt.country has with Nashville have little

to do with the music and much more to do with the very nature of

this city at the heart of the country music industry since at

least the 1940s, when Fred Rose left ASCAP during a bitter

strike, joined BMI, and incorporated with Roy Acuff in October

1942 to created the famous songwriting empire Acuff-Rose (Malone

1985, 180). Nashville is hardly a country town: It’s the town of

bullish petit bourgeois overreaching boosterism which sees fit to

build a faux Parthenon to mark its Centennial Exposition in 1897

(www.nashville.gov/parthenon/) and lay claim to the moniker the

“Athens of the South” (nashvillecvb.com/Media/ Statistics.aspx?

menu=Visitors); the town of starched linen Belle Meade and the

Frozen Tomato; “America’s Friendliest City … 4th Best American


http://www.nashville.gov/parthenon/

City for Holiday Travel and Culture and 6th Best American City

for Fall Destinations” (nashvillecvb.com/); home to burgeoning

health care, finance, and insurance industries; in a word, the

town which brought us Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill

Frist not Al Gore's new best friend Robert Ellis Orrall, late of

Boston (Remnick).

Chicago

For an alternative urban history of country music, we need

look no further than Chicago, Illinois, like Leeds itself, a city

founded on a river and at the geographical and economic center of

a transportation nexus. In telling this tale, I follow Elijah

Wald’s lead in discovering the true roots of country music and

its original but long forgotten popular performers. Where he

found urban female blues singers and orchestras rather than the

solitary Delta bluesman, I find the World's Largest Store (Sears)

National Barn Dance and an urban recording industry in Atlanta

that predates Nashville's hegemony (Peterson 99–101, 12-32). The

former Chicago institution will be our hook to Jon Langford who

found its detritus as well in the form of another Chicago


institution, The Sundowners, once fronted by none other than West

Texas playboy and legend Bob Wills.

Moving to Chicago in the early 1990s, Langford discovered

further connections to classic American music through the older

performers who once graced the airwaves on America’s oldest

country radio show, The WLS National Barn Dance

(www.wlshistory.com/WLS20/). Jon and his band The Waco Brothers

hung out at such country bars as “this place called The R&R

Ranch, The Sundowners Ranch” (Langford). Jon went on to tell me:

In the late 1980s when the Mekons visited Chicago, people

would take us out to redneck bars. I think they thought it

would be a laugh. But we heard some really good music and

took it seriously .… Actually we really got into it, even

started wearing the uniform [embroidered shirts and ten

gallon hats ].… And these guys would recognize us as a band

and get us on the stage. Then I started going there on my

own and performing with these real country musicians.


http://www.wlshistory/

Later Jon credited his backing band on a Johnny Cash covers album

as The Pine Valley Cosmonauts. This looser conglomeration of

artists includes a who’s who of such alt.country singers as guest

vocalists Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Neko Case, Dave Alvin and Steve

Earle among others.

Langford’s projects include solo recordings, collaborations

with The Sadies, The Pine Valley Cosmonauts, and The Waco

Brothers and cover compilations of Johnny Cash, Bob Wills, and

WLS Barn Dance staples not to mention a burgeoning folk art

career around images of country including a recent show "Three

Britischer Cowboys" at yarddog in Austin, Texas (www.yarddog.

com). Each of these solo and group projects illustrate another

facet of Jon Langford's fascination with the harder-edged country

music of his adopted homeland. His most recent solo effort (with

occasional collaboration from the Pine Valley Cosmonauts) All the

Fame of Lofty Deeds (2004) fully represents his descent into country

insurgency while retaining a punk flair. And the odd Mekons

reference abounds. This song cycle concerns Langford's mythical

alter ego who quits his band and heads to Nashville and "gets his

own show." On "Last Fair Deal Gone Down" "the little calm, this


precious quiet / gives way to a riot," the riot one supposes that

the Mekons claim never to have been in! The Dickensian "Hard

Times" is a field day of verbal pyrotechnics surrounding all the

possible connotations of the word "hard," including the hard in

hard country. He even roots into Jimmy Witherspoon/Big Bill

Broonzy country blues territory with a live Pine Valley

Cosmonauts cover of "Trouble in Mind."

Sally Timms follows a similar career pattern from an early

appearance with Pete Shelley, a major role with the Mekons from

1985’s Fear and Whiskey forward to a 1990s career as Cowboy Sally on

TV and disc. Here she recalls her growing connections with the

band for me:

i met the mekons in 1979. my cousin shared dorm rooms

with jon langford's

girlfriend at that time. i didn't start singing with

them until 1983 and

then started in a more full time capacity around 1986

or 87, can't actually


remember. mostly my early interaction with them

involved hanging around in

the fenton pub as friends.

Beyond her vocal work for the Mekons, Sally Timms fronted an all

female band the Shee Hees. She fronted another band the Drifting

Cowgirls on the 1987 ep Butcher's Boy. Her first full length release

was 1988's Somebody's Rockin' My Dreamboat. Her solo career picked up

more steam with 1994's To the Land of Milk and Honey. But it was with

the 1997 creation of her Cowboy Sally character that she really

highlighted her country stylings. She describes the evolution of

this performing persona as an outgrowth of a Pee Wee's Playhouse

stepchild:

cowboy sally is a character on a now defunct

cartoon/live action show "rudy

and gogo's world famous cartoon show" which was

directed by our friend

barry mills for tbs. i played a slightly malicious

cowgirl who rustled


goats. i decided to go under the name cowboy sally for

the country stuff

because it felt a little like a persona, and since i'm

english there is a

faux quality to the whole thing. also it

differentiates between the stuff

i would do normally under my own name and the country

stuff.7

Her 1999 release Cowboy Sally’s Twilight Laments for Lost Buckaroos "features

songs written for her by Robbie Fulks, Jon Langford, Handsome

Family, and Jeff Tweedy" (http://www.mekons.de/ sallydisc.htm).

That list of artists should fully realize the entertwining and

commingling of American and English punk, post-punk indie rock,

and alt.country performers in the early twenty first century. All

these groups play “insurgent” country, Bloodshot’s self-created

term for “music that is as informed by George Jones as it is The

7 There's a parallel narrative here: from punky Pee Wee's Playhouse to Captain Kangaroo, and then through the person of Bob Keeshan as Clarabell the Clown to the original alt.country idol, Howdy Doody.


http://www.mekons/

Clash—if not in sonic content, then in aesthetic outlook”

(www,bloodshotrecords.com/ faq.html).

Austin 2006?

Only one question remains: Whither from here? Austin seems

as good a bet as any. Every other musician is moving to the “Live

Music Capital of the World” (www.lonelyplanet.com/

destinations/north_america/austin/). Even Jon Langford has been

seen showing his art at local gallery yarddog. Austin also has

its own rebel country tradition around Willie Nelson, Waylon

Jennings, and Asleep at the Wheel,

(www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/north_america/austin/

history.htm). And, of course, a river runs through it.


http://www.lonelyplanet.com/destinations/north_america/

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/

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Discography

The Drive-By Truckers. The Dirty South. New West, 2004.

Langford, Jon. All the Fame of Lofty Deeds. Bloodshot, 2004.

Langford, Jon and The Sadies. Mayors of the Moon. Bloodshot, 2003.

Langford, Jonboy. “Nashville Radio.”

The Mekons. Fear and Whiskey. Sin, 1985.

———. The Edge of the World. Sin, 1986.

———. The Mekons Honky Tonkin. Twin/Tone, 1987.


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http://www.yarddog.com/

———. Original Sin. Twin/Tone, 1989.

Neutral Milk Hotel. In the Aeroplane over the Sea. Merge, 1998.

The Pine Valley Cosmonauts, Barn Dance Favorites. Bloodshot, 2004.

———. Misery Loves Company: Songs of Johnny Cash. Bloodshot, 1998.

———. Salute the Majesty of Bob Wills. Bloodshot, 1998.

Timms, Sally. Cowboy Sally’s Twilight Laments for Lost Buckaroos.

Bloodshot,1999.

———. To the Land of Milk and Honey. Feel Good All Over, 1994.

Uncle Tupelo. Anodyne. Sire, 1993.

———. March 16–20, 1992. Rockville, 1992.

———. No Depression. Rockville, 1990.

The Waco Brothers. New Deal. Bloodshot, 2002.

———. To the Last Dead Cowboy. Bloodshot, 1995.

———. Waco Electric Chair. Bloodshot, 2000.

AcknowledgementsThanks to Bloodshot Records and especially Lee Gutowski for help connecting with the artists and a cornucopia of merchandise. Thanks to Nobby for the JPEG of the Sin Recordslabel. Thanks also to Jon Langford and Sally Timms for talking. For comments and suggestions I thank Robert Christgau and John G. Norman. For the impetus to write this essay, I thank Barbara Ching, Renee Dechert, and Pamela Fox.


honky tonkin' in leeds, nashville, and chicago: the place of punk in alt. country

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