R.I.P. Porter Wagoner

Live at the Opry- Porter's joined by Dolly Parton and Marty Stuart
Photo from Hell's Donut House

Text and pictures by Jeff Economy
(December 2007)

It was the quintessential country music showbiz moment, and Porter Wagoner was playing right along. There he was, on stage at the Grand Ole Opry as honered guest rather than host, for the first time as long as anyone could remember, being feted for celebrating fifty years - fifty years! - as a member of country music's most venerated institution, while Dolly Parton moistened every eye in the house with a genuinely heart-tugging rendition of "I Will Always Love You," the number she wrote for Porter three decades earlier to commemorate their disintegrating partnership. And Porter, The Thin Man From West Plains, The Ambassador of Country Music, the man who proudly wore the mantle of "Mr. Grand Ole Opry" ever since Roy Acuff's death in 1992, was soaking it up like a rhinestone-studded sponge. But if you were looking closely, into the space between Porter's farmer gaze and Dolly's Barbie-doll emoting, you might have noticed a crack in the veneer. Not the kind of crack "where the light gets in," as Leonard Cohen put it, but rather, an opening where, if you happened to have your emotional AM radio tuned to just the right frequency, you might have caught a little bit of the darkness coming out.

Now, don't let me give you the wrong idea. Even though Porter might have had good cause to use the occasion as a pulpit to bemoan the current state of country music, he wasn't about to go off-script; he was far too much the country gentleman for that. He didn't grouse about his former label RCA letting every last one of the 30-odd albums he recorded for them between 1956 and 1982 go out of print (save for a couple compilations, and a smattering of the duet albums he and Dolly Parton made together), nor did he, for so much as a moment, excoriate his entire industry for serving up the synthetic, twang-ladled pablum that has dominated the industry's fast-food menu for the last few decades. Instead, he left that honor to cohort Marty Stuart, who pointedly remarked that it took Anti-, "a punk rock record label," to release Wagonmaster, the down-home country music album he produced for Wagoner in 2006, and which no Nashville label would touch with a ten-foot fishing pole.

In fact, the entire star-spangled program at the Opry played out without a hitch largely verbatim twice that night, once at 6:30 and again at 9:30, just like every Saturday night there. And if you weren't looking for a crack in the plaster, you probably missed it. Most of the audience that night almost certianly did; as much as Porter was the main attraction, with all the attendant standing ovations that were his well-earned right, there was no mistaking the even more deafening roar that erupted from the crowd when Parton strode onstage midway through the show.

For the benefit of those who've never been to Nash-Vegas, I should mention here that buying an Opry ticket is a roll of the dice. If, for instance, you're visiting from out of town, you buy tickets for the program which you can squeeze into your schedule between, say, a trip to the Country Music Hall Of Fame & Museum and a few late-night Bud Lights at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge (still across the alley from the Ryman Audtorium, though the Opry moved out in favor of fancier digs back in 1974). Then, you hope that one of your favorite stars is stomping the floorboards that night. More than a few of those lined up before the show were overheard talking about how they had lucked out by seeing Parton (in the same way you'd boast of a winning lottery ticket). But although the souvenir "Porter Wagoner 50th Anniversary Signature Show" Hatch Show Print posters looked to be a sellout in the gift shop, and plenty of folks were seen outside beforehand getting their photos taken with a model wearing a replica of one of Porter's trademark wagon-wheel-themed, rhinestone studded, $10,000 Nudie Suits, few voiced the same excitement at the privelege of simply seeing Porter perform. But then, that was Porter's fate in later years; he was so solid and reliable, such an unfashionable staple of the country music diet that he was taken for granted. He would always be there, wholesome and nourishing, like the cornstalks that return to the Missouri plains every season.

It wouldn't be the first time that Porter would appear to be upstaged by Dolly. From 1967, when a green and virtually unknown 21-year-old Parton first appeared on Porter's long-running TV show as the replacement for Porter's recently departed sidekick "Pretty Miss" Norma Jean, through a multi-million-selling string of massively popular singles and duet albums, until their acrimonious parting in 1974, Porter watched his star dim slightly in contrast to Dolly's.

But lest you think we're throwing a pity party, know that Porter deliberately put his career on the back burner in favor of nourishing Dolly's. Some have suggested that there were romantic undercurrents, which both stringently denied; in truth, it's just as likely that Porter felt so established in his career (his syndicated TV show, for instance, ran from 1960 to 1981 for an astounding 700+ episodes) that he could afford to share the wealth with the equally once-in-lifetime talent who fate had directed across his path. At any rate, the motives are probably irrelevant, and besides, despite the highly-publicized and openly litigious acrimony between them in the years immediately following their split, Wagoner and Parton eventually buried the hatchet and once again become best friends.

So when the tribute reached its climax on the Opry stage that night, there was no reason to expect anything but a beatific glow from Porter's unfailingly, even preternaturally cheerful countenance. After all, he'd just been treated to the kinds of accolades only accorded to true valedictorians, including the presentation of a personalized Martin guitar that seems to leave him genuinely touched. Moreover, Wagoner's career was experiencing the kind of renaissance few artists are treated to, especially at this late stage, one especially impressive considering the circumstances; who else ever, at age 80 no less, got to play both a prestigious, intimate club date in New York, and then only weeks later perform at Madison Square Garden (opening for the White Stripes)?

Well, Porter almost didn't make it. In mid-2006, at the age of 79, Porter suffered a debilitating stomach aneurysm that darn near killed him. While recuperating, Porter was contacted by longtime fan Marty Stuart, who made it a personal crusade to shepherd Porter's rehabilitation. Firmly but gently, with the full support of Porter's family, Stuart guided Wagoner into the studio for what turned out to be a victory lap of an album that easily rivals what Rick Rubin accomplished with Johnny Cash on their "American Recordings." The result of Stuart & Wagoner's collaboration, Wagonmaster -- which cleverly and unselfconsciously mirrors the format of an episode of his TV show, down to the "sacred number" recitation featured on every program -- is more than a comeback (and really, it's not even that; Wagoner never stopped recording, and in fact shortly before his death recorded one last album of gospel standards that will be released in the near future).

It's also a summation of themes and obsessions that have figured in Wagoner's work since the fertile period in the last 1960's that spawned an utterly remarkable series of social realist albums including The Cold Hard Facts of Life (1967), one of the first country music concept albums that boasts a cover image depicting of a man in the act of being cuckolded that is surely the definitive visual statement on the subject; The Carroll County Accident (1969), with its title track narrating a sordid tale of adultery and death; the alcoholism-themed albums The Bottom Of The Bottle (1968), Confessions Of A Broken Man (1966), and Skid Row Joe/Down In The Alley (1970), all of which are explorations of the depths a man can fall to, which on the surface hew to Chet Atkins' radio-friendly countrypolitan formula, yet still depict addiction as starkly as, say, Arthur Lee's "Signed D.C."; and What Ain't To Be, Just Might Happen (1972), featuring the still mind-bending single "The Rubber Room," which one can say without fear of hyperbole is one of the most sincerely cracked, if not outright demented recordings to ever crack the country music charts.

That's not even mentioning the duet albums with Dolly which, for all their shiny and sunny surfaces never failed to include at least one "dead baby special" like "Jeannie's Afraid of The Dark," a sorrowful tale of a little one called home to heaven too soon, or "The Party," a self-flagellating, first-person morality tale about how just a smidgen too many good times will inevitably lead to eternal torment, or worse. You can listen to these songs looking for the telling, ironic wink, but it never comes; on the contrary, the sincerity is sometimes so heavy you almost want to look away. On record, the bleaker sentiments were sometimes ameliorated with a corny country production embellishment that would make the medicine go down; it's almost as though Porter was, for a moment, the Brian Wilson of country music. But as performed on his weekly TV show, there was often no artifical sweetener, nothing to distance you from a vibe as serious as a sermon. Look no further than one of Porter's ghostly readings of his popular recitation "Men With Broken Hearts." The lights on the bizarrely day-glo green "Wagon House" set dim to reveal only Porter in spotlight against a stark black background, accompanied only by a few mahogany lines dragged from Mack Magaha's fiddle and a few stray note or two from Don Warden's weepy steel guitar. The pace is stately, the mood is dire, and Porter's empathy is like a beacon in the fog, the totality of his compassion absolute. Watching these shows with benefit of 40 years' hindsight is to stand in wonder at the intersection of traditional, down home simplicity and minimalist pop art, and marvel that, for a time, this was considered the apex of family entertainment.

The very fact that each of the aforementioned albums from this period spawned a significant chart hit ("The Cold Hard Facts of Life" peaked at #2 on the country charts) speaks volumes about not just country music, but the entire state of popular entertainment. As hard as it may be to fathom now, for a few years there, at the same time The Beatles and The Beach Boys were fighting to outdo each other with Pet Sounds and Sgt. Pepper, Porter Wagoner was a true voice of the zeitgeist. Though in later years, Wagoner downplayed the degree of personal investment in these works, claiming he was just "giving his audience what they wanted," the fact that he was known to dress in rags and hang out incognito in the skid rows of Chicago and elsewhere for "research" speaks to a dedication to exploring the roots of darkness in both the world and his own psyche that would make the wannabe Nick Caves of the world bow their heads in respect.

So on the night of the tribute, when Dolly launched into that inevitable moment everyone was waiting for, and told Porter how much she would always love him, and hearts swelled and eyes watered, you figured that Porter would just bask in the moment beatifically knowing all was finally well in the world, the troubles articulated in his songs left far behind. Yet there it was, an almost inscrutable and impossibly complex look on his face that betrayed a lifetime of love and fear and triumphs and losses, a look that gave up nothing and said everything at once. It was a gaze directed at Dolly so simple and unadulterated and penetrating that you could be forgiven for thinking that the reason she was finding it hard to look Porter directly in the eye for most of the song had little to do with stagecraft. It was the certainty that if not for a subtly exaggerated moment of pantomime where Dolly dabbed an imaginary tear on Porter's face and he wiped it away with a laugh, that the truth between them, and all the truth bottled in every one of Porter's songs would come spilling out in a flow of unmediated emotion that would bring the whole show to a halt and leave everyone involved laughing and crying and heaven knows what else all over the Opry stage. It was one of the most ineffable conflations of professional show business and intimate, naked vulnerability it's ever been my privilege to witness, and there it was happening on the Opry stage, simultaneously broadcast live across the globe, and in that moment I wanted to thank Porter for everything, for the rhinestones and the pompadour and the corn, and for going into the darkness and coming back to report on what he saw there. And in a moment it was over, and Porter and Dolly walked off together arm in arm, and not long after that, he was gone.