(Faber & Faber)

www.fsgbooks.com

I read Sing Me Back Home the same week that Jerry Reed died, which seemed somehow fitting. Not just because it's a book about country music and Reed was a great country musician, singer and songwriter but because of the kind of country performer Reed was. Songs like "Amos Moses," "The Bird," and even "East Bound and Down" from Smokey and the Bandit are just this side of parody, saved from novelty status by the fact that Reed's cornpone humor, exaggerated hillbilly vocals, and redneck aphorisms all came from an insider's perspective, delivered with affection and intimacy rather than scorn and detachment.

Sing Me Back Home is that kind of book. On one hand, it reinforces almost every damned hillbilly stereotype in the book-hard-drinking, quick to fight, not too bright, promiscuous. On the other hand, well, Jennings is writing about his own family and his own life, and his portrait of his people is as loving as it is unflinching. Growing up in Kingston, New Hampshire-yes, Virginia, there are hillbillies north of the Mason-Dixon line-in extreme poverty in the 1950s, Jennings couldn't wait to get out, and on his way to becoming a New York Times editor, he rejected his people just as adamantly as he rejected the country music that gave them succor and solace in the face of squalor and heartbreak. Over the years, though, Jennings realized that to reject them was to reject himself, and Sing Me Back Home is both a moving tale of coming to terms with your past and an exceptionally insightful and illuminating look at country music's role in American lives.

As music criticism, the book obviously owes a huge debt to David Cantwell and Bill Friskics-Warren's Heartaches by the Number, which in turn owes a debt to Dave Marsh's Heart of Rock and Soul (the debt would be evident even if Jennings didn't cop to it in the acknowledgements). All of them write about the music absolutely without pretension and with an emphasis on how an entire record-music, lyrics, and performance-works in a sort of call-and-response with the listener, echoing, amplifying, and sometimes even clarifying our own experiences. Dividing the book into chapters around common themes-yes, prison, trucks, drinking, and mothers are included, but so are home, social status, death, and spirituality-Jennings alternates between family biography and reflections on particular songs and artists. All the usual suspects like Hank Williams, Merle Haggard, Patsy Cline, and Loretta Lynn are here, but so are names less familiar to those outside country music: The Bailes Brothers, Brother Claude Ely, and Billy Lee Riley. (The book's primary fault lies in the fact that Jennings believes that, save for Iris Dement, there hasn't been a decent country singer since roughly 1970.)

Jennings also alternates between a terse journalist's style and the language of his people, often within the same paragraph, sometimes within the same sentence-i.e., "Most of us Americans, for better or worse, don't know what real work is no more" or "Plain as barn cats, my relations and I all lived in ‘the other America,' busted, hurting, silent." It's a bold rhetorical move, one that could have backfired, but Jennings' prose is sure enough that it feels completely natural-and for Jennings, like most of us, it probably is, even though we're taught to write one way and speak another.

And over it all lords the shadow of the author's Grammy Jennings, a woman he says only wanted to "fuck and drink," a woman who, like Patsy Cline, knows "what it is to go walkin' after midnight searching for her man, to fall to pieces, to be crazy-you don't go chasing your oldest son with a butcher knife if you ain't crazy." Grammy is her grandson's spiritual and emotional lighthouse, someone who, like the best country music, is full of both heartache and joy (but mostly heartache), the spirit that sings Jennings back home to who he really is, with neither sentimentality nor illusion. ERIC SCHUMACHER-RASMUSSEN