Misery loves company
This month on music’s countdown of obscurity: hardcore country for alcoholics and adulterers.
“I wanted to make it in country music, but I kept my day job just in case.” RODGER WILHOIT
The “Social World” Of Rodger Wilhoit PARKLANE, 1974
“IAM CONFIDENT this album will make Rodger a top name in country music,” wrote producer and songwriter Carl French in the sleevenotes for The “Social World” of Rodger Wilhoit.
“Listen for yourself, I’m sure you’ll agree.”
Like a thousand other contenders, Wilhoit was never to reach such top name status. Instead, his sole solo album was mainly sold from the bandstand as he played one-nighters at the bars and honky tonks of North America. The record’s illustrated black and white cover gives clues to his provenance and fate.
In 1974, when Willie Nelson was hirsute, bearded and posing for a pot bust mugshot, here was a man with sideburns and hair fully oiled, clad in a tuxedo from the previous decade and manfully avoiding the viewer’s gaze, as if fearing exposure. He is superimposed on Nashville’s nightlife thoroughfare Printers’ Alley, where stars came to relax after a day’s hitmaking, though the image is more crime noir than carefree abandon.
Wilhoit began his long pilgrimage to that place he’d never reach in Greeneville, Tennessee. Born on July 17, 1937 to a farming family, he grew up on “mountain music” until the farm was connected to the grid in the early ’50s. Thereafter, radio broadcasts from Grand Ole Opry and nearby Knoxville exposed him to The Stanley Brothers, Bill and Charlie Monroe and mandolin great Red Rector. After playing mandolin, Wilhoit moved on to guitar and was playing with local groups by the age of 16. Aged 20, he followed his brother Bill to work as a driver and mechanic in the Cleveland motor industry and entertaining customers in the clubs and dancehalls.
“It was pretty standard honky tonk and country music,” Wilhoit told country sage Colin Escott of his output, which grew to take in rock’n’roll: “If it was good music, I liked it.”
In Cleveland, Wilhoit met songwriter, producer and talent scout Carl French, another Tennessean, who later co-founded the Parklane label and released Wilhoit’s first single in 1972.
“I wanted to make it in country music,” Wilhoit explained, “but I kept my day job going just in case. I worked for a fella in an auto body shop. I could leave when I wanted. Come back when I wanted. For some time, I was playing someplace every night of the week. I’ll say this for Carl, he did the best he could… he found me a booker out of Nashville, and I worked some shows with George Jones.
I went up into Canada, down to Texas. Covered quite a bit of ground.”
French’s belief in Wilhoit extended to recording an album, and co-writing all but one song on it. Wilhoit remembered recording in Nashville, at RCA, Mercur y, or Bradley’s Barn, with session musicians including harmonica ace and multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy, fiddler Johnny Gimble and vocalists The Nashville Edition. Further recordings were made in Cleveland, he added, in an underground facility at the airport.
A strangely reconciled audit of human frailties was the result. The concise arrangements, with their cr ying steel guitars and strings, display not a hair out of place: contained and intent, Wilhoit is a singer who means business, and comparisons to such heavyweights as George Jones and Merle Haggard are unavoidable. Yet in his reflections on those essential countr y predicaments – the urge to drink, the yearning for lost love, of lust and despair – he mines rare ore.
A spry setting for the hardest truths, My Shoes Are Not That Hard To Fill is the testament of a gutter-bound man annihilated by booze who knows the futility of trying to keep his woman: at times of acute emotional pain, a piano or a guitar meander playfully, as if asking, what else did you expect? The Smell Of Strange Perfume and Eyes With That Hungry Look mull over compulsive promiscuity, the latter song justified by his rival’s drunken impotence. The acceptance of unhappy matrimony, as in the acrid I’ve Spent My Time In Hell Loving You, is a recurring theme, though My Effort Will Bear The Fruit evinces the kind of blind hope needed by those at rock bottom:“I know I can’t have your love but, strange, I feel I’ve won…”
The gospel reset of closer God Is Not Dead (I Spoke To Him Today) suggests the circle of sin will not be broken, but in giving voice to his pathologies, a pained catharsis is achieved.
Yet the big break was not to be. In 1995 he returned to Crossville, Tennessee, where he worked as a mechanic and played bluegrass. Colin Escott reports that Wilhoit, a reformed alcoholic, wouldn’t take cough mixture, or any other medicines, lest they cause him to return to drinking.
As The “Social World” Of… was being prepared for its expanded reissue, on July 1, 2020, he died. “We just didn’t have a whole lot of luck,” Wilhoit reflected, as Covid raged outside. “But we worked hard at it.”
The album is released in expanded, remastered form on Sweet Mental Revenge Records this month. Acknowledgements to Colin Escott’s excellent sleevenotes.