KENNY ROGERS – “Coward Of The County”
There’s a term in comics criticism, “Women in Refrigerators Syndrome”. It’s applied when the murder, rape, torture or otherwise abuse of a female supporting character provides the impetus for a male hero’s character development. This being superhero comics, “character development” and “whuppin’ the villain’s ass” are generally synonymous. “Coward Of The County” is women-in-refrigerator pop: the hero may have the best of motivations for being yellow, but yellow is what he is, until his girlfriend is gang-raped and he discovers his inner man.
It’s an unpleasant, manipulative record, a country version of that old liberal-baiting (or Christian-baiting) hypothetical – well, what if it was your wife/daughter….? Of course, it’s a very well crafted track – it hooks you into its story, Rogers is on fine avuncular form, and its rolling country groove is easy on the ear. But I just can’t sit comfortably with its message or the tools it uses to get that message over: since I have no problem with some fearsomely conservative modern country music, and adore string-pulling schlock like Red Sovine’s “Teddy Bear”, I’m guessing it’s the deadly combination of tawdriness and sententiousness that hits me like a Daily Mail scare story.
2
From Too Much Too Young to this? At the time it seemed an impossible jump. This was music for people who didn’t like music – wasn’t it?!? My grandma LOVED this song. Listening to it now, with a lot more appreciation for country music it’s still lacking something. Perhaps it’s the plodding bass line, or the fact that, for me, Kenny seems unable to infuse his voice with any kind of emotion. I mean, lest we forget, this cute little singalong is a story of retribution for a gang rape! Kenny hasn’t been scared of tackling unsavoury subjects before but here he sounds like he’s barely awake. His delivery worked on other songs such as Ruby, but there’s only so many times you can deliver such a soporific vocal before your audience actually drops off.
All in all a very forgettable song but not as bad as the made-for-TV movie that it inspired. In that our protagonist was regarded as a no-good-cotton-picking-yellow-belly because he refused to fight in WWII. Presumably beating crap out of the Gatlin boys introduced a herethereto unknown bloodlust because after gaining revenge for his sweetheart off he went to war with a smile on his face. 2.
I’m bridling gently at LondonLee’s “even Toby Keith” comment (#7) – it’s true that Toby made that “The Angry American” record at a very particular place in history, but Toby doesn’t make a habit of singing this kind of morally-repugnant stuff, really. It’s true that he’s a (Democrat-supporting!) tweaker of liberal sensibilities but he’s way more likely to treat you to a hymn to rugged domestic individualism or a good-old-boy community knees-up than indulge in the kind of murder balland which justifies vigilante violence! An interesting Toby counterpoint to COTC is the marvellous “New Orleans” off “How Do You Like Me Now?”, which I heartily recommend. I love Toby Keith. That is to say, I love a lot of Toby Keith’s records, even some I disagree with.
I too find COTC uncomfortable, though I can’t work out why I feel less discomfort with (for example) the Louvin Brothers’ version of “Knoxville Girl”, which is a murder ballad without justification *or* remorse. Maybe because COTC sounds musically like it’s in the present, and lyrically like it’s part of the old weird America?
(“Teddy Bear” is awesome, by the way! Tom, did I ever play you the Dutch version I havem “Teddy Beer” by Gerard de Vries?)
Re songs made into films – there was an example (or a threat!) of this very recently and I’m trying to remember what… Arctic Monkeys??
Re #26 – you go right ahead, Tom. I’ve been a noble pedant since that day in ’83 when I brought home the Guinness book and discovered that Mike Read wasn’t just a curiously standoffish DJ and Saturday morning telly presenter.
#21: When Kevin Keegan had a hit with “Head over heels”, did Kenny Rogers end up being the manager of Tranmere Rovers for a weekend?
#24: “The Sheffield Grinder” wasn’t the hit track, it was “Capstick comes home” which was a take-off of the old Hovis advert (‘real butter’, “New World symphony”, etc)
re#29- i remember plans a few years back to make a cinematic version of Avril Lavigne’s “Sk8ter Boi”- what a treat that would’ve been…
the other side of the country coin:
“i killed a man/just to watch him die” <— hurrah! er, no, wait, that’s not a good thing to do, is it?
haha i got into a big FITE w. doctrahs becky and vick on fri, over the claim that if you make a historical film JUST BCZ you have a bonnet left over from the film before that you didn’t get to use, then the film with the bonnet as pretext will BY DEFINITION by poor
they were all: first you need a good script obv
i was all: bah! RONG! ect
anyway, ditto a film based on this song-plot — no need for it to be bad (haha it’s basically the plot of HAMLET after all)
(i think t.keith is pro-obama, tho i only found tertiary references to this)
In a happy turn of events, this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/19/toby-keith-praises-obama_n_119930.html is the top google return for the search “Toby Keith Obama” – herein TK expresses his admiration for Sen. Obama, and also talks about the forthcoming film, “Beer For My Horses”, named after the TK song of a few years back. Marvellous.
I must admit my knowledge of Toby Keith is limited to the whole Dixie Chicks brouhaha and I’ve always lumped him into that post-9/11 redneck idiot brigade as a result. Glad I’m wrong.
Not sure if they made it to # 1 , but ” Ode to Billie Joe ” was a movie ( made for TV ? ) and Kenny Rogers made a movie called ” The Gambler ” …..
Not in this warren.
Re 21: Bobbie Gentry’s Ode To Billie Joe was made into a film in the mid 70s, re-titled as Ode To Billy Joe. Bobbie re-recorded the same for the titles. Not sure if she renamed herself Bobby for the occasion.
Boyzone/Westlife number ones prob coincide w/Alex Feguson manager of the month awards, dammit.
Re 24: V shocked when I got the first Guinness book that T Rex’s Zip Gun Boogie and Ray Stevens’ Turn The Radio On, both huge Radio 1 spins, didn’t even make Top 30
Ah! Brian, you just pipped me to the post. Ode… was a US number one. And the fastest ascent to the top ever by a debut act, at that point, I think.
re: #27, surely the difference between The Louvins’ ‘Knoxville Girl’ and Kenny’s ‘Coward of the County’ is that by the end of the song, the Louvins seem genuinely chilled by the full horror of what they’ve done, and the murder itself is ostentatiously given no justification (while the girl’s pleas are given full voice), so it seems a song about damnation, evil and horror. Whereas we’re supposed to clap Kenny on the back and buy him a drink for his act of vigilantism.
(Okay, not him necessarily, but then I always thought – re: #21 – that the ‘slip’ of ‘I heard these words again’ was deliberate to imply that secretly the singer’s singing about himself. A bit like Beckett’s ‘Not I’. Only with a beard. And a twang in the voice. And a grating series of key changes.)
This isn’t a murder ballad, because Kenny doesn’t think he’s murdered anyone, just punished or executed them.
Mind you, I love this when I was younger. I used to tape Top of the Pops with a battery cassette recorder and I would happily segue between The Specials and Kenny without batting an eyelid. The first time I remember making my brother laugh was because of this song. My dad used sometimes to drop us off at school in his custard-coloured Chrysler Sunbeam (oh they were classy days), and my joke to my brother as my dad drove off was the sing ‘Hey look ol’ yeller’s leavin”. A profound, albeit ludicrous, bonding moment.
I think there have been several ‘Gambler’ movies, it’s a franchise like his roasted chicken places.
I worship the ground Bobbie Gentry walks on, especially when she’s wearing that tight red trouser suit.
I liked this a lot when I was a kid, and I certainly don’t mind it now. I can see that for the some the gap between the tone and the subject matter would jar, but for some reason it’s never bothered me that much. There are plenty of better Kenny Rogers songs, but it’s fine by me.
(Incidentally, at the time – aged nine – I was keen on both this Too Much Too Young).
Re: 22 & the US switchover – exactly. Remember, we’ve got a full-time shadow government who in theory should be ready to take over instantly, whereas Obama and McCain simply have campaign teams. Also, back in the day, it could take weeks for new elected politicians to even travel to DC from the far reaches of the Union.
# 42 – Lee – I googled Bobbie to see the red jump suit thing and found that she appears in her crimson long-leggedness on 3 LP covers. Shame about the Morticia hair though…..
We call it Priscilla hair in our household, and hold it in very high esteem.
Mark G #30: dunno about Tranmere Rovers, I think Kenny might have become chairman of Chelsea at some point in the 80s. Back in June when we discussed “Lucille”, someone posted a link to the “Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers” website which included a pic of Ken Bates, I’m not sure if it’s still going though.
Dan R at #41: “the Louvins seem genuinely chilled by the full horror of what they’ve done” – see, I don’t hear that at all and I never have. If there’s anything terrifying in “KG” the way I hear it, it’s a blankness where there should be horror and remorse (the tone of delivery doesn’t change through the song, for a start) and by the end the Louvin lads seem to be mostly a bit sour that they’re rotting in a boring, dirty jail.
one of the things about growing up through and out of punk — not sure i was really fully aware of this for years — is that what i had been excitedly teling myself was “the real thing” was kids capering around in horror masks (inc.me), and that for actual real psychotic no-affect depiction of REAL ACTUAL EVIL, you may have to turn to seemingly (deceptively!) bland hits like this!!
anyway i still basically prefer kids capering in horror masks (but plz to follow the safety-with-fireworks code everyone)
Re: #45
I call it ‘astronaut’s wife’ hair, though they were never that glam really. I hold it in very high esteem too
Lee ~ Thanks for the link to your site. I visit often & which is great BTW. Drag her into the 90′s and really she’s not far off my fellow Canadian , Shania Twain.
Who’s available since Mutt left her. She’s hold up in Switzerland baking strudle…..
I hated this record, as I hate the kind of usage in comics and elsewhere that Tom mentions: when a woman’s suffering is not related to her at all, but is just an excuse for the hero to kick ass. Loathsome.
I’ve never much cared for Kenny Rogers either – too smooth and bland, not my kind of C&W. Combine that with such hateful ideas, and I’d give this 0, if that score exists here.
It wasn’t enough that he forced the wretched “Lucille” on us. He had to do it again and get an equally hideous number one that sounded more like a number 2.
UGH !
Thanks Lee, very nice piece on Bobbie G. I love the idea of her baking apple pie in her jump suit on an autumn day like this.
Before we fully consign Kenny R to the dumper, a thumbs up from me for his Eyes That See In The Dark album. All Barry Gibb written/produced, inc. Islands In The Stream.
Roger Bowling is the writer responsible for COTC and Lucille, as well as Billie Jo Spears’ Blanket On The Ground, What I’ve Got In Mind and 57 Chevrolet, and something called Always One Redneck Away From Loving You. He died in 1982 of unknown causes. Dare I suggest embarrassment?
Wichita, I actually like “Blanket on the ground” and got it for my 9th birthday !
I don’t know what Mr Bowling died of but it certainly wasn’t good taste.
This is a song promoting nonviolence, and shows that darkness can’t drive out darkness, but light can do it.
Light sabres? Can’t see how else ‘Old Yella’ won the day.
“Blanket on the ground” = shagging in a field, “57 chev” = shagging in a car, “What I’ve got in mind” = shagging generally.
What did he die of? Answers on a postcard…
I never heard this song until I heard it being discussed by Norm MacDonald and friends on the Adam Corolla show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ9fPnzcMHk
“Here’s what I would say: “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town” is depressing stem to stern, soup to nuts, all the way through—but it doesn’t deliver the knockout blow that “Coward Of The County” does. Now, I don’t want to step on it, but it does involve gang rape.”
This really was the best possible context for me to encounter this jaw-dropping work.
Two things spring immediately to mind; firstly, the bungled rescue of the hostages in Iran under the presidency of Carter which occurred at around this time, the fallout from which contributed in a very major way to the coming of Reagan at year’s end; and secondly, the truly noble and dignified response – which really should shame us all – of the Amish community to the shootings in Pennsylvania around three years ago. The latter in particular is I think the deepest and truest proof that we, as a community, do not have to act as our purported destroyers act, and that this is precisely why we are known as a “community.” It is horrible beyond words, but yet the society, the way of living, continues unhindered, with no thought of physical reprimand or public hand-wringing. To say nothing of Gandhi or Luther King.
On this background it’s perhaps easy to understand why I find “Coward Of The County” so offensive, and listening to it for the purpose of this blog an unusually upsetting experience. No doubt it was intended as nothing beyond a simple update on the old country/cowboy worm-has-turned routine, and 30 years previously would, with equal lack of doubt, have been bellowed out of the luminous lungs of Frankie Laine. But the song, with its theme of the pacifist told to live as such by his otherwise nogoodnik father but who finally has to turn to violence under Promethean provocation, is chilling in its seemingly whimsical acceptance of the argument that violence justifies violence, such that uxorial rape can only be responded to by dispatching her chortling assailants (“there wuz three of them,” hisses Rogers like a salivating snake).
Rogers sings this bloody and unforgivingly cynical song as though out for a pleasant afternoon’s fishing, his voice characteristically loitering half a beat behind the rhythm and changes. But the message it projected at the time was unwittingly Reaganite, exactly what its core audience was rabid to hear; an eye for an eye, whatever the circumstances. At least the killers of “I Did What I Did For Maria” and “Indiana Wants Me” recognise the wrongness of their actions and realise the price they must shortly pay. But the message of “Coward Of The County” appears to be: shoot the fuckers anyway, morally we are right (feel free to capitalise that “right”) – and then, as Eastwood mournfully points out to Hal Holbrook in Magnum Force, such thinking ends up making people shoot their next-door neighbour because their dog just peed on their lawn. The lesson still hasn’t been learned, and I don’t suppose ever will be until it’s too late.
Again. Over analyzing. A good song and a good story. You, at least remember it because it does have a story. Most song, you don’t know what the purpose is.
Good call on Indiana Wants Me, Punctum. The crime seems to be impacted by its opening line “If a man ever needed dying, he did”. Huh? No kind of explanation, just blind and dumb revenge, and the perpetrator has to face the consequences by the end of the song knowing he’ll never see his wife home and baby again. Coward Of The County would sound quite different if it ended with the sirens and police radio that gradually swamp R Dean Taylor.
Whoa, people!
The guy did not kill the gatlin boys! He ‘beat ‘em up’
Just to prove that he was ‘man’…
Otherwise, what Punctum said.
I wonder why we like old fashioned retribution in Hollywood movies (Unforgiven, Death Wish etc.) but not in music. It’s a truly bad song and I have never seen the film it spawned. The subject matter seems ever familiar. Like some kind of modern fable.
#25 Tom – be careful correcting people over 60s hits that were #1 on the NME charts but not on the Record Retailer one which is now canon!
Malmo58 – to be fair, I think Tom was speaking mainly in the context of 70s/80s songs there!
You appear to be new on here – if so, welcome! – so regarding NME charts and how the Record Retailer one came to be canon, you might like to read the concise account by Marcello (who’s in hospital at the moment and we’re all sending our love) on the “School’s Out” thread – comment no. 31 onwards.
(Wales and Northern Ireland both played World Cup matches in Malmo in 1958, am I right?)