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Among country music fans there’s a long-standing debate over “The Grand Tour,” a song written by George Richey, Norro Wilson, Carmol Taylor, and popularized by George Jones, a singer regarded by just about everyone as one of the great voices of our generation.. If you’re not familiar with the song or the singer, here it is. Or, alternatively, here’s a contemporary interpretation by jazz singer Staci Griesbach. And the lyric is here. The debate is over the real meaning of the song—is it a divorce song or a death song? Did she walk out on him? Or did she die in childbirth? The debate hit the 20th Century Country Music Facebook page recently, where I participated in it (I favored divorce) and where it got quite lively, with the kind of close textual analysis we try to teach our intro to poetry students. The songwriters in interviews have said it’s a song about the breakup of a marriage, but who’s to say they’re right? We don’t know everything that goes into, or comes out of, what we write. If we do, then what we’re writing isn’t going to be very good. And once we finish a work of art and let it out into the world, it’s not ours any more, and we are no more the authority on it than anyone else. One of the iconic poems of our time is Robert Creeley’s “I Know a Man”: As I sd to my sd, which was not his can we do against drive, he sd, for John’s advice particularly captured the fancy of readers. Post-Beat novelist Jeremy Larner wrote an acclaimed novel entitled Drive, He Said. And some five decades after writing the poem, Creeley came clean. John didn’t say that. It was not only not his real name, it wasn’t his real quote. The speaker of the poem suggests getting a goddam big car and driving, and the only thing John has to offer is “for christ’s sake, look out where yr going.” John, it turns out, is not a mystic visionary offering a profound aphorism about life, he’s just some bozo who has been paying no attention to what his friend is saying (after all, he’s always talking) but notices he’s about to step off the curb into traffic. So, does this clear it up? Everybody happy? No way. The poem has taken on a life of its own since Creeley first wrote it, and so has John, who has become Prophet John the Revelator, revealing to us that if we drive for the sake of Christ, we have an obligation to watch where we're going. If Creeley had wanted to make sure we understood that he, and not John, was the star of the poem, he could have blocked off the dialog with quotation marks, or lineated it differently. And if Richey, Wilson and Taylor had wanted us to know that she walked out on him (or died on him) they could have said so. So what did they want us to know? We’ll get to that. And if A. E. Housman had wanted us to know…. I was on a poetry ListServ back in those old-timey days, and a contentious discussion broke out among the members of the ListServ, who were a pretty high end group of poets and professors, as to what the last line of “Loveliest of Trees” meant. Housman has described the beautiful cherry blossoms of springtime, and reminded us that life is short, and therefore About the woodlands I will go, In other words, I’m going to spend all my spring days looking at the beautiful snowy white cherry blossoms—their very snowy whiteness a reminder that winter, snow and death come all too soon, Or, as some of the other ListServers would have it, since fifty springtimes aren’t enough time to appreciate beauty, I’ll go and look at cherry trees in the winter, too. Housman was safely dead, and couldn’t join in the discussion. Creeley wanted to lead the discussion, but no one really cared what he thought the poem should mean. Once you let if out into the world, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. As I discovered one afternoon. I was teaching an intro to poetry class, and I decided to have a colleague guest teach one session, leading the class in the discussion of a contemporary poet. The contemporary poet would be me, but they wouldn’t know that. One poem—as I typed it up and gave it to them—began: This is an archetype; her name is Aurore. The discussion revolved around the story of a guy rekindling an old romance. But, I pointed out when I was revealed as the author of the poem, that wasn’t it at all. I had typed the poem out wrong, with punctuation in the wrong place. It was supposed to read: This is an archetype; her name is Aurore. It was about getting a reboot of your life, starting it over for a second time, this time with this archetypal woman by your side. My class, and my colleague – quite rightly – said to hell with that, this is the poem you gave us, and this is the poem we’re discussing. Once you let it out into the world, it doesn’t belong to you anymore. So what are the arguments on either side of “The Grand Tour”? Here’s Tyler Mahan Coe, administrator of the Facebook 20th Century Country Music group, and writer/producer/host of the acclaimed podcast history of the same subject, Cocaine and Rhinestones. The Grand Tour is about the narrator's pregnant wife dying in childbirth. Death, not divorce, chills bystanders to the bone. Death, not divorce, removes the physical ability to touch. The Lord knows they had a good thing going, so the guy isn't delusional and he has no memories (like the morning paper scene) with the baby because it was never born and never made it home to the nursery. She didn't leave her ring. She left her rings, all of them. He doesn't describe her departure from him as a merciless act consciously undertaken by his wife. Rather, he describes the state he's been left in, which is one without mercy. And, obviously, anyone who's been through a divorce involving a young (and living) child knows their ex is anything but gone forever. The only way the divorce interpretation makes sense is if this guy is a physically abusive liar to the point where a woman would not take a single one of her possessions when fleeing for her life, which there isn't anything in the actual lyrics to support. And do keep in mind how many variations there are on the cliche of "taking nothing" when we depart this mortal coil: "Leaving this world naked the way you came in," "can't take it with you when you go" regarding possessions, etc. A compelling argument. Others joined in, with further textual analysis. Many pointed out that a woman doesn’t leave everything behind if it’s simply a matter of a marriage breaking up. But, one could argue, that’s not an uncommon theme in songs. The rich man’s wife cheerfully leaves everything behind to go with her gypsy lover. She even leaves her baby behind, which is her only cause for regret. In “Golden Ring,” George Jones’s duet with Tammy Wynette, she walks out leaving everything, including her ring, which she “throws down…as she walks out the door.” Folk singer Rosalie Sorrells not only sang about walking out on a marriage and leaving everything behind, she did it in real life. All her things? A diaper bag for the baby, some underclothes stuffed in her purse…the stricken husband would hardly notice. And she can send for the rest of her things later. And if she had died, wouldn’t the rings, at least her engagement and wedding rings, be buried with her? In “Golden Ring,” the ring hitting the floor is a powerful symbol of a marriage crashing. One writer suggested that a clue may be found on “she left me without mercy” –Mercy could be the name they had given to the baby-to-be. A cheap pun, in a situation so serious? No one would do that. But John Donne did. In his solemn and heartfelt “A Prayer to God the Father,” he confesses his sins—the sin of being born a mortal (in original sin), the sin of lust, the sin of doubting his faith—but ends with the confidence that his sins will be forgiven, and that God will welcome him at his death. Not many yuks there. And yet each stanza ends with a pun. “When thou has done, thou has not done” – you have me, but you don’t have me, John Donne (and spelling was not rigid in those days; “done” and “Donne” were interchangeable) – “for I have more.” I have more sins, maybe more than you can forgive. And I am not done with life yet—as perhaps symbolized by the figure of his beloved late wife, Ann More. The tone of “The Grand Tour” is one of bitter mockery, a mirthless joke, which is why I associated it more with the dissolution of a marriage. But one can also respond to the sudden death of a loved one (or two loved ones) as a grim cosmic joke. In either case, the singer is the butt of the joke and also the joketeller, as he begins by imagining himself as a carnival barker, a sideshow huckster – “Step right up!” and proceeds to offer a huckster’s hyperbole—a grand tour, a story that will chill you to the bone. As with the carnival sideshow, it’s all about the promise, not the delivery. It’s not much of a grand tour – a chair, a bed, some clothes in a closet. Let’s consider the structure of the lyric. There are the brutal, simple rhymes, rammed at us in contiguous metric feet, in such a way that you can hear the carnival barker’s voice: “Over there sits the chair…straight ahead, that’s the bed…her rings, all her things.” Then in each case, as the husband goes on, the rhymes get softer, spaced farther apart, the tone gets more introspective, as he can’t quite sustain the carnival barker’s cruel cynicism. And ultimately, he can’t sustain the mockery. The crass obviousness of the earlier rhymes gives way to a startling, imaginative, and devastating rhyme: “As you leave, you’ll see the nursery / Oh, she left me without mercy.” Death or desertion? That question may never be answered, and it doesn’t need to be. The song is about loss, and the awareness that it’s an old story, trite enough to be exploited by a carnival barker, profound in its mercilessness. Donald Justice described loss in more restrained tones: Men at forty The husband in “The Grand Tour” knows the truth of that, but it’s a lesson he has not quite learned. As the song ends, the bitter, tragic, mocking carnival huckster starts his pitch all over again: “Step right up…” |