Country singer Henson Cargill died late last month at the age of 66. You can read an obituary for the “Skip a Rope” singer here.

Below, I’ve posted a Cargill review I wrote last year for No Depression, which I want to share to commemorate his passing but also because it, inadvertently, adds to the discussion generated by our recent Martin Luther King, Jr. post. –David Cantwell

*****

Henson Cargill
A Very Well Traveled Man: The Best of the Monument Years, 1967-1970
Omni

The boycotts and sit-ins and marches of the civil rights era coincided precisely with those years in which the Nashville Sound catapulted country music to unprecedented levels of national popularity. But if you tuned in country radio in those years, the events of Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma—or Nashville, for that matter, where sit-ins were taking place just a few blocks from the Ryman in 1960—passed without comment by the records played, if not perhaps by the DJ’s playing them.  

This sin of omission is at least partly explained by the continuing support for Jim Crow by many, if not most, country musicians and fans. As critic Craig Werner observes in A Change Is Gonna Come, “The real problem with country’s racial politics during the sixties was they pretended not to exist. Blacks weren’t attacked, they simply weren’t anywhere to be seen.”

There were infrequent exceptions. But even those country performers who wished to go literally on the record (belatedly) in support of integration were stymied by cautious label heads—as was reportedly the case with the Billy Joe Shaver-penned “Black Rose,” for example, a would-be Waylon Jennings’ single from 1972.

Other country acts suffered failures of nerve. Merle Haggard would certainly have caught hell if he’d followed the Silent Majority success of “Okie from Muskogee” with the interracial love song “Irma Jackson” (as he’d originally planned), rather than with “The Fighting Side of Me” (as producer Ken Nelson persuaded him to do). But does anyone doubt that “Irma” would’ve been an enormous hit, in any case? And if it had been, how might that have altered the future of country radio? We’ll never know. As it stands, the only country single to broach the topic of racism and to become a major hit in this era was “Skip a Rope,” a 1968 country chart topper and number 25 pop hit by Henson Cargill.

On the one hand, this makes Cargill a kind of hero. He’d been everything from a rancher to a deputy sheriff in Oklahoma before he began recording for Monument Records in Nashville, and within his era of country music, “Skip A Rope” presents Cargill as the rare man with guts enough not only to admit to himself but to condemn out loud the way parents teach children “to hate your neighbor for the shade of his skin.” So: good for you, Henson Cargill. And good for producer Don Law, who provided the handclaps and hopscotch beat that helped Cargill’s medicine go down smooth.

On the other hand, 1968’s “Skip a Rope” was the only major country record of its time to acknowledge race as an issue at all—and it does it only in the one partial line quoted above. This is the very definition of too little, too late. When Cargill’s single topped the charts, after all, Emmett Till had been dead for nearly 15 years, the March on Washington was half a decade past, and MLK had just two months to live.

Several Cargill recordings exhibited a similarly frustrating social consciousness. In “None of My Business,” a top ten country hit in 1969, Cargill sang, “This stuff about my fellow man’s fate, well, it’s none of my business.” He meant it sarcastically, but one wonders if many listeners didn’t simply shake their heads in agreement. Elsewhere, his message songs don’t look away from the world’s troubles so much as they seem to say: Sure the world’s a mess…but whataya gonna do?

Even “What’s My Name,” which wants to say something profound about the human potential for good and for evil, can only throw up its hands at the seeming arbitrariness of human evolution. In a bizarre chant, a Nashville Sound Greek Chorus intones earnestly: “Augustine, Bonaparte, Hitler, Mussolini, Martin Luther King, Abraham, Jagger, Jonas Salk.” You get the idea.

Still and all…A Very Well Traveled Man is a disc more than worth your time and money. The half dozen message numbers here will at the very least prompt a groan or two, but they nonetheless provide a revealing glimpse of Music Row politics, circa 1970. And the remaining 20 or so cuts are simply first rate countrypolitan, backed alternately by loping or skittering rhythms, dramatic choruses, and sad stories—the kind of numbers that would have been accompanied by quick cuts, groovy zooms and dancing girls on The Ed Sullivan Show or The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.

Cargill had a low, ragged tenor that’s well suited to singing about loss, as he does for instance on a wise cover of Roger Miller’s “Husbands and Wives,” or on a live hidden track that has Cargill bemoaning the changes brought by an increasingly urbanized south in Joe South’s “Don’t It Make You Want to Go Home.”

Maybe the best moment here is the working class lament “Hemphill Kentucky Consolidated Coalmine”: A son, faced with the mining death of his father, asks his mother when they can leave the coal country for good. That sort of song, of course, is a species of social consciousness at which country music has long excelled. They don’t call it the white man’s blues for nothing. 

*****

Henson Cargill “Don’t It Make You Want to Go Home”
Henson Cargill “Hemphill Kentucky Consolidated Coalmine”

Both tracks available on Henson Cargill’s A Very Well Traveled Man: The Best of the Monument Years, 1967-1970 (Omni, 2005)

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