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Bottoming Out

Remember we deal with alcohol — cunning, baffling, powerful.
— Alcoholics Anonymous, “Big Book”

The Louvin Brothers:
Ira and Charlie (seated)
(c.1960) (source: charlielouvin.net)

Ira and Charlie Louvin recorded “Wreck on the Highway” late in their career. The volatile duo – Alabaman brothers whose talent for close harmony singing helped them escape a violent father and backbreaking labor making charcoal and farming cotton – finally went their separate ways in 1963 after two decades of performing together, their partnership a victim of Ira’s out-of-control drinking. Recorded in 1962, less than a year before they called it quits, their version of “Wreck” is marred slightly by bland instrumental backing, but their voices – pure, guileless, clean as well water – bring chills, transporting the listener to the heart of the song’s pitiful scenario. On record, the Louvins always sound like their best or better selves, as if their deepest conflicts – with each other, their inner and outer lives, God and a devil that was painfully real for both – could be set aside and forgotten only when they sang together.

Louvin Brothers: Wreck on the Highway (1962)

Ironically, Ira was sober when he and his fourth wife, Anne, died in their own wreck on the highway – a 1965 head-on collision between cars in a Missouri construction zone. Compounding the irony, the other driver was drunk and Ira, when he died, had an outstanding warrant for driving under the influence. A wretched alcoholic – amiable when sober, violent when drunk – Ira Louvin died at 41 and was outlived by nearly 50 years by his more even-tempered brother.

June 20, 1965: Ira Louvin, his wife, and four others died in a head-on collision in Williamsburg, Missourri
(newspaper photo, source unknown)

Like the Louvins, George Jones had a doleful voice of such emotive power he tapped depths of feeling rarely heard in country music before or since. Like Ira, he was also bedeviled all his life by demon alcohol (plus various drugs) – a circumstance that led to multiple hospitalizations, public breakdowns, and periods of outright madness despite commercial success and widespread admiration for his vocal gifts. For years he appeared high on celebrity death pools, but a drunken car wreck in 1999 seems to have frightened him into sobriety. He died 13 years later, age 81, of a respiratory infection.

Jones recorded “Wreck” in 1965, in an unlikely duet with teen idol Gene Pitney, and gave the song the sort of sensitive, soulful reading that characterized all his best material (“I sing because I love it,” he told Billboard a year before his death, “not because of the dollar signs”). Like the Louvins, when Jones sang he seemed to find an inner peace that eluded him in daily life and certainly in his struggles with addiction. While “Wreck” falls short of his best work, hampered by the song’s awkward duet format and Pitney’s lesser vocal talent, it’s still an affecting performance.

George Jones & Gene Pitney: Wreck on the Highway (1965)

Alcohol suffuses “Wreck’s” narrative, but redemption is its true theme. Central to Christian theology, especially in its most literalist forms, salvation through Jesus – the forgiveness of sins and promise of life after death achieved through heartfelt confession and embrace of Christ as savior – is the subtext of the song’s woeful chorus. If “Wreck’s” narrator hears no regretful last words, no anguished cries to God at the “scene of destruction,” an already senseless tragedy might mean a fate worse than death, with souls lost forever beside cold, stiffening bodies.

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