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Satan is Real

When I mentioned to Ken I wanted to write about York’s poem and about the Louvin Brothers’ knotty history, he sent me his copy of Satan is Real, a memoir co-written by Charlie Louvin and Benjamin Whitmer. The book recounts much of the Louvin Brothers’ childhood and provides sufficient testimony to conclude that the boys had their own troubled lives to bring to their music. York was mostly right – they learned “Knoxville Girl” from their mother, who also taught them what Charlie said was the first song they ever learned by heart, another murder ballad, “Mary of the Wild Moor.” They learned these songs when they were little boys helping inside with housework because they weren’t old enough to work outside with their father. It’s too bad they couldn’t stay little.

We only have to read a few pages of the book before we’re into accounts of whippings and beatings doled out by Papa, who was, by Charlie’s telling, hard on both brothers but harder on Ira. The tales of the beatings are gruesome – difficult to read. So too are other passages of the book, including one in which Charlie recalls a coon hound in heat trapped in the loft of their barn. His father was saving her to breed with another coon hound, but Charlie and Ira hauled a bulldog up and watched the dogs go at it. When the puppies were born, their father ordered Charlie to shove the whole litter in a burlap sack. “Papa had no feeling for any animal at all,” Charlie writes. “If it was worthless, then it didn’t deserve to eat…..if that dog failed, if Papa took it out and it wouldn’t hunt, he’d just pick up an ax, say ‘Come here, boy,’ and split its head right down the middle.”

Charlie and Ira’s uncle, it seems, was more violent than their father. “He spent three quarters of his life in prison,” Charlie claims. “Hell, he died in prison. Every time he would get out, he would do something stupid like carry some little teenage girl across a state line, and get ten more years for it.”

As for Charlie and Ira, they managed their lives in different ways. Charlie was married to the same woman for 61 years, but Ira seemed to ruin (or try to ruin) every relationship he had. He drank too much. Some wonder if he drank so much because he ignored a calling to preach. Charlie acknowledged this in the memoir, but he also suspected Ira’s problems had more to do with the beatings he got as a boy. Ira went through four wives. One of them shot him six times after he tried to strangle her with a telephone cord. He lived, but his drinking took a toll on more than his marriages. By 1963, it ruined his partnership with his brother. Two years later, he died in a car accident. If you try to balance the gospel-themed concept albums the brothers recorded with the murder ballads they loved, it seems something tips toward darkness, at least as that measure applies to Ira.

In a chapter titled “Tragic Songs of Life,” titled after the brothers’ first full-length album with Capitol Records, Charlie discusses the popularity of “The Knoxville Girl” and explains his own understanding of the song. The reason why Willie kills the girl is clear, he asserts: she had “dark and roving eyes.” The roving eyes, of course, are what matters, and though the explanation, embedded in the song as it is, feels almost hidden, it’s available to anyone who listens with some attention.

“Of course, Willie doesn’t get away with it,” Charlie writes. “That’s the way of it, as Ira and I learned at an early age from Papa, you don’t get away with nothing. He goes home and loses his mind. He sees the flames of hell all around him, and spends the rest of his life in a dirty old jail cell.” Charlie knew something about the misery of getting caught. The book is full of his tales of trouble and reproof.

Method Acting

All of this raises questions about the imperative for an artist to enter other and the degree to which the Louvin Brothers were method actors or, more specifically, method musicians. In covering “The Knoxville Girl,” The Louvin Brothers, by some necessity of lyrics, channeled a killer. York dramatizes and exploits that channeling in his poem, erasing the gauzy barrier between singer and song. The poem fascinates me because of the questions it spawns: were the Louvin Brothers, because of their early introduction to murder ballads, always trying to live up to or into those songs, or did their lives prepare them for their performances? Perhaps more simply put, did they become the roles they sang?

Philip Seymour Hoffman. Credit: Georges Biard.

In a 2014 article in The New Yorker, Richard Brody writes, “There’s something about modern-day acting – that style that is famously associated with Lee Strasberg’s Method and that gained currency from his Actors Studio and its offshoots – that inclines toward deformations of character.” Later, writing about Philip Seymour Hoffman, Brody notes, “The connection of his inner life and outer skill generated a sort of emotional short circuit that overheated him terrifyingly, resulting in the justly admired intensity that he brought to every role.” Hoffman died of acute mixed drug intoxication when he was 46. Investigators found a syringe stuck in his arm. Some wonder if his devotion to acting asked too much of him. It’s possible to ask a similar question about the Louvin Brothers’ commitment to music.

Lee Strasberg took Constantin Stanislavsky’s imperative for “believable truth” and honed it into his Method, urging actors to summon real experiences from their real lives. Stanislavsky, before Strasberg, urged something similar when he encouraged actors to prepare for roles by recalling emotions from their lives. At the core of Method acting is a belief that in order to convincingly play a character, an actor must live the character. The result of this mirrored living is, for those who believe in the Method approach, sincerity.

A method actor doesn’t leave his role behind him on stage, so what he does on stage is not, as some would say, fabrication. The Louvins, in this way, were very much like method actors. They didn’t pretend to understand misery. They brought their own emotional history to the songs they sang.

Stanislavsky and Strasberg wanted to bridge the gap between life and theater, but at what expense? The Louvin Brothers – particularly Ira – were haunted by trauma and violence. They didn’t have to build the bridge, but what was the cost of maintaining it? York’s poem addresses this cost and works as a kind of autopsy, slicing open the Louvins’ recording, examining cause and effect, and discovering something new.

We know of actors who take method acting seriously, and we know of actors who take method acting too far. A 2015 article in Mental Floss lists 15 of the most outrageous examples. Jack Nicholson lived at the psychiatric ward where One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was shot. He mingled with patients and participated in group therapy sessions. Some of those sessions were filmed without patients’ knowledge. Billy Bob Thornton (who, incidentally, sang “Knoxville Girl” with Charlie Louvin at a show one night in Nashville) put crushed glass inside his shoes to help him walk with the kind of gait necessary for his role in Sling Blade. Ira Louvin sometimes smashed his mandolin on stage. Was that, in some way, method acting that went too far?

Songs of Life

Charlie and Ira Louvin loved those tragic songs of life, but Charlie, it seems, was able to get outside of them. He understood their tragedy, but he acknowledged that the tragedies of most old murder ballads are of a different scale than the tragedies we read about today. In his chapter about tragic songs, he writes, “You can talk about ‘Knoxville Girl’ being a tragic song, but it only talks about the death of one person. Today the death of one person wouldn’t even make the news….as far at the news items go, ten people barely matter, and one don’t count at all.”

Charlie Louvin died in 2011 of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 83. Jake Adam York died in 2012 after a massive stroke. He was 40. Though I understand what Charlie Louvin was after when he angled toward a redefinition of contemporary tragedy, York’s death counts. So does Charlie’s. So does Ira’s. There was something tragic in each. York died too young, Charlie knew more than a man’s share of cruelty, and Ira (who also knew more than a man’s share of cruelty) never settled into a life that seemed to work. About Ira, Charlie wrote, “The worldly things were just too strong for him. He couldn’t overcome them long enough to be what he knew he ought to be, and that made his entire life a buildup of the misery in his mind.”

At the end of his essay in Terrain.org, York confesses, “I hope that somehow I too can blend my voice with the bygone, in the ghost choruses of culture, and yet raise it when called to answer, to be able to say, with strength, ‘I’ve got my own way of talking,’ yet listen rightly, if the voice that gives me voice should say, in some way, Go do my will.” That essay was published in 2006, a year after York’s Murder Ballads was published. I’d say by then York already had blended his voice with the bygone and raised it too. His “Knoxville Girl” both acknowledges its roots in the Louvins’ song and declares its independence from the song.