In-Law Country - Diane Diekman

By Geoffrey Himes

Geoffrey Himes looked back at the history of modern country music to define a movement that took place between 1968 and 1985, beginning in Los Angeles and moving to Nashville. Its musicians wanted to change and update traditional country music through songwriting and performances that resonated with young baby boomers. Himes describes this period and its history in his book In-Law Country.

I find the title misleading, as if the focus is on family relationships rather than music. Inlaw Country would be a more accurate term. The participants are not in-laws, although several are spouses. As the author points out, “The name is an obvious play on the Outlaw Country movement.”

The In-Law Country movement began in 1968 with Gram Parsons, who’d moved from Florida to Los Angeles and wanted to add the exciting sounds of rock music to the country and gospel genres he’d been raised on. His protégé, Emmylou Harris, became the first star of the movement. Her producer/husband, Brian Ahern, set the standard for record production. “Brian Ahern invented the sound of In-Law Country,” writes Himes. “Each element in a song had its own distinct personality that could easily be heard apart from everything else. . .. This was a studio-specific sound that Ahern perfected and that country audiences embraced.”

Harris learned from Parsons to work with high-priced musicians on the road and then record with them in the studio, in contrast to the Nashville model that hired the same A-team studio musicians for everyone’s recordings. Members of her Hot Band—Rodney Crowell, Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs—followed her lead to become singing stars and Ahern’s lead to become producers. The entire group, which had migrated mostly from Nashville to Los Angeles in the 1970s, returned by 1985. Their goal was to be accepted into mainstream country music.

“Though it has never been properly defined and acknowledged in country music histories,” Hines writes, In-Law Country “is arguably the genre’s most crucial development over the final quarter of the twentieth century. It had an enormous commercial impact in the 1980s and a powerful artistic impact in the 1990s. . . . it remains the only viable response to the changes in country music’s core subject matter—marriage, faith, death, work, and home.”

The movement can be defined by two commitments: reaching the mainstream country audience and maintaining a high standard of songwriting craft. The basic songwriting style was defined by two Texans, Townes Van Zandt (“Pancho and Lefty”) and Guy Clark (“Desperados Waiting for a Train”), and expanded by a third, Rodney Crowell, who initially wrote for their approval. They composed story songs in the tradition of the Old West, with complex chords and lyrics that met meticulous standards of word choice and message.

This was baby boomer music about equality in marriage, Hines explains: “where the woman was not a subservient sidekick but an equal partner, someone with her own ambitions, her own ideas, her own needs. These weren’t songs about leaving marriages behind but about changing them so they worked for both parties.” Harris and Ahern, Rodney Crowell and Rosanne Cash, Janice and Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs and Sharon White, and Susanna and Guy Clark lived out these new two-career marriages in public and created songs alongside their spouses and friends in similar marriages.

Hines personifies the lyrics and music with his poetic descriptions, such as this one for Rosanne Cash’s “Seven Year Ache”: “The chord changes, with their weave of majors and minors, have a moody quality that implies the narrator’s alternating attempts to be furious and reasonable. Cash’s seemingly reluctant vocal holds back against the crisp push of the rhythm section.” And, “There’s a dreamy, cushiony quality to the verse vocals, which slip in and out of tempo, as if she has left logic and rationality behind, as if mere desire can overcome the miles.”

In-Law Country is a wealth of research and information, told in an engaging style. I enjoyed learning new details and hearing the stories of familiar and not-so-familiar people. I liked the chapter organization, which focused on one person while bringing in numerous other characters. For example, I immediately knew Chapter 14, “Don’t Get Above Your Raising, 1980,” was about Ricky Skaggs and Chapter 16, “Seven Year Ache, 1981,” would feature Rosanne Cash. However, this resulted in details repeated throughout the book, as if the reader hadn’t read them before.

This 360-page book could have been shortened considerably by cutting the repetition of the characters’ stories and trusting the reader to understand the meaning of In-Law Country without constantly pointing it out. Also, rather than the standard use of endnotes, Hines listed in the text the date and source of every interview: “’I was twelve when my parents broke up in 1967,’ Cash said in 2002.” That statement was a fact no matter when she said it. These distractions appear on most pages: “told the New York Daily News in 1977,” “told Rolling Stone in 1989, “told Stereo Review in 1985.”

In-Law Country is a great book that could have been even better. It should be on the bookshelf of everyone interested in this period of country music history. I learned so much about the music I’ve loved my entire life, following the threads of the various lives and hit records as the author tied them all together.