Tryin' Like The Devil

Sooo, you were in Randy’s Records the other day (in my best Wayne from Letterkenny voice) … killing time after a hard day at work (don’t ask.) I’d already found a two-record collection from 1974 of one of my favorite country-rock bands, The Flying Burrito Brothers (featuring the always amazing Gram Parsons, the guy who arguably invented the genre), and I was just lackadaisically thumbing through the rest of the new arrival bins, not really expecting to find anything else good. I was actually kind of bored and ready to go home when I glanced to my right at the bins I hadn’t looked through yet, and saw an album I’ve never actually seen in the wild before. At first, I thought it was just wishful thinking, but even after I blinked, the album was still there: James Talley’s 1976 album, Tryin’ Like the Devil.

“Who is James Talley?” you might legitimately ask, and it wouldn’t mean you were an idiot in my eyes because you didn’t know. James Talley is a fairly obscure country singer from Oklahoma who released two pretty amazing records in the mid-1970s. President Jimmy Carter – who, among his other virtues, has great musical taste – sang Talley’s praises and invited him to play at the White House. James Talley is a guy who should have been a star (if intelligence and talent counted for much) but instead faded into undeserved obscurity.

Tryin’ Like the Devil, James Talley's second album, is my favorite – working class outlook (despite Talley’s doctorate in American Studies), great lyrics and melody, and heartfelt singing. I discovered James Talley in the 1990s through Peter Guralnick’s book Lost Highway, a collection of essays about country and blues musicians. According to Guralnick, Talley’s cultural heroes are musicians Merle Haggard, Woody Guthrie, blues singer Otis Spann, and author James Agee, and it shows in his music. After reading the book, I managed to track down digital downloads of Talley’s albums, but had given up hope of ever finding an original vinyl copy of any of his records because they went out of print forty years ago, were never best sellers, and, to the best of my knowledge, have never been reissued. Yet there was Tryin’ Like the Devil staring me in the face at Randy’s today, moderately priced compared to how that place usually jacks up the good stuff.

So tonight, I’m listening to James Talley sing,

“I’m like that pot-bellied trucker drinkin’ coffee,

I’m like that red-headed waitress named Louise,

I’m like every workin’ man, all across the land

Just tryin’ like the devil to be free,”

and happy that the day turned out half-way decently after all.

 

Archie Bunker, Fifty Years Later

 

On January 12, 1971 – fifty years ago next week – Norman Lear’s revolutionary sitcom All In The Family debuted. There was literally nothing like it on American TV at the time, and it was quite a shocking departure from Green Acres or whatever family friendly show it replaced. I remember my family never missing an episode when I was a kid. I had cool parents.

 

I broke out my DVDs of the first season of All In The Family tonight and watched the series premiere. It’s been at least ten years since I watched that show, and given that we’ve had Archie Bunker’s more evil twin as President for the last four years, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it. Surprisingly, Carroll O’Connor and Norman Lear’s comedic genius is just as relevant now as it was fifty years ago. No two ways about it, Archie Bunker is a bigoted asshole, but he’s funny. In spite of myself, I laughed until I had tears in my eyes. The thing is, I was laughing AT Archie, not with him. Played to perfection by O’Connor, and based on Norman Lear’s own father, Archie is not a sympathetic character, and I hear echoes of Archie’s rhetoric in the worst of today’s political dialogue, especially on social media, where Trump supporting politicians and commentators bloviate, and anonymous incel keyboard warriors reign. Jean Stapleton is equally as funny as Archie’s long-suffering wife Edith, and – at least in this episode – she isn’t the pushover that I remembered her being later on in the series.

 

Archie represents the worst of the Nixon era – ignorant, uninformed, and bigoted. Lear never meant for Archie Bunker to be a role model (I hear sympathetic nonsense occasionally from people who seem to be nostalgic for Archie’s racial epithets, not realizing that Lear wrote them as ironic commentary on Archie’s ignorance), and Carroll O’Connor (who was politically liberal in real life) was just a really good actor who made Archie believable. The first few seasons of All In The Family hold up well both as comedy and social commentary, but neither Norman Lear nor Carroll O’Connor meant for Archie to be a modern day politically incorrect anti-hero, either. Archie Bunker is an ignorant bigot whose attitudes are sadly still with us today, fifty years later.