Nashville Chrome by Rick Bass Page B

they were bigger than he was, and then—for a while—even when he was big, they stayed even with him on all the charts, for a while.
    Even their best friend, Jim Reeves—Gentleman Jim Reeves—had a movie made about him, as did their record producer, Chet Atkins, with
The Chet Atkins Story.
A movie at or near the end of one's career or life is simply de rigueur in country music. Where's her movie? It's like going out onstage without shoes, or like the recurring nightmare in which, while playing in a huge and elegant venue, her voice comes out but the microphone isn't working, so that only the audience in the first few rows can hear her.
    This is how it was in the old days, this fever, this feeling that something immense had entered the world and was shoving her, pushing her from behind, urging her toward a life of great consequence, with the wind at her back; and now, as then, she is eager to accept that assignation.
    That the fame has been gone fifty years now does not register in her. In her mind it has only been gone one day. Sometimes she imagines the actors and actresses she would like to see in her movie. They change, decade by decade. In such imaginings, she tries to stay current.
    How can fame not equal a movie? The fame came so quickly. Almost everything they touched went to number one. After having lived through a World War, then a Depression, then another World War, and finally an economic expansion, and the ascent from poverty into middle class—after all that, there was an excitement and a yearning to feel sophisticated, and a dissatisfaction or even embarrassment about those earlier days and generations. The Browns' voices were shiny and elegant, and utterly controlled; the spirit of their voices had the Appalachian hillbilly music as its rootstock, but without the nasal whine and twang. People had never heard anything like it and could not get enough of it. Every song the Browns released in 1955 and 1956 hit the top ten. Never in the history of music has any group had as many Top Ten hits over a two-year period, nor as many number ones.
    It was a smaller world—fewer radio stations, and smaller audiences—and television had not yet assumed full primacy in the culture. Radio was still king. Companies such as RCA were only just beginning to merge the two media, using variety shows as a bridge. It was still an aural rather than visual culture with regard to how people entertained themselves and how they relaxed after a long day at work in the factory—exhausted from having trudged a day closer to a relief if not an affluence that finally was beginning to seem possible. They sat down on their couch, opened a beer, turned the music on, and listened to whatever was playing, as if awaiting instruction on how to live the rest of their lives, or to be encouraged to get up and keep going—to live more engaged lives, heroic lives—though sometimes, too, they sat there after work just listening.
    The Browns flooded the market with their songs, which were written mostly by Maxine: stories of small-town growing-up, cruising the drag, dressing up for boys, cruel betrayals, longings for love—the standard fare of what would become American music. Jim Ed penned some of the drinking songs, and within about an eighteen-month period, they had essentially created the country music market, had provided both a template and a path for all the other musicians, many almost exactly like themselves but lacking only the strange assignation.
    It could have happened to anyone; it could only have happened to them. The Browns—led largely by the firstborn and fiercest and hungriest—broke trail, and quickly, like escapees; all the others poured through right behind them.
    And as if creating or colonizing all that new territory—the idea of country music—wasn't enough, the Browns spilled over, within that same short time period, into other adjacent markets: pop, rock, folk.
    And just as