TAKE THIS JOB AND SHOVE IT
Johnny Paycheck
Take This Job and Shove It
Epic : 1978
[Buy it]

WOULD YOU LAY WITH ME (IN A FIELD OF STONE)
Tanya Tucker
Would You Lay with Me (In a Field of Stone)
CBS : 1974
[Buy it]

JOLENE
Dolly Parton
Jolene
RCA : 1974
[Buy it]

Other than Gram Parsons, David Allan Coe may be the most overrated figure in Southern music. If Waylon & Willie and Johnny Cash represent a noble if erratic outlaw spirit which can only operate in its own, near-mythic world of freedom and regret, then Coe represents the other side of that myth, the pure self-indulgence and spiritual bankruptcy that it also contains, of becoming an outsider not out of a search for both greater freedom and a deeper code of ethics but as a means to satisfy one's most elemental desires without any adult sense of responsibility. While he may have a song about picking up the hitchhiking ghost of Hank Williams, Coe's soul is pure Hank Jr.

That said, Coe (like Bocephus) has written a number of songs that stand to be continuously handed down, even if some of them, like "Divers Do It Deeper" and especially the Johnny Paycheck smash hit "Take this Job and Shove It," register more as catchphrases than works of art.

While "Take this Job" seems to be remembered as a brazen "fuck you" to a shitty factory job, and thereby both a vicarious thrill and a challenge to a corrupt system, it's at heart a "she's left me" song as much as anything, told in a new way. After listening to it again, you realize that the speaker in the song is not in the process of telling off his boss, but is daydreaming about it: "I'd take the shirt right off of my back if I had the nerve to say 'take this job . . . .'" "I can't wait to see their faces when I get the nerve to say . . . ."

But apparently his woman has left him, and after fifteen years of working in this factory, where he's seen good, hardworking people die with lots of bills left to be paid - apparently, even though all the reasons he was working for are gone, and though the job itself is a losing battle, even still, by the end of the song he's still only imagining saying these things and walking out the door. Apparently, he'll keep coming back to a job he hates, doing labor which he no longer has a reason to perform, which all in all is a much darker and hopeless sentiment than the t-shirt-ready chorus hints at.

With all this said, it is still a disturbing shock to me that Coe penned the words and music to what is in my opinion the greatest country music recording of all time, Tanya Tucker's "Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)." Briefly, three reasons:

1) Billy Sherrill's production. The Nashville Sound gets a bad rap as the bloated, insular machine that everyone from Waylon Jennings to Townes Van Zandt had to go to Texas or California to avoid and, paradoxically, slay. And there are countless examples of overzealous string arrangements and keyboard flourishes that threaten even the greatest of songs: Ronnie Milsap's "Smoky Mountain Rain" for instance, or the ridiculous intro to Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard's cover of "Pancho & Lefty." Even the song most often propped up as country music's greatest, "He Stopped Loving Her Today," suffers from an intrusive string arrangement by Sherrill. But on "Would You Lay With Me," everything is simultaneously ambitious and understated; the strings and backup singers accentuate Tucker's aching vocals, but don't distract from them. Tucker expresses a very personal narrative, and like the presence of friends and family at a wedding ceremony, the instruments and back up singers locate that personal narrative in a wider social context; this is one of the reasons I find Tucker's version infinitely more moving than, say, Johnny Cash's stripped-down later version, which is effective as a private emotion but misses the collective feel of Tucker's, which layers sounds that are part Nashville, part church, part orchestra. If Brian Wilson grew up in Tennessee, this might have been what Pet Sounds would've sounded like.

2) The darkness of love. For me, only one other country song approaches the perfection of "Would You Lay With Me": Dolly Parton's "Jolene." Both songs share a deep similarity in that they illuminate the darkness and neediness that underlie unconditional devotion, which is why both also have a spiritual resonance for me. While Parton communicates an unsettling awareness of the contingency of her love object, that he could be easily taken away by (and might very well be happier with) this new woman, she recognizes that she cannot live without him, regardless of his preferences: this is one logical outcome of unconditional romantic devotion (as is "He Stopped Loving Her Today"). Tucker, meanwhile, demands this degree of devotion, one that transcends rationality. Who would walk a thousand miles through the burning sand, lay in a field of stone, etc., just because she/he would need or want you to?

3) Tanya Tucker. What a strange figure she was early on, a girl too young to drive a car singing very adult songs about betrayal, love, tragedy with a worldly knowingness. Even her album covers from this period are pieces to be studied. In one, fifteen year old Tucker is photographed from above, in a dress right out of Bonnie & Clyde, and looks longingly outside a window with flowers in her lap - she is sitting 'Indian style,' with her knees spread, and it's unclear if this is supposed to evoke innocence or promiscuousness. In the upper right are the words "Tanya Tucker" and right below are the words "Would You Lay With Me" and then the parenthetical follows. One assumes that if you buy the record, your answer is "yes."

Tucker would go on to a lengthy, very successful career through the '80s and '90s, but it is only in this early incarnation that she seems to be some Southern archetype - to me, the young Tanya Tucker is like something in Faulkner, gothic and eternal. Or, she is Delta Dawn herself, a tragic embodiment of a specific notion of womanhood, a figure meant to evoke contradictory impulses that she herself may or may not be fully cognizant of evoking or embodying. Tucker's performances on her early records are the sultriest, most vulnerable vocals I can think of, with "Would You Lay With Me" being the biggest triumph.