It’s amazing how many just grow up,
grow up only to be cast down.
So they all play their part though they knew at the start:
there’s a darkness at the heart of this town.

And that dark will enfold you
like your mother’s sweet arms.
She just wants to hold you.
She don’t mean you no harm.

It’s amazing how many just freeze up
when they look and they see where they’re bound.
There’s no map, there’s no chart, there’s no ease, there’s no art.
Just a darkness at the heart of this town.

Hear that lonesome whippoorwill

He sounds too blue to fly

The midnight train is whining low

I’m so lonesome I could cry

Thus begins “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” the four-verse, three-minute ode to loneliness to which, it has been said, the entire corpus of country music is but a commentary. What is it about this song that has inspired such devotion? Why is it usually numbered among the handful of stone-cold classics of American popular music? How does it differ from what came before, and why did it change everything that came after?

Let’s start with that first verse. There are none of the usual tropes of country music present: women and work, marriage and moonshine, ramblin’ and gamblin’. It presents two sounds; just those two sounds, followed by a feeling. Hank invites us to hear them: first the sound of the lonesome whippoorwill, then the whistle of a passing freight. Neither of these sounds are incidental. The song of the whippoorwill has long haunted artists and writers, and amassed its fair share of myth and legend. In New England they used to say that these birds could sense a soul departing, and general American folklore has taken the song to be an omen of death. Horror writers H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King both featured whippoorwills in their fiction. It seems to be the consensus that these birds are trouble.

As for the train whistle, this sound has been a source of fascination in rural America since the creation of the railroads. Even the most cursory examination of American folk music – black and white equally – reveals the profound change of consciousness that followed this pivotal event. The freedom that was suddenly possible was both liberating and profoundly dangerous. How many songs are there about “grabbing a freight to ride?” God only knows. Suddenly, every situation, whether a bad job, a bad relationship, or an entire life, could be miles behind you in minutes. But alongside this feeling of unbounded freedom, both blues and country singers have often commented on the similarity between the whistle of a freight train and a human cry of sorrow.

But what is Hank hearing in these sounds? Though both carry weight, I don’t think they are burdened-down with it. First of all, he’s setting the scene. He’s inviting you to hear these sounds with him, as the song begins. (Perhaps for this reason I always pictured the singer sitting by a window at twilight.) The sounds themselves carry the meaning, if you can close your eyes and hear them. Hear that lonesome whippoorwill? Hear that train? The whippoorwill, bird of dread, is hardly an agent of death here. Indeed, the bird itself is struck down with sorrow and ennui, too blue to even fly, a threat to no one. The train is crying, not beckoning, simply joining its song to the song of the bird in weird harmony. Something is going on, outside that window.

I’ve never seen a night so long

When times goes crawling by

The moon just went behind a cloud

To hide its face and cry

There is no plot, no story, to this song, but there is movement. First, the sounds, then, look, the moon passes behind a cloud. Time is moving slowly, crawling by, but it moves, though the narrator hardly moves with it as he passively observes the scene. His passiveness seems almost total; the most he can do is make an analogy. When the moon disappears, it seems to him like a person bringing a handkerchief up to their face to hide their sorrow, appropriate for the ever-feminine moon

Now we can see more clearly what is happening (as, in the last verse, we heard). Nature itself is caught up in this pure, plotless moment of loneliness. With the moon involved now, the feeling becomes cosmic. Everything Hank sees and hears is a reflection of his lonesomeness; nature itself is grieving, and even the moon can’t bear to see what’s become of him.

There is a psychological truth to this description that grounds any attempt to see the song as romantic. Anyone who has known depression knows that it changes the way you see, forcing you to view the world through a grey web. Everything Hank sees or hears in this moment is testifying to his broken heart.

Have you ever seen a robin weep

When leaves begin to die

That means he’s lost the will to live

I’m so lonesome I could cry

Another bird. What a strange, unsettling question: “Have you ever seen a robin weep?” Imagine a stranger approaching you to ask it. Who would ask a question like that? Hank would, and clearly he has seen such a thing; most likely he is seeing it now, in the eternal, captured moment of this song, as he gazes out the window. We know already what he is hearing, we know what he is seeing, now he turns his gaze straight to us and asks us a question: “Have you seen this thing?”

Unlike the whippoorwill, the robin is not freighted with notions of doom. The epitome of springtime, the robin is often among the first birds to sing to the rising sun. But what happens when spring starts to fade? Hank believes that then the robin weeps, and it isn’t hard to imagine that the singer’s own spring is passing, with the same inevitability as the season. The robin can’t stop the onset of autumn, and the singer can’t stop the onset of his grief.

Weird and fatalistic, this verse, and it also contains an element of controversy. The official lyric has always been “That means he’s lost the will to live” but certain listeners have always heard it as “like me” rather than “that means.” A small point, perhaps – the meaning seems the same either way, though one way makes it explicit – but those who hear the “like me” can point to it as more evidence that Hank’s early demise was a slow suicide. It could be that the public of his day, who did not hold up the dead young genius as some kind of noble ideal, didn’t want to hear that kind of sentiment from Hank. It is only our time that has come to embrace him as the prototype of the suffering artist, with his death as the final confirmation; to his own time, his death was anomaly, pure tragedy.

The silence of a falling star

Lights up a purple sky

And as I wonder where you are

I’m so lonesome I could cry

I’m not the first person to comment on the seeming synesthesia in this song (it is the silence, not the star, that is lighting up the sky). I find it both deeply strange and perfectly fitting. Sitting at his window, Hank loses himself in the sights and sounds, until his feelings of isolation and abandonment and the things he is seeing and hearing are one and the same. The world distorts and stretches, and the singer is the birdsong, he is the train-whistle, and silence is lighting up the purple sky. Van Gogh would have painted it; Hank Williams sung it with a four-piece country band.

The last two lines always destroy me. Up until this point, the reason for the singer’s loneliness has been striking in its absence. There is no event that is being brooded over (indeed, there never is). Perhaps to some ears the song would have been even more perfect if the moment had remained untouched by any hint of a love affair gone wrong, if the despair had remained purely existential; perhaps to some ears these final lines bring “I’m So Lonesome” a little closer to being yet another broken-hearted love song.

To me, those lines, coming at the end as they do, are the coup de grace. Having expanded the horizons of his lonesomeness to include the entire natural world, from the birds in the trees to the very stars themselves, just as silence is beginning to light up the sky and the song threatens to collapse under the burden of its massive undertaking, he sings, “I wonder where you are.” I get chills just typing it. We suddenly remember that this is about a real human being in real pain.

And it’s “I wonder where you are,” not “You done me wrong,” or “How many hearts have you broken?” What a forlorn sentiment, “I wonder where you are,” as he stares out the window and hears the midnight train. The “you” isn’t identified. She could have left him, she could have died, she could be truly missing, perhaps he hasn’t met her yet. If you like, it could be a parent, a friend, or a child. But he doesn’t know where she is, and that is the only thing worth knowing; without that knowledge, the world is full of tears, and the sounds of nature are a symphony of sorrow.

“I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” both epitomizes and transcends its genre. It epitomizes country music because country has always been the about real, adult pain, the kind that aches in the deepest place, and can kill. It transcends the genre because it removes that pain from circumstance – white, southern, or otherwise – and makes it universal. We’ve all looked out that window, but most of us didn’t look for long. Hank Williams seemed to have had a hard time looking away.

“One day I was over at Acuff-Rose, our mutual publisher, and Hank handed me a piece of paper and said, ‘Do you think people will understand what I’m trying to say when I say this?’” – Jimmy Rule, on “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”

The Ramones were always a tough band to define politically. Apolitical on the surface, they nonetheless flirted with provocative political statements throughout their long career. From the controversial references to Nazism on their first album (“I’m a Nazi schatzi, y’know I fight for Fatherland” sings the Jewish giant, Joey Ramone) to their smart anti-Reagan screed, “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,” which was an indictment of Reagan for visiting the graves of the Nazi war dead during a visit to Germany, those looking for consistency will be hard pressed to find it. Much of this can be attributed to the extreme political dichotomy between Johnny Ramone, the band’s drill-sergeant-like guitar player and leader, whose political sympathies were somewhere to the right of Bennito Mussolini, and Joey Ramone, who came out late in life a pro-choice, anti-apartheid New York liberal. Then there was Dee Dee, the deranged, brilliant bass player and songwriter, singing on their hardcore punk classic, “Warthog,” about “doomsday visions of commies and queers” – this from a man who used to sell his body to cruising gay men for bags of dope. Clearly, looking for a political ideology in the Ramone oeuvre is a fool’s errand.

But something I noticed early on in my life as a Ramones fan is that they wrote and performed what, to my ears, was a game-changing feminist anthem, “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker.” What was so different about this song? Just this:  a huge percentage of songs in the pop lexicon are about women, but these songs are almost always about women as they relate to men. Happy, sad, angry, jealous, lustful, the lyrics are almost always about the man’s feelings for the woman; in other words, the man is the true subject of the song. This goes for good songs and bad songs; it’s not a statement of value. But what was so new and so exciting about “Sheena” is how the lyrics – which tell the story of a young girl liberating herself from conformity through the new punk subculture – are simply about the girl. There is no male narrator interjecting his thoughts about Sheena’s choice, or how it makes him feel. There’s just:

Well, the kids are all hopped up and ready to go/They’ve got their surfboards and they’re going to the discotheque-a-go-go/But she just couldn’t stay/She had to break away/New York City really has it all, oh yeah/Sheena is a punk rocker

Just that, and the repeated refrain, joyous, rebellious and catchy as all hell, “She’s a punk, punk, a punk rocker,” ad infinitum. Where’s the love story? Where’s the man? There isn’t one! (As to why the kids are bringing their surfboards to the disco, this is a question for a wiser man than I.) The song is about Sheena turning into a punk rocker, and nobody else really enters into the equation. Now, I’m not claiming that these songs came out of any adherence to feminist ideology. Actually, I think the songs derive a large part of their worth and sincerity from being so un-rhetorical, so bereft of a political agenda.  I don’t think Joey Ramone, who wrote it, was trying to make a feminist statement, and for that, I’m thankful. There are a lot of really well-intentioned political songs that are artistically dead from the weight of the agenda they’re trying to carry. Michael Franti of Spearhead seems like a nice guy, and I’m sure he and I agree on a lot of political issues, but that doesn’t mean his lyrics don’t sound like a collage of bumper-sticker slogans. When The Ramones had a message, it came out naturally, seamlessly integrated into the song. Almost without exception, when someone has a political message first, then tries to craft a song to carry it, they end up with something that is more propaganda than art, more rhetoric than poetry, more meaning than music. Joey Ramone succeeded so well in writing this perfect feminist anthem precisely because he wasn’t trying to.

“It was funny because all the girls in New York seemed to change their name to Sheena after that. Everybody was a Sheena.” – Joey Ramone

I’ve been hiding,
please find me.

I’m hidden to myself.
I look like someone else.
When I look in the mirror
the strangest face appears.

I’ve been hiding,
please find me.

Please just look around.
Listen for familiar sounds.
It’s me, the voice you know,
all scratched-up and alone.

I’ve been hiding,
please find me.

Just look beyond the air.
Rip up that emptiness and please look there.

I’m stuck here in this place
wearing a foreign face
and when I speak I hear
a stranger in my ear.

I’ve been hiding,
please find me.

Please find me.

Oh, I don’t know where to go from here.
Maybe heed the altar call, maybe just have a beer.
After all these years, I’m still in love with you.

If I had the choice I think I’d choose to not have to choose
whether to face the ugly truth or fall for the fatal ruse.
After all these years, I’m still in love with you.

Where is the mercy that you promised would be mine?
I have not found it in the women and the wine.
After all these years, I’m still in love with you.

If the sky should open wide and fire come raining down
I don’t think anyone would notice in this town.
After all these years, I’m still in love with you.

If I only had the time, if time would just allow,
if my timing wasn’t off, but time will tell somehow.
After all these years …

Everything re-arranges when you look away for a minute:
the walls, the floor, the lights, the door, the room and all that’s in it.
Objects appear from nowhere; others disappear.
One day you find a stranger in the mirror.
One day you find a stranger in the mirror.

All the plans we made, they fade, and the wind blows them away.
And you fight to keep the night but it always turns into the day.
And the love you keep inside you starts to feel a bit like fear.
One day you find a stranger in the mirror.
One day you find a stranger in the mirror.