Ernie Chaffin
Ernie Chaffin (left) and his collaborator/friend Pewee Maddux.
Come on Back Home.
Ernie Chaffin was loyal. He held onto his friends and they held onto him. He was the calm one in relationships—focused and diligent and set in his ways. Maybe fighting in Europe in 1944 matured him; he wasn't yet eighteen (though he claimed to be) when he enlisted in the Marine Corps. When Ernie came home, he was still young—and whole—though, like a lot of the men who returned from that war, he never really talked about it. Is that what combat does? If you don't die or go nuts, you become stoic?
Water Valley, where Ernie is born in 1928, is a seven-mile speck in Northern Mississippi. A quiet town in Yalobusha County, Water Valley is primarily known among anglers as the home of the world's largest crappie (a fish that tastes, some say, like milk). Mississippi's Depression years are so well-documented that Ernie's childhood may be glibly placed in a threadbare rural landscape under a scratchy gray sky. Crop furrows colliding at the smudged horizon. The boy loves listening to The Grand Ole Opry on the radio. The Delmore Brothers, Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe. Porch-stompin' violins and blackface skits, hillbilly antics. The stage may be two hundred and fifty miles away, but the station's transmission power is mighty enough to stir listeners in remote spots, diminish their sense of isolation.
Ernie has three sisters and plays the mandolin. He sings in church. He's keen on the Nashville music and gospel, too. He is a handsome, dark-haired lad with a charming gap between his front teeth—his sisters must dote on him.
Mississippi's lumber boom was good while it lasted—the Chaffins are loggers—but there aren't anymore old-growth forests to plunder. While Ernie is off fighting—in Belgium? France? the Netherlands? (even his son doesn't know)—the Chaffin family relocates farther south, settling in Gulfport. Seagulls, sailboats, the smell of moist, salty creatures. Tourists. Back from the war, Ernie joins his family and a bevy of relatives who live there, too, and maybe the balmy setting, the fluttery palms and gentle ocean, help scuff the death residue from him.
Ernie, now with guitar, enters local talent shows. His face is baby, but his singing voice is man. In one contest, he meets a singing and dancing cutie-pie named Avalon Jean who snags his heart (though he wins the competition). Two well-behaved kids giddy with desire (AJ eighteen, EC nineteen), two chirpy birds connected by song—only matrimony will suffice. The union lasts over forty years; it is serene.
The Gulf Coast in the '50s is a jubilant, racy spot. Luxury hotels, gambling dens, and cheap martinis lure movie stars and high-rollers, plus crooks and alcoholics. Playing in a Biloxi pavilion, Ernie meets a stringy little fellow named Pewee Maddux, a gifted musician and songwriter with unstoppable ambitions. When Pewee (also spelled Pee Wee, Peewee, and PeeWee) hears Ernie's sunny twang, he gets a twitchy feeling—the recognition of talent. He's a scout of sorts, sensitive to possibility. Ernie, at five foot nine and solidly built (his confidence makes him seem an inch or two taller), enjoys the excitable little man and they partner up, friends for life. Collaborators. In the fashion of the day, they dress like squeaky-clean cowboys—embroidered shirts with fancy cuffs and smiley pockets, neckties like ribbons on wreaths. They're both pals with another great Mississippi singer, Jimmy Donley, who adores Ernie when he's not feeling suspicious (Donley stabs his own wife for dancing with Ernie) and who is rambunctious and fierce but so shrimpy in size that folks also call him Pee Wee.
In 1954, Pewee Maddux takes Ernie to Nashville to meet country-music honchos. Ernie impresses Jim Denny, manager of the Grand Ole Opry, but something goes sour at Decca Records, the prestigious country label. Ernie doesn't click with Paul Cohen, the A&R man who signed and produced Kitty Wells and Bill Monroe, among others, and Ernie declines his offer. Pewee is exasperated, but Ernie won't budge. He trusts his intuition. Cohen's influence on country music is legendary but he is a businessman from Chicago and he doesn't have a soft touch (he fired Buddy Holly from Decca in 1957). Ernie's decision is final. Maybe Nashville is too slick, too phony. And he and Avalon Jean are planning to have kids. Pewee and Ernie disagree about what it means to succeed and to flourish.
Memphis, however, is more pleasing. Ernie arrives at Sun Studio in the fall of 1956 with Pewee and two Gulfport musicians, Ernie Harvey and Leo Ladner. The vibe is laid-back, as Ernie explains in a recorded interview unearthed from the Sun vaults: "You would just go in there and start picking around and playing around and first thing you know you was recording—you might be sitting on a vacuum cleaner or anything you could find to sit on, but that's the way it was at Sun Studio back when Sam Phillips had it."
Like Pewee, Phillips responds to the special quality of Ernie's voice, but note the date: Phillips is busy—he's hit it big with Elvis—and he's hooked on the new sounds—rock & roll and rockabilly, which Phillips describes as the merging of "a country man's song with a black man's rhythm."
In 1957, Sun releases two sides by Chaffin, the country songs "Feelin' Low" and "Lonesome for My Baby" (both written by Pewee) on which he's backed by Harvey on steel guitar, Pewee on acoustic guitar, and Ladner on bass. The songs are spare and elemental—just a few instruments buffering the clear, expressive vocals. Billboard: "Sun Records may have another big-time artist in Ernie Chaffin. He warbles in the earthy Presley groove, with plenty of feeling, interesting phrasing, and spontaneous sounding vitality." Sales, however, are unremarkable.
Chaffin returns with the same gang to Sun for a session that yields "I'm Lonesome" and "Laughin' and Jokin'" (both again written by Pewee). (Billboard describes "I'm Lonesome" as "an appealing chant.") I'm in bed reading when I first hear "I'm Lonesome." Ernie's voice comes at me like a searchlight, bright and shimmery but also jarring. The human voice conveys moods, but this one I can't figure out. Such a simple rhyme scheme (Feeling blue/Missing you), such an eerie sound. The dramatic shifts in register shouldn't work. The hint of ye olde Western should seem creaky. A minute or so into the song, he plunges into a deep bowl of polysyllabic oh's. He goes: "oh, oh, oh, oh, oh" and then "low, woe, own, some." It's graceful and vibrating and then the voice tilts up again.
A few more Sun sessions follow, but much of the material is unreleased. Chaffin's songs are engaging and warm, but it's hard-unkind, really-to imagine his polite rhythms and winsome croon competing with Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Elvis. Suddenly, Sun has attitude—their ads are even cocky:
You think Sun ain't hot!
Is New York big!
Has a cat got a tail!
Ernie's singing is earnest, like his name. He is a romantic. He is married and, most likely, faithful. He is content, consistent. He is not an exhibitionist.
Sun tries to nudge Ernie toward rockabilly, but as Ernie explains, "I'm a country boy and I sing country music and I just never did care to sing the rockabilly. I guess it probably would have been profitable if I had, but I didn't do it anyway."
Phillips later says if he had devoted himself to country music, with "stylists" like Charlie Feathers and Ernie Chaffin, he "could have had a darn good country label." But late-'50s Phillips craves the sexy and illicit. Miscegenation.
When someone, say, drops your heart in a sink and grinds it through the garbage disposal, how do you react? One kind of person sticks her hand down the drain and drags out the moist muck and then runs into the street, screaming murder, fingering culprits. Another kind of person stares down the drain, sorrowful, self-pitying, but allowing a smidgen of self-blame. This is the difference between rock & roll and country music. Rock & roll can admit to pain but it tends to project it: Look at this crap I've been through—ook how it's made me tougher. Country sucks in the grief, accepting as a sponge: You dumped me, but I still think you're all right, and I am going to sit here and weep, okay? Rock is obsidian; country is buttermilk. The genres overlap, but in essence they are like the eponymous characters in the Lydia Davis story "Head, Heart," attempting to persuade but unable to connect. Most of us favor one side or the other. If you are Manhattan, you disdain the call of country bumpkins.
With Ernie, the country ballad—more mid-tempo than drawly—fits him. He isn't a melancholy person, but his songs dwell in a lonely climate. "Pretty girls all around, and I'm the saddest guy in town," he sings, "because I'm lonesome for my baby." This is a sappy line, right? Still, the way he brings it out makes me shivery. I once was city, but Ernie confirms I'm also country.
Young writers are told to find their voice, but how do they recognize it? Does it stay fixed, like a parking spot you nose into every morning, or does it change and vanish? Ernie Chaffin found his voice early on-or more likely it found him. He opened his mouth—in a church pew? a bassinet? a music class?—and the sound swept out. It probably pleased him—like a laugh turned liquid, like a cartoon.
When a woman hears a male singing, she becomes a magnetic opposite, the object. But sometimes, more rare, she becomes him. Ernie Chaffin brings you so close you're inside him looking out. It may be the Gulf of Mexico you see, placid but seething with a violent past, more like jelly than surf, quivering.
Jimmy and Pewee, two of Ernie's best friends, kill themselves. Jimmy is holding Chaffin's phone number in his hand when he is discovered, self-asphyxiated. Ernie's Avalon Jean dies of cancer. He remarries. His two kids grow up. Ernie, Jr., graduates from Southern Miss., Celonne is a schoolteacher. Father and kids sing gospel—there are dozens of recordings in his son's possession. Ernie has a tractor and one day it rolls over on him, crushing him slowly. He is sixty-nine. He is pinned by thousands of pounds of machinery to Mississippi's rich, fertile soil. Do you know this is the third wettest state in the country? The river, the rain, the wetlands, the floodplains.
You play his songs when you are driving—alone—in Arkansas: His voice is not delicate, exactly, but it is unguarded: not right for parties. There are landscapes in the tunes—the steel guitar (Ernie Harvey) is prairie or seascape or moon, anywhere you consider the horizon as an extension of yourself or an equal. The voice cracks, deliberately, or bends an octave; it makes you aware of tectonic shifts in the earth and how they travel through the layers of history to resolve in our bodies, unnoticed. He didn't sing at The Opry, a disappointment, but he was a regular on Louisiana Hayride, he was pals with Elvis. Everyone liked him—he was cute and he was also unpretentious. He was a believer but his voice expresses finitude. Maybe he is telling you about death, which is either the ultimate lonesome or the end of all loneliness. This voice finds a hole in you and swims inside it. For now, you are not divided.
