Grammy Winner Rodney Crowell’s Passionate Glance At His Own Family’s Somewhat Twisted Tree By Dave Shiflett Most families are strange in their own way, to twist Leo Tolstoy’s observation a bit, while some families, including Grammy winning songwriter Rodney Crowell’s, are strange through and through. That could make life dicey but also provided material for a delightful and sometimes moving memoir. Crowell, whose hits include “Shame on the Moon,” “If Looks Could Kill” and “Til I Gain Control Again” is from truly interesting stock. Father James Walter Crowell was a hard-drinking, honky-tonking wife beater. He was born in 1923 and said he never slept on anything but straw until 1941: “It’s a wonder I don’t crow like a rooster,” he once told his son. (page 44) Mother Cauzette, born in 1924, was a Pentecostal epileptic who suffered 13 miscarriages, lost one child in infancy and sent her husband to the hospital on at least one occasion to have a wound closed. And they were nothing compared to other relatives, including an octogenarian great-grandfather whose 1960 death inspired the reflection that “he hadn’t answered a direct question truthfully since his twelfth birthday and hadn’t taken a bath since he fell in the Blood River in 1936” (page 44). Nor was he bound by traditional mores, Crowell writes “His sexual preferences included daughters, sisters, granddaughters neighbor’s wives and the odd farm animal. “ A grandmother, meantime, “excelled in four areas: beating her children, fighting with her husband, baking biscuits and breaking wind, the latter being her greatest passion.” (Page 45) It may be a miracle Rodney Crowell came out as well as he did. Born in 1950, Crowell writes with passion and a sometimes bemused horror about his upbringing in a Houston subdivision of cookie cutter houses, towering scrub brush and chinaberry trees. His parents, he notes, were not cut out to be members of the landed gentry, or any other gentry for that matter. They “took to home ownership like horse thieves to a hanging judge.” (page 12) Pop practiced might be called laissez faire home maintenance, allowing the house -- “essentially a tar paper shack” (page 13) -- to slowly disintegrate. His parents eventually “had to strategically place a number 3 washtub, a five-gallon Igloo water cooler, an ice chest, and various pots and pans to catch the rainwater coming through the ceiling” – through which, he adds, one could see the nighttime constellations. (page 14). The family also struggled financially. Crowell writes movingly of watching his mother cook eggs in an aluminum pie plate heated by an electric iron and of watching his parents fight, sometimes to the point where bones were broken and blood was shed. Yet this is far from a sneering look at the family tree. It is, for the most part, a story of love, if not of the fairy book variety certainly of the enduring type. It is also a story of pursuing dreams, especially his father’s desire to be a country crooner, which introduced Crowell to musical performance -- initially as a drummer. He got the job, he admits, not because of his drumming prowess but because the regular drummer in his father’s band had departed and dad knew he wouldn’t have to pay Rodney, whose first gig was dreadful. Yet performing in dive bars was an eye-opening experience for the pre-teen percussionist. “I saw every kind of skirt lifting, ass grabbing, ear licking, tongue sucking and dry humping there is,” he writes. (page 157) Crowell also recalls the fateful day in 1958 when he and his parents attended a concert featuring Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash: “twenty three years later I’d produce a live recording of those three artists” (page 229) and he’d also marry Cash’s daughter, Roseanne, though the marriage was short-lived. We get a fleeting glimpse of Crowell’s musical development, which included stints with bands called The Rolling Tones and the Arbitrators, as well as personal struggles, including a drug overdose that landed him in the hospital. Yet the focus is on life with his parents. He vividly recalls attending Pentecostal church services with his mother, where he encountered Brother Pemberton, who “gives the impression that he might burst into flames at any moment. With his greasy pompadour spilling down over his eyes, his necktie flying, his shirt hanging halfway out of his pants, his face turned to the heavens like a satellite dish awaiting God’s direct signals, which once received will be spat at the congregation like bullets from a Gatling gun, Brother Pemberton in full flight is a sight to behold.” (page 69). Despite his fire and brimstone, Crowell writes, “he, too, was bored” – which was revealed during one service when Brother Pemberton winked at him. It was a transforming moment. “In the wink of an eye,” Crowell writes, “ I saw a compassionate, tolerant, and non-judgmental God of love and great humor. My own faith was planted as a seed that morning, and there are days its fruit sustains me still.” 77 He also writes powerfully about his father’s demise, which was wrenching though ultimately closed the circle with his wife. “Your daddy looks like he did the day I married him,” Cauzette said just after he died. (page 247). She lived on several more years. Crowell warmly embraces his role as “a witness to and harvester of my family’s past” (page 9) which helped him “realize that life’s basic impulse – given half a chance, even in death – is to heal itself.” 230 His healing has produced a memoir that is, in its own strange way, quite life-affirming.
