What do a gay, Nobel Prize-winning French author and a redneck Southern Rock Band have in common?
Andre Gide (above left),
a French author, homosexual and outspoken gay rights activist won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Van Zant (above right) is a country music duo whose lyrics and delivery have a certain redneck quality to them - and I don't mean that in a bad way!
Despite the fact that Andre Gide looks a bit like a rock musician, one would imagine that if we could arrange for Andre Gide and the Van Zandt brothers to dine together, that they would find little common ground over which to converse (unless Kenny Chesney were also eating with them).
But wait!! It turns out they are, in a small way, linguistic soul mates.
The prolific Van Zandt brothers, - Ronnie, Johnnie and Donnie, have been a force in Country Rock for decades. Ronnie Van Zandt was the founder and lead singer of Lynyrd Skynyrd until he died in the band’s infamous plane crash in 1977, at which point Johnnie replaced him. Donnie Van Zandt was the musical force behind .38 Special.
These days, Johnnie and Donnie play Countrified Southern Rock as “Van Zandt”. And awhile ago while listening to my favorite country radio station, I heard their song "Help Somebody" from the CD "Get Right with the Man", and I found it quite catchy - good Southern Rock sound, catchy lyrics, good hook.
Country music has grown up quite a bit in the last twenty years, but I find still that half of all country songs fall into a few stereotypical categories. "Help Somebody" follows to the letter the "I'm a hillbilly and I'm damn proud of where I come from and the way I was brought up" theme. Songs of this type include references to patriotism, religion, respect for elders, how wise Granny was, and paint a picture of a time when a man's handshake was better than any piece of paper.
Here's some of the lyrics from Help Somebody:
Well grandaddy was a hillbilly scholar,
blue collar of a man...
He came from the school of
"you don't need nothin' if you can't make it with your own two hands"
He was backwoods, backwards, used words like:
no sir, yes ma'am, by god, I'll be darned, hell yeah I'm American..
and all the years he walked this earth
I swear all he did was work.
He said the devil dreams on an idle horse
so you listen to me squirt..
Don't get too high on a bottle,
and get right with a man.
Fight your fights, find your grace
and all the things that you can't change, and help somebody if you can
Now Granny said sonny
stick to your gun if you believe in something
no matter what
'cause it's better to be hated for who you are
than to be loved for who you're not.
Well, you get the idea...Patriotism? Check. Religion? Check. Respect for elders? Check. Granny's words-o-wisdom? Check. It's all there and dang if it don't paint a picture of good 'ol country livin'! It practically screams, "We're hillbillies and proud of it, and you fancy pants, hi-falutin', liberal, city folks can take your political correctness and cram it up your ass for all we care!"
Great song, really! I'm a liberal and it almost makes me wish I was a hillbilly! I listened to it on my MP3 player for months.
Anyway, aside form listening to country music I also read on a wide variety of topics and when I happen across a quote that I like I usually look up the source on Wikipedia and see what other profound yammerings the person uttered.
So, during those months while I had Help Somebody on my MP3 player I happened across the following quote:
"Trust the man who is seeking the truth, but beware the man who claims to have found it."
With regard to seeking spiritual truth, I'm not sure you could hit the nail more squarely on the head than this quote. The quote was attributed to Andre Gide, who I had never heard of and so I checked him out on Wikipedia. And lo and behold, among the other quotes attributed to him there was this little gem...
"It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not."
Hmmmm....where had I heard that before? Oh, yeah - Van Zant! I entertained the thought for about one-tenth of a second that Van Zant might actually have read the literature of a relatively obscure gay, french, homosexual writer before concluding that what we had here was not a shout-out from Van Zant to Andre, but rather a case in point where a piece of wisdom encapsulated in a handy little sound-bite of a package by a French gay-rights activist got repeated enough times over a half a century before ending up in a freakin' Southern Rock song!! Man do I love strange things like that!
And although I don’t know anything about the politics of Van Zant or where they stand on gay rights, I’m guessing a certain segment of their fans sing “Help Somebody” at the top of their lungs, taking comfort in its words because its an anthem more or less on hanging onto the old ways and resisting the moral relativity of those social liberals who are trying to bring down western civilization one step at a time.
And unwittingly, every time they sing it, they’re paying a tribute of sorts to one of the pioneers of gay rights. Perhaps somewhere out in the Universe Andre Gide is chuckling.
