Red Dirt Girls
by Casey N. Cep
We were lost, but not really lost. We were lost in the way that you can get lost with a GPS on your phone, which is to say we knew exactly where we were, even if we didn’t quite know where we were going. I had entered the wrong address, so instead of arriving at the movie theater, here we were, five miles away on a dirt road in Alabama, trying to get turned around.
I kept thinking of a song by Emmylou Harris called “Red Dirt Girl.” I know that “County Time” is supposed to resurrect classic songs, but let me stretch the years a bit to tell you about this song. It’s nowhere near as old as the others, but it’s timeless in a way that listening to it, you don’t believe for a minute that Harris released it as recently as 2000.
“Me and my best friend Lillian and her blue-tick hound dog Gideon,” it begins, “sitting on the front porch cooling in the shade, singing every song the radio played.” Country music gets maligned as melodrama, and yet the best songs are mindful of that genre. This one might only be about “two red dirt girls in a red dirt town,” but it’s also a pointed look at life in mid-century America. Take Lillian’s brother: One second he’s tinkering with a ’49 Indian, all flesh and grease, but the next he’s dead, just cold words on a telegram. “He never got farther than Vietnam,” Harris sings, “now he’s lying somewhere about a million miles from Meridian.”
Lillian herself rises and falls in only a few sweeping lines. “She grew up tall and she grew up thin” has to be one of the most delicate ways of describing a woman’s beauty, while “her daddy turned mean and her mama leaned hard” is just as delicate a way of describing poverty and abuse. Lillian leaves one kind of broken home for another, getting pregnant and trying to make a go of it with the father: “She was only twenty-seven, and she had five kids. Coulda been the whiskey, coulda been the pills, coulda been the dream she was trying to kill.”
It’s not really clear why some people get away from small towns and others never get the chance, or why some flourish there while others languish. “Red Dirt Girl” takes seriously both fates, but also the obscurity of either: “There won’t be a mention in the news of the world about the life and the death of a red dirt girl named Lillian, who never got any farther across the line than Meridian.”
Harris says the song came to her while she was driving through Meridian on her way to Louisiana. It wasn’t just the rust-colored road that set her to writing; when she got to New Orleans she saw the film Boys Don’t Cry. “It unnerved me,” she says on her website, “not only because of the violence, but also because of the underlying theme of how trapped those young people were. We all come into this world with so much potential and so many dreams. Who knows why some people escape and other people don’t?”
It is one of those things you just don’t know, about yourself or the ones you meet: how they escaped, or how they found their way home. “Somewhere out there is a great big world, that’s where I’m bound,” Lillian tells her best friend, the one singing this sad song in her memory, “and the stars might fall on Alabama, but one of these days I’m gonna swing my hammer down away from this red dirt town. I’m gonna make a joyful sound.”
The hammer falls and Lillian never gets away, but she finds her way to us through the song. I don’t know when melodrama became a dirty word or when sentiment became something to scoff at, but they’ve never ever felt that way to me; these stock red dirt girls and their stereotypical red dirt town feel very real to me. This hammer song has a way of coming alive when I least expect, like earlier this year when I found myself there on a stretch of Alabama’s crimson clay.
I think of “Red Dirt Girl” in times of sadness, too. Another one of Harris’s delicacies is this sinking, searching account of that feeling: “But one thing they don’t tell you about the blues when you got ’em, you keep on falling cause there ain’t no bottom. There ain’t no end.” It’s there, though, that I remember the song isn’t only about brokenness. The one singing it was a friend, a best friend, to Lillian, and so whatever sadness lives in these lyrics, there is also friendship, a rarer thing than even the falling stars that those red dirt girls saw falling over Alabama.
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