Book review: Stephanie Clifford’s ‘The Farewell Tour’ paints a realistic portrait ot life as a woman in country music
Rock ‘n’ roll may never forget but country music has a long history of short memories.
I encountered that in the late 1980s and early ’90s, working as an arts and entertainment writer for the newspaper in Springfield, Missouri. One of my jobs was covering Branson, a fishing village that had a few homespun country music shows and a place called Roy Clark’s Celebrity Theater, which featured the star picker and regularly brought through famous names of country’s past.
Shortly after taking over the beat, I got word from the owner of Roy Clark’s place that Mel Tillis was going to buy one of the empty theaters and move there. That was big news in the small Missouri town.
Tickets sold out quickly. Then came a flood of country stars anxious to get off the road after years of travel and settle down, let the audience come to them for a change. The names flowed through town like a walk of fame: Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, Brenda Lee. Louise Mandrell, who’d been performing for years at Roy’s, got sister Barbara to come to town.
It became big news across the nation – to everyone but those who ran the country music industry.
The folks who sat in the corner offices on Music Row called them “has beens” in a business that discards its history like last week’s fruit in favor of newer, riper tastes.
The rest of the world called them legends and stars and flocked to see them.
All those memories came flooding back as I read Stephanie Clifford’s novel, “The Farewell Tour.” It follows the fictional Lillian Waters, a one-time country music hitmaker who’s seen her career evaporate. Early on, we find her in 1980 at Nashville’s Fan Fair, in a booth in a back waiting for fans that no longer show. She also has been diagnosed with a polyp on her vocal cord, marking an end her only true love, music.
Knowing time is short, she embarks on a final tour.
Clifford structures the book like a forlorn country song, and it checks all the boxes. There’s mama, a train, rivers of whiskey, unrequited love, and a lot – a whole lot – of hard-hearted men.
But Clifford goes beyond a story about a singer and musicians. She fashions a historical novel, full of rich documentation of country music in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.
We see the rise of the electric guitar and its influence on music, as Lil and her sidekick Charlie try to imitate the jazz licks they hear from Charlie Christian with the Benny Goodman orchestra. They ponder how to pick just like B.B. King. This really happened and helped country evolve from “hillbilly” music into a sophisticated sound that inspired the blues players to steal licks back, leading to the emergence of new music like rock ‘n’ roll.
We also feel the struggles of women during those decades, when many were resigned to be wives and mothers, and those like Lil who wanted to make their own way had to endure a lot of pain to do so. They fought a society trying to knock them down or knock them up. To keep her dream from being derailed, Lil even uses a homemade form of birth control with Lysol that’s so startling I had to stop reading and look it up to see if it was a real thing (it was).
Lil may have her moments in the spotlight but only after years of enduring abuse by parents and siblings, along with a whole lot of suffering at the hands of men. Lil’s quest to make music mirrors the hurdles of real-life stars like Loretta Lynn. But unlike Lynn’s husband, who may have been abusive but also encouraged and managed his wife’s country career, Lil’s men are simply rotten.
Clifford develops a riveting story of Lil escaping an abusive farm life in Walla Walla to finding her voice in Tacoma and finally to Nashville, via Bakersfield. Along the way, Lil rubs shoulders with real-life country heroes Buck Owens and his guitarist Don Rice.
What Lil has is a voice like Tanya Tucker and guitar virtuosity like Maybelle Carter. She also has a best friend and bandleader in Charlie, a multi-instrumentalist in the vein of a Marty Stuart, who provides what little support she has in her life. Even the “Farewell Tour” starts on dusty fairgrounds and high school gyms.
Along for the shows and the ride are Kaori, a hard-working young fiddle player with lots of talent and gumption, a driving rhythm section of a pair of bridge-playing brothers, a tour manager and bus driver who favors flat Pepsis, and the ever-patient Charlie leading the band.
The question is: Will there also be comeback?
Clifford manages to show the hard work and challenges that go into artistic success, especially for women, especially during the mid-20th century.
It recalls that time when country music focused more on the next young face with a hit single in his or her pocket and less on paying tribute to the those who laid the groundwork, the Tuckers, Lynns, the Mandrells, Janie Fricke and Dottie West.
What “The Farewell Tour” makes abundantly clear is that honkey tonk angels may be manmade, but they’re fierce, tough, and not easily broken.
Ron Sylvester has been a journalist for more than 40 years with publications including the Orange County Register, Las Vegas Sun, Wichita Eagle and USA Today. He lives in rural Kansas.