Big Ugly’s Country Friends
On Big Ugly, North Carolina band Fust are homesick for a home that no longer exists.
By John Silver
At the exit of the Country Music Hall of Fame exhibits in Nashville, there’s a notebook. It lies open to the following scribbled lyrics: “I can still hear the soft southern wind in the live oak trees. And those Williams boys they still mean a lot to me, Hank and Tennessee. I guess we’re all gonna be what we’re gonna be, but what do you do with good ole boys like me?” This is the chorus of songwriter Bob McDill’s masterwork, “Good Ole Boys Like Me,” recorded in 1979 by Don Williams. Though the title conjures images of flags waving from $40,000 pickup trucks, the song is a profound tragedy, much more akin to The Sound and Fury than “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue.” It belongs to the great country subgenre of heartbreak songs about a home that has changed forever. This subgenre of futile homesickness represents the modern experience of so many Americans. We leave our small town homes and return to find they don’t feel like home anymore. All the people we knew have left or died. The WalMart supercenter is the only store now. Or, most tragically and most likely, we ourselves have changed so profoundly that the place doesn’t fit anymore. It still pulls us as strongly as ever: it just doesn’t satisfy upon arrival. “When I was eighteen, Lord, I hit the road,” Williams sings, “but it really doesn’t matter how far I go.” Home still calls, whether it’s there or not.
The band Fust have heard “Good Ole Boys Like Me.” It sounds like it might be their favorite song. The title track of their new album ends with the lines “I’ve got the mud of Big Ugly running through me, and I’ll never get it off or get it out though I know what the rain can do. Oh I love this town, it shows me my lonesome’s written in the stars.” Big Ugly, a great album name for a band with a less than great name, is taken from an unincorporated town and tributary in Lincoln County, West Virginia. The band is based in Durham, NC, but songwriter Aaron Dowdy is originally from Bristol, Virginia, the birthplace of country music (and NASCAR’s fastest half-mile), and is himself a distant descendent of the Carter Family. Big Ugly serves his stories here as a stand-in for Bristol like Faulkner’s Yoknapataphaw County. He populates the songs with mountain convenience stores, beers under bridges, and back-home people. He calls them “country friends” whom he will see again once he makes it up that mountain he must climb to get back home.
These “country friend” characters are Big Ugly’s greatest strength. For the most part, we find them out of work and drinking or worse. But they’re more than that. They’re helping each other out of jams and building master craftsman furniture as thank-you gifts (“Mountain Language” and “Gateleg”), and they’re in love. “Me and Jody’ve been at this since high school,” Dowdy sings on “Jody,” “We’ve been at this now longer than we’ve not. And I think that as I watch her stir her heavy with her finger, I’ll never get enough of what I’ve got.” This is a couple deep into their habit. They’d be more at home in a notorious Breaking Bad episode featuring a stolen ATM machine than a sweet country love song. But, somehow, Dowdy pulls off a sweet country love song about them. He’s a master writer when it clicks. He changes Jody’s name when the narrator addresses her directly at the end of the song. “Jo, put me down from this big world,” the narrator pleads over and over to fiddle runs and a Springsteenesque backbeat. These are the “country friends,” and Dowdy loves them deeply and painfully.
Home hasn’t changed, it’s gone forever, lost to mortality and then to the man-made mortality of a changing landscape, a hospital room levelled to an empty field.
Sonically, this album fits comfortably into the resurgence of country rock being labeled on streaming service playlists, somewhat offensively, as “Indie Twang.” They’re the latest example of Carolinan musicians to become darlings of indie rock critics, a trend so dominant it has all the makings of a “scene” like Athens, Georgia in the late ‘80s. With MJ Lenderman producer Alex Farrar enlisted, the album sounds like the sweet spot standing back by the soundboard in a 1000 capacity rock club. It’s dynamic, with rockers, like “Gateleg” which sounds like the best of The Heartbreakers updated for mulleted Gen Z-ers, and with swelling ballads like “Sister” in the spirit of Jason Molina’s “Hold on Magnolia.” Dowdy’s voice serves the songs well throughout. He builds melodies from an ambling legato delivery that finds the note, true and clear, but then fades away, not to make a big fuss. His voice is emblematic of his characters, who would be embarrassed to find out there’s a song about them.
“Spangled,” the lead single and opening track of the album, is Dowdy’s “Good Ole Boys Like Me” and probably his best song to date. It takes place, like all the greatest songs in American music, on the road. “They tore down the hospital,” Dowdy sings, looking out the window, “out on Route 11. I’m not sure what happened. It seems like repossession.” He’s back home, and it’s changed. And then come some of the best lines of the past year, “I’m not one to try to get all the way to heaven. But I can’t even visit the last place it was relevant. No, I can’t even visit the last room I may have been in it.” Home hasn’t changed, it’s gone forever, lost to mortality and then to the man-made mortality of a changing landscape, a hospital room levelled to an empty field. But there’s hope here still, in the form of those country friends. Dowdy dedicates the song to them by name. “Give my love to Amy. Give my love to Kevin. They tore down the hospital. And I’m left floating, in room 305, I’m floating forever, 305.” Big Ugly opens with a personal heartbreak of a lost sense of place, then spends the next 40 minutes making you fall in love with that place and its people. By the end, if you’ve been listening closely, the heartbreak is your own.
Joseph Collum is a 2022 graduate of Dartmouth College with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. Born in Mississippi and raised in Kentucky, he now lives in Philadelphia where he is teaching high school English. He is also working towards his Master’s of Education as a member of the Alliance for Catholic Education at St. Joseph’s University.
