Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee’s 2005 film about a romantic and sexual relationship between two ranch hands, based on a short story by Annie Proulx, has received no shortage of popular acclaim and critical attention. The film won three Academy Awards, including one for best original score, as well as four Golden Globes, and its soundtrack was nominated for a Grammy. This essay begins, literally, where the film ends.
Over the film’s closing credits, we hear Willie Nelson’s recording of a traditional folk song, “He Was a Friend of Mine.” (The presence of Nelson’s music in the film is advertised on the film’s promotional poster, and this recording is available on the film’s soundtrack album). Nelson’s rendition begins with a fingerpicked acoustic guitar, and he sings the first verse accompanied only by this instrument, evoking the 1962 recording by Bob Dylan on which Nelson’s arrangement is clearly based.¹ For the second verse, Nelson and his guitar are joined by a tambourine and accordion. The full band kicks in for an instrumental bridge, followed by a brief chorus that features the unmistakable sound of Nelson’s guitar. With this short guitar solo, Nelson takes full possession of the song, as he stamps it with the unmistakable sonic signature of his battered yet mellifluous guitar. While Nelson’s arrangement applies this trademark signature, he leaves the lyrics effectively unchanged from Dylan’s. The first verse, for example, states simply: “He was a friend of mine / He was a friend of mine / Every time I think of him / I just can’t keep from cryin’ / ‘Cause he was a friend of mine.” The placement of Nelson’s spare and somber rendition of the song at the end of the film both aligns Nelson with the film’s politics and queers the traditional song, rendering manifest the romantic undertones of this elegy for a dead friend. Juxtaposing the narrative of the tragic romance of Brokeback Mountain’s Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist with Nelson’s recording of “He Was a Friend of Mine” reveals the song’s capacity for evoking not only platonic friendship, but also same-sex romantic longing.
The next year, 2006, Nelson released via iTunes another recording, “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other.” Like “He Was a Friend of Mine,” this song was also written by someone else, and transformed through Nelson’s interpretation. Lubbock-born, New Yorkbased musician Ned Sublette wrote the song in 1981, he has said, with Nelson’s voice in mind.² Sublette debuted the song at CBGB in 1982, and recorded it in a Lubbock, Texas, studio in 1984 for an as-yet unreleased album titled Sweet Texas Crude; “queercore” pop punk group Pansy Division recorded it a decade later.³ Sublette’s recording is a mediumtempo waltz, whose instrumentation is colored by a prominent pedal steel guitar and twin fiddles. Pansy Division’s recording of the song, from their 1995 album, Pile Up, is in 4/4 time, with conventional punk rock guitar/bass/drums instrumentation, and a medium fast tempo.⁴ Both recordings evince an uneasy tension between the anti-homophobic sentiments of the lyrics and the idea that the idea of gay cowboys is necessarily funny. Despite the formal transformation that the song undergoes in Pansy Division’s recording, the lyrics in their performance remain the same as in Sublette’s original. That the members of the band self-identify as gay suggests that, for them at least, the anti-homophobic satire of “Cowboys are Frequently Secretly” trumps the risk that listeners would respond to it by laughing not at the homophobes who are the target of the song’s satire, but at gay men themselves. Willie Nelson, who had first heard it in 1988, waited until after Brokeback Mountain to let the song “out of the closet,” as he told Time magazine. In that same interview, Nelson also says that it was “the funniest goddamn song [he had] ever heard,” suggesting that he played the song for laughs (Neuman). By contrast, though, the recording’s tone is in fact quite serious, akin to that of “He Was a Friend of Mine” or of the film itself. Nelson’s arrangement—with its loping 3/4 time signature, the unmistakable sound of Willie’s guitar in the opening solo and Mickey Raphael’s harmonica during the chorus (both of which serve as distinctive sonic signatures)—transforms the song and places it squarely within an aesthetic that Nelson and his band had developed in the 1970s. Lyrical content aside, this recording would not have sounded out of place on Nelson’s breakthrough album, Red Headed Stranger, which reached #1 on the country charts in 1975.
While Nelson’s status as one of country music’s great songwriters is indisputable, his role as one of popular music’s best and most distinctive interpreters is crucial to understanding his performance of “Cowboys Are Secretly Frequently.” Red Headed Stranger illustrates this role effectively. This album, which established Nelson as a star, combines a handful of original songs (e.g., “Time of the Preacher” and “Denver”) with decades-old country standards (e.g., Eddy Arnold’s “I Couldn’t Believe It Was True,” Hank Cochran’s “Can I Sleep in Your Arms,” and Fred Rose’s “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” popularized by a 1945 recording by Roy Acuff), creating out of this mixture of old and new an aesthetically coherent whole. “Red Headed Stranger” and “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” in particular, have come to be regarded as among Nelson’s signature songs. Ned Sublette, who calls Nelson “a great interpreter,” observes that in Willie’s hands, “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” “is not a cover song anymore in any meaningful way.” It becomes, instead, a Willie Nelson song. The same is true for other of Nelson’s signature songs, such as “Red Headed Stranger” (written by Carl Stutz and Edith Lindeman), “Whiskey River” (originally recorded by Johnny Bush and a staple of Nelson’s live shows since 1973), “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” and, most recently, Sublette’s “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly.” Much like “Red Headed Stranger” or “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” Sublette’s song undergoes a profound transformation as Nelson adapts and absorbs it into his aesthetic. While the recording of Sublette’s rendition may well have been “the funniest goddamn song [Nelson] had ever heard,” in Sublette’s own assessment, it is not “a particularly funny song when Willie sings it.”
I want to suggest that Nelson’s rendition of Sublette’s song renders explicit a queer dimension of the cowboy-as-outlaw image long prevalent in Nelson’s work. We should consider, for example, how his participation in Brokeback Mountain and his recording of Sublette’s song affect our understanding of Nelson’s earlier oeuvre, such as Red Headed Stranger and “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” How do those performances from the 1970s anticipate and participate in the queer cultural work of “He Was a Friend of Mine” or “Cowboys are Frequently Secretly (Fond of Each Other)”? How does Nelson’s acknowledgment of the queer iconography of cowboy culture in “Cowboys are Frequently Secretly” affect the way we read the similar iconography of his earlier work?
In its narrative about same-sex romantic love between two ranch hands, Brokeback Mountain disarticulates the link between normative heterosexuality and the iconic masculinity represented by the figure of the cowboy. So, too, do Nelson’s Brokeback Mountain-era recordings. I want to argue, though, that the cultural work of both the film and Nelson’s later recordings are of a piece with his earlier work. Much as Nelson’s mid-1970s rapprochement between redneck and hippie cultures proposed an alternative to the hidebound strictures of Nashville, so too, perhaps, does the expansiveness of his body of work provide a means for us to rethink the forms of masculinity represented in mainstream country music. The outlaw country movement spearheaded in Austin by Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and their cohort of like-minded musicians in the mid-1970s fused the psychedelic pansexuality of hippie culture with the more strictly gendered codes of country and western. The resulting fusion reproduced the tropes and iconography of conventional cowboy masculinity, but did so in a way that could not fully repress a potentially uncomfortable queerness. Nelson himself suggests as much in the Time interview, where he observes that the negative attention his recording of “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly (Fond of Each Other)” had elicited was “[s]imilar to years ago, when the hippie thing come out and I started growin’ my hair and puttin’ the earring in, I got a 91 little flak here and there.” Nelson, in other words, is well aware that the counterintuitive, politically progressive, anti-homophobic cultural work of Brokeback Mountain and “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly” is in some way analogous with the so-called outlaw country movement’s rejection both of Nashville’s musical conventions and the particular forms of masculinity (and, albeit to a much lesser degree, femininity) that that branch of the culture industry enforced.
“Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly (Fond of Each Other)” presents the same-sex attraction dramatized in Brokeback Mountain not as aberrant or exceptional, but as everyday and routine. Here are the song’s first two verses:
Well, there’s many a strange impulse out on the plains of West Texas. There’s many a young boy who feels things he can’t comprehend. And a small town don’t like it when somebody falls between sexes. No, a small town don’t like it when a cowboy has feelings for men. And I believe to my soul that inside every man there’s the feminine. And inside every lady there’s a deep manly voice loud and clear. Well, a cowboy may brag about things that he’s done with his women. But the ones who brag loudest are the ones that are most likely queer.
These lyrics are noteworthy in that not only do they acknowledge the possibility of gay cowboys, but they in fact insist that queerness and femininity are constituent elements of “every man,” cowboys especially. This claim structures the chorus:
Cowboys are frequently secretly fond of each other. Say, what do you think all them saddles and boots was about? And there’s many a cowboy who don’t understand the way that he feels for his brother. And inside every cowboy there’s a lady that’d love to slip out.
At this point Sublette’s original and Nelson’s rendition diverge. Nelson streamlines the song, cutting a verse (the one about “gettin’ riled up about fairies” quoted below) and regularizing the chorus (Sublette varies the chorus after each verse). After the first chorus and a signature acoustic guitar solo, the tone of Nelson’s rendition darkens, as the third and final verse addresses the violent consequences of the homophobia that the song addresses:
And there’s always somebody who says what the others just whisper. And mostly that someone’s the first one to get shot down dead. So when you talk to a cowboy don’t treat him like he was a sister. You can’t fuck with the lady that’s sleepin’ in each cowboy’s head.
This verse is troubling, both for the eruption of violence in the second line and for the equally shocking use of the expletive “fuck” in the fourth. The admonition that “[y]ou can’t fuck with the lady that’s sleepin’ in each cowboy’s head” carries a double meaning: it warns not only of the cultural prohibition against same-gender sex but also of the dangers of, as Sublette explains it, “telling a hung-up heterosexist dude that he’s queer too.” Of course, this is precisely what the song does, as it speaks the unspeakable of same-sex desire between (presumably straight) cowboys.
If this song is satirical—again, Nelson called it “the funniest goddamn song [he] had ever heard”—the objects of satire are multiple, and include both homophobia and the phenomenon of the “urban cowboy.” The film of that title, starring John Travolta, was popular in 1980, as Sublette was writing the song; Sublette has described “Cowboys Are Secretly Frequently” as a response to what he terms “the urban cowboy plague.” But if we take seriously Sublette’s claim to have attempted to ventriloquize Nelson in writing the song, another object suggests itself: the markedly homosocial “outlaw” movement in country music that arose in the mid-1970s around—as Nelson and Waylon Jennings sing self-referentially in “Luckenbach, Texas”—“Willie and Waylon and the boys.”⁵ In delineating cowboys as a type, the song self-consciously echoes “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” Nelson’s chart-topping 1978 duet with Waylon Jennings, which had been written by Ed and Patsy Bruce three years earlier. Here is the first verse of Willie and Waylon’s version:
Cowboys ain’t easy to love and they’re harder to hold. They’d rather give you a song than diamonds or gold. Lone star belt buckles and old faded Levis, And each night begins a new day. If you don’t understand him, and he don’t die young, He’ll probably just ride away.
Sublette’s song is, in part, a parody of “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” and other songs that traffic in similar imagery, such as Tammy Wynette’s “Cowboys Don’t Shoot Straight (Like They Used To).” All three songs deploy signifiers of cowboy style—“lone star belt buckles and old faded Levis” in “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies,” “big silver buckles and pre-faded jeans” in Wynette’s song, “saddles and boots” in Sublette’s. The significance of these accoutrements of cowboy style is never defined in the earlier songs, except as stylistic markers of a cowboy identity. Sublette’s song seizes on this indeterminacy, and fills in the blank: “What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?,” the song asks. The answer, of course, is same-sex desire between cowboys. This sentiment is even more explicit in lyrics that are present in Sublette’s recording of the song but absent from Nelson’s: “Now the cowboy is famous for gettin’ riled up about fairies / But I’ll tell you the reason a big strong man gets so uptight . . . / That’s why they wear leather, and Levis, and belts buckled tight . . . / There’s many a cowboy that’s more like a lady at night.” In “Cowboys Are Secretly Frequently,” in other words, cowboy iconography functions both to display and to repress queerness, and the song points to this simultaneous display and repression as a key component of outlaw country. The cowboy accoutrements in Sublette’s chorus (“What did you think all them saddles and boots was about?”) point to another direct connection between commercial cowboy iconography and gay culture: Sublette wrote the song while he was living in New York City at the height of pre-AIDS gay culture; near his apartment was a bar called Boots and Saddle, which made explicit use of cowboy iconography.⁶
“Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” presents the cowboy as a figure defined by contradictions and deviation from social norms:
Cowboys like smoky old pool rooms and clear mountain mornings, Little warm puppies and children and girls of the night. Them that don’t know him won’t like him and them that do Sometimes won’t know how to take him. He ain’t wrong, he’s just different, but his pride won’t let him Do things to make you think he’s right.
I would like to suggest that the chorus of the song can be read as anticipating the dilemma that Ennis and Jack—the male lovers in Brokeback Mountain—face. Both men marry and have children, but, as Willie and Waylon sing: “They’ll never stay home and they’re always alone / Even with someone they love.” The manifest queerness around which Brokeback Mountain’s narrative centers, in other words, is at least latent in the outlaw country songs that “Cowboys Are Secretly Frequently” parodies.
“Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love),” written by Chips Moman and Bobby Emmons (the pair also wrote “Cowboys Don’t Shoot Straight”), provides another key illustration of the homosocial dynamics of outlaw country. Waylon Jennings included this song on his 1977 album, Ol’ Waylon, and it spent a month at #1 on Billboard’s country music chart. The song begins with an abrupt declaration of heterosexuality: “The only two things in life that make it worth livin’ / Is guitars that tune good and firm-feelin’ women / I don’t need my name in the marquee lights / I got my song and I got you with me tonight / Maybe it’s time we got back to the basics of love.” The opening lines of the song valorize guitars and women’s bodies; the narrator addresses someone he refers to as “baby,” with whom he is trapped in a stifling form of heterosexual domesticity, which he fantasizes about escaping: “So baby, let’s sell your diamond ring / Buy some boots and faded jeans and go away / This coat and tie is choking me / In your high society you cry all day.” Curiously, though, after divesting herself of her wedding ring, the singer’s female partner completely drops out of the picture in the fantasy suggested in the chorus, to be replaced by a homosocial utopia filled with music and men. Likewise, homosocial cowboy iconography (“boots and faded jeans”) replaces the iconography of heterosexuality (the diamond ring). Willie joins Waylon for the last chorus: “Let’s go to Luckenbach, Texas / Willie and Waylon and the boys / This successful life we’re livin’ / Got us feuding like the Hatfields and McCoys / Between Hank Williams’s pain songs and / Jerry Jeff’s train songs and ‘Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain’ / Out in Luckenbach, Texas, there ain’t nobody feelin’ no pain.” The imagined community of “Luckenbach, Texas” provides a homosocial center for the outlaw country music that coalesces around “Willie and Waylon and the boys,” many of whom are named in the song. Hank Williams, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Nelson’s own Red Headed Stranger provide the soundtrack for this imagined community.
Ol’ Waylon’s album art is also germane in considering the questions of homosociality and queerness in the outlaw country of the 1970s. The album’s cover art includes a photograph of Waylon Jennings pasted to a wall covered with graffiti (Fig. 1). The various items scrawled on the wall
include references to Austin, Texas (geographic home to outlaw country) and the Country Music Association (“THE CMA IS WATCHING”). Drawn in what looks like red marker is the name “Jessi” in a heart pierced with an arrow, presumably referring to Jessi Colter, Jennings’s wife and musical collaborator. (Colter was featured with Jennings, Nelson, and Tompall Glaser on the hit 1976 album, Wanted! The Outlaws, marking her as a rare female presence in the outlaw country scene). On the opposite side of the photograph, though, is scrawled another message: “WILLIE WAS HERE FIRST!” This graffito could be meaningless or some sort of inside joke. On the one hand, it can be read as a declaration of Willie’s musical priority over Waylon (a form of homosocial competition). On the other hand, it at least flirts with the idea (albeit jokingly) that Willie and Waylon have some sort of intimate relationship, one that precedes or supersedes Jennings’s relationship with Colter.
Indeed, as Nelson’s comment about getting “flak” “when the hippie thing come out and [he] started growin’ [his] hair and puttin’ the earring in” suggests, Nelson and Jennings have often been the subject of such joking conjecture (Neuman). Sublette explains, for example, that he had imagined Willie and Waylon singing “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly” together, “taking the homosociality of the buddy thing to” its logical conclusion. He also recalls bemusement at learning that musician and comedian Kinky Friedman had poached the phrase “cowboys are frequently secretly fond of each other” as a laugh line, and that Nelson joked that he and Friedman were going to make a western of that name in which the two singers would play cowboy lovers. Friedman later recorded a comedy bit entitled “Willie Nelson’s Latent Homosexual Silver Concho Belt,” which follows his announcement, “Folks, we’d like to do a little homosexual song for you now; we get a lot of requests for this little booger.” The bit itself entails a series of jokes that Friedman and his sidekick, Little Jewford, together describe as “alarmingly homophobic. . . but funny.”
Taken as a joke, “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly” runs the risk of being understood as trafficking in homophobia for laughs. Sublette 97 recalls that he was initially concerned “that people would think it was gay bashing or gay baiting or making fun of gay people,” but that he was reassured by the positive response it elicited from gay friends and fellow musicians. He also notes that both his rendition and Nelson’s were submitted for consideration for the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack, but that the producers rejected both, apparently for being inappropriately humorous. In my assessment, the producers misapprehend the tone of Nelson’s recording. One striking aspect of Nelson’s rendition is that it works to disable the possibility of homophobic enjoyment on the part of listeners by so thoroughly incorporating the song into the unique aesthetic that Nelson had established in the 1970s, both in his solo material and in the songs he recorded with Jennings.⁷
“Luckenbach, Texas” was one of many duets Nelson and Jennings recorded together. The genre of the country duet was well-established by the mid-1970s, and included such famous examples as George Jones and Tammy Wynette, Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn, and Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Nelson and Jennings are noteworthy as the only same-sex duo to win the Country Music Association’s Vocal Duo of the Year award in the 1970s, in 1976, when they also won the Single of the Year award for “Good Hearted Woman.”⁸ This song resonates with both “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” and “Cowboys are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other.” “Good Hearted Woman” is about “a good-hearted woman in love with a good timin’ man” who “loves him in spite of his ways which she don’t understand.” Specifically, “[h]e likes the bright lights and night life and good-timin’ friends / And when the party’s all over she’ll welcome him back home again / Lord knows she don’t understand him but she does the best that she can / This good hearted woman, lovin’ her good timin’ man.”
The 1978 album, Waylon & Willie, includes five such same-sex duets. This album’s cover, too, suggests an uncommon intimacy between the two men, as smiling painted portraits of their heads, nearly touching and framed by embossed leather, are accompanied by a lone figure on horseback (Fig. 2). Side one opens with “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”; side two with “I Can Get Off On You.” In the latter, the two men trade verses as they address, according to the perspective from which the listener approaches the song, either a lover
in the second person or each other, joining together to sing the chorus: “Take back the weed, take back the cocaine, baby / Take back the pills, take back the whiskey too / I don’t need them now, your love was all I was after / I’ll make it now, I can get off on you.” This first chorus is followed by Nelson’s verse: “I can get by on little or nothing at all, I know / I can get high just thinking about you / and so.” And then here is Waylon’s response: “Who would have thought this was something that I’d ever do? / I’m working it out, mellowing out on you.”
In her groundbreaking work of gender theory, Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofky Sedgwick describes herself as being “blown away” hearing Willie Nelson singing “In the Garden,” an early twentiethcentury hymn, on the radio:
I had already listened to a lot of Willie Nelson’s songs about Waylon Jennings, which I always interpreted as love songs, but I never thought I was meant to; and nothing had prepared me for a song in which the love and sensuality between two men could be expressed with such a pellucid candor, on AM shit-kicker radio or maybe anywhere. (141)⁹
It is not at all difficult to imagine why Sedgwick would interpret Nelson’s duets with Jennings as love songs. If not for the fact that both singers are men, it would be nearly impossible to interpret them any other way. The lyrics of “In the Garden,” written by C. Austin Miles in 1912, lend themselves to an interpretation that at least flirts with the erotic:
I come to the garden alone, While the dew is still on the roses And the voice I hear, falling on my ear The Son of God discloses. And He walks with me, and He talks with me And He tells me I am His own And the joy we share as we tarry there None other has ever known.¹⁰
Still, Sedgwick’s response is not only to the text of “In the Garden,” but to Willie Nelson’s particular rendition of it, in which she hears “the love and sensuality between two men . . . expressed with pellucid candor.” The Troublemaker, the 1976 album on which Nelson’s rendition of “In the Garden” appears, comprises, like Red Headed Stranger from the previous year, a combination of original songs and standards (gospel tunes in the case of The Troublemaker). Like the earlier album, the standards that Nelson incorporates into The Troublemaker undergo a process of sonic adaptation, whereby a song like “In the Garden” transcends its church trappings and transformed, stamped with the signatures of Willie Nelson’s sound.¹¹ That is to say, the songs on The Troublemaker sound like those on Red Headed Stranger, or Willie’s duets with Waylon. A key component of that sound, for Sedgwick and others, is its capacity for the candid expression of same-sex love. From this perspective, it is perhaps unsurprising that Nelson transforms “the funniest goddamn song [he] had ever heard” into a moving and sensitive, decidedly unfunny performance. His recording of “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly” was released on iTunes on February 14, 1996 (Valentine’s Day), and elicited a number of comments like this one, erratic in its punctuation but clear in its sentiment:
Im 20 years old, i have been a Country music fan since i was a little boy. Willie Nelson has been one of my fav. artist in country music. To hear this song brings tears to my eyes because of the HEART Willie brings to his music. I have only been out of the closet for a little while and to hear my idol sing something like this is so heart warming. (searchingtheroad)
Let me be clear: I am not arguing that Willie Nelson is gay, nor that Waylon Jennings was (he died in 2002 due to complications from diabetes). What I am arguing, though, is that the outlaw country movement that centered around the personae of Willie and Waylon not only allowed for intimacy between men, whether strictly homosocial or something more, but that this intimacy is in fact central to the outlaw aesthetic. The outlaw country movement of the 1970s took masculinity as one of its primary subjects—Willie Nelson’s recording of “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly” renders explicit and manifest the same-sex intimacy that had been present, if latent, in the music all along.
Notes
1 Dylan’s recording is available on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991. 2 All quotations from Sublette are from a November, 2010 telephone interview. 3 The CBGB performance was released on Life Is a Killer, a 1982 compilation album of avant-garde poetry and music from Giorno Poetry Systems. I am grateful to Ned Sublette for providing me with a copy of his unreleased 1984 recording. This recording is the one from which Willie Nelson learned the song, having been given a cassette tape of it during a mid-1980s appearance on Saturday Night Live (Neuman). 4 Sublette rightly observes that this arrangement is “musically nonsensical.” 5 I am using the term “homosocial” in the sense popularized by gender theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. “Homosocial” generally “describes social bonds between persons of the same sex” (e.g., “male bonding”), and is distinct from “homosexual,” which connotes romantic or sexual relationships between members of the same sex. Sedgwick argues for what she calls “the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual” (Between 1). My contention is that in recording “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly” Willie Nelson likewise acknowledges this unbroken continuum. 6 The bar still exists. Time Out New York describes it as an “old-school, Christopher Street landmark [with] a cowboy-leatherman theme” (“Boots and Saddle”). 7 Nelson included “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly (Fond of Each Other)” on Lost Highway, a 2009 album, where it is followed by a version of Wynn Varble’s “Ain’t Goin’ Down on Brokeback Mountain,” a rather one-dimensional parody song based on the homophobic statement that comprises the chorus: “I ain’t goin’ down on Brokeback Mountain / That shit ain’t right.” It is difficult to know just what to make of this juxtaposition. “Ain’t Goin’ Down” functions as an antidote of sorts to “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly.” The former song is genuinely affecting and potentially uncomfortable; “Ain’t Goin’ Down” defuses this discomfort by situating the idea of gay cowboys firmly in the realm of parody 8 A complete list of CMA award winners is available from the CMA Awards website: <http://www.cmaawards.com/past-winners/SearchQuery.aspx>. 9 T. Walter Herbert uses Sedgwick’s anecdote to begin his compelling explication of Nelson’s rendition of this hymn as articulating the surprising confluence of same-sex intimacy and evangelical spirituality. 10 As Sedgwick observes, the barely sublimated eroticism of “In the Garden” has proven discomfiting to some critics. A striking fact about Nelson’s interpretation is that it embraces the eroticism of the lyrics, rather than being embarrassed by them (142). 11 The website allmusic.com agrees: “[C]ountry gospel in his hands doesn’t sound like traditional country gospel—[The Troublemaker is] a Willie album, through and through. . . . [T]he sublime subtlety of the performances on The Troublemaker make it sound of a piece with” Red Headed Stranger (“The Troublemaker”).
Works Cited “Boots and Saddle.” Time Out New York. <http://newyork.timeout.com/artsculture/gay-lesbian/118655/boots-and-saddle>. 23 Mar 2011. Brokeback Mountain. Dir. Ang Lee. Universal, 2005. Dylan, Bob. “He Was a Friend of Mine.” 1962. The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991. Sony, 1997. Friedman, Kinky. “Willie Nelson’s Latent Homosexual Silver Concho Belt.” Classic Snatches from Europe. Sphincter Records, 2000. Herbert, T. Walter. “‘The Voice of Woe’: Willie Nelson and Evangelical Spirituality.” In Reading Country Music: Steel Guitars, Opry Stars, and Honky Tonk Bars. 2nd ed. Ed. Cecelia Tichi. Durham: Duke UP, 1998. 338-349. Jennings, Waylon. “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love).” By Chips Moman and Bobby Emmons. Ol’ Waylon. RCA, 1977. __, and Willie Nelson. “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” By Ed Bruce and Patsy Bruce. Waylon & Willie. RCA Victor, 1978. Nelson, Willie. “Ain’t Goin’ Down on Brokeback Mountain.” By Wynn Varble. Lost Highway. Lost Highway, 2009. __. “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly (Fond of Each Other).” By Ned Sublette. iTunes, 2006. __. “He Was a Friend of Mine.” Brokeback Mountain Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Verve Forecast, 2005. __. “In the Garden.” By C. Austin Miles. The Troublemaker. Columbia, 1976. . Red Headed Stranger. Columbia, 1975. Neuman, Clayton. “Brokeback Balladeer.” Time 1 March 2006. <http://time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1168901,00.html>. 23 March 2011. Pansy Division. “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other.” By Ned Sublette. Pile Up. Lookout! Records/TVT, 1995. Proulx, Annie. “Brokeback Mountain.” The New Yorker 13 Oct. 1997: 74-85. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. __. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. searchingtheroad. “Tears in my eyes.” <http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/cowboys-are-frequently-secretly/id121720398?uo=4>. 24 March 2011. Sublette, Ned. “Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly.” Life is a Killer. Giorno Poetry Systems. 1982. __.“Cowboys Are Frequently (Secretly Fond of Each Other).” Sweet Texas Crude. 1984. __. Telephone interview. 10 Nov. 2010. “The Troublemaker.” <http://www.allmusic.com/album/the-troublemaker-r93358/review>. 24 March 2011. Wanted! The Outlaws. RCA Victor, 1976. Wynette, Tammy. “Cowboys Don’t Shoot Straight (Like They Used To).” By Chips Moman and Bobby Emmons. You Brought Me Back. Epic, 1981.
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