Encore: The King of Tears

Why does country music make you cry, but rock and roll doesn’t? We revisit a musical interpretation of a divided America in this episode from 2017. Get ad-free episodes to Revisionist History by subscribing to Pushkin+ on Apple Podcasts or Pushkin.fm. Pushkin+ subscribers can access ad-free episodes, full audiobooks, exclusive binges, and bonus content for all Pushkin shows. Subscribe on Apple: apple.co/pushkin http://apple.co/pushkin Subscribe on Pushkin: pushkin.fm/plus https://www.pushkin.fm/join-pushkin See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. When you're a business owner interested in expanding to new markets, there's a lot to consider and countless questions to answer before making the call. The most important one being, are you ready? That's where ChatGPT comes in. Give it a goal, add your files, and ask chat to help you map out different scenarios for the future of your business. So when growth is on the table, you've got an expansion plan ready to implement. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 0:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on, and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over the limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. And while I haven't done it yet,

• 1:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  if I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over time without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval. Variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners, subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC.

• 1:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 2:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  Bushkin.

• 2:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  I started listening to country music when I was about 12 or 13. This was rural Ontario in the 1970s. Everyone else my age was listening to The Eagles, or Fleetwood Mac, or some properly Canadian rock band like Rush. But for some inexplicable reason, I, a British-Jamaican kid marooned in the Canadian heartland, found solace in the music coming out of Nashville. Lots of Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings. I can still sing almost all of Goodhearted Woman from memory, and of course, George Jones. I still remember the first time I heard "The Grand Tour." Step right up, come on in, if you'd like to take the grand tour of a lonely house

• 2:53Malcolm Gladwell?

  that once was home sweet home. And then, the amazing lines, "I have nothing here to sell you, just some things that I will tell you, some things I know will chill you to the bone." To my maudlin 13-year-old heart, the line, "Some things I know will chill you to the bone," was so fantastic, so over the top, so bonkers. And just thinking about that lonely house that was once home sweet home brought tears to my eyes. Pop music, particularly the pop music of that era, just couldn't compete with that. I carried George Jones in my heart for a very long time, until the point that I decided it was time to revisit the question.

• 3:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  What exactly is country music doing when it makes you cry? In Nashville, Tennessee, there's a songwriter named Bobby Braddock. He's in his 70s, maybe five foot seven, bald head, scruffy beard, wiry, like if you messed with him in a bar, you'd probably lose. The most striking thing about him is his eyes, which are the palest and most intense shade of blue. He wears sunglasses a lot, and it's almost as if he needs to protect the world from that look.

• 4:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  I met him on Music Row in Nashville. We had lunch, and then we sat in one of the writers' rooms in the Sony building, piano in the corner, couches to one side, and he talked about his education in the music business.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  I think I always had the reputation as being kind of a quirky writer, maybe a little left field.

• 4:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  "The Turning Point" in Braddock's career was a song you've probably heard of. It was performed by Tammy Wynette back when she was the reigning queen of country music, 1968, about a mom who had to spell out the word D-I-V-O-R-C-E so her kids wouldn't know their parents were splitting up.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  So, D-I-V-O-R-C-E. Yeah. Wrote this, did a demo on it, and no takers. Nobody did it. Nobody recorded.

• 4:54Malcolm Gladwell?

  "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" was a song with a gimmick. Braddock did a lot of gimmicky songs back then. No one wanted this one. So Braddock went to a friend and longtime collaborator, Curly Putman.

• 5:07Speaker 02

  So I said, "Well, why is nobody recording?" He said, "I think around the important part of your song, it's a sad song, and your melody on that part is too happy." And what I was doing was-- (playing guitar) "Oh, I wish that we could stop this D-I-V-O-R-C-E." It went a little bit like a soap commercial. And I said, "Well, what would you do?" And he goes to guitar, and he had this really mournful singing style. Tammy Wynette was a big fan of Curly's singing. She loved his singing because he had, I mean, he just, his singing was just so sad. He goes to guitar and he said--

• 5:52Speaker 02

  (playing guitar) So I said, "Get your guitar. Let's put it on tape like that."

• 6:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" went to number one. It was Bobby Braddock's first great exercise in how to make people cry. And from then on, things just got sadder. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

• 6:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  This episode is about something that has never made sense to me. Maybe it's because I'm a Canadian, or maybe Americans puzzle about this too. I'm talking about the bright line that divides American society. Not the color line, or the ideological line. I'm talking about the sad-song line.

• 6:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  I don't know why people don't talk about this more, because it's weird. For the sake of argument, let's use The Rock magazine Rolling Stones list of the best songs of all time, the top 50. These are the critics' choices. "Hotel California" by The Eagles comes in at 49, which, as far as I can tell, is a song about drugs. "Toody-Fruity" by Little Richard at 43. "Toody-Fruity," which I remind you has as its signature lyric, "Toody-Fruity, oh Rudy, toody-Fruity, oh Rudy, toody-Fruity, oh Rudy, toody-Fruity, oh Rudy, wop bop, alo bop, alop bam boom." There's "Dancing in the Street" at 40, "Light My Fire," "Be My Baby," Nirvana's "Smells

• 7:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  Like Teen Spirit," Derek and the Dominos' "Layla." There are songs about wanting to have sex, songs about having sex, songs about getting high presumably after having sex. Number-one song on the list, "Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan. "Ah, you've gone to the finest schools, all right, Miss Lonely, but you know you only used to get juiced in it. Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street, and now you're gonna have to get used to it." I think that's a song about someone who dropped out of Harvard. The number-one rock song of all time is about dropping out of Harvard.

• 8:24Malcolm Gladwell?

  In all of those 50 songs, nobody dies after a long illness, no marriage disintegrates, nobody's killed on a battlefield, no mother grieves for a son. The closest that any song in Rolling Stones' list comes to being truly sad is Smokey Robinson's "Tracks of My Tears," which is, first of all, number 50, so they put the sad song at the bottom of the list. And secondly, it's about a guy at a party. In their moments of greatest travail, the protagonists of rock and roll's sad songs still get to go to parties. Now just turn on a country music station, especially a traditional country music station, and listen. It's like a different universe. Marriage is going to hell. People staring into their shot glass in a honky-tonk.

• 9:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  People dying young. Have you ever heard John Prine's "Unwed Fathers"? It's a devastating bit of songwriting about a teenage mom fleeing town. He sings it with his wife Rachel.

• 9:21Speaker 03

  Somewhere else, man. Smoking mad and we have. She bows her head down, humming lullabies.

• 9:36Speaker 04

  Your daddy never meant to hurt you ever. You just don't live here, but you've got his eyes.

• 9:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  Those last two lines, "Your daddy never meant to hurt you ever." "He just don't live here, but you've got his eyes." That's brutal.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Like some bad dream. Unwed fathers.

• 10:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  One half of the country, the rock music part, wants their music to be hymns to extroversion. The other half wants to talk about real-life dramas and have a good cry. I don't get it. By the way, you know who wrote that "Unwed Fathers" song with John Prine? Bobby Braddock.

• 10:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  Or maybe you've heard this, another classic recorded by Tammy Wynette.

• 10:39Speaker 05

  With one tiny little stone, cast aside. Life's a love that's dead and gone.

• 10:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  "Golden Ring." It follows a couple from first love to the breakup of their marriage by tracing the journey of their wedding ring. From pawn shop to pawn shop. It's a weeper. Who wrote it? Bobby Braddock.

• 11:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  And today, 40 years after he wrote it, Braddock is still mad about a one-word change made by the song's producer, Billy Sherrill, because that made his song one crucial degree less sad.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  What we had was, he says you won't admit it by New Year running around. And Billy changed it to, "He says you won't admit it, but I know you're leaving town." That's not as powerful as "You're running around."

• 11:45Speaker 02

  I think country music is supposed to be about real life, you know, and I try to reflect that in my life, right?

• 12:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  Which brings us to maybe the greatest country song of all time. Certainly, the saddest country song of all time. The song that made me get on a plane and go to Nashville. It was recorded by the great George Jones, one of the half dozen or so most iconic figures in the history of country music. You just heard him singing in "Golden Ring." Jones was famously the husband of Tammy Wynette for a time, a hard-living, dissolute megastar. Once, in the midst of an epic bender, Jones' family took his keys away, so he got on his riding mower and drove eight miles to the liquor store to get some whiskey. This was a man who could pour his fractured heart into his music like no one else.

• 12:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  A half dozen times in his career, Jones found a song truly worthy of his talents. But it never got better than "He Stopped Loving Her Today." I still remember when I first heard that song. And from the day I started thinking about this episode, I haven't been able to get it out of my head.

• 13:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  Do I need to tell you who wrote that song? Bobby Braddock. Bobby Braddock is the king of tears.

• 13:56Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 14:34Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is a paid message from Apple Card. It's easy, I think, in the hubbub of our lives to lose track of our spending. We pay the bills and move on and don't understand the deeper patterns in our spending, the many different decisions we're making knowingly or unknowingly. You have to understand where your money is going in order to make better decisions about it. That's one reason Apple Card stands out to me. You can earn unlimited daily cash back on every purchase you make. I also appreciate the simplicity. Apple Card doesn't have annual, late, or over-the-limit fees. No fees ever. There's even an option to open a high-yield savings account through Apple Card. Under all, I haven't done it yet. If I do, my daily cash can grow automatically over time

• 15:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  without any extra effort. When you better understand your spending habits, it's easier to make your money work harder for you. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval, variable APRs for Apple Card range from 17.74% to 27.99% based on credit worthiness. Rates as of October 1, 2026. Existing customers can view their variable APR in the Wallet app or card.apple.com. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility. Savings and Apple Card by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City Branch, Member FDIC. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 16:03Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 16:44Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 17:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  One of the things that got me interested in sad songs was a story my sister-in-law Bev told me. She and my brother live in the same area I grew up in, Waterloo County in southern Ontario. And a while ago, she went to a performance by a local chamber choir, 30 singers. They sang a cantata called "Annalise" by the British composer James Whitborn, a choral composition which puts the words of Anne Frank's diary to music. I know this seems like a little bit of a digression from country music, but it's a really useful case study in understanding why some songs make us cry. The performance Bev told me about was on a Sunday afternoon, a free performance at a public library, which is a very utilitarian,

• 17:58Malcolm Gladwell?

  very 1960s building on Queen Street in downtown Kitchener. I've been there many times. Wall-to-wall carpet, that old books, libraries smell, which I have to admit I love. How many people are there?

• 18:10Speaker 06

  It's in their main reading room. They've moved around all the tables and...

• 18:16Speaker 06

  A hundred? Hundred and twenty, it's full, pretty much standing room only.

• 18:31Speaker 06

  As they're singing, I think, why is that alto not singing? And then I look over and I think, that's somebody else, a soprano not singing. That's odd, because everybody else in their parts is singing. And I realized they were crying, and they couldn't sing.

• 18:48Malcolm Gladwell?

  Bev says she cried pretty much through the entire performance. She was looking straight ahead because she didn't want people to see she was crying, but it didn't matter, because everyone was crying. When the performance was over, Bev approached the stage to talk to the soloist, the woman singing Anne Frank's words.

• 19:05Speaker 06

  I just went up to her afterwards and congratulated her on the beauty of the piece and then, and her singing. And I said, and how did you manage to sing without crying? And she said, well, I couldn't look at Mark, the conductor, because he was wiping tears from his eyes. And I had my back to the choir, so that was good. And I didn't look at anybody in the audience, because they were crying. So I just looked up in the middle distance and I sang. It was a good thing I had it memorized.

• 19:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  I was at home in Canada when Bev told me that story. So I called up Mark, the conductor, and the soloist, whose name is Natasha. They're actually husband and wife. They only live a few minutes away from my brother, so they came over. Mark sat at the piano in the living room, and Natasha stood behind him. And they performed one of the pieces from Annalise that they did that day in the library.

• 19:57Speaker 07

  This is the last movement, it's called, it's called Anne's Meditation. I see the world, I see the world being slowly turned, turned into a wilderness.

• 20:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Now, I realize this is a crazy question, because we're hearing a piece based on the diary of Anne Frank, which is one of the most heartbreaking stories from one of the most horrific moments in recent history. But why was everyone crying that day at the Kitchener Library?

• 21:03Malcolm Gladwell?

  The obvious reason is that the music is beautiful. So is Natasha's singing. The performance is also authentic. There's nothing contrived about it. It wasn't at Carnegie Hall. People weren't wearing suits and evening gowns. They were at the Kitchener Library, and there's families getting books and kids running around, and everyone's on stacking chairs with the tables pushed off to the side. But here's the most important thing. Annalise is specific. It's a cantata about the actual experiences of a real person in her own words.

• 21:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  Bev says that when she cried, she started thinking about her own family, Mennonites who escaped terrible persecution in Russia. Natasha says that as she sang about 12-year-old Anne Frank, she was thinking about her own daughter, who was 10, and who was sitting right next to Bev in the audience.

• 22:02Malcolm Gladwell?

  Beauty and authenticity can create a mood. They set the stage. But I think the thing that pushes us over the top into tears is details. We cry when melancholy collides with specificity. And specificity is not something every genre does well.

• 22:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  Wild Horses by The Rolling Stones. Written by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger. It's a song about a conversation a man is having with a silent, suffering loved one. The story goes that Mick Jagger dreamt up the verses while sitting at the bedside of his then-girlfriend, Mary Ann Faithfull, as she recovered from an overdose.

• 23:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  "I watched you suffer a dull-aching pain. Now you've decided to show me the same. No sweeping exit or offstage lines could make me feel bitter or treat you unkind. Wild horses couldn't drag me away. Wild, wild horses couldn't drag me away."

• 23:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  Wild Horses was recorded first by the legendary Graham Parsons. Not long afterwards, Parsons died of an overdose, and his friend and protege, the country music singer Emmylou Harris, made a song in his memory. She wrote it with Bill Danoff. It's called "From Boulder to Birmingham."

• 24:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  Someone who has suffered a terrible loss has gotten on a plane, and she's so numbed by grief that she could no longer see those around her.

• 24:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  From Boulder to Birmingham and wild horses are both beautiful, melancholy. They're about the same thing, the ties the living and the healthy have to those in pain. But which is the sadder song? I don't think there's any question. Wild horses is generic. Listen to how it starts. "Childhood living is easy to do. The things you wanted, I bought them for you. Graceless lady, you know who I am. You know I can't let you slide through my hands." What's going on? Any idea? What is Mick yammering on about? Now compare that to the specificity of looking down from the airplane and seeing nothing but prairie, then standing on a mountain and watching a canyon burn.

• 25:21Speaker 05

  I watched it burn. I would rock my soul in the bosom of Abraham. I would hold my life in his saving grace. I would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham if I thought I could see, I could see your face.

• 25:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  First she references the great black spiritual, "Rock my soul" in The Bosom of Abraham. The bosom of Abraham is where the righteous dead go while awaiting judgment. Then she sings, "And I would also walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham." Now she's locating her grief. "I would make a pilgrimage from progressive, hippie, liberal," remember, this is 1973, "dope-smoking Colorado, back to the repressive heart of the old South, just to see your face." Two completely different, specific images, each with its own set of emotional triggers, and she's piled one on top of another. Mark Vornan, the music director of the choir in My Hometown, says that there's a part

• 26:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  in Annalise that does the same thing.

• 26:43Speaker 07

  Ann is, they're in hiding already, and she starts singing, and the composer has set these words in kind of a style of an American Souza march.

• 26:55Speaker 07

  And so she's talking about being in the bathtub and being scrubbed in the bathtub. And it's a Souza, "We'll scrub, scrub, scrub ourselves in the tin-tot, da-dum-ta." Right? Very happy and optimistic music.

• 27:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  Anne Frank in the bathtub to the tune of a Souza march with the horrors of the Holocaust outside her door. Three absolutely concrete images in merciless combination.

• 27:22Speaker 07

  It just floored me every time I heard it because it was so close to, you know, our own daughter. You know, to think that she would have to create this kind of fiction in order to just get through the day.

• 27:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's how you get tears. You make the story so real and the details so sharp and you add in so many emotional triggers that the listener cannot escape. But it's a risky thing to do, right? If you aren't a talented composer and you don't do a sensitive rendition of those lyrics, they could fall flat, could seem forced, even offensive. Far easier just to fall back on the bland cliche that wild horses couldn't drag you away. Country music makes people cry because it's not afraid to be specific.

• 28:12Speaker 08

  You know, she came to see him one last time.

• 28:18Speaker 08

  Oh, and we all wondered if she were.

• 28:26Speaker 08

  And it kept running through my mind.

• 28:44Malcolm Gladwell?

  Bobby Braddock was born in Auburn Dale, Florida, a little town between Tampa and Orlando. His father grew citrus. They were Church of Christ, just about the most fundamentalist of fundamentalist Christians. Braddock moved to Nashville in 1964, just after getting married, to seek his fortune in the music business. He wrote his memoirs a few years ago. It's called A Life on Nashville's Music Row. I read it before I went to see him. And the best way to describe the book is that it's exhausting. I don't mean that in a bad way, because I couldn't put it down. But so much happens. You've lived this incredibly tumultuous, emotionally tumultuous life.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  I have, yeah.

• 29:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  And in the book, it sounds like the first precipitating event is the death of your son. Braddock was touring with the country music legend Marty Robbins at the time. He and his wife Sue had a baby. The child was just a few months old when he died.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Whenever I was in town, not on the road with Marty Robbins, every single day, we'd buy fresh flowers, go put it on his grave. We were just pathetic.

• 29:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  He and Sue fight. She cheats on him. He cheats on her. They break up. They get back together. They have a daughter. They divorce. His ex-wife mysteriously vanishes. He drinks a lot, gets into fights, owes enormous sums to the IRS, has a major bout with depression, smokes a lot of pot, lurches from one volcanic event to the next. And through it all, Braddock writes songs, hundreds of them. Your kind of tolerance for emotional volatility seems extraordinary.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  I guess. Tolerance is probably a pretty good word for it.

• 30:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  Braddock walks over to the keyboard on the other side of the room. He begins to talk about an old girlfriend named Angela, who committed suicide by driving her car into the river.

• 30:45Speaker 02

  When Angela died, her mother took her baby to raise it. And she sent me a picture of the little girl, Angela's child, when she was about four or five years old. Looked just like her mom. Picture of her standing out in the yard. And boy, it did a number on me.

• 31:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  He wrote a song about that in 20 minutes. He played it for me. Then he played his favorite bit of a sad Randy Newman song. He played me a heartbreaking song he wrote once after getting up in the middle of the night and passing his lover in the hallway. And as he played one weeper after another, I realized that that thing I'd said about Braddock's tolerance for emotional volatility, tolerance was the wrong word. That was just me projecting my uptight Canadian self onto Braddock. But Braddock is from the musical side of the United States where emotion is not something to be endured, it's something to be embraced.

• 31:57Malcolm Gladwell?

  At one point, when cell phones were still analog, you could buy a scanner and listen in to other people's conversations. And that's what Braddock does. He can't help himself. A woman complains to her husband for an hour about his lack of affection from the parking lot at the grocery store, then asks him what he wants, and he says, "Maybe Apple Newtons." And then, this is my favorite part, I'm quoting now from Braddock's memoir, "The conversation that truly touched me was between a man, perhaps 40, and his mother, maybe late 60s, in which the son opened up about sexual problems he was having with his wife. And I envied the sprinkling of profanities and the mother's invitation to, 'Come over to the house, son, and let's open a bottle of whiskey and talk about it,' wishing I

• 32:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  had that kind of easy and open communication with my mom, then learning that the guy's mother was terminally ill with cancer." If you're keeping track, that's marital difficulty, sex, profanity, whiskey, mom, and terminal cancer in one conversation, and it truly touched him.

• 33:04Malcolm Gladwell?

  Do you know what Braddock's favorite song is? Vince Gill's "Go Rest High on That Mountain," which Gill wrote in memory both of his brother, who died young of a heart attack, and fellow country star Keith Whitley, who drank himself to death.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  Oh my god, when Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs and Patty Lovelace are singing harmony on that thing, I go nuts. It still tears me up. Knowing that it's about death and that Vince wrote it about Keith Whitley and then about his own brother, and just the emotion that's in that song, it's just powerful.

• 34:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's heartbreaking. Listening to that song makes me wonder if some portion of what we call ideological division in America actually isn't ideological at all. How big are the political differences between red and blue states, anyway? In the grand scheme of things, not that big. Maybe what we're seeing instead is a difference of emotional opinion. Because if your principal form of cultural expression has drinking, sex, suicide, heart attacks, mom and terminal cancer all on the table for public discussion, then the other half of the country is going to seem really chilly and uncaring. And if you're from the rock and roll half, clinging semi-ironically to tutti-frutti-oh-ruddy, when you listen to

• 35:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  a song written about a guy's brother who died young of a heart attack and not a guy who drank himself to death, you're going to think, who are these people?

• 35:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  Here's another way to think about the sad song line.

• 35:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  Let me read you the list of the birthplaces of the performers of the top 20 country songs of all time. Again, I'm going to use a Rolling Stone magazine list. Ready? Arkansas, Virginia, Alabama, Texas, Mississippi, Mississippi, Georgia, California, Central Valley, by the way, not Los Angeles, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Texas, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, Texas, Kentucky, Texas.

• 35:46Malcolm Gladwell?

  I could do the top 50, or the top 100, or the top 200, and you get the same pattern. Basically, you cannot be a successful country singer or songwriter if you're not from the South. It's impossible. There's one exception, which is the great songwriter Harlan Howard, who was born in Detroit. But almost immediately thereafter, his family moves to a farm in rural Kentucky. It's like the five-second rule. When you drop a piece of food on the floor, if it's not on the ground long enough, it doesn't count. As far as I can tell, there are no Jews on the country list, almost no Catholics, only two black people. It's white, Southern Protestants, all the way down.

• 36:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  Now, compare that to the rock and roll list. You've got Jews from Minnesota, black people from Detroit, Catholics from New Jersey, middle-class British art school dropouts, Canadians, Jamaicans. Rock and roll is the rainbow coalition. That diversity is a good thing. It's why there's so much innovation in rock and roll, but you pay a price for that.

• 36:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  There was a very clever bit of research published recently by Colin Morris in the magazine The Pudding. He analyzed 15,000 popular songs using an algorithm that compresses digital files. So if you take out the repetitive bits in a song, how much of it is left? Morris's big finding is that rock and roll, as a genre, is really, really repetitive. Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, The Beatles. If you take out the duplicative parts, their music shrinks by 60%. That's what happens when everyone is from somewhere different. Nobody speaks the same language, so you have to use cliche, the same phrases over and over again. Because if you go deeper,

• 37:39Malcolm Gladwell?

  or try to get more specific, you start to lose people. Country music, on the other hand, is not nearly as repetitive. When Morris ran the lyrics of popular country singers through his algorithm, they only shrank by about 40%, a third less than the rock and rollers. Nor is hip-hop repetitive, which makes sense. The birthplaces of everyone on Rolling Stone's list of greatest rap songs reads like an urban version of the country list. Queens, South Central L.A., Brooklyn, Long Island, South Central, Long Beach, Houston, Queens, the Bronx, Englewood, New Jersey, the Bronx. Hip-hop and country are both tightly knit musical communities.

• 38:20Malcolm Gladwell?

  And when you're speaking to people who understand your world and your culture and your language, you can tell much more complicated stories. You can use much more precise imagery. You can lay yourself bare because you're among your own.

• 38:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  In the book, it sounds like your relationship with Sparky was the one that seemed the most creatively fruitful.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  It was. It was.

• 38:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  Sparky was a beautiful blonde from northern Alabama, the great love of Bobby Braddock's life. Why was that?

• 38:57Speaker 02

  I think because my feelings about her are so strong. I mean, it was sort of a visceral thing.

• 39:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  I think that's why I found Bobby Braddock's book so exhausting. It's because everything is felt. Everything is a mountain peak. And Sparky, Sparky was Everest, high altitude infatuation.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  That's the sort of thing that makes people go absolutely crazy, you know? And that was the case with her, you know? That's what gets the animal instinct of people, maybe who haven't evolved as much as they should, and causes them to go out and get a gun, blow somebody's brains out over it. Some gun not being able, can't stand the thought of someone, you know, having sex with the person that you love.

• 39:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  Braddock and Sparky were on and off lovers for years. It was intense, painful, euphoric. When it ended, Braddock was in pieces.

• 40:12Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's Braddock in the original demo he made of "He Stopped Loving Her Today."

• 40:25Speaker 02

  I said, "I'm not sure where it came from. It may have come from Sparky, you know? I honestly don't know. Be interesting."

• 40:32Malcolm Gladwell?

  How could it not?

• 40:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think it probably did, but I can't see that for any certainty.

• 40:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  I felt like Braddock shrink at that moment, listening to his tangled dreams, and then wanting to shake him at the end of the session, "It's Sparky, Sparky."

• 40:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  I mean, you wrote a song in the middle of the great defining love affair of your life. Your relationship ends and you write a song about the heartbreak that a man carries to his grave.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true.

• 41:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  Could it be more clear?

• 41:21Malcolm Gladwell?

  Bobby Braddock wrote "He Stopped Loving Her Today" with his friend Curly in 1977. They took it to the singer George Jones. Jones was then at his lowest ebb, a wreck, strung out on cocaine and whiskey. He'd just checked out of a psychiatric hospital. The great love of his life, Tammy Wynette, had embodied her hit song "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" and left him. Jones had just nearly shot and killed one of his best friends. The heartbroken Bobby Braddock has written a song about a man who cannot stop loving a woman, and it's sung by the heartbroken George Jones, who cannot stop loving a woman.

• 42:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  Underlined in red.

• 42:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  Every single "I love you."

• 42:26Speaker 08

  I went to see him just today.

• 42:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  Why did he finally turn his back on his great love? Why is this the first time he's smiled in years? Because he's dead. Only death could end his love.

• 43:17Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's totally over the top. Maudlin, sentimental, kitschy. Call it whatever you want. Just don't fight it. One thing that Bobby Braddock told me in passing that I think about a lot is that he thought of the character in his song as a bad role model. The man was obsessed. He couldn't let go. But that's the point, right? That's why we cry. Because the song manages to find beauty and even a little bit of grandeur in someone's frailty.

• 44:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  Wild horses, please.

• 44:12Speaker 00

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• 44:49Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 45:31Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 46:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to health influencers, real people, and most importantly, doctors, to separate fact from fiction. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 46:57Speaker 09

  Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Grand Ole Opry House to the celebration of life of George Glenn Jones, one of the most important people ever of all time and of any time in the history of country music.

• 47:11Malcolm Gladwell?

  George Jones died in 2013. Everyone who was anyone in country music came to his memorial service. You should watch it if you get the chance. It's on YouTube, all 2 hours and 41 minutes of it, because it's everything I've been talking about. Vince Gill stands up with Patti Lovelace and sings "Go Rest High on That Mountain" and breaks down halfway through.

• 47:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  Travis Tritt remembers a conversation he once had with Kris Kristofferson about how they expected George Jones to have died years before.

• 48:01Speaker 10

  And I looked at Kris and I made the comment, you know, with all the years of hard living that George had, who would have ever thought that he would outlive Tammy? And Kris looked at me and said, "Had it not been for Nancy, he would not have."

• 48:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  Nancy Jones, George Jones's fourth and final wife, the real love of his life, his soulmate and companion. Travis Tritt holds out his hand towards Nancy, who's sitting right in the front row.

• 48:43Speaker 10

  George said it many times. She's my angel, and she saved my life. And so we owe you a debt of gratitude for that.

• 48:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  Then comes the crowning moment of the day, the final performance. Alan Jackson strides out onto the stage, a big rangy guy, craggy features, cowboy boots, jeans, long coat, white Stetson. He looks squarely at Nancy Jones and without introduction launches into "He Stopped Loving Her Today."

• 49:16Speaker 08

  He said, "I'll love you till I die."

• 49:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  And you realize, as he sings, that Braddock's song has gotten even more specific. It's no longer about a long ago love affair. It's about right now. This is the day George Jones stopped loving Nancy Jones. Alan Jackson takes off his hat and places it over his heart. He stopped loving her today. And if you aren't crying, I can't help you.

• 50:13Speaker 09

  We love you, George. One of the three greats of our time, ladies and gentlemen, at all time. That's Alan Jackson. Thank you so much, Alan.

• 50:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  Revisionist History is produced by Mia Lobel and Jacob Smith with Camille Baptista, Stephanie Daniel, and C. Omara Martinez-White. Our editor is Julia Barton. Flan Williams is our engineer. Original music by Luis Guerra. Special thanks to Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg of Panoply. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

• 51:27Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 52:11Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 52:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's whoop.com for your free month of Whoop.

• 53:00Speaker 11

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