Since Peter Cooper died two years ago, I’ve been missing him and our often-daily phone conversations and regular lunches. There will be many folks today who look back and lament the bright light he was, even while battling the disease that caused his death. I am responsible for bringing Peter to Nashville from Spartanburg, S.C., since I was the entertainment editor at The Tennessean who hired him for the chief music writer’s job. In the 17 years-plus since I was “bought out,” Peter has been on my mind, even bringing smiles in the last two years when I think about our many serious talks as well as wordplay/horseplay or his appreciation of me and my profane life. Sometimes while we spoke, Russell, the dog, was literally inside his shirt (truly). He loved that dog, and I'm sure they are sitting at some heavenly computer while Peter cranks out his own version of the Good Book, adding tales about baseball and Batman tattoos and a really literate dachshund. Peter and I were the “first” readers of each other’s work. Even after I left the newspaper I’d get his stories before his editor. And I read all of the speeches and other writings he did before he turned them in to his bosses at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. He read each chapter of my most recent book, Pilgrims, Pickers And Honky-Tonk Heroes as I finished each installment in the course of the year or so when I was writing it. I loved the guy and he often told me he loved me.
Instead of rerunning the teary and raw (to me, still) blogpost I wrote at the time of his death, I thought I’d rerun one of his final pieces of work, the foreword to that book. This is not an ego thing for me. I do this because it actually makes me smile. And I need that.
Here are Peter's words from my book:
There is no such thing as impartiality.
Or, God forbid, there is such a thing. If so, we’re screwed.
Impartiality is robotic, metronomic, and exactly the opposite of everything
that writing should be.
Everything in the world is subjective. There are people who
worship the sun, and that’s fine. A favorite (see, I am impartial) songwriter
of mine, Malcolm Holcombe, sings, “I like the shade, where it’s cool and
green.”
I want to hear Malcolm sing about the shade, not about the
sun. I want to hear Tom T. Hall sing, “Those clear Kentucky streams, they are
always in my dreams/ I think that is something you should know.”
I don’t want to hear Tom T. objectively compare Kentucky
streams to West Virginia streams.
I want to hear Kris Kristofferson sing, “Take the ribbon
from your hair/ Shake it loose and let it fall,” and I don’t want to hear him
give an impartial guide of ways that someone might secure their hair.
I don’t want to hear that Hank Aaron hit .268 with 20 home
runs in 1974. I want to hear the story of how he changed everything that year
by hitting a towering blow off Al Downing of the Dodgers on April 8 that made
him the all-time home run king.
(He still is, in my partial opinion, though cold statistics
and easy research will tell you that the homer crown is shared by Barry Bonds
and performance enhancing drugs.)
None of this is to say that facts are inconsequential. You
can’t get ‘em wrong, or you’ll lose credibility. But facts are an essential but
incomplete part of our stories.
Where are you from? Who are you, really? These questions are
often related. The answers are inherently different. I’ve never met anyone from
Ironton, Ohio, who reminds me of native hero Bobby Bare, and I’ve spent some
time in Ironton.
I’m partial to Tim Ghianni, in no small part because he’s
anything but impartial. He sees people for who they are, not for their
statistics. He values humanity and humility over scoreboard-lit
accomplishments. If you want to know what these people did, you can look it up
yourself (it’s simple these days). If you want to know who these people are, or
who they were, you can’t find it anywhere but here.
Tim’s writing provides a window into people you will
treasure.
If you want to know who Tim Ghianni is, you’ll find that
here, too. And, partially speaking, it’s a finding far worth the journey.
-Peter Cooper
Nashville, Tennessee
