No song on the current country music scene more emphatically underscores Nashville’s newfound preoccupation with modern female concerns than Pam Tillis’ hot single, “Let That Pony Run.”
Visceral as a gutshot, the song presents a middle-aged woman whose husband leaves her for a waitress several years her junior. The husband explains that the barmaid “makes me feel reckless and young” and, with no real alternative, the spurned spouse “let(s) that pony run.”
In verse two, the ex-wife takes control of what is left of her life, moving to a farm where she indulges one of her fond desires by buying a horse-and finds that riding the animal fast “down by the river” brings her feelings of recklessness and youth, tooo.
On first hearing “Pony,” Tillis recalls, she didn’t like it at all.
“I said, `So? So what? What’s the point here?’ ” she remembers. “There seemed to me to be no resolution. It was just a slice of life, a visual thing. It went right over my head.
“That may have had something to do with the circumstances at the time, though. I was in the recording studio working on some other things when somebody first played me the song, and I just didn’t hear it. To tell you the truth, it aggravated me.”
However, profoundly respecting “Pony” writer Gretchen Peters, Tillis didn’t reject the song out of hand. She pulled it out again one night in her touring bus bunk and gave it another chance, only to have it “hit me like a bolt of lightning. I got real excited. I said, `This is a smash.’
“Months later, doing an interview, I figured out why I finally connected with it so strongly,” she adds. “In a lot of ways, it was my mom’s life. She was the lady who survived this. She just let it go, as hard as that was, and made another life for herself.
“She doesn’t have horses, but she gardens like a maniac. She has made another identity for herself-which, because my dad is a star, was doubly hard for her. But she did it.”
In the ’70s heyday of Tillis’ father, Mel, and long after, female country singers-working in an industry dominated by male executives, many of them with young second wives-would not have felt terribly free to record a song like “Pony.” That may help explain the fact that for the first few years of Nashville’s present record-sales revolution, the hot and hot-selling new stardoms were all male.
No more. A profusion of young women have joined veteran Reba McEntire and Tanya Tucker in recording songs with themes resolutely and independently female in viewpoint, and women too now are making commercial country waves on the gold and platinum levels established by their male colleagues.
Tillis agrees that women fans-the majority of record buyers-naturally are more immediately attracted to male performers. For female performers to attract women fans, Tillis says, “you gotta be their voice.
“In fact, you’re supposed to be their voice,” she adds. “That’s all an artist is, anyway-take gender out of it-that’s the only validity. And that’s not to say, `Take your own personal expression out of it,’ either. Most of the time I’ve found that the more personal and specific you are, the more universal you are.”
The popularity of “Pony” indicates there are multitudes of women who have had similar experiences or know and empathize with others who have.
Tillis, though, calls attention to a facet of the song that is not as readily obvious. “Pony” is also, she points out, a “very non-judgmental song.
“You get a glimpse of where the guy is coming from, too,” she says. “The song says it `made him feel reckless and young.’ So how could he turn it down? It’s like the situation was almost too much for him to walk away from.
“And it’s all so beautifully written. Sometimes we songwriters don’t want to use the same word or phrase twice, but she (Peters) used the phrase `reckless and young’ twice because it was important. What do they say-`find your bliss’? These people were both finding their bliss, and it’s a very non-judgmental song about it.”
As a star’s daughter, Tillis grew up in the entertainment business, but, although she has been performing on the fringes of the Nashville scene for more than a decade, her own stardom recently passed only its second anniversary.
On Feb. 15, 1991, she recalls, her debut single, “Don’t Tell Me What to Do,” attained the No. 1 spot in the country hit charts. That is a mark none of the rest of her singles has managed to match, although only one has failed to make the Top 5. Tillis hopes “Pony” will return her to the top spot.
” `Maybe It Was Memphis’ was my hottest record out of the box,” she recalls. “It was added by 109 stations out of the box, whereas this song (`Pony’) had 147 adds out of the box. It was huge.”
Her long residence on the Nashville scene doesn’t seem to have given Tillis any increased sense of security.
A highly sensitive woman who won her industry spurs with brainy and wacky performances at Nashville’s folkish Blue Bird Cafe, she says she relates-“personally, not artistically”-to 1992 Country Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year Mary-Chapin Carpenter, but confesses there are many peers she can’t seem to “feel close to because of the climate today.
“Anytime anybody else does good, you’d love to jump up and down and applaud them, but you go, `Oh, damn!,’ because there are only so many niches, especially for women.”
Tillis acknowledges trying to make herself as different as possible to forestall any notion that she and any other woman on the scene are “interchangeable,” and being different while staying within the female country context “is very difficult,” she says.
Her insecurities notwithstanding, Tillis’ distinguishability can be expected to continue to grow. She started off 1993 by being nominated for a Grammy Award and getting her first movie role, a bit part in “The Thing Called Love,” a Peter Bogdanovich film about the Blue Bird Cafe.
She recently began her touring year working Canada in the company of Marty Stuart, with whom she hopes to co-write some songs. She has booked a Japanese festival tour, and she expects to return in the fall to a U.S. billing with Male Vocalist of the Year Vince Gill, with whom she closed out 1992.
That there will be nobody else out there like her is assured by her quirky sense of humor. Who else would pick a single with the title “Cleopatra, Queen of Denial”? Who else, in fact, would write “Cleopatra, Queen of Denial,” a song about a woman who keeps making excuses for her Significant Other?
“I wrote it in 10 minutes, and I wrote it so fast because I’ve lived it,” she says, going on to stress that this experience predates her two-year present marriage.
“Also, somebody told me a real bad joke about Cleopatra and Marc Antony, and the punchline was, `Because she’s the queen of denial.’ That was such a funny pun to me, having read quite a few self-help books. I heard `She’s in denial’ or `He’s in denial’ for five years.”
The Tillis eyes twinkle. . .
“I wanted to write another song titled `The Last Word in Denial Is Al,’ ” she confesses deadpan. “But I’m glad I didn’t.”
