Essays from West of 98: Levelland
“Flatter than a tabletop
Makes you wonder why they stopped here
Wagon must have lost a wheel or they lacked ambition one.”
Thus opens “Levelland,” written and recorded by songwriting great James McMurtry and later recorded by fellow Texas luminary Robert Earl Keen. It is a brilliant song, both in substance and form. There’s no chorus, just four verses. It is filled with the sardonic wit that James McMurtry shares with his late father Larry. However, it’s hardly the stuff of Chamber of Commerce boosterism dreams. The descriptions of Levelland? They go downhill from that stark opening lyric.
The narrator is a young native who questions much of his town’s existence and his family’s experiences there. Granddad grew the dryland wheat, we’re told. He admirably “stood on his own two feet” until overcome by some form of dementia. Daddy farms irrigated cotton, relying on an Ogallala Aquifer that is withering away. The narrator dreams of leaving on a jet plane. Then, the fourth verse takes an even more sobering turn from the already-sobering decline of the West Texas farm economy. We meet the narrator’s mother:
“Mama used to roll her hair
Back before the central air
We’d sit outside and watch the stars at night
She’d tell me to make a wish
I’d wish we both could fly
Don’t think she’s seen the sky
Since we got the satellite dish.”
My friend Keith Irwin told me on Twitter that this line rips his heart out every time he hears it. Mine too. I’ve listened to “Levelland” thousands of times at this point in my life. If there’s ever a song that speaks to my entire raison d’être, it’s this one: a young person longing to escape a declining small town in West Texas and how to reverse that. Levelland is the poetic location, but it represents communities across rural America. And it is this fourth verse on which I place much importance.
Last week, I wrote that television and the internet have rapidly homogenized and nationalized our culture, untethering culture from local place. In the early 1990s, Wendell Berry wrote that “more and more country people, like city people, allow their economic and social standards to be set by television and salesmen and outside experts” and that “the message of both the TV programs and the salestalks is that the watchers should spend whatever is necessary to be like everybody else.” Berry wrote that television encourages us to imagine that we have advanced “beyond sitting till bedtime with the neighbors on a Kentucky ridgetop…the stories that now entertain us are made up for us in New York or Los Angeles or other centers of such commerce.”
I am hardly a promoter of a Pollyannaish vision of rural America that probably never existed in real life. But James McMurtry paints a vision of what DID happen in real life. Rural America is a hard place to make a living. In fact, that is often what drew people to the frontier—opportunity to build something for your family if you were able to overcome the obstacles. Rural sunsets are often magnificent. It fills a person with wonder to see a truly dark night sky, full of stars and free of light pollution. But once Mama’s life centered around the satellite dish, when she was told to spend whatever necessary to be like everyone else, why did any of that matter? Once your culture revolves around the same things that are available everywhere, why not just pack up and live somewhere easier, with better weather, fewer obstacles, and fewer dust storms?
Local culture matters. It provides value. It builds relationships and community. In the absence of local culture, well, the people will simply dream of flying as far as they can get from places like Levelland.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to West of 98 wherever podcasts are found.