‘Forty Acre Feud’ or — Better Than ‘Nashville’?

Ron Ormond’s ‘Forty Acre Feud’ (1965) is a prime slice of Americana that follows a wide variety of various musicians as they put on a county and western concert against the background of an election campai… hang on! This is just like that Robert Altman movie!

And Ormond’s film certainly has a lot in common with Altman’s comedy yet whereas ‘Nashville’ (1975) was satirical fabrication ‘Forty Acre Feud’ is authentic fabrication with the film containing a boat-load of songs by some of the most popular (and whitest) stars of the day.

It’s all set in the forty acre town of Shagbottom where the local residents have to elect a new representative when the Tennessee legislature reapportions the state… and so a country and western concert is staged. It’s all very silly but this lightweight story is simply an excuse to treat the audience to NINETEEN performances from artists such as George Jones, Loretta Lynn, The Willis Brothers, Hugh X. Lewis, Roy Drusky plus others and every single one of them is utterly mesmerising, and for a variety of wide-ranging reasons.

The songs encompass everything from the cornball (Del Reeves — ‘This Must be the Bottom’) to the hysterically depressed (Bill Anderson singing “The world’s an awful place at 3 a.m.”); the deludedly upbeat (“Ain’t no future in the past, broken hearts and all that jazz”) to the downright mind-boggling, specifically when Ferlin Husky warbles “Since you’ve gone, my heart, my lips, my tear dimmed eyes, a lonely soul within me cries” as they count the final votes. No wonder the host introduces the number with the sentence — “And now words fail me to describe this next song”.

Those words could also apply to the entire concert, especially when Ray Price sings a song consisting of the lyrics “I can’t give up the other woman in my life” immediately followed by “Why do you treat me as if I was only a friend?”

Then there’s George Jones and his band who all possess such severe crew cuts it’s like watching a group of deranged Apollo astronauts who’d decided to form a country music group between space missions.

Although my favourite performance was Skeeter Davis’ and her rendition of ‘The End of the World’ which is so unbelievably beautiful (just listen to the way she sings the word “end”!) I’ve had the song on repeat for the last fifteen hours… and I can’t bloody STAND country and western!

The music, in general, sounds wonderful with many of the songs featuring some gorgeous slide steel guitar work frequently blending with some lovely vocal harmonies, so if you’re a fan of, say, Bill Frisell’s country orientated work with Greg Leisz you’ll adore what’s going on here.

I loved ‘Forty Acre Feud’, which is pretty remarkable considering it consists of nearly everything I hate and despise. It’s not even a particularly good movie but as a piece of rambling Americana with political undertones set to bonkers music it might, just might, be better than ‘Nashville’.