It was Ira Louvin—the older brother, the songwriter, the genius—who in 1958 designed the cover of the Louvin Brothers’ most famous album, Satan Is Real: a photograph of him and his brother, Charlie (in matching white linen suits, pink shirts, and squared-off blue ties), singing, arms outstretched, before what look to be the pits of Hell. Looming behind their backs, amid the flames: a big red devil, complete with fangs, horns, and a bloody pitchfork. As Charlie explained years later:

Ira built that set. The devil was twelve feet tall, built out of plywood. We went to this rock quarry and then took old tires and soaked them in kerosene, got them to burn good. It had just started to sprinkle rain when we got that picture taken. Those rocks, when they get hot, they blow up. They were throwing pieces of rock up into the air.

In the photograph, the brothers look remarkably calm, considering. In fact, if you didn’t know better—if you had never heard with what gravity the Louvin Brothers sang songs like "Satan is Real" and "Are You Afraid to Die?", you might think he and Charlie seemed to be laughing in that photograph. And if the title of the album weren’t printed right there over their heads, you might be forgiven for taking that cross-eyed, big-eared, anatomically incorrect cut-out Halloween devil for a joke. It looks like nothing so much as a giant paper doll, waiting to be clothed.

Is that Satan a joke? And if so, what is he doing there? These questions (and what are, I think, the answers: "Of course… but kind of scary too"; and "Unclear") point to a vein of self-conscious humor in the Louvin Brothers’ gospel that’s easy to mistake for kitsch. Many—most—truths in country music are spoken half in jest. No music is more embarrassed about its own theatricality.

The title track of Satan Is Real features one of Ira’s famous recitations, based (as his recitations often were) on a true story: in this case, the story of an old man who stood up, during a service attended by Ira, and demanded the preacher tell the congregation that, although God is real, "Satan is real, too."

The old man’s confession could have been written by Mark Twain, for laughs: "I know that Satan is real," Ira drawls in a penitent, old-man voice, "for oncet I had a happy home. I was loved and respected by my family. I was looked upon as a leader in my community. And then—Satan came into my life. I grew selfish and unneighborly. My friends turned against me, and finally my home was broken apart. My children took their paths into a world of sin," etc., etc.

"Ira never would preach to an audience," Charlie once said, "but he could get through the most sentimental recitation and never lose it, always keep a straight face."

To understand that interplay of humor and sentimentality is to understand something about the quality of seriousness in the Louvin Brothers’ gospel. Ira never wrote to convert or condemn what we call, secularly, the secular world. In his songs, the secular world does not exist.

"I think religion tortured Ira," Charlie once said, and yet the calling that tormented Ira and provoked the gospel songs he and Charlie recorded from 1947 to 1963 is barely recognizable to us now. It belongs to a fundamentalist tradition that is deeply insular, concerned less with the spiritual health of the country, or the world, than with its own small community of believers, and less with the community than with the individual. Who is, before anything else, a sinner.

Sin, in the music of the Louvins, is not a force to be conquered Out There or an awkward fact in an otherwise pious and well-meaning life. Sin is what Christianity feels like to Ira Louvin, and he assumes his listener knows that feeling, too.

Compared to the rhetoric of today’s religious right, which always assumes a hostile audience, Ira’s songs are at home with their listener. There are no politics in the songs he wrote. He could attack profane songs that "give praise to idols and sinful things of this world," when he wasn’t recording those songs himself, between gospel albums, but those songs were a fact of life. In his gospel there is the world, which is Satan’s, and there is God, and his listener is trusted to agree.

For this reason the refrains of the Louvin Brothers’ gospel songs are misleading on the page. "That word ‘broadminded’ is spelled S-I-N," Ira sings in one of the early, foot-tapping, hand-clapping, songs that the Louvins used to draw crowds for the preacher who employed them at state fairs—but what are the sins that Ira is preaching against? Sins that many listeners in the crowd might commit and confess to: playing a game of cards "now and then for pleasure," drinking a little whiskey "just to please a friend," or going to a party and dancing on Saturday night, once the kids are in bed.

As musicians, and as natives of the rough south-Appalachian plateau called Sand Hill, the Louvin Brothers grew up and worked in communities that tolerated these sins, whatever anybody said to the contrary—and that is exactly what made the sins worth singing about. When Ira denounces a mother who likes to dance, "and then on Sunday morning she says she loves her savior: she should be begging GOD to forgive her of her sin," this line is moving to me because you can hear, in the earnest directness of his phrasing, that he is addressing people who do love their savior, and who know how to repent, people for whom it is human to sin and whose best hope is to call sin by its proper name.

In this song Ira’s recitation takes its text from Romans 8:6-7. " 'For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. For the carnal mind is enmity against God, since it is not subject TO the laws of God, neither indeed can be,' " Ira quotes, before explaining, "You’ll find your word broadminded means 'sin,' if you’ll read."

Broadmindedness, when Ira uses the word, is not a quality of the secular mind; it’s the truce we all strike with experience. It is the triumph of experience, the way of all flesh.

The carnal mind—that enmity against God, which is death—is the great subject of Ira’s gospel songs. He seldom wrote about God’s presence in his life. It was not in his nature. He loved Jesus from a distance, and the distance was what concerned him. But he knew Satan first-hand, and his songs are intimate with the wages of sin: "I talked to myself one night in my room," he sang in 1963, during his last recording session with Charlie, "And looked back on my wasted years, Just me and my conscience while facing my doom…. A slave to the bottle that makes a man fall, and sink to a life of regret."

This song, "The Price on the Bottle (Is Just a Down-Payment)" is one of several Louvin Brothers songs that describe an early end due to drunk-driving—the second-leading cause of death in the Louvin Brothers oeuvre, exceeded only by murder. If this statistic sounds melodramatic, it describes Ira’s corner of the world realistically enough. When Ira was killed by a drunk driver in 1965, he died with a warrant out for his arrest on DUI charges and with three bullets buried near his spine—the work of his third wife, who had shot him five times in 1963, after Ira had tried to strangle her with a telephone cord.

For Ira, to be a man was to be a drunk, and he was by all accounts the kind of drunk whose sickness looks and feels like a kind of possession. "Today they call it an illness," Charlie says. "In those days it was bein’ mean." Ira’s meanness was legendary. When Ira drank, he fought, cheated compulsively on each of his four wives, and worst for his career, killed a tour with young Elvis Presley, a devoted Louvins fan, by calling him a "white nigger" and his rock ‘n roll "trash."

Although Ira disdained raucous music, when he drank he behaved onstage like a rock star—a monster yet to be invented—and regularly broke his instrument, long before promoters looked kindly on spectacles of destruction. There must have been something terribly disturbing about watching a grown man smash his mandolin—particularly since the mandolin became a symbol, for the Louvin Brothers, of everything that set them apart, for better and worse, from rock ‘n roll. In a song like "You’re Running Wild" of 1956, Ira’s tremolo falls so gently into each new phrase, with such a graceful step behind the beat, that by the time the straightforward rockabilly electric guitar takes up the melody, it sounds dull and hopelessly hidebound, like an instrument without a future. It took a mean man to smash that mandolin.

But mean is a euphemism for what Ira really was—or, what he was according his songs. In the songs, meanness is given its religious name (evil) and its true meaning: separation from God. "When I lived my life—so reckless and evil—" the brothers sing in "Satan’s Jewelled Crown,"

DRINKING and RUNNING AROUND
The things I would do were the will of the Devil:
I was selling my SOUL for Satan’s jewelled crown.

On the face of it, there’s something paradoxical about the Louvin Brothers’ lasting popularity in country rock and hipster circles. Since the sixties, their sacred songs have enjoyed a kind of transgressive chic. Partly this is camp and condescension. But I think it has more to do with the loneliness of their gospel; and Satan Is Real is their loneliest gospel album.

You don’t need to have been raised Baptist to be moved by "The Christian Life": to hear the delicate, sad tone of explanation in Charlie’s voice when he sings, "Others find pleasure in things I despise" or the yearning in Ira’s harmony on the following line: "I like the Christian life." The words want to tell a story of triumph, but the story they actually tell—and the story that the Louvins Brothers sing—is more complex:

My buddies tell me that I should have waited.
They say I’m missing a whole world of fun.
But I am happy and I sing with pride,
I like the Christian life.

It would be impossible for Billie Holiday, or for that matter Patsy Cline, to sing "world of fun" more mournfully than Charlie does. When he sings "I am happy," caution and sadness are built into the very notes of the song.

In country music, there is a phrase for that style of sadness: "high lonesome." The torch-singer sings sadly by stepping behind the beat; her hesitations and bent notes, which seem to mimic and exaggerate the qualities of speech, establish a fiction of independence from the song as it is written. She pretends to speak. The high-lonesome singer pretends to sing—pretends to sing imperfectly. His rhythmic and melodic variations are tiny. He (or she, when it is a she) sings like a child. There is always an implied fiction of childlikeness in his songs: his pose is innocence. (It goes without saying that the "country" accent is part of this pose.)

The torch-singer is vulnerable because she is caught in a painful repetition: hurt again and again and never the wiser. The blues begins in weariness. The high-lonesome singer has never been hurt before. It is always the first and last time. He will never be WHOLE again.

This is a powerful fiction for a love song. The Louvin Brothers didn’t invent it, but they gave it what may be its highest technical expression. Ira’s greatest love song, "When I Stop Dreaming" (the most beautiful country song I have ever heard) can never be sung by anyone but the Louvin Brothers. Even Ray Charles can’t sing it, because his voice—so full of adult intelligence—can’t capture the shock of first abandonment, the innocence of a mind immune to healing, which lies at the heart of the high-lonesome voice:

The worst that I’ve ever been hurt in my life,
The first time I ever have wanted to die,
Was the night when you told me you loved someone else
And asked me if I could FORGET.

Forget? This voice, so mindful of the notes it has to hit and the text it has to repeat, this voice that seems to watch its feet while it dances, has no experience of forgetting. It lives (as Ira sings in a later verse) "in the shadow of undying pain."

Ira wrote several songs from a child’s point of view. In "A Tiny Broken Heart," a seven-year-old boy learns that the family next door has been evicted and tells his father, "Let us buy the farm so they can stay! Give them all the toys that dear Santy gave, and give them the pennies in my little piggy bank, pennies that my darling helped me save." This is music that takes childhood very seriously indeed. ("I’m only seven now," the boy tells his father, "But it’s just like you said: Daddy, some day I’ll be a man.") The effect, like the effect of the old man’s soliloquy in "Satan Is Real," is to provoke us toward laughter and, at the same time, whether or not we keep a straight face, to preserve in us the very thing we are laughing at: our own infantile capacity for terror, or regret, or brokenheartedness.

No less in Ira’s gospel, the first task is to make his listener become as a little child:

Are you too wicked to cry?
Would you to God’s bosom fly?
Kneel with your mother,
Stray not from her side.
God will hear your cry.

Like "Broadminded," this song from Satan Is Real—"Are You Afraid to Die"—takes what might have been a hectoring refrain, "Are you afraid? Are you unsaved? Are you afraid to die?" and turns it inward. We have made ourselves forget to be afraid, but underneath our forgetting there is the original fear, just as, in the love song, there is the original wound. Underneath the paradox of the Louvin Brothers’ popularity is their musical ability to imagine innocence from a position of experience. Even in an up-tempo song of Ira’s like "The River of Jordan," this innocence can move you unexpectedly to tears: "I’m going to wade right in, I’m going down: I’m going down to the river of Jordan."

That is the meaning of those strident, obedient harmonies. That is the plainness toward which George Jones works back when he covers his own bluesy "She Thinks I Still Care," now in the clearest, most cautious tenor he can muster, or when Roy Orbison performs the first line of "Crying."

And when the Everly Brothers—whose style springs, fully-formed, from the Louvins’ teen ballads—tell themselves "Love wounds and mars / any heart not tough / or strong enough / to take a lot of pain," the heart they mean is the heart of Ira’s gospel.