Author: Caine O'Rear

Caine O'Rear is a writer and editor based in Mobile, Alabama. He is the former editor in chief of American Songwriter Magazine. Follow him at www.instagram.com/caineorear.

A Songwriter’s Songwriter

Tom T. Hall is not a household name. Even in haunts where the country jukebox constantly spins, his songs are not on heavy rotation.

This is not to his discredit. Hall had chart success in his heyday, but he’s a songwriter’s songwriter, first and foremost, and his influence looms large in the world of any country songwriter versed in the canon. Or it should anyway.

As Peter Cooper writes in our cover story, Tom T. was one of a handful of writers in the ’60s who “elevated and altered the language and narrative form of country music, and blazed a path down which Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, and John Prine would later meander.”

The small-town Kentucky boy showed up in Nashville as a writer for hire, attempting to mimic the radio trends of the time, as his publisher would have it. Hall found his own voice serendipitously with a little help from his wife, continued to believe in the merit of that voice, and never looked back.

I first discovered Hall via a tribute album in the late ’90s that featured versions of his tunes by artists like Ron Sexsmith, Calexico, and Iris Dement. The songwriting prowess wowed. Years later, I heard Drive-By Truckers cover “Mama Bake A Pie (Daddy Kill A Chicken),” a song about a disabled war veteran, and was reminded of his wordsmithing brilliance. “Since I won’t be walking I suppose I’ll save some money buying shoes,” the paraplegic narrator deadpans. This is vintage Hall lyricism — walking the razor’s edge between despair and humor like some trailer-park version of Oscar Wilde.

Tens of thousands of songwriters have called Nashville home in the last half-century. There have been too many good ones to count, but only a handful who can truly be called great, who have busted open new worlds and changed the evolutionary arc of the art-form. For writers like Tom T., it’s no so much three chords and the truth as it is three chords and the all the new truths that he will discover.

This year’s Legends issue, often referred to within the office as the annual O.W.D. (“old white dude”) edition, salutes a group of writers and musicians — most of them not super well-known — that have created a body of work that continues to inspire and influence.

The late Blaze Foley, an Austin-based songwriter and professional hell-raiser, is one of these unsung heroes. Foley is perhaps best known as the writer of “If I Could Only Fly,” a tune covered by Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson. Lucinda Williams immortalized Blaze in the song “Drunken Angel” off her Car Wheels album. For our story, James Williamson traveled to Georgia and New Orleans and tracked down some of Blaze’s old acquaintances, piecing together a nomadic and tragic life that was punctuated with brief periods of songwriting brilliance. A number of young songwriters in Nashville know Blaze’s small catalog chapter and verse. Newcomer Aaron Lee Tasjan, whose album In The Blazes made our Top 50 of 2105 List, pays tribute to him on on the song “Lucinda’s room,” for instance.

Elsewhere, we check in with Spooner Oldham, the organist from The Swampers in Muscle Shoals and one of the all-time great session men in the history of rock and roll. Spooner, ever content to be the sideman, also released a solo album in the early ‘70s that was reissued earlier this year. Here, he looks back on his life as a session man.

We also catch up with Tony Rice, a master flat picker who is cited by many a bluegrass guitarist as their reason for picking up the instrument. My first introduction to Tony came in the form of The Pizza Tapes, the bootlegged recording of an impromptu jam session between Rice, Jerry Garcia and David Grisman in the early ‘90s that featured a number of traditional folk numbers. It is worth checking out. Also, Rand Bishop pays tribute to fellow Oregon native Mickey Newbury, who decided to give songwriting a shot after a tenure in the Navy. Like Tom T., Newbury is a true master craftsmen, and though he never attained mega-stardom, his songs continue to amaze today.

Lucero’s Never-Ending Tour

I caught my first Lucero show in 2006. The band played Nanci Raygun, a storied hardcore punk club in Richmond, Virginia that has since closed its doors. The show appropriately veered more toward punk than country in sound and spirit that night, and found frontman Ben Nicholsdonning his best Paul Westerberg impression. The band had released seven albums by that point since forming in ‘98 and had amassed a sizeable following in Richmond. The show felt like a good hang among friends, almost to the point that it resembled a house show. Back then, in Richmond, you could still buy PBR in a can for a dollar in the Fan district. Those were the days indeed.

Lucero launched its tour for eleventh studio album All A Man Should Do in Nashville last month. It’s a record that muzzles some of the band’s raucous tendencies and finds Nichols mining more introspective terrain as a songwriter, but without compromising that beloved balls-to-the-wall spirit. Nichols has said this is the record he wanted to make in 1989 – what is it about that year? — when he was 15 years old, but it took “25 years of mistakes” to actually get it done.

The band recorded the new record in Memphis at the famed Ardent Studios, where Memphis legends Big Star recorded all three of their albums in the early ’70s. Lucero even covers Big Star’s “I’m In Love With A Girl” – the first cover song they’ve ever committed to an album – and it features Big Star drummer Jody Stephens singing back-up. It’s a fitting tribute to a band that still reigns supreme as the spiritual godfathers of independent music in the River City. All A Man Should Do is part three of a trilogy of albums, according to the band, that began with 1372 Overton Park, the first record that featured a horn section and marked a turning point sonically.

“This is a Memphis record in the greatest sense and a perfect finish to the three-part love letter to a city that brought us up and made us what we are today,” guitarist Brian Venable said.

Lucero has never tried to reinvent the wheel, and the new album is no exception. Like the novels of Jane Austen, the songs that make up the Lucero catalog are concerned with variations on a few themes, and in their case, the themes are women, work and whiskey. (Their 2012 album was titledWomen & Work, after all, a term that Nichols confessed to being very Bukowski in its nomenclature.)

These themes still abound on All A Man Should Do, only this time they are looked at from the vantage point of one too many Sunday mornings that have come crashing down. The songs are about making peace with the life you’ve chosen, knowing full well that you can’t turn back. And their path is the long and winding road of a touring rock band, and its attendant occupational hazards, namely drinking and the difficulty of maintaining any semblance of a stable romantic relationship. Watching the show in Nashville and hearing the words to the new songs I was reminded of the Drive-By Truckers lyric, “Rock and roll means well but it can’t help telling young boys lies.”

The band is performing two sets on this tour, one acoustic and one electric, with an intermission in between and no opener, so be sure to get there on time. Much of the first set involves tracks from the new album, along with fan favorite “Texas and Tennessee,” a song off their 2013 EP of the same name that deals with a long-distance love affair but also unites the musical histories of the Volunteer and Lonestar states. Whatever regret about the night life is evinced in the songs of the opening set is non-existent in the second. This is the hard rocking portion of the show and features songs like “On My Way Downtown,” “Nights Like These,” and “Women and Work,” a high-octane number that boasts the lyric: “A honky tonk and a jack knife/ A tomahawk and an ex-wife/ Come on kid let’s drink ‘em down/ Kid don’t let it get you down.” It’s a call the crowd took to heart, as if it needed any encouraging.

When you consider how many shows Lucero has played in its time, and it’s not uncommon for the band to play 250 shows a year, you might forgive them if they seem a bit enervated from a decade and a half on the road. But amazingly, the old feral fire is still there, as much as it was when I first caught their live act in 2006. And it’s mind-blowing to consider that the original line-up is still intact. Of what other band of their longevity can that be said?

The crowd at Cannery Ballroom in Nashville was characteristically a sea of plaid-flannel, and heavily male. In fact, it would take seeing 1,000 Morrissey shows to match the level of testosterone present that night. “I dare anyone to try and not drink whiskey at a Lucero show,” my friend Tom said early into the second set. One look around the room and you saw he was right.

Taylor Swift Conquers Nashville With A Little Help from Mick Jagger

If we are known by the company we keep, then Taylor Swift is doing all right. The pop superstar summoned one of rock and roll’s all-time greats to the stage Saturday night in Nashville in the form of Mick Jagger, who performed the Stones’ classic “Satisfaction” with her in front of the sold-out crowd of 15,000 at Bridgestone Arena.

It was a move that surprised everyone in the crowd, and served as a reminder of the colossal power she commands as a broker in the industry.

Did she fly Jagger in from London for one song? Was he hanging out in Nashville for something else? Jagger played LP Field with the Stones this past summer, and it marked the first time the Glimmer Twin had visited Music City in a long time. So Nashville is by no means a regular haunt for the rock icon.

Swift’s 18-song show, her second of a two-night stand in Nashville and heavy on tracks from 1989, proved to be a master class in showmanship and arena production, and Jagger’s appearance was just lagniappe — a WTF? moment that enhanced but didn’t define the night. Swift opened with “Welcome To New York,” sporting Wayfarers and a glitter warm-up jacket, backed by a dozen or so male dancers who on the opening number called to mind Biff’s futuristic squad from Back To The Future II. The jumbo-tron flashed with black and white images all night, in an effort to evoke the classic New York of Gatsby. Manhattan may be wildly overpriced and gentrified these days, with a Starbucks on every corner, but Swift’s vision of the city still contains “all the iridescence of the beginning of the world,” as Fitzgerald wrote, and it remains a dreamscape for reinvention, where you take your “broken hearts and put them in a drawer.”

As Swift transitioned to the second song, she shed the warm-up jacket like Larry Bird used to after the first round of the 3-point contest, revealing a black halter-top as she tore into fan favorite “New Romantics,” a bonus track from 1989. It was one of many outfit changes of the night.

Like any masterful politician, Swift knows how to play to the base— and the red-meat wing of the party is still young teenage girls. The high pitched shriek of the crowd when she first strode on stage affirmed that. One of Swift’s greatest talents is her ability to make the fans feel they are as much a part of the show — and her life — as anyone else. At one point she remarked that she recognized several in the crowd from their Instagram pics. (Before the show, fans even approached her dad for a photo op as he was milling about, for that one-degree of separation experience.)

Saturday’s show was punctuated with testimonials from her “squad” (Girls creator Lena Dunham, Victoria’s Secret models Karlie Kloss and Lily Aldridge, Selena Gomez et al.) about what it’s like to hang with Taylor. It’s not so much a lifestyle brand she’s selling a la Martha Stewart as it is the dream of a better, more glamorous existence. It’s the promise of Thunder Road, only this time Thunder Road leads to Xanadu and is populated with beautiful women, talented writers, pastries and cats with funny names. And no matter what your take is on the songs, and we at American Songwriter are bigs fans of her songwriting, naming 1989 one of the best albums of 2014, you can’t help but be inspired by the Horatio Alger ambition on display here, no matter what form your own dream takes.

When Swift delivered a solo acoustic take of “Fifteen” from Fearless, she dedicated it to Abigail, her best friend from high school, and gave a shout-out to Hendersonville High School, a moment that connected the dots between small-town Tennessee girl and world superstar. Watching her show, it’s easy to forget Swift was even associated with country music. And if any of Nashville’s country music stars had joined her onstage Saturday night it would have been, well, a let-down. At another point Swift delivered a monologue about staying true to yourself and shaking off the haters, in her case the tabloid gossip that has dogged her dating life, and she became visibly emotional. “If anyone tells you you are uncool, they’re wrong,” she said.

Tickets for the event were not cheap. As of show time, some seats on the floor were listed on Stubhub for as much as $2,000. There were entire families in tow Saturday night and it was clear that not all of these dads were dentists with disposable incomes. But for so many of their kids, it must have been the highlight of their year. “Every time I get to hang out with you is the happiest I am,” she said near the end of the show, and no doubt many in the crowd returned the sentiment.

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

I wrote this poem about the Voyager 1 exhibit at Seed Space, an installation art gallery in Nashville.

It was 1977.
We needed a dream
to rise up
and stoke “our capacity for wonder,”
as Fitzgerald would say.
Elvis was dead,
New York City was dark,
and there were Saturday night fevers
that just wouldn’t break.

So we fired you up,
cut the apron strings
and let you fly.
Over Jupiter and Saturn,
past pitiful old Pluto even.

But it gets lonely living “out there”
and thinking “out there.”
Just ask Icarus.
He left Earth and got burned by the sun.

But now
a little purple light
in a dark room in Nashville
that moves in shades
of red and blue and green
let’s us know
our old friend,
the robot,
is still out there,
still moving and shaking,
still talking back
to anyone
who will listen.

And since our friend left,
Carl Sagan has died,
and the pale blue dot we call home is burning.
And now Jimmy Carter has cancer.
But his Georgia farm boy voice
is with you, Voyager
and will be for a billion years.
And so is the cry of that baby
and the sounds of Bach and Beethoven,
of Blind Willie Johnson and “Johnny B. Goode.”

I hope someone finds you
and your record collection
before your race is run.

But they might not.
Sometimes love letters get lost in the mail.

But this little purple light
let’s us know
for now
that you were here
and there
and so were we.

In Due Time

American Songwriter Editor’s Note, September/October 2015

Jason Isbell turned heads in the music industry when his album Something More Than Free catapulted to the top of the Billboard country charts in June. When the news broke, left of center singer-songwriter Todd Snider – who served as the officiant of Isbell’s wedding ceremony – took to Facebook and declared “the war was over” and that Jason Isbell “saved country music.” No one could continue to complain any more, he said, that independent artists couldn’t compete with their radio-friendly cousins on a commercial level. “That’s the thing Nashville wouldn’t let everybody do,” Snider wrote. “Well, somebody did it and nobody stopped him. Without changing his music, and without changing his clothing, Jason Isbell did it.”

The battle between Americana and Wal-Mart radio country has been raging ever since the rise of alt-country in the mid-’90s, playing out like a micro-level NPR versus Fox News culture war. They represent two different aesthetics and serve two different markets. But within the last year, traditionally-minded country artists (Chris Stapleton, Kacey Musgraves, Ashley Monroe) have begun making serious waves within the established Nashville machine.

Much of this likely has to do with the backlash against “bro-country” as the reigning style of country radio. Jay Rosen of New York Magazine coined the term “bro-country” in 2013 to describe the Florida Georgia Line song “Cruise.” Since then, this subgenre of country music devoted to tailgates, beer, and scantily-clad girls has become the favorite punching bag of country music preservationists. (In many ways, these tirades have grown more tiresome than “bro-country” itself.) And songwriters on Music Row seem who can’t operate in the bro vein have experienced a crisis of faith with respect to their craft.

But bro-country has sold, and country music in Nashville has always been a business first. Chet Atkins used to joke that the “Nashville sound,” a slicker, pop-friendly production style that developed in the late ’50s and replaced the more rough-and-ready honky-tonk, was the sound of money jingling in his pocket.

*****
Our cover artist Chris Stapleton is the perfect example of a Music Row artist who has found critical and commercial success while remaining faithful to his artistic vision. He came to Nashville with quite literally just a dream and is now regarded as one of the best writers and singers in town. Stapleton got signed to a publishing deal shortly after showing up in Music City and then started a bluegrass group called The SteelDrivers that still continues without him to this day. After leaving The SteelDrivers, he started the Jompson Brothers, a rowdy Southern rock outfit in the vein of ZZ Top.

Stapleton once told me that he doesn’t like to mix genres when he’s writing. If it’s bluegrass, he keeps it bluegrass. If it’s Southern rock, Southern rock. His new album Traveller is old-school country, but without sounding self-consciously retro, and peaked at No. 2 on the country Billboard charts. It’s a veritable banger, and he’s even earned shout-outs from Justin Timberlake. It’s just amazing that it took so long for such a singular talent to finally get his due as a solo artist in his own right.

Another ascendant songwriter featured in these pages is John Moreland, whose latest album High On Tulsa Heat has generated a steady amount of buzz among Nashville’s songwriting community. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard other Music City songwriters rave about this Oklahoma rambler, and this is a town that often succumbs to a kind of “I’ve heard it all before” weltschmerz. One songwriting friend, who caught his show earlier this summer at the 5 Spot in East Nashville, said it was the first time in a long time he can remember hearing an artist who kept him stock-still, rapt in awe, for the entirety of the show. With artists like Moreland and Stapleton in our midst, the future definitely looks good.

Goin’ Up Country: Wildwood Revival Delivers The Goods in Georgia

Please pick up your trash, this is not Bonnaroo.”

Those words greeted us on a sign that marked the entrance to the Wildwood Revival campgrounds this past weekend, moments after a volunteer warned us a rattlesnake had been spotted near one of the patron’s tents.  “They bush-hogged it the other day and it stirred some stuff up, so keep an eye out, boys,” he told us.

There was no chance of anyone mistaking Wildwood for Bonnaroo. Now in its third year, this finely curated music and culture festival is the epitome of a laid-back Southern hang.

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Wildwood is held on 30 acres of rolling farm country in northeast Georgia, about a twenty-minute drive from Athens. An 1850s antebellum mansion sits prominently at the front of the property. This year’s event was capped at 500 entrants and at times gave off the air of an over-sized Southern wedding. It was a far cry from the bacchanalia that is Bonnaroo — no toplessness here, no candy-flippers frolicking in mushroom fountains, no appeals to the lunatic fringe.

The two-day event featured 15 musical acts and leaned heavily on rootsy singer-songwriter fare (Joe Fletcher, Lindi Ortega, Kelsey Waldon among them), with some more rocking ensembles (Water Liars, Blackfoot Gypsies, American Aquarium) thrown in for good measure.

In addition to the music, all of which took place from a stage nestled at the front of an open-air barn, the weekend offered a wide spectrum of life’s finer things: farm-to-table cuisine, craft beer, a pop-up vintage clothing store, Civil War-era tintype photographic portrait sessions for patrons, wiffle ball, an early morning yoga session, and more.

So it was as much an all-around chill-out as it was a music event. Once the province of neo-hippies and jam bands, the music festival as we know it is a constantly evolving beast, offering a little something for everybody, if they know where to look. Some festivals are run so well it’s easy to get spoiled as a music fan. In the age of the Internet and human isolation, these type of affairs also make for great social events, giving patrons to chance to kick back and make new friends with kindred spirits.

We arrived on grounds late Saturday afternoon to find Joe Fletcher and the Wrong Reasons engaged in a rowdy set amid some Deep South August humidity. (My photographer marked time that day by the arc of the sweat stain on my friend Will’s T-shirt.) Fletcher, who cut his teeth in the Providence, Rhode Island music scene but moved to Nashville years ago, led the crowd in a sweaty sing-along of “Mabel Gray,” an original tune by Brown Bird, the solo project of David Lamb, a Providence musician and friend of Fletcher’s who passed away from leukemia in 2014. Fletcher’s band, which featured Texas singer-songwriter Brian Wright on lead guitar, closed the set with a rootsy, down-home version of the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for the Man.”

Another highlight on Saturday came from Water Liars, a three-piece from Oxford, Mississippi who takes its name from a short story by Barry Hannah, the other great writer who made his home in Oxford. They delivered their brand of Crazy-Horse styled Southern rock as the drummer took sips of beer from a sports water bottle between songs.

Canadian songstress Lindi Ortega, who served up a sea of heartbreak ballads along with a cover of Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz,” was the last performer to take the stage. Her set was followed by the Keep On Movin’ dance party, a DJ set of national renown that goes down every Monday at East Nashville’s 5 Spot. Their playlist, heavy on the Motown, made for the perfect ending to a great day of music.

Fourth Time Around

–Editor’s note from American Songwriter’s July/August 2015 edition

Bob Dylan’s song “Fourth Time Around,” which is featured on his 1966 album Blonde on Blonde, is generally read as the American songwriter’s response to The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)”. Dylan’s words are silly and playful, and come off as a parody of the lyrics that John Lennon wrote for his tune. The title seemingly refers to the boomeranging of influences The Beatles and Dylan exerted on each other in the early years of their stardom. (Dylan also turned The Beatles on to pot, another watershed moment for the Fab Four.) 

“Norwegian Wood” was recorded in 1965 and represented Lennon’s first real Dylan impression. When Lennon first heard The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1964, he played it over and over. His songwriting would never be the same from then on. Even tunes like “Working Class Hero” from his solo catalog years later bear strong Dylan fingerprints.  

“Fourth Time Around” is somewhat illustrative of the relationship between British and American folk and popular music. Throughout the centuries, the music of each country has played off each other in one long ricochet, almost to the point that they they’ve become two sides of the same coin.  

American folk music really begins with the ballads of the British Isles, some of which go back as far as the 13th century. In this issue, we take a close look at the Child ballads, a 10- volume collection of more than 300 songs that was originally published in the late 1800s. Many of these songs made it across the Atlantic via oral transmission and took deep root in Appalachia, becoming standards in old-time music. These tunes populate the songbook of the “old, weird America,” as music writer Greil Marcus so famously dubbed it. “Barbara Allen,” the most famous of the Child ballads, tells the story of “Sweet William” who lay on his deathbed for the love of a girl who didn’t return it. The folklorist Alan Lomax said the song “traveled west with every wagon” during the settling of the frontier, and Dylan said it was the inspiration for “Girl of the North Country.” The tune is part of the DNA of American songwriting. 

We also look at the influence of traditional Irish music on American folk and bluegrass. Nashville-based musician Tim O’Brien noticed the connection early on in his education. “My great-grandfather was from Ireland, and when I started playing bluegrass and fiddle tunes, I started thinking, ‘Oh, these are really Irish tunes. I quickly realized that Bill Monroe – who was actually of Scotch heritage – I realized that his bluegrass music, and Irish music and Scottish music, were very closely intertwined.”  

Elsewhere in the issue, we break down The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers, an album that was recently reissued in Deluxe form just in time for their current stadium tour. The Stones wore their American influences on their sleeve, especially where the blues were concerned. It is one of the ironies of American music that it took a bunch of art-school kids from Britain to really shine a light on the treasure trove of blues music that had been grown on its own soil. Sticky Fingers is the album that really showcased the influence of Gram Parsons and American country music. And three of its standout tracks were recorded at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, in Sheffield, Alabama. A very American album, indeed.  

For our cover story, we catch up with Noel Gallagher, formerly of Britpop titans Oasis. Many of the songs Noel wrote for Oasis (“Wonderwall,” “Don’t Look Back In Anger,” “Champagne Supernova”) have aged well and stand as high-water marks of that musical era. His new solo album is called Chasing Yesterday, a title that addresses the burden of making new art in the wake of having created something iconic. Gallagher, always a funny and frank interview, also offers some keen insights on the difference between American and British rock. “If Oasis were American, we would have been awful, because we all would have learned to play our instruments, and I would have been doing two-hour guitar solos.” And on the flip side, it’s okay for American band to go for the Brit sound … just don’t sing with a fake British accent.

The Blues Issue

–from the Editor’s note of the American Songwriter May/June 2015 edition

The story of the photo gracing the cover of The Blues Issue is as beguiling as its subject, Robert Johnson. 

The picture is considered to be the third verified photograph of Johnson, the Mississippi-born musician regarded as the King of the Delta Blues Singers. (Johnson is the man pictured on the left; on the right we see Johnny Shines, a Memphis-born bluesman who traveled and played with Johnson on and off throughout the ’30s.) 

Johnson is, of course, one of the more mysterious figures in American music. We know very little about his actual life; so little, in fact, that a Greek-sized myth took shape around him –namely, that he sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for guitar brilliance.  

In his short life, the man from Hazlehurst, Mississippi made just 29 recordings. But even so, his small body of work would go on to alter the course of American folk and popular music. Johnson died at age 27, after being poisoned at the hands of a jealous husband whom he allegedly cuckolded, or so the story goes. 

The history of the “third Johnson photo”unfolds like detective fiction. Zeke Schein, a Robert Johnson enthusiast and guitar merchant who works at Matt Umanov Guitars in New York City’s West Village, stumbled on it back in 2005 while looking at vintage guitars on eBay. The photo was advertised as “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B.B King???”.  

Schein soon realized that neither of the gentlemen in the photo was King. The asymmetrical left eye and long, bony fingers of the figure on the left were tell-tale signs. This could very well be Robert Johnson, he thought to himself. Schein placed a bid on the photo and ended up acquiring it for $2,200. He still owns it to this day, though he assigned the copyright to the Johnson estate. “It’s their family and I thought it was the right thing to do,”he says.   

Over the last decade, there has been much dispute as to whether this is in fact Johnson pictured. Lois Gibson, one of the world’s leading forensic experts, issued a sworn affidavit in recent years attesting that it is the famous bluesman. Claud Johnson, Robert’s son, has always maintained that it is his father.  And even if this isn’t Johnson or Shines, the photo itself is an undisputed masterpiece, a pictorial tomb of the unknowns for the bluesmen of old. 

Based on his research, Schein now believes the photo was taken circa 1935, which would put it close to the time of the Johnson “cigarette photo.”Schein says the type of suit sported by Johnny Shines in this picture –a style similar to the “zoot suits”that became popular in the African-American community in the 1940s –was around much earlier than he previously thought. We do not know who took the photo or where it was taken and likely never will. Before he died in 1992, Shines said a woman named Johnnie Mae Crowder took a photo of him and Johnson in Arkansas, but that tidbit of trivia has not been corroborated.  

Johnson has been called the best of all blues guitarists by more than one authority, Keith Richards and Eric Clapton among them. Schein thinks the hype is well justified. “He was, in my opinion, the Jimi Hendrix of his time period,”he says. “I feel like Robert Johnson definitely borrowed heavily from people who came before him, but he put it out in a way that was his own voice, in my opinion …and it was the origins of what we came to accept as rock music.” In this issue, we look at the legacy of Robert Johnson and the work of the foundation. Robert’s grandson, Steven, is calling on today’s musicians to help carry the mantle of Johnson’s legacy. “We want those people that he inspired and those that talk so highly of him to reach out and become a part of what we’re doing now,”he says. 

Elsewhere in this issue, we take a liberal definition of the blues. In addition to profiling hardcore bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta, the Piedmont region of Carolinas, and Texas and Chicago, we look at a few New Orleans jazz cats as well as singers like Billie Holiday, all of whom played the blues in one way or another.  

Today, the blues can be read as a living, breathing document of the plight of African-Americans in the Jim Crow South. It’s “folk music”in the strictest sense of the term. But the blues is much more than that. It’s dance music, it’s jukebox music, and for contemporary blues artists like ‘Keb ‘Mo, it’s a vehicle for positive expression. So it’s not always about being down and out.

Steve Earle on the Making of “Terraplane,” And Then Some …

Steve Earle’s old friend has always been the blues, but never has the prolific and mercurial songwriter released a quote unquote blues album. But that will change on February 17 with the arrival of Terraplane Blues, an album that takes its name from the Robert Johnson song about fast cars and even faster women.

Earle, who currently resides in New York City, cut the record this fall in Nashville at House of Blues studios over a 6-day stretch with his band the Dukes. It’s a bit of a breakup album, he says, what with it coming on the heels of his recent split with singer-songwriter Allison Moorer. Terraplane is a raw and dirty affair sonically, and moves from acoustic East Texas blues numbers to boogie-rock to early Stones-type ballads, with one spoken-word piece in iambic pentameter thrown in for good measure. The record was produced by R.S. Field and is being released by New West Records.

We hung out with Earle in the studio  and chatted about the album, and a host of other topics, including the Shakespeare authorship controversy, where Elvis really learned how to “shake it,” and why Earle’s writing songs for ABC’s Nashville.

So how long have you been thinking about making a blues album?
For a while.

I’d thought about doing it at some point as long as seven or eight years ago. I basically had a couple of things going. I wrote some songs that aren’t on this record, and they were sort of headed in one direction, and then the blues songs started to come along. And I don’t know why, but I decided that I’d make a blues record and then I’d make a country record, so that’s what I’m going to do. The country record’s like half-written. And some of the stuff [on the country record] I wrote for Nashville, just because T-Bone [Burnett] asked me to.

The TV show?

Yeah.

Now when I think of Steve Earle making a blues album, I think of the Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins kind of stuff.

That’s there, but I decided on the Mance thing – there’s a Mance thing and a Lightnin’ thing. You know, Lightnin’ played with a band whenever he could. Mance didn’t, but I don’t think it was a choice. What Mance really did was he played dance music on one guitar when he first started out. So we did a thing that’s very much Mance, but we did it with a band. It’s all acoustic. You know, I’m playing guitar and Chris [Masterson] was playing a baritone resonator. I think that’s what he’s playing. We’ll get drums on it, and upright bass. It’s very much the kind of thing Mance did, the sort of in-between blues and ragtime. I mean, there’s no such thing as between blues and ragtime. There are people that, most of them wearing bowling shirts, will probably listen to this record and say that some of it’s not the blues. But they would be mistaken.
And “Tipitina” is the blues. It’s the 16-bar blues. And pre-war “St. James Infirmary” is the blues. So that stuff’s included. There’s a boogie. I chose Canned Heat rather than ZZ Top for that path. But there’s one song that’s based on the fact that I very much believe, for me, where I come from, the first two ZZ Top records are blues records. And that one track that rocks pretty hard is kind of from that.

So is “Terraplane Blues” your favorite Robert Johnson tune?

No, my favorite Robert Johnson tune is probably “From Four Until Late.” “Terraplane” just seemed like a good title. It’s a car. It’s a fast car. I’ve never wanted to learn how to play “Terraplane,” and I don’t know for sure if I will do it. I’m trying to figure if I can do it. It’s a hard song to sing, so I gotta find some version of it that works for me. [If I do record it], it’ll be an extra track. You have to have an extra track or two.

I know you’re a big patron of Matt Umanov’s guitars in Greenwich Village. 
I’m a big patron of guitar shops in general.

I understand you’re friends with Zeke Schein who works there. He’s a big Robert Johnson guy. 

Zeke knows more about this stuff than anybody that I know. I spent hours talking to him about this record. He knows what tuning all the songs are in. Zeke’s a really good player. He plays all that shit.

Do you think the general perception of blues these days is that it was just a form of folk music and that the dance element and the popular element of what blues used to be in the ‘30s and ‘40s has gotten lost?

Yeah, I mean that’s one thing – this record’s got a song that’s sort of based on “Smoke Stack Lightning.” And “Smoke Stack” – all those Chess records were jukebox records. They were made for people to dance to. They weren’t long and there wasn’t a lot of improvisation on them. They were improvising, but there wasn’t a shitload of long solos because they wrote two minute and 30 second records. And that’s represented here. But it very much sounds like this band. It’s the best band I’ve ever had. The existence of the band was part of the inspiration for making the record. Finally doing it had as much to do with Chris being in the band as anything else because I never had the guitar player to do it.

Did your time in New Orleans working on HBO’s Treme inform this album? 

Absolutely.

It wasn’t until recently that I learned that “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It” was actually taught to Hank Williams by that blues musician who’s from New Orleans.

“Tee Tot” [Rufus Payne] is the story … I don’t know how much there is [to all that] … there’s all those stories about how black music and white music … I don’t know. The legend says that Elvis got all those moves from watching black gospel groups and watching bands on Beale Street. I know where he got everything he got. It was from Wally Fowler. Wally Fowler was the founder of the Oak Ridge Boys. He was the first white gospel singer to perform the way that black gospel groups did. You know, to not just stand there. He was the first real showman in white gospel music and he founded the Oak Ridge Boys. And there’s been an Oak Ridge Boys ever since.

When Guitar Town was written I was writing for Sunberry/Dunbar, which belonged to the Oak Ridge Boys and was run by my publisher, Noel Fox, who was the last bass singer in a non-secular version of the Oak Ridge Boys. Oak Ridge Boys are a gospel group. And [Richard] Sterban took over. Sterban came from J.D. Sumner, who replaced Noel because Noel quit. Noel went out and worked for Olan Mills or something, you know, selling people pictures of themselves for years. When the Oaks got big they brought Noel back to run their publishing company. He was a great song man. He’s gone now, but there would be no Guitar Town without Noel. He told me to write an album and not worry whether or not it would get you a record deal, and I had just lost my first record deal after being here for 12 or 13 years. I was pretty discouraged, and didn’t have much faith in myself as a writer anymore. And I wrote the songs that became Guitar Town in about 11 months.

But I heard all the war stories from him and from the Oaks and from those guys during that period, and they set me straight on where Elvis got that shit, and I believe it’s true. It just makes more sense. I went back and found a couple of films of Wally Fowler performing and [I was like] “ohhh …”

But it took a while to get poor white people and poor black people at each other’s throats, and it didn’t always take. There was already someone who was interested, like upper middle class kids like Sam Phillips slummin’ just because they loved the music. He ended up starting Sun Records, that kind of stuff. So you know, it couldn’t stay contained forever, the two things. And Sam knew, and that’s not a legend. He looked for years and [said], “If I can find a white kid, a good looking white kid who can sing this stuff, then I’m going to get rich.” He didn’t get as rich as he should have, but he got rich.

You’ve got a history of borrowing from the blues lexicon in your own tunes. And you taught that course at the Old Town School of Folk Music years ago, I think it was titled “The Cool Shit To Steal.” How do you walk that line between borrowing from traditional material and coming up with original stuff? You know, so much of the folk tradition is obviously about borrowing. 

It is, but in the blues it’s really tricky because it’s a limited genre. Some of this stuff is definitely post-Bob Dylan blues. Dylan started making blues records on purpose a long time ago. It begins on Bringing It All Back Home and it’s fully realized on Highway 61. Everything is in a blues form from that point on for a while, until probably Nashville Skyline or John Wesley Harding maybe. And I thought that it would be sort of fun to do something where I didn’t necessarily have to come up with a lot of melodies, that I would find at least the components for the melodies in this toolbox that’s called the blues.

Some of it’s more original that I thought it would be, melodically. The lyrics I pushed as hard as I’ve ever pushed. Some of the best lyrics I’ve ever written are on this record. I wrote a spoken word piece in iambic pentameter again. That’s me making up for my lack of education. I didn’t get a chance to write in iambic pentameter in high school because I only got halfway through the 9th grade.

So are you still a big Shakespeare buff?

Yeah. I don’t think that the glovemaker’s son wrote those plays, but yeah. I think Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote them. So does the greatest Shakespearean actor of our time, so did Mark Twain, so does Meryl Streep.

I don’t know if I believe that. Is there evidence?

There’s tons of evidence. There’s evidence both ways. You should read all the books and make up your own mind about it. There’s no way it was a bunch of people. It was one person, in my mind, and it pisses Billy Bragg off because he thinks I’m being elitist, and I’m far from an elitist.

There’s no way [it was] someone who’d never been to Italy, was illiterate, or in other words couldn’t form words, and that’s probably true of Shakespeare and most actors of his time. He could read but he couldn’t write, because that was a much harder thing to learn to do then. He had no intimate knowledge of life at court, and didn’t have political protection to keep him from getting his fucking head chopped off with some of the things he was parodying and some of the things he was writing about when he was writing them.

So the theory about de Vere is that he was either Elizabeth’s son or Elizabeth’s lover. Some people even think both. My guess is that he was her son, or somehow related to her, anyway. And so he got away with it. But it’s one person, it’s a singular genius voice. There’s no way it was more than one person, no way there was more than one person that brilliant in Elizabethan England, when there were only a 100,000 people in London and the whole area. It just doesn’t make sense.

Like with Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Their voices were so different from the Shakespeare plays, there’s just no way …

Yeah, and Ben Jonson is where a lot of the clues that it may have been de Vere come from. Ben Jonson wrote the preface to the First Folio, he’s the one who called him “The Soul Of The Age” and all that stuff. And they all were writing really great stuff, but nobody was writing anything like that. And nobody really emulated him in his time. Shortly after he died people did. And he became a big deal – Shakespeare’s plays were being staged and they were hits in London. And at that moment Elizabeth was patronizing theater. She didn’t go out to the theater, she couldn’t do that, but plays were brought in and performed at court. And she was the very first monarch in Europe that did that, which is another clue.

But there are a lot of books about it, and there’s a lot of evidence, and people are horrified of it. There’s a film called Anonymous that’s about the authorship and it’s just a shoot-em-up. Every theory is about Edward de Vere being the actual William Shakespeare, and who the real William Shakespeare was, and why he got set up. I think it’s really simple. I think he had to have a front because he was the Earl of Oxford and he couldn’t be a playwright, so I think he just set up a guy and paid him, because Shakespeare retired and went back to his hometown and set himself up in a wool business and fucking sold wool for the rest of his life after becoming the greatest playwright and actor of his age. It just doesn’t make sense.

He was a hoarder too; he hoarded grain during the plague, which was a bad thing to do.

Yeah, he was a businessman. That’s what he was. He was a Republican. But yeah, I believe that.

(American Songwriter, April 2015)

Rag and Bone

(Editor’s Note: American Songwriter, Jan/Feb 2015)

It’s close to midnight on the day before we go to press. For the last two weeks I have worked around the clock on this issue, taking breaks only to eat and sleep. I had planned to say some grand and eloquent things in this column about the magazine turning 30 but I’ve forgotten what exactly – my brain has turned to mush.  

Late-night sessions were a constant in the early days of my tenure here. I recall scrambling at the 2 a.m. hour in that cramped, musty office on Music Row to finish an issue right before deadline: feature-length articles copy-edited and designed in a flash and then fired off to the printer at the last second. I remember art director Rachel Briggs blasting Creedence Clearwater Revival from her computer speakers one night for motivational purposes. I will now blast CCR as I try to write this note, for old time’s sake.

****

No one expected this magazine to reach 30. Like Keith Richards, we are supposed to be dead. But here we are, on our birthday, about to release our biggest issue in six years. Damn.

It’s been fun – no other job could offer more in that category. As I think back on my time at American Songwriter I am flooded with memories of various adventures going down in far-flung corners all over the country: rooftop shows at SXSW in the pre-dawn hours; 15-hour road trips listening to George Strait’s sixty No. 1’s ; a music cruise to Grand Cayman where we pranked hapless cruise-goers; lying awake in my tent all night on the campgrounds of MerleFest because a few old drunks wouldn’t stop playing “Wagon Wheel”; talking Hemingway with Guy Clark in his basement workshop amid a cloud of pot smoke. I could go on …

No magazine is an island, and there is a long and distinguished Honor Roll of folks who have made American Songwriter possible. The readers, for starters. Thank you for your support. Music inspires more passion than any of the arts and you are especially passionate. You keep us in check.

Vernell Hackett is the one who got this whole ball rolling. American Songwriter’s big bang moment occurred when Vernell, along with publisher Jim Sharp, decided to start a songwriting magazine out of the ashes of Country News, a widely circulated country fanzine that ran in the ’70s and early ’80s. It was Bobby Bare who told Vernell that she should hang out with songwriters, because they were “more fun.” She took it to heart, a magazine was born, and the rest is history.

Regime change came in 2004 when Robert Clement, Tom Clement and Doug Waterman bought the magazine. Robert and Doug (read: “The Mobile, Alabama Mafia”) increased circulation logarithmically, giving it a seat on the international stage. How they pulled it off is beyond me. In the years they ran the magazine the worlds of journalism and music were in extremis, to say the least. There was also the worst economic climate since the Great Depression to contend with.

I don’t think Robert slept for eight years. 4 a.m. e-mails with his signature were not uncommon. If it wasn’t for their herculean efforts – often at great personal sacrifice – I wouldn’t be writing this column right now. And thanks to current owner Albie Del Favero for staying true to the mission of the magazine and continuing to improve its quality and reach over the last few years.

I want to salute all the writers and contributors who have given their best to AS no matter how modest the assignment, how paltry the pay. I have been humbled and inspired by the quality of your work, issue after issue. Writing is a tough gig and you have to be crazy to attempt it as a profession. I admire your guts.

I began working at American Songwriter in 2009, shortly after arriving in Nashville. When I got here I was awestruck by the wealth of creative talent in this town. The artist is supposed to be the exception in society, but in Nashville, the artist is the rule: a sociological rarity, to be sure. Here you can say you’re a songwriter and it’s considered an honorable trade. In other places people would just think you’re nuts.  Thanks to the musicians and songwriters from Nashville and elsewhere who have granted interviews over the years, played our parties, and serenaded our offices. You are the taproot of everything we do.

I have made some great friends through this job and met some very cool people. I respect their values and the way they choose to live their lives. It serves as affirmation for my own chosen path. I don’t take that for granted.

Okay, I’m turning off the Creedence now. Enough is enough. Time for some Stones. I’ll be up for a few more hours on account of this Red Bull. Here’s to 30 more years, American Songwriter. Our revels have not ended.

Mrs. Claus Tired Of Role As “Stay-At-Home Wife,” May Seek Separation From Santa Claus Citing Infidelity

Mrs. Claus has tired of her role as stay-at-home wife and is thinking of leaving Santa, according to a soon-to-be-published 8,000 word expose in the North Pole Reader. 

Gretchen Claus, who met Santa in late 1849 amid the swinging Paris scene, is seeking a new life, close friends and business associates say.

In this “tell-all” article, friends and prominent North Pole socialites reveal to the North Pole Reader that her relationship with Mr. Claus has been under considerable strain over the last few decades amid reports of Santa having affairs with leagues of women, many of them married, in more than 100 countries around the world. Santa’s “mistletoe excuse,” once a reliable “get-out-of-jail-free card,” is no longer holding water with Mrs. Claus. 

“’Tis the season, my ass,” she is alleged to have told one of the elves.

Since 2010, Mrs. Claus has worked part time as a consultant in the shipping business. She received an online degree in business via The University of Phoenix in 2009. Her clients include the Tooth Fairy and U.S. Postal Service. 

The article alleges that Santa has resorted to using dextroamphetamine to stay awake during his travel. His drug habit, friends say, has impaired his ability to deliver the right goods to the right children. The drugs have also reduced his appetite to a considerable degree, meaning mountains of cookies and oceans of milk have gone to waste the night before Christmas. 

Further, the Elf On The Shelf, a Yuletide trend that has surfaced in recent years, is a mole employed by Mrs. Claus to keep surveillance over her sex-crazed husband, the article says.

Once thought of as diligent workers, the Elves Workers Union has become more of an issue for the Claus operation as they demand less hours and better pay. Many of the elves have filed lawsuits alleging abuses vis-a-vis the North Pole Disability Act. Also, Mrs. Claus went gluten free in 2012 and has insisted the elves make gluten-free cookies, a change in policy that was met with great protest.

“It’s a different time,” one of the elves told the Reader, speaking on condition of anonymity. “It used to be fun. Now, it’s just a paycheck. “

Dark Star

I first saw Ryan Adams perform during the Goldtour in the winter of 2002. It was in Munich at the Georg-Elser-Hallen, an ill-lit music venue named after a German carpenter who tried to kill Hitler in 1939.

 It was a good show. Bucky Baxter, a former member of Bob Dylan’s band and the father of Rayland, played steel guitar. I don’t know why but I heckled him. Watching a rock and roll show in a hall full of Germans is a strange experience. They are not there to boogie, they are not there to rage. Rock and roll appears a wholly alien creature.  

 By the time of that show, Adams had two solo albums under his belt, including his debut on Bloodshot Records, Heartbreaker, already regarded then as something of an indie classic. Two years before, he had disbanded his star-crossed country band Whiskeytown after ditching his homeland of North Carolina for New York.  

 In recent interviews Adams has been dismissive of his work in Whiskeytown, calling the songs “style appropriation” of a type of music – “country” – that he doesn’t really care for. But those albums are still revered by so many. There are no better songs about feeling disconnected in the South, and yet, his imaginative renderings of life in small-town North Carolina betray a deep sense of affection for the place, crooked though those renderings may be. 

 My favorite Ryan Adams songs are the ones where he’s singing about the South, usually from some place outside of it. His songwriter voice, at times, comes off like the Quentin Compson of the American songbook. He’s the Southern kid  living up North who has to explain the mysteries of the dark and bloody ground after being asked by a Yankee, “Why do you hate it?” 

Of course there are so many kinds of Ryan Adams songs. A quick trip through his extensive back catalog is a schizoid experience and unfolds like a survey course through a myriad ofstyles of American popular music, from rock to country to New Wave to metal to hardcore punk.

His new self-titled album was recorded and self-produced at his PAX-AM studio in Los Angeles and released on an imprint of the same name. It comes at you full throttle like a shot of ‘80s adrenaline, and makes you wanna pull out that yellow Sony Walkman and Vision Shredder skateboard that you got for Christmas in 1987 and just go to town. The album cover art itself is decidedly ’80s. It features a pixilated selfie and appears to mimic the cover art of 1984’s Reckless by Bryan Adams, his almost namesake, an album released on November 5 of that year, Ryan’s 10th birthday.

 By all accounts Adams seems to be at a personal and professional high-point. His PAX-AM studio sounds like it’s his ideaof an idyllic paradise, an important psychic base from which he can make and produce music unfettered by the demands of the music industry. (Adams recently produced albums for Ethan Johns, Jenny Lewis and Fall Out Boy.) He seems to be following the path laid out by Jack White, an artist Adams recently praised for subverting the traditional model of the record industry with his Third Man Records operation.  

 In this issue, we take a good look at the music scene in Los Angeles. We visit some of the city’s best singer-songwriter venues, including the Grand Ole Echo, which hosts a Sunday old-timey jam that almost sounds like a back-porch hang in Nashville. We also stop in at the Hotel Café, an L.A. institution that has served as a key meeting place and clubhouse for musicians during the last several years.

 We take a look at the musical history of Laurel Canyon, the epicenter of the folk-rock scene in the late ’60s, a place that created a musical ideal that still holds sway for a number of young acts today. We talk with a number of L.A. writers about the business of penning tunes for film and television, including Jenny Lewis, Robert Schwartmann of Rooney, and Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne. Writing for the screen is a different beast and requires the writer to learn a new language. In the television world, those who can produce their own material stand at an advantage, as directors are looking to keep the payroll down to a minimum.

 And don’t forget to check out our annual Holiday Gear Guide. This year we feature nothing but guitars, most of which come in well under a $1,000. They won’t break the bank like so many that are fresh out of the factory. Happy holidays.