 |
||
|
Mary Gauthier Gurf Morlix Holly Williams Justin Townes Earle Stella Parton Diana Jones Sam Baker Joe Ely The Wilders
Silver tongued Roach bends the truth A.J. Roach admits to being a liar – in the nicest possible way. The singer, songwriter and guitarist from Scott County, Virginia, who has charmed Scottish audiences over the past five years with his wonderfully distinctive singing style and gripping stories drawn from backwoods life, doesn’t believe that anyone is so interesting that they can write songs solely about themselves. So he makes bits up, bends the truth. Sometimes the truth only needs bent a little to make a line scan better. Take Grandaddy, where Roach sings about a character who ‘used to press five cent pieces from the ore on the side of the hill.’ This was actually his father’s grandfather and the coins he counterfeited were silver dollars. The problem was, the silver was so pure that when Grandaddy dropped one on the table, it would land with a thud instead of bouncing. So he ground glass from milk bottles into the powder and made his home-made money realistic enough to spend. As the song goes on to say, if Grandaddy had realised what he’d tapped into on that hill and staked a claim, instead making just enough dollars to buy his own basic needs, he wouldn’t have had to run the risk of arrest for counterfeiting or for carrying on his real business as a provider of illicit hooch – white lightning – to the county. His great-grandson also would probably have been too rich to bother with the troubadour’s life. So perhaps we should all give our thanks for Grandaddy not being greedy. Roach’s upbringing on a farm in a ‘holler’ with a population of some sixty or seventy souls is a world away from his life now in “Going to college was a huge culture shock,” says Roach, who returns to Singing had been part of his life since he started going to church at the age of three and he credits this with giving him a vocal tone that sounds very old, even ghostly. “I think it’s just a vocal colour that you’re exposed to in rural Roach’s musical guide at church was his uncle, who lived on the same farm and without children of his own came to regard A.J. and brother Travis as his own. When a teenage A.J. found a guitar under his father’s bed and his father, an otherwise very patient man, proved less than wonderful as a teacher, his uncle took over, showing him some of the songs they heard coming from the radio on a Saturday when the local AM station closed down and the Grand Ole Opry came blasting out of Nashville. “Looking back, we were pretty isolated down there,” says Roach. “We didn’t watch much TV - we only had two channels – and although we knew the world was out there, we assumed that everybody lived the way we did, working on a farm and playing instruments. We’d see things on TV but that was television, we thought it was made up. That’s why going to college was such a culture shock.” A lot of Roach’s background may have gone into his songs and it may be a background that speaks from another age but he’s also capable of tapping into things that everybody can relate to, such as broken hearts and disappointment, in the here and now. And if people haven’t actually done some of the things he sings about – he didn’t actually set off to kill the local sheriff either – his talent as a storyteller can draw them into a narrative and make them feel that they’re actually witnessing these events. His two albums to date, Dogwood Winter and Revelation, are full of incident, atmosphere and observations that show an artist’s eye for description. “I’m actually looking at songwriting more and more from the point of view of a visual artist,” he says. “If you look at the work of the Dutch masters, these paintings are so real they look like photographs and if you look at modern art, that can be just as powerful and beautiful but it feels like what you want it to feel like. So there are some songs where you take the listener down a certain path all the way to the conclusion and there are songs where I want to give them a few options and they can draw their own conclusions. It’s a more interactive way of songwriting – they can decide themselves what it’s about. So you have the pictorial style and the abstract style but essentially what I really want is to be really good at both of them.” From The Herald, July 23, 2010.
Mary Gauthier - Songs of a foundling
Mary Gauthier paced up and down in front of the telephone, trying to pluck up the courage to dial the number on her notepad. For six hours she sweated over making that call, having already spent six months building up to it. When she finally made it, it was, she says, the hardest thing she’ll ever have to do in her life because the woman at the other end was her mother and they’d never spoken before. “I didn’t even know why I wanted to call her,” says the New Orleans-born singer-songwriter. “I was thinking, I’m forty-five, I don’t need a mother but in the end I decided that what I wanted to do was thank her for giving me a life.” Gauthier’s mother was twenty-one and unmarried when she became pregnant in 1961. Times were different then. The stigma of being an unmarried mother would have brought shame and social exclusion, so the young Mary was given up for adoption and brought up by a family who, she notes, were olive skinned Italians with a French name. “I didn’t look like my adoptive family,” says Gauthier, “and the odd thing is, after we’d spoken and cried all the way through that conversation, I asked my birth mother to send me a photograph of her – and I don’t look like her either. So that made me think, I am a foundling after all. The first time I heard that word I knew that I had to write a song called The Foundling.” She’s written more than a song. The Foundling grew into a concept album that could give that often maligned term a good name. Written and recorded over a period of two years, it tells the story of Gauthier’s search for her own identity. The track March 11, 1962, her date of birth, relates the conversation she had with her birth mother after Gauthier had hired someone to trace her and another song, Goodbye, tells of the feeling of emptiness, the “orphan feeling” that Gauthier had carried around with her for much of her life. It’s not all downbeat, though. In Sideshow, Gauthier sings of being ‘another truly troubled troubadour writing songs to even up the score.’ She’s being ironic. “Well, it wouldn’t be honest if it was all heavy,” she says. “You’ve gotta laugh at yourself and there’s humour in the story because there’s been humour in my life. Sure, there’s been trauma and drama along the way but it’s been a life worth living and I’ve got to become what I wanted to be; I’ve always been a big reader and I always wanted to be a writer, so I’m truly grateful because whatever stuff I’ve been through has given me what all writers need: a story.” Gauthier came late to songwriting. A twenty-four carat wild child who, at fifteen, stole the family car to run away from her adoptive home in Louisiana and celebrated her sixteen birthday in detox and her eighteenth in a Kansas City jail cell, she recovered from alcohol and drug addiction to become a successful restaurateur, only to fall off the wagon spectacularly following the opening of her own, award-winning restaurant in Boston. Music became her refuge and having, at the age of thirty-five, begun writing songs about the characters she’d met while stumbling through the years she says she’s lucky to have survived, she sold her restaurant, the Dixie Kitchen (a play on the Little Feat song title Dixie Chicken), in 1998 to take up music full-time. Her albums including Drag Queens in Limousines and Mercy Now won her admirers in the U.S. and Europe (she has Glasgow’s visionary music promoter, the late Billy Kelly to thank for the chance to find her still growing British audience) with the New York Daily News declaring that, if she kept up the standard of her 1997 album, Between Daylight and Dark, she might “one day assume the mantle of Johnny Cash.” The Foundling might be said to put her alongside another country music hero, Willie Nelson, who succeeded with Red Headed Stranger in creating an enduring, nay classic, concept album. “It’s a tough challenge to bring off,” says Gauthier, “because each song has to work on its own merits and then you have to fit them together to tell the tale. It certainly stretched me as a writer, although emotionally it wasn’t so difficult because I’d already lived through what I was writing about and I didn’t have to relive it to write it. I just needed the perspective that comes with maturity. There was always a sense of longing in my songs before because I was looking for my identity, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens when I start writing again.” As for her relationship with her birth mother, there isn’t one, she says. Unlike Gauthier’s friend and fellow adoptee, Diana Jones, who found her musical self as well as establishing contact, albeit slightly shaky, with her birth mother when she traced her real family, Gauthier doesn’t expect anything beyond that initial phone call. “She lied, basically. Nobody knows she had me because it would have been a huge taboo back then. It turns out that she later married a man with two children and when she told me that she’d raised them as if they were her own, it hurt. I was like, I’m your own. But I understand why she didn’t want to meet me and I know she didn’t mean to hurt me. She’s hurt herself by living a lie and keeping me as her shameful secret for nearly fifty years. So I bear her no ill-will. I’m just grateful that she had me and gave me the chance to be who I am.” From The Herald, May 28, 2010. Gurf Morlix - the relunctant award-winnerWhen Gurf Morlix won the Instrumentalist of the Year title at the Americana Music Awards in Nashville in September he was almost the last to know. A singer and songwriter in his own right, as well as guitarist, bassist and record producer with Lucinda Williams, the late Warren Zevon, Tom Russell, Mary Gauthier and Slaid Cleaves among his employers and clients, Morlix might have been excused had he claimed to be too busy to notice.
The truth was, he was away on tour, wasn’t paying too much attention to events back home and anyway, having been nominated in various awards before and never won, he’d banished this latest nomination from his mind.
“I don’t put much stock in awards, to be honest,” says the laid-back Morlix down the line from another stop on another tour. “For me, there is no best in music but when I got back and started checking my emails and found hundreds of messages of congratulations, I realised that this really meant something to these people. People like to see the people that matter to them being recognised and I felt honoured.”
Tangible recognition for Morlix’s talents has been a long time coming. Having taken up guitar as a teenager after seeing the Beatles’ famous appearance on the Ed Sullivan TV show in 1964, he became set on being a musician. He was playing in bands not long after getting his first guitar, often arriving at high school just a few hours after finishing the final set at one or other of the Buffalo area’s biker bars, and after leaving school went off in search of work on the next rung up the ladder and preferably in warmer climes than New York state.
After fetching up in Florida and then Texas, where he made his recording debut playing bass guitar on singer-songwriter Eric Taylor’s Shameless Love album, he moved to Los Angeles in 1981. There he worked with Dwight Yoakam, recorded with Jerry Lee Lewis on the Great Balls of Fire soundtrack and began an eleven-year association with Lucinda Williams, playing guitar, leading her touring band and producing her breakthrough, self-titled album.
“There was really nothing I ever wanted to do except play music,” he says. “I used to pretend to be sick so that I could stay off school and when my mum left me to go shopping, I’d sneak into my sister’s room and turn the dial on her radio till I heard something I liked.”
Morlix recounts moments like this and later, when he had his own rocket ship-shaped radio and listened through an ear-plug while pretending to be asleep, on his song Drums from New Orleans from his splendid recent album, Last Exit to Happyland. The defining moment was hearing the Everly Brothers’ Cathy’s Clown, the sound of Don and Phil’s voices convincing the youngster that this was what he wanted to do. The Beatles’ arrival simply shattered his parents’ resistance to his pleas for guitar lessons.
Touring with Lucinda Williams and Warren Zevon became a belated substitute for his parents’ forlorn hope that Morlix might go into further education.
“You learn from everyone, really, but with Warren, who was like no-one else who ever lived but was also a class act as a musician and a human being, I learned to respect the audience. He really showed that every night. He also showed me that you can write a song about anything and that was a really valuable lesson.”
The most valuable lesson Morlix was learning, however, was that, compared to the writers he was working with, his own songs weren’t good enough.
“I’d been writing for a long time, since my teens, and I’d come up with something that I thought sounded good until I listened to what Warren or Lucinda or any of the great songwriters - John Prine, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan at his best – were writing,” he says. “And I had to figure out how to make that leap to where you make what you’re writing compelling enough so that other people will want to listen to it. That’s not easy but working with great writers showed me that you can do it if you learn the craft. Sure, sometimes you’ll get a complete song tumbling out in fifteen minutes. But those occurrences are rare and I came to enjoy the act of rewriting and polishing and getting songs to say exactly what you want them to say.”
Having moved back to Texas in 1991 and built a studio in his house, Morlix became the go-to guy for whole platoons of the prodigious Austin music scene. The list of his notable musical associations and production jobs would fill the space allocated to this article – and more – but as much as Morlix will tell you that he benefited from being around talents such as Ray Wylie Hubbard and Buddy & Julie Miller, those same people were encouraging Morlix to record his own songs.
His first album, Toad of Titicata, released in 2000 when he was nearly fifty years old, came, he says, before he was ready. But in the nine years since then he’s really hit his stride, creating songs such as Madalyn’s Bones, about the mysterious disappearance of American Atheists founder Madalyn Murray O’Hair, which put him in the long tradition of ballad writers reporting events and give his concerts a great depth of character along with his entertaining way of imparting background information.
“Madalyn’s Bones was a song that was crying out to be written by someone – and I’m glad it was me,” he says. “It’s funny because people say you shouldn’t write about death and murder but Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley’s repertoires have way bigger body counts than a rapper like 50 Cent’s. Rap’s supposed to be like a newspaper set to music and that’s the aspect of songwriting I like. I want people to feel something when they hear my songs, maybe cry a little, laugh a little. I’m sure I’m telling them things they already know but if I can do it in a way they haven’t heard before, then I’ll be doing my job.”
From The Herald, Thursday, December 3, 2009.
Holly Williams - No Nashville short cuts for Hank's granddaughterWith her blonde, leggy good looks, she might have become a model and there was a time in her mid teens when she actually did some modelling, although only in a small, local way and not to the extent that’s been portrayed. Acting also appealed. But Holly Williams’ path in life was established at seventeen, the day her sister brought a guitar home and having learned a few chords, Holly found songs started arriving from nowhere. This wasn’t how it was meant to turn out. The grand-daughter of Hank Williams, the country music legend responsible for Your Cheatin’ Heart and a priceless catalogue of other songs completed in a life cut short, Holly had been shielded from her father, Hank Jnr’s on the road excesses as he coped with living up to the ‘son of Hank’ expectations through sex, drugs and onstage brawls.
“My dad didn’t want us to be around him when he was working because he didn’t want us to see him at his worst,” she says. “So we’d spend our time together on the family farm and I actually had to sneak into one of his concerts to see what all the fuss was about, back in the days when he was stripping to the waist and firing guns onstage. He didn’t really want any of us to go into music – he was just protecting us because he’d been pushed into the business by his mother – but when he saw that I was serious about it, he was very encouraging, told me to be myself and to take my time to develop my music.”
There would be no short cuts for Hank’s grand-daughter, and that’s the way Holly wanted it. Growing up with her mother – her parents divorced when she was nine – she wasn’t really aware of the Williams legacy. Her dad had only been three years old when Hank Snr died in his sleep while being driven to a gig overnight on New Years Eve 1952, and so had come to know his father second-hand, mostly from musicians who had played with him.
“People always ask what it’s like being Hank Williams’ grand-daughter and the truth is, I don’t really know,” says Holly. “My dad always talked about how funny he was, saying that despite the drugs and alcohol issues and all the sad songs he wrote, he remembers him as being a happy, smiling figure. He did happy songs as well as sad ones. Look at My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It and My Little Bocephus, which he wrote for my dad. So although my mum and dad stayed good friends after their divorce and never bad-mouthed each other in front of us, it wasn’t like we were brought up hearing about this famous grandfather we had all the time.”
In fact, it was only when Holly started listening to people like Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, both big Hank Williams fans, that she realised how important an influence her grandfather had been as the prototype singer-songwriter. Determined not to follow the Nashville route of being groomed for show business, country style, she had steered clear of the music that was coming out of Music Row and studied at what she calls her own university: the classic songwriters of the past forty years, including Cohen, Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro and blues singer-guitarists Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell.
This was instead of formal university because, in an act of rebellion that chimes with her fondness for the Willie ‘n’ Waylon-led Outlaw Country movement over the manicured Nashville sound, she became possibly the first pupil ever at her very academically minded school not to go on to college. Instead, she got a job on the cosmetics counter in a Nashville department store to subsidise her music career.
“I became an outcast because going straight to work from school just wasn’t done,” she says. “But I was getting invaluable experience, playing gigs on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays, sometimes in an Irish bar, sometimes doing songwriter in the round places. My dad wouldn’t make calls recommending me or trying to play on the family connection – and I wouldn’t have wanted him to because I needed time to develop, find my own voice, learn how to relax with an audience and how to hustle for gigs. I didn’t go out on tour opening for my dad, although I did use the Williams name a few times maybe, but only because I wanted to play. I didn’t want to be like a lot of other Nashville hopefuls who get signed by labels before they’ve even played a show or have people thinking I was some kind of jetsetter.”
Originally giving herself a year to try to pursue her dream, she extended this to three years as playing solo and sometime with a small band, she began to build a small local audience around Nashville. She then moved out to Los Angeles, where she worked on her songwriting and learned piano as a second instrument, before getting her first real break, a European tour as support to Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith.
“I flew over with a guitar and a backpack full of five-song EP’s I'd made and took trains to each venue,” she says. “It was killer. I had just read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and it changed me. I was travelling along, soaking up every minute of it. I loved it.”
If she’d wanted to make it in music without being mollycoddled, she was getting her wish as back in the States, she began to get live dates all over, taking on those engagements that hardy road warriors wear like medals, where they drive for ten hours, play to a handful of people and get back in the car, drive hundreds of miles to a motel, grab some sleep and start all over again. The handfuls of people grew into hundreds and thousands as she toured with artists including John Mellencamp and Keith Urban and in 2004, she signed her first recording contract, releasing her debut album, The Ones We Never Knew, the same year.
It wouldn’t be a true Williams tale without some element of tragedy, though, and in March 2006, Holly was involved in a near-fatal crash when her sister Hilary’s car overturned on the highway just outside Memphis. Fortunately the arm she thought she was going to lose – the car landed on top of it - turned out to be only broken. The experience had a bearing on her songwriting, however: it’s now much more direct, she says, and her second album, Here with Me, just released in the UK, is generating positive reviews and airplay on country music radio stations back home.
“Songs still come from nowhere and they come all at once, lyrics and melody,” she says. “That’s something that goes back to when I was about eight and had a whole book of things I’d written but couldn’t explain. They’re usually personal. I can write something and look at it later and realise, oh right, that was when such and such was happening, although I couldn’t have sat down intentionally and written about how I was feeling at the time. Maybe it’s something in the blood after all.”
Justin Townes Earle - Channelling the willpower creativelyJustin Townes Earle is a young man in a hurry. The singer-songwriter son of hard-living singer, songwriter and author Steve Earle arrives in Scotland this weekend to promote his first album, The Good Life, but he already has the follow-up written, the studio where it will be recorded booked for five days in October and the track sequence organised.
The reason for this urgency is, he says with deadpan certainty: “I should be dead by now.”
At twenty-six, Earle has, he says, already gone down all the roads his father took. His first album’s release finds him eight years behind schedule – everything was in place for him to start his recording career when he was eighteen – but stuff got in the way. Stuff like heroine addiction, alcoholism and messing up so badly and so often that his father, who’s been there, done that and got the t-shirt, fired him from his band.
Unlike his father, the younger Earle hasn’t served time in prison, although he did spend three months in a correctional centre after Earle senior began to despair that his oldest son would ever get himself sorted out and had him incarcerated.
In the end, it took a near-death experience – one of several – before “JT” (he got his middle name from Texan Townes Van Zandt, who was a great example as a singer-songwriter but not so good from a lifestyle angle) saw the error of his ways.
“I was twenty when dad sacked me and I deserved it completely,” he says. “I wasn’t even a very good guitarist and keyboardist back then. More to the point, though, I had a bad drug habit and I was drunk all the time. Then I landed up in hospital. I’d had bad experiences before but this time I was kept in for forty-eight hours and yet I woke up and started using again.”
A week later, however, he checked himself into a treatment centre.
“I don’t know why – why this time. I’m one of the most wilful people on this planet and if there’s a rule to be broken, I’ll break it,” he says on his mobile phone from Winnipeg, where’s appearing at one of Canada’s top folk festivals. “But I think, in the end, you’ve gotta know what you’re here for. It’s, what, ten thirty in the morning. By this time of the day I used to be completely wasted. I’d miss the tour bus and I’d be in some dodgy neighbourhood looking to score. Now I know that nobody’s paying for me to get messed up. I’ve got a show to do tonight and they want me there on stage, on time, sober and ready to be as good as I can be.”
Music – specifically getting his career on track - has given his life focus but then, there’s always been music in his life. Growing up in Nashville, he could hardly avoid it and he spent his teens playing in the bluegrass-ragtime group The Swindlers and the louder, more rocking The Distributors. Neither outfit kept him away from temptation. That took something more, which has involved finding, he says, that he can enjoy being a member of society for the first time.
Another factor has been a good book. Not the good book, which has been credited with saving many another musician from a life of dissolution, but biographies and histories, about the United States in general and the American Civil War in particular. One of the stand-out tracks on The Good Life is Lone Pine Hill, in which Earle tells of the bleak loneliness of a Civil War soldier.
“One of the pieces of advice that my dad gave me and I did pay attention to was, he said you should read a lot, because if you put nothing in then nothing good comes out,” he says. “So I’ve been studying the Civil War, although I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, and it’s given me ideas. I’ve never written a song based on a character from a book because that just doesn’t seem to work for me. I’d get so far and it would feel false, so what I did with Lone Pine Hill was create my own character and place and then colour them from real events, and that somehow feels more authentic.”
Earle’s self-education in history extends to music. If much of The Good Life has the feel of classic American music going back to its roots in blues, Appalachian ballads, vintage country songs and the Woody Guthrie school of songwriting, that’s because Earle has made it his business to study what came before.
“I’ve always been told that everything that’s good started way before I was born,” he says. “And I think it’s very important for a singer-songwriter to check this out because too many of them think that it’s enough to know three chords and be able to string rhymes together. There’s a certain way that songwriting’s done and let’s face it, you’ve got .9999% of a chance of coming up with something original. So if the best you’re ever likely to achieve is adding a wing to a structure that’s already there, you have to pay close attention to the people who put that structure in place.”
The songs for the next album came relatively easily and find Earle in a better place both mentally and physically than some of The Good Life’s tracks, three of which were written in crack houses.
“I can write anywhere and although I like to work as fast as I can, I still want to make sure that what I’m doing is notable,” he says. “The problem in the past was that I’d write a lot and half the time I wouldn’t remember what I’d written. But now I know that you don’t have to torture yourself to write songs. It’s not cool, as someone else said, to kill yourself and while it might not sound cool to be getting inspiration from history books, take it from me, that’s way better than the alternative.”
From The Herald, July 17, 2008.
Stella Parton - Dolly's sister is doin' it for herselfStella Parton thinks back to her early days in Nashville in the mid 1970s and gives the Tennessee equivalent of a “harrumph”. “They called me a maverick,” she says. “I had to go and look that up in a dictionary because I didn’t know what they meant.”
As a country girl, whose cash-strapped farming parents reputedly paid the doctor in corn meal for attending her better known older sister, Dolly’s birth, she knew, of course, that a maverick was a stray calf without an owner’s brand. And if the Nashville music business suits thought that description fitted her, they were even lower than she gave them credit for. But when she found that maverick could apply equally to someone who doesn’t conform, she decided that she liked the term and used to it to her advantage.
“People often think, because I’m Dolly’s sister, that she must have helped me to get into the business,” she says. “But when I arrived here in Nashville, they wouldn’t take me seriously because of who I was. To be honest, I never really thought about asking Dolly for help because I was just busy getting on with things and I had to do everything myself. I didn’t follow the established rule. When I couldn’t get a record deal for a song I’d written, I Want to Hold You in My Dreams, I put it out on my own label and it gave me my first Top Ten hit.”
Singing was a way of life in the Parton household and when organisers of church functions, school concerts and country fairs needed a turn, Stella and her sisters always got the call. She and Dolly, who is three years older, made their television debut when they were seven and ten respectively and then Stella formed a trio with her two other sisters, Willadeene and Cassie.
“All the family were musicians,” she says Stella, who learned to sing harmony “by touch” – meaning that she knew she’d got it right when she didn’t get a dig in the ribs. “Singing was pretty much all we knew and when it came to deciding what to do after leaving school, I just thought, well, I’m a singer, I’ll sing.”
By this time she’d become a teenage bride and was about to become a teenage mum but the independent spirit that would get her through her early experiences in Nashville was already instilled and while still in her teens she was leading the gospel-styled Stella Parton Singers and working as their manager and booking agent.
She arrived in Nashville in her mid twenties, determined to make it as a singer and songwriter.
“I’d always written songs,” she says. “That was how we entertained ourselves as kids, you know, let’s all make up a song today. I’m not sure that any of the songs we wrote back then were very good but Dolly’s done all right as a songwriter and I’ve survived this long. Besides, it was a good discipline. You had to get your song finished for the concert on the back porch after supper.”
When she started touting her songs round Nashville’s music publishers and record companies she’d noticed that truck driving songs were the vogue. Those were the days when CB radio was at the height of its popularity, with truckers warning each other in code about upcoming speed traps and such like, so she put together a demo featuring two songs ready-made for the market, she thought, and added I Want to Hold You In My Dreams in the time left over on the session. It was the “make weight” that provided her entrée into the business.
Further exacerbating her maverick reputation, she wrote and released Ode to Olivia, a song in support of Olivia Newton John’s right to be acclaimed as the Country Music Association’s Top Female Vocalist, an award that, at the time, was viewed as unsuitable for an Australian singer.
Still, if Stella had wanted to get noticed, she’d succeeded. She signed to the Elektra-Asylum wing of the mighty Warner Communications company and working with the producer Jim Malloy, who became her second husband, she followed up that first hit with a run of further successes including The Danger of a Stranger, which earned her a UK chart placing, Standard Lie Number One and Four Little Letters.
It wasn’t just music industry executives who noticed her, though, and a parallel career as an actor and dancer resulted when she agreed to audition for a part in the popular 1980s TV series The Dukes of Hazzard. Playing a fake deputy sheriff who put the real one in the boot of a car, she became, she says proudly, the first country artist to appear in a show that had a theme song by outlaw country star Waylon Jennings and the only country artist to get a speaking role throughout the show’s lengthy run.
More to the point, perhaps though, her natural sense of dramatic timing won her a leading part in a touring version of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which despite never having had any acting or dancing lessons, she was able to learn in nine days. Further stage productions followed, including The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Pump Boys and Dinettes, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and it remains an ambition of hers to act in London’s West End and on Broadway – the latter currently being a possibility as she’s in negotiations with a Broadway Theatre for a part in Holy Fire.
“It’s about a televangelist and it sounds like a lot of fun,” she says. “I love the theatre, although it’s hard work. But then, I’m used to working. In forty years I’ve never really been out of work. Whether it’s singing, writing or acting on stage and television, I’ve always just accepted whatever offers have come in.”
A celebrity chef gig might well be another possibility. She’s already appeared on the Home Shopping Network with her Taste of Life all-natural food products – home-made jams, jellies and preserves that she decided to market - and she’s produced a series of cook books, which have sold well.
“I love cooking,” she says. “When I wasn’t singing on the back porch back home, I’d be dragging a chair up to the stove so that I could reach up and stir the pot. I used to love trying out new recipes on my brothers and sisters. To me, cooking is one of the most nurturing things you can do for those you love - or for those you want to impress, which has worked for me a time or two.”
Music, however, remains her first priority and the means through which she can do most good for others. A staunch believer who isn’t averse to quoting from the scriptures to make her point, she openly uses her fame to bring increased public awareness to issues such as domestic violence, something of which she herself has been a victim. A percentage of her cookbook sales goes towards domestic violence shelters across America and she regards it as her duty to speak out about it.
“It’s actually one of the most rewarding things I can do,” she says. “Because when you’re up onstage with a microphone in front of an audience, you are in a position to make people think – and that’s my aim as a singer, songwriter and performer: to let people feel a little introspection, share some love and a lot of laughter, too. There has to be laughter because we are kinda funny, us humans, when you think about it.”
From The Herald, March 18, 2009
Diana Jones – It really is in the bloodDiana Jones never quite fitted in with the crowd as a youngster in New York. When the rest of her classmates at school were buying pop and rock records from the charts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Jones was listening to Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. This liking for ‘hick’ music, as the metropolitan sophisticates around her deemed it, caused no end of teasing. They’d call Jones ‘the cowgirl,’ a nickname that has come back to haunt her as she speaks down the line from Switzerland with a background of cowbells from a herd that have obviously spotted the country girl in Jones and gravitated towards her. "Even before I was in my teens, if anything came on the radio that sounded country or had an Irish or Scottish folk melody, I was drawn to it," she says. "Everybody else was listening to guys with dyed hair but they didn’t do it for me, whereas I felt a real connection with country singers – and I didn’t know why." The answer lay in her genes. Jones had been adopted as an infant and at the age of fifteen she left home in search of her roots. It took her a few years, mostly due to lack of resources, but after she finished college she found her birth family living in the Eastern Tennessee hills and discovered that, as a young man, her grandfather had played with country music legend Chet Atkins. "I didn’t even know where East Tennessee was on the map," she says. "That sounds terrible, I know, but there’s still a real north-south divide in America. I had some impressions of southern culture but they were mainly stereotypes that I picked up from television, so I really didn’t know what to expect when I got there." What she found was a whole extended clan who all looked like Diana Jones and when she heard her grandfather, Robert Lee Maranville, singing and picking his guitar, she recognised her own voice in his singing. "I’d been writing songs since I was about eleven and always sang in church because that’s such a great place to start," she says. "I also painted and the thing I noticed in all these things was a longing. I’ve noticed that other singer-songwriters in this genre, I’m thinking particularly about Mary Gauthier and Gillian Welch, were adopted, too. I can only speak for myself, of course, but I think this does make you all the more determined to express yourself as well as wanting to find out who you are and where you came from." Jones traced her birth mother to England, where her mother now lives with her English husband, and lived there for a time. It was during this sojourn that she decided to get serious about songwriting. Recovering from a near-death experience in a car accident, she thought about what she would regret not having done in her life most and decided that was music. She moved to Austin, Texas, home to one of the most competitive but supportive music scenes anywhere, and listened and learned, she says, from the best. "There are so many great singers and incredible writers in Austin that you can’t help but learn from them," she says. "Then my grandfather died and I moved back to the north east to get away from the music scene for a while and I found that, living in isolation, my writing started coming from a deeper place." There’s a rustic, mountain music authenticity to Jones’s songs, as exemplified on her latest album, My Remembrance of You. Even when she’s putting herself in someone else’s shoes, like the dime a turn dance hall partner of Pretty Girl or the Native American child who narrates Pony, she seems to be singing from experience. "That’s something I determined to do when I started writing seriously," she says. "I wanted to be able to sing these songs every night and put myself into them, so although they may not all be about me, they have to be informed by my own story and my own emotions. For instance, the little girl in Pony is taken from her own family. That’s happened to so many people. They’re not just separated from their own people but from their own culture too. I can relate to that so there’s a lot of me in that song." Songs, she says, come two ways: some come as ideas and take months of rewriting and polishing until she’s happy with them. Others appear to just fall, ready to sing, from the sky. "And you know, the weird thing is that the ones that fall from heaven are usually the best," she says. "They’re the ones I don’t trust because I always think, how can something be that good if it was so easy? I’d love to think that those doubts are due to some East Tennessean work ethic I’ve inherited but I think it’s probably just natural scepticism." From The Herald, October 12, 2007 Sam Baker – Inspiration in a flashAn upbeat character whose conversation is punctuated at regular intervals with easy laughter and whose ability to talk for Texas sits at odds with the spare economy of his songwriting, Baker has reason to count his blessings. In 1986, while he was visiting Peru, a terrorist bomb exploded on the train that was about to take him to the Inca city of Machu Picchu. The German family sitting opposite him and with whom he had been sharing typical tourist chat were all killed. Baker passed out, came to on the operating table and felt sure that he wouldn’t survive either. His recovery was slow. His left femoral artery had been severed and his left hand was, he says, "badly chopped up". Following emergency surgery in Peru, he had to undergo seventeen corrective operations back home in Houston. At first he couldn’t walk or feed himself and for a long time he expected every room and every car he sat in to blow up. Eventually he got back to work. Before the incident he’d been a carpenter and a rafting guide. But he found a job in a bank and in his spare time he began writing short stories to try and make sense of what had happened to him. "It’s a surreal experience, of course, because we’re not living in that kind of situation all the time," he says. "One minute everything is normal and safe and I’m speaking to this German kid who’s translating for his mum and dad, who are sitting so close our knees are almost touching. Then suddenly this red backpack in the rack above the mum explodes. It blows her head off. The kid is pinned to his seat by shrapnel through his chest and I can’t breathe with the force of the explosion. I remember thinking, this is it. I’m not going to make it." The long-term physical consequences for Baker were complete deafness in one ear and only seventy per cent hearing in the other and when he got back to playing the guitar, he had to adapt to playing left-handed. "I wasn’t exactly a virtuoso before. I’d had piano lessons as a kid because my mum played piano and organ in the church and there was always music in the house," he says. "But I soon gave up music for baseball and football until I was about nineteen and then I bought a guitar in a pawn shop and taught myself. That was terrible, though. Your hands hurt and it sounds dreadful." Looking back, the songs he began writing in his twenties were, he says, pretty awful, too. "They were all that kind of ‘I love you and you don’t love me’ thing and it wasn’t until the year 2000 that I decided to try and get serious," he says. Writing fiction had given him what he considers his most valuable tool: the ability to pare down words and just accept that sometimes it’s necessary to take something he’s laboured over for hours, if not days, and "boot it out the door." The songs on his first album, Mercy, which came out in 2004, were so sparse that even their titles consist of only one word. It’s an approach that’s worked, though. When influential musician and producer Gurf Morlix heard the atmosphere Baker’s songs created, he immediately started telling everyone he came into contact with about this great new songwriter, and Radio 2’s Bob Harris has just pronounced Baker’s second album, Pretty World, one of the albums of the year. "I’m not trying to capture whole lives in these songs," says Baker. "They’re just moments because you can cover so much in two or three minutes. Something can happen, as I know from that train in Peru, in a flash and you have the basis for a story right there. I often start out with a lot of stuff and start peeling away, and if I can get it so that there’s not one phrase that annoys me and where every word carries a lot of implication without sounding false, then I’m happy." With his hearing difficulties, taking his songs onto the stage hasn’t been easy. But as with a guitar style that he describes as ‘three chords and a cloud of dust but I’m working on getting more expressive,’ he has persevered. He’s due to play his first concerts in Scotland later in the year and says that since live performing is part of the reality of being a singer-songwriter, he can’t let physical problems become an obstacle. "When it’s quiet and the onstage sound is good, I’m okay," he says. "At other times, it’s like experiencing the Braille equivalent of music. I know when it feels right through my hands and my vocal cords. In the end, though, if you have something to say, you have to do it and find ways of working round whatever comes along. If it doesn’t all fall apart, that’s great." From The Herald, August 2, 2007 Joe Ely - Tales and tragedy from a real Texas troubadourWho says Americans don’t do irony? Not Joe Ely. The Amarillo-born singer, songwriter, sometime fellow traveller of The Clash and accidental founder of the alt-country movement is recalling his involvement in Tornado Jam.Sam Baker has a simple philosophy. "You do what you can with what you’ve got," says the Austin, Texas-based singer-songwriter whose work is beginning to make big waves in the Americana field. "And if you start looking at what you don’t have, well, you’re lost." Diana Jones never quite fitted in with the crowd as a youngster in New York. When the rest of her classmates at school were buying pop and rock records from the charts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Jones was listening to Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Dolly Parton and Emmylou Harris. Held in Buddy Holly Park in Lubbock, the town in the Texas flatlands that Ely called home from the age of ten, the first Tornado Jam in 1980 starred Ely, by then an internationally known performer, and attracted some four thousand people. The following year, with guitar hero Stevie Ray Vaughan on the bill, the audience grew to ten thousand. But in year three, when Linda Ronstadt and Holly’s former band, The Crickets, drew a 30,000-strong crowd, the city council held an emergency meeting. There would be, they announced, no more music in Buddy Holly Park. Ely laughs at the idea of banning music from the site named after the musician who’d brought Lubbock into the American public’s consciousness and declares, "That’s when I moved to Austin." Holly’s ghost keeps reappearing in Ely’s life. When Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore – before they and Butch Hancock formed The Flatlanders, subsequently credited as the band that started the alt-country music form – made their first demo recording, it was produced by Holly’s father in the studio he’d built after Buddy’s death. The house where Ely learned to play guitar, Ely discovered thirty years later, happened to be one of Holly’s former homes. Holly muse Peggy Sue became a family friend and Ely’s daughter, Marie Elena, was named after Holly’s widow, who arrived at the hospital to visit just after the birth in 1983. It wasn’t Holly’s emphatic illustration that a smalltown boy could become a national hero that inspired Ely to get up and go, however. Jack Kerouac did that. And Ely, already writing songs and a veteran of Lubbock’s tough music bars, took Kerouac’s On the Road to heart. He joined a theatre troupe as a guitarist, appearing off-Broadway and accompanying them on a European tour that included seven nights on the Edinburgh Fringe in 1970. Then before he took the Joe Ely Band onto rock’s endless highway, he joined a circus with the task of looking after the llamas and the world’s smallest horse. Throughout his travels he kept a notebook, jotting down scraps of stories and descriptions of characters – while in Edinburgh he also began to draw – and some of these, he says, became songs. Other recollections went into his book of road tales, Bonfire of Roadmaps, which was published recently by the University of Texas, and still others have found their way into an as yet unpublished novel, which is part truth, part fiction. "I’ve always seen myself as a storyteller," says Ely, "and I tell you, writing a song is a piece of cake compared to writing a novel. With a song, you try to tell the whole thing in as few words as possible whereas with the book I got about forty pages in and thought, what have I started? Eventually, I began to enjoy the freedom of being able to change things – I got to do stuff I hadn’t actually done and undo stuff maybe I shouldn’t have done – but I don’t think I’ll be writing another one." Other outlets including playwriting and creating art, which he’s exhibited in prestigious galleries across America, are unlikely to take the place of music either. Having buried four former bandmates over the past year, including the brilliant Jesse ‘Guitar’ Taylor, Ely is making the most of his musical opportunities as he enters his sixties. "Losing friends like Jesse just makes me grateful that we managed to make music together and I’m really enjoying playing with my current group," he says. "It’s an intimate, acoustic set-up, just guitar, bass and accordion and actually, as much as I knock Lubbock, I have to thank it, too. Because when I was growing up there, every summer the streets would be full of itinerant Mexican musicians who were working in the cottonfields – and the accordion sound I heard then has stayed with me. We’re able to cover stuff from all the different eras of my songwriting and we keep everything simple because in the end, it’s the song – or the story it tells – that’s important." From The Herald, April 20, 2007 The Wilders - Still wild about HankThere can’t be too many people who qualify, as Ike Sheldon does, to sing in grand opera and on the Grand Ole Opry. Broadcast from Nashville, the country music radio institution reportedly got its name when its original host, George Hay, opened the new programme, which followed the rather more high brow Music Appreciation Hour, by announcing: "You have been listening to Grand Opera. Now we will present Grand Ole Opry!" Later, the downhome Opry came live from the Ryman Auditorium, which had played host to appearances by the New York Met and Mario Lanza, and would go on to both welcome and ban country legend Hank Williams, which ties in even more neatly with Sheldon’s story. As lead singer and guitarist with Missouri-based country music whirlwind The Wilders, Sheldon has broken not a few Scottish hearts these past two years by capping the band’s Herald Angel-winning appearances at the Edinburgh Fringe with drop dead gorgeous readings of Williams favourites including the much mangled Your Cheatin’ Heart. In Sheldon’s hands, Your Cheatin’ Heart is reclaimed as a simple but affecting song of love and loss, with emphasis on its purity and directness. If he sounds like the real deal, that’s because he is. Born and bred in small town Missouri – Phillipsburg or P’burg to its friends - Sheldon grew up hearing his parents’ records of the Statler Brothers and Tom T Hall and his sister’s Cream albums. He played piano from the age of eight – another facet of the Wilders’ performances is Sheldon’s ability to add solo instrumental blues, jazz and ragtime cameos if there’s a piano to hand – and he later took up organ and guitar. Then he underwent a curious form of teenage rebellion. “I got culture,” he says down the line from his Kansas City home. “Don’t get me wrong, rural Missouri was a great place to grow up but when I was in my teens, a friend moved into town from Alaska and he pointed me towards all sorts of different stuff as well as showing me what was cool about the music around us. I started reading more, hearing a lot of music that was new to me, and the upshot was, I went and did a degree in vocal performance. I sang opera, although I really loved recitals and art songs the best.” Throughout his university years in Liberty, Missouri, which included a trip to the Edinburgh Festival with the university’s choir in the late 1980s, Sheldon still kept in touch with his roots. On holidays back home he’d make compilation tapes from his parents’ records and then, when he felt homesick back in Liberty, he’d drive around the dirt roads on the outskirts of town, listening to these aural comfort blankets. In a striking parallel with singer-songwriter Diana Jones, who grew up with a foster family in New York and whose mysterious connection with country music was subsequently explained by discovering that her Tennessean grandfather was a musician who had played guitar with Nashville guru Chet Atkins, Sheldon later inherited a guitar belonging to his own maternal grandfather, Leo Myers. Sheldon’s mother had never said much about her parents, other than the fact that they and all their belongings had perished in a house fire before Sheldon was born. But it turned out that this house had been quite the musical meeting point, and that Sheldon’s grandfather had played with Chet Atkins, too, as well as Dolly Parton’s mentor, Porter Wagoner, who was among those who dropped by between gigs. So when, in 1996, after having graduated from Liberty and spent a few years playing in rock groups with names such as Wig Newton and Foolish Sad Robot, Sheldon began reconnecting with old country songs and bumped into Wilders-to-be Phil Wade and Betse Ellis, who were trading in the new age dream for bluegrass heaven, there was a feeling that this was a meeting that was pre-ordained. The guitar heirloom, which had escaped the fatal fire because Sheldon’s grandfather had swapped instruments with one of his nine brothers just days beforehand, became part of Sheldon’s re-immersion into country music, although it has since been retired to prevent potential damage on planes or perhaps more likely, onstage. It’s one of the features of the Wilders’ live performances that, even allowing for recent moves into more conventional amplification, the quartet of fiddle, guitars and double bass does tend to be packed closely together with the guys’ Stetsons bobbing like cogs in some Heath-Robinson rhythm machine. “When we started out, we were only about the second band in our area to be doing that old-time thing of all crowding around the one microphone,” says Sheldon. “We got quite a bit of flak from sound engineers but because we were playing this undiluted country music, we figured that was the way to do it and it felt right. I remember reading somewhere that someone who had joined Bill Monroe’s band way back said the first week was like playing in a washing machine – you had to get used to the dance, and there’s still a bit of choreography involved when we play. You sing a song, then it’s time for the fiddle solo so you have to get out of the way quick. Nobody’s been seriously hurt but I’ve whacked Phil a time or two with the headstock of my guitar while he’s pulling out of a dobro solo, and Betse’s fiddle bow could cause some damage if one of us drifted into its path at the wrong time.” With their latest album, Someone’s Got to Pay, picking up rave reviews in the US, the Wilders’ star is emphatically on the rise back home. The album is based round a murder story, first explored on a limited edition 10” red vinyl record released last year and expanded into a concept album that is, says Sheldon with a tone of reassurance, some way short of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. This increased songwriting productivity hasn’t lessened their commitment to Hank Williams, however. “For me, if anyone who sings country music hasn’t learned a whole lot from Hank, they really need to go back and do it,” says Sheldon, for whom great singing is all about communication whether it’s Elvis, Sinatra or one of his other favourites, Axl Rose of Guns and Roses. “I get flak for that, too, but hey, Axl gets across what he wants to put across. The thing with Hank is, it can be daunting to sing his stuff. You might think, how can I add to what he did to it? And the answer is, don’t. His songs are so perfectly written that you really don’t need to add interest or your own thing to them, you just let them speak for themselves.” From The Herald, July 31, 2008
Site Last Updated - 31/08/2010 17:37:00
|
||
| All written work copyright Rob Adams. | ||