01.28.2021
AMERICANA SIN LÁGRIMAS PART FOUR
1979 – North Hollywood.
Just over a month after the release of “Armed Forces” and despite having three records out, I somehow qualified for nomination as “Best New Artist” at the Grammy Awards, along with Toto, The Cars and the eventual winners – “Boogie Oogie Oogie” sensation – “Taste Of Honey”.
Rather than attend the ceremony, the Attractions, John McFee and I played two sets at “The Palomino”, a country music club in North Hollywood.
Our sets that night included three songs that wouldn’t be released until our next album, “Get Happy”, the recent George Jones hit “If I Could Put Them All Together (I’d Have You)” and a Leon Payne song that I’d learned from a Jack Kittel 45rpm called, “Psycho”, a number frequently requested in the City of Glasgow until this day.
Murder ballads have been part of my trade since “Watching The Detectives”.
Some tell a version of real life events like “Let Him Dangle”, others like, “Condemned Man” were inspired by the tone and message of “I Want To Live” and I’m not referring to the songs by either Glen Campbell or The Ramones but the movie starring, Susan Hayward.
Not all such songs I’ve recorded come from my own poison pen. Some have passed through the hands of archeologists, professors and beatniks and into the repertoire of countless singers.
Some have deep roots that run under the Atlantic Ocean like telegraph cables from Heart’s Content.
“The Butcher Boy” is an American folk song that has verses originally found in several English ballads. It was recorded by Buell Kazee in the 1920s and later popularized by Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers.
The faithless lad in the song is sometimes a butcher’s boy in “London town”, other times he works the railroad.
I gave it a stab in the company of Bill Frisell, Don Byron and Eliza Carthy for Hal Willner’s “Harry Smith Project” at UCLA which can be seen in the film “Old Weird America”.
On that same evening, Kate and Anna McGarrigle performed the song in which “Omie Wise” is murdered by Corporal John Lewis, yet bewilderingly, he escapes judgment or justice.
I wrote a song on the same air for the occasion in which I offered a reply and some retribution on the topic of “What Lewis Did Last”.
“Omie Wise” was famously recorded by Doc Watson and, like his chilling version of “Tom Dooley”, his account does not spare the listener the brutal specifics of murder.
I first heard Doc play “Tennessee Stud” on record and chanced to see him play a little Detroit club in the early ‘90s, the kind of fortunate opportunity that sometimes falls to a traveling musician.
2007 – “Merlefest”, Wilkesboro, NC.
I was taken to a motel to meet Doc Watson before my appearance at Merlefest.
He gave me his hand and told me his life story; how his sightlessness had never thwarted him.
Later on, I put my reflections of this conversation into a song about the “lifetime to discover” that it might take to accept your lot in life.
I named it, “Dr. Watson, I Presume” and recorded it with Buddy Miller playing baritone guitar and Vince Gill singing the high harmony.
My name might have looked like an unlikely billing for a festival of bluegrass and string band music but I was playing with a band that included Larry Campbell on fiddle and guitar, Sam Bush on mandolin, Bryon House on bass and the dazzling dobro of Jerry Douglas.
Jim Lauderdale sang harmony on the Grateful Dead song, “Friend Of The Devil” and took lead on, “High Timberline” a song he’d written with Robert Hunter.
The band was an impromptu prototype for what would become The Sugarcanes, the acoustic band with whom I would tour and record until the end of the decade, with fiddle player Stuart Duncan, mandolinist, Mike Compton and double bassist, Dennis Crouch and accordionist, Jeff Taylor joining Jerry Douglas and Jim Lauderdale.
This once in a lifetime, all-star line-up that tore it up from the Ryman Auditorium to the Montreux Jazz Festival, from Cain’s Ballroom, Tulsa to The Count Basie Theatre in Red Bank, NJ sadly disbanded the week after “National Ransom” was released.
However on that carefree North Carolina night in 2007, I took thirty years of songs to the stage, tunes from 1977, along with some recorded in Hollywood for my first on-location album, “King Of America” and one from my more recent trip to Mississippi, “The Delivery Man”, a record I had briefly considered calling, “South”.
2004 – Oxford & Clarksdale, MS.
In a different world, “The Delivery Man” might have been a radio play; the tale of a divorcée, a war-widow and her daughter to whom a man shows a different face and nature.
The narrative is sketched in the title song and picked up in, “Nothing Clings Like Ivy”, “Heart Shaped Bruise”, “I Dreamed Of My Old Lover” – which I put aside for another session – and “The Name Of This Thing Is Not Love”- which, like “Ode To Billie Joe”, takes place on a bridge above a river into which a secret is thrown.
In the end, different songs from the world outside and the life within kept breaking through the wall of the old Wells Fargo depot in which Sweet Tea Studios was located.
We traveled down to an abandoned radio studio in Clarksdale to cut my answer song to Dave Bartholomew’s “The Monkey” – an address about the vanity of man from our simian cousins.
These wires and wherefores keep criss-crossing and doubling back.
I cannot take all the time it would take to explain how I found my way into a trio with my wife, Diana Krall and Willie Nelson, singing his “Crazy, a “Crying Time” duet with Wanda Jackson or recorded a Hank Williams number that I’ve sung since I was 17 years old for an album, revisiting his childhood experiences in a family string band with jazz bassist, Charlie Haden accompanied by the great James Burton on guitar.
I daresay the play-acting and tom-dooley-foolery of The Coward Brothers, a performing alias that T Bone Burnett and I adopted in 1984, has a lot to do with all these travels and chance encounters, not to mention T Bone asking me to be part of the ensemble that recorded 42 different settings of 24 unpublished Bob Dylan lyrics, cut during a 12-day session at Capitol Studios for the “Lost On The River” album.
After all, Henry and Howard Coward’s second known recording was, “They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me”, also credit to Leon Payne, the kind of heartbreak ballad that could be a showstopper one night and a b-side the next.
But as my father once told me, you might be “top of the bill”, one minute but in time you’ll be “Down Among The Wines And Spirits”.
To be continued…
1) PSYCHO – Elvis Costello & The Attractions from “Almost Blue”
2) THE DELIVERY MAN – Elvis Costello & The Imposters from “The Delivery Man”
3) KISS LIKE YOUR KISS – Lucinda Williams with Elvis Costello from “True Love”
5) WONDERING – Elvis Costello from “Almost Blue”
6) THE BUTCHER BOY – Elvis Costello from “The Harry Smith Project”
7) DR WATSON, I PRESUME” – Elvis Costello from “National Ransom”
9) THEY’LL NEVER TAKE HER LOVE FROM ME – The Coward Brothers from “King Of America”
10) YOU WIN AGAIN – Charlie Haden with Elvis Costello, James Burton from “Ramblin’ Boy”
11) LOST ON THE RIVER #12 – The New Basement Tapes from “Lost On The River”
12) COUNTRY PIE – Bob Dylan from “Nashville Skyline”
13) I THREW IT ALL AWAY – Elvis Costello from “Kojak Variety”
14) MY LOVELY JEZEBEL – Elvis Costello with Leon Russell from “National Ransom”
15) NO REASON TO QUIT – Merle Haggard from “The Best Of The Best Of Merle Haggard”
16) TONIGHT THE BOTTLE LET ME DOWN – Elvis Costello & The Attractions from “Almost Blue”
17) DOWN AMONG THE WINES AND SPIRITS – Elvis Costello from “Secret, Profane & Sugarcane”
18) CRYING TIME – Wanda Jackson with Elvis Costello from “Heart Trouble”
19) MEET ME ON THE CORNER – Dan Hicks with Elvis Costello & Brian Setzer – from “Beatin’ The Heat”