Tom Russell - Tonight We Ride

Thomas George "Tom" Russell (born March 5, 1953 in Los Angeles) is an American singer-songwriter. Although most strongly identified with the Texas Country music tradition, his music also incorporates elements of folk, Tex-Mex, and the cowboy music of the American West. Many of his songs have been recorded by other artists, including Johnny Cash, k. d. lang, Guy Clark, Nanci Griffith, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Iris Dement, Dave Alvin, and Suzy Bogguss.

In addition to his music, Russell also paints folk art, and has published a book of songwriting quotes (co-edited with Sylvia Tyson), a detective novel (in Scandinavia),and a book of letters with Charles Bukowski (Tough Company; Mystery Island Press).

Russell graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara with a degree in criminology and taught at schools in Nigeria during the Biafran War. He has also lived in Spain, Norway, and played music at a circus in Puerto Rico. He began his musical career in earnest in the early 1970s in Vancouver playing strip bars, then later relocated to Texas and formed a band with singer-pianist Patricia Hardin. In 1977, they moved to San Francisco, performing regularly in clubs there as Hardin & Russell, during which time they recorded the second of their two studio albums. They eventually split in 1979, at which point Russell drifted out of the music industry for a while.

While working as a taxi driver in Queens, Russell met guitarist Andrew Hardin (no relation to Patricia). After hearing his songs, Hardin convinced him that they should form a new band. Shortly after this, Robert HunterGrateful Dead was a passenger in Russell's cab. Russell sang him his song Gallo Del Cielo. An impressed Hunter invited Russell and Hardin first to join him on stage at New York's Bitter End, and then to become his regular opening act. Hardin remained Russell's full-time sideman until April, 2006. of the

Russell's albums in the 21st century have been heavily influenced by his current home city, El Paso. Albums such as Borderland feature a strong Tex-Mex influence and feature songs of life on both sides of the border.
In 2005 Russell released Hotwalker, the second part of his Americana trilogy (the first part being "The Man From God Knows Where"). It was another conceptual work largely inspired by his correspondence with author Charles Bukowski. Subtitled "A Ballad for Gone America", the album features songs and spoken word pieces, many of the latter delivered by another friend of Bukowski, circus midget Little Jack Horton. The sampled voices of Lenny Bruce and Edward Abbey are also heard on an album which takes the form of a musical collage lamenting the passing of the America of Russell's childhood and the Beat generation.

In addition to working on new music, Russell also exhibits his original artwork and organizes an annual trans-Canadian music train, which combines song-writing and -singing workshops with live concerts aboard a vintage long-distance streamline train. This train trek was depicted in Russell's 2005 concert/documentary, "Hearts on the Line", produced by Canyon Productions, which features a concert with Russell and Andrew Hardin videotaped at Capilano College in Vancouver as well as behind the scenes footage of the music train experience.

In 2006, Russell released Love and Fear, a collection of original songs that were inspired by the highs and lows of his relationships with women. This was followed in 2007 by "Wounded Heart of America", a tribute album of Tom Russell songs covered by other artists, including Joe Ely, Suzy Bogguss, Dave Alvin, Jerry Jeff Walker, and beat poet legend Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Two new songs, "Who's Gonna Build Your Wall" and "The Death of Jimmy Martin", are also included on the album.

In 2008, Russell's new record company, Shout Factory, released a 2 CD retrospective album "Veteran's Day: Anthology" and Russell and Canyon Productions, Inc. released a DVD featuring Russell and Ian Tyson discussing the art of songwriting called "Mano a Mano." Russell is also working on a documentary film project called California Bloodlines and is currently touring, painting and writing new songs.

On September 15, 2009, Shout! Factory released Russell's new album "Blood and Candle Smoke" featuring twelve original songs. The album was recorded in Tucson, AZ at Wave Lab Studios with members of Calexico providing a world music beat to many of the songs. The album was produced by Tom Russell and Craig Schumacher, who has worked with Neko Case, Iron & Wine and Calexico. Russell will tour extensively through the U.S., Canada and Europe in support of the album for the remainder of 2009.


"Panco Villa crossed the border in the year of ought sixteen
The people of Columbus still hear him riding through their dreams
He killed seventeen civilians you could hear the women scream
Blackjack Pershing on a dancing horse was waiting in the wings

Tonight we ride, tonight we ride
We'll skin ole Pancho Villa, make chaps out of his hide
Shoot his horse, Siete Leguas, and his twenty-seven bride
Tonight we ride, tonight we ride

We rode for three long years till Blackjack Pershing called it quits
When Jackie wasn't lookin' I stole his fine spade bit
It was tied upon his stallion, so I rode away on it
To the wild Chihuahuan desert, so dry you couldn't spit

Tonight we ride, you bastards dare
We'll kill the wild Apache for the bounty on his hair
Then we'll ride into Durango, climb up the whorehouse stairs
Tonight we ride, Tonight we ride

When I'm too damn old to sit a horse, I'll steal the warden's car
Break my ass out of this prison, leave my teeth there in a jar
You don't need no teeth for kissin' gals or smokin' cheap cigars
I'll sleep with one eye open, 'neath God's celestial stars

Tonight we rock, Tonight we roll
We'll rob the Juarez liquor store for the Reposado Gold
And if we drink ourselves to death, ain't that the cowboy way to go?

Tonight we ride, tonight we ride
Tonight we fly, we're headin' west
Toward the mountains and the ocean where the eagle makes his nest
If our bones bleach on the desert, we'll consider we are blessed
Tonight we ride, Tonight we ride

Tonight we ride, tonight we ride."
 

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Guy Clark - The Guitar

Guy Clark via last.fm

Guy Clark: Master Songwrite:


"Songwriting legend Guy Clark doesn't merely compose songs; he projects images and characters with the kind of hands-on care and respect of a literary master. Clark works slowly and with strict attention to detail, and has produced an impressive collection of timeless gems, leaving very little waste behind. The emotional level of his work, as well as the admiration and esteem of his peers, consistently transcends sales figures and musical genres. Using everyday language to construct extraordinary songs for more than 35 years, Clark continues to be the type of songwriter whom young artists study and seasoned writers, as well discriminating listeners, revere.


Born in Monahans, Texas, on November 6, 1941, Clark grew up in a home where the gift of a pocketknife was a rite of passage and poetry was read aloud. At age 16 he moved to Rockport, on the Texas Gulf Coast. Instructed by his father's law partner, he learned to play on a $12 Mexican guitar and the first songs he learned were mostly in Spanish.


Moving to Houston, Clark began his career during the "folk scare" of the 1960s. Fascinated by Texas bluesTownes Van Zandt and Jerry Jeff Walker. "It was pretty 'Bob Dylan' in the beginning," Clark said. "Nobody was really writing." Eventually, Clark would draw on these roots to firebrand his own fiddle-friendly and bluesy folk music, see it embraced as country and emerge as a songwriting icon for connoisseurs of the art..."
 

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Rodney Crowell - Earthbound

Rodney Crowell via last.fm

Rodney Crowell


Rodney Crowell (born August 7, 1950) is a Grammy Award-winning musician, known primarily for his work as a singer and songwriter in country music.


He is considered to be part of both the alternative country and the mainstream country music camps. He is a contemporary of Steve Earle and, like Earle, was also influenced by the songwriting greats Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. Crowell played guitar and sang for three years in Emmylou Harris' "Hot Band".


Crowell was born August 7, 1950 in Houston, Texas to James Walter Crowell and Addie Cauzette Willoughby. He had come from a musical family, with one grandfather being a church choir leader and the other a bluegrass banjo player. His grandmother played guitar and his father sang semi-professionally at bars and Honky tonks. At age 11, he starting playing drums in his father's band. In his teen years, he played in various garage rock bands in Houston performing hits of the day mixed with a few country numbers.


After producing Rosanne Cash's highly successful Rhythm & Romance, Crowell signed to Columbia Records in 1986. His first album for that label Street Language was co-produced with Booker T. Jones and featured a blend of Soul and country music. The album, however, failed to produce any chart activity.


Although best known as a songwriter and alternative country artist, Crowell enjoyed mainstream popularity during the late 1980s and early 1990s. His critically acclaimed album, 1988's Diamonds & Dirt, produced five consecutive No. 1 hits during a 17-month span in 1988 and 1989: "It's Such a Small World" (a duet with Cash), "I Couldn't Leave You If I Tried," "She's Crazy for Leaving," "After All This Time" and "Above and Beyond" (a cover of Buck Owens' 1962 hit). His follow-up album, 1989's Keys to the Highway, produced two top 5 hits in 1990, which were "Many a Long and Lonesome Highway" and "If Looks Could Kill."


As Crowell's popularity in hit-radio country music faded, he continued his prolific songwriting. After 1992's Life Is Messy, he left Columbia Records and signed to MCA Records where he released two more albums.

Ray Wylie Hubbard - Snake Farm

Image via Wikipedia

Ray Wylie Hubbard

It wasn’t that long ago that Ray Wylie Hubbard allowed to an acquaintance that he wouldn’t mind being a hybrid of Guy Clark and John Lee Hooker. Now, I’m no seer or mystic, but my instincts suggest that wish came true. And then some. A. Enlightenment, B. Endarkenment (Hint: There is no C) confirms it.

Ray Wylie Hubbard writes the kind of songs that make you want to ride along no matter where he’s going, because you know it’s gonna get strange somewhere along the way. The references to Muddy Waters being as deep as William Blake (“I really do believe it,’’ Ray says) and lipstick pickups, resonator slides, the dreams of drunken poets, deceased call girls, opium, wasp’s nests, clouds growing a tail, his ability to segue seamlessly from primal exclamations of carnal lust into songs about salvation without pausing for irony; and a craftsmanship that manages to rhyme mescaline and gasoline and Volkswagen with dragon while painting vivid portraits of characters both real and unreal, all evoke a sense of place that is larger than life but in no way made up.

Anyone who’s followed Ray Wylie Hubbard over the long and winding path he has traveled already knows he possesses the kind of exceptional gift for observation that any songwriter yearns for. His sense of wonder is tempered by an accumulated wisdom and knowledge that comes with experience that has elevated him into the Wylie Lama of Texas Music, freely imparting songwriting verities to all kinds of aspiring musicians, which allows him to lay all his cards on the table and let the listener decide what it all means.

In case you’re wondering where he’s been since his last album Snake Farm, Ray’s been writing, only he moved out of the song category to test his chops as a screenwriter, conceiving an outlaw western straight out of the Peckinpah school of blood and vengeance (“set in 1912 so we can have a Buick and a motorcycle and automatic weapons well as horses”). That his first screenplay actually got funded, filmed and slated for release is a testament to the caliber of his writing, the fact that Kris Kristofferson, Dwight Yoakam, and Lizzy Caplan appear among the ensemble of accomplished actors speaks volumes of the respect he has earned among his peers.

Besides the movies, a weekly Tuesday radio show and constant touring as well as producing other artists, his focus remains fixed on the song-constructing and performing stories set to music that resonate like no one else’s. Not for nothing is he the dark literary, cat daddy of Americana songsters who was outlaw long before it was cool.

But don’t take my word for it. Ray Wylie is far better-versed explaining how the sacred and the profane, the yin and the yang, the eternal and the now, the hippies and rednecks, the saved and the damned are all part of the same conversation.

“I like to look at both enlightenment and Endarkenment,” he declares. “I feel comfortable observing each. Now I really feel like I gave up the right to judge anybody a longtime ago. With my behavior back in my twenties and thirties, I don’t have that right. I really don’t.” That doesn’t stop him from taking note of what’s going on around him. “It’s so turbulent right now,” he says. “Like the idea of The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. That’s pretty strong and scary stuff, especially since I try to stay here in this Pollyanna world of hope and idealism I’ve created, but I’m able to get in that mind set and look at it and write it from the point of view of one who believes it.”

“In ‘Rise Up,’ I can go in there and see the need for that kind of Salvation and understand why that need is there but then read about Chet Baker and heroin and think, yeah, man, it does make the deep things appear (which he captures in ‘Opium). “I feel very fortunate, being able to see that, but not really go there.”

“Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” and “Rise Up,” two straight up gospel pieces that could be sung in a four square church are “straight, basic fundamental Pentecostal Bible,” Ray explains with a sly grin. “Then all of a sudden I write about a naked woman in ‘Drunken Poet’s Dream.”

So what’s up with the unusual title song? “It is my honoring Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Raven,’” he says, breaking into a conspiratorial smile. “That is my favorite poem of all time. It still is. I re-read it and as I was going to bed I thought, I should write something like this. I couldn’t use a raven so I used a black sparrow. And it started. It was so weird, just laying in bed thinking, OK, here’s Edgar Allen Poe, he’s drinking, he’s just lost the most precious thing in his life and all that. What would happen if I was in that frame of mind and suddenly this bird lands by my bed? What would it say? 'A. Enlightenment, B. Endarkenment (Hint: There Is
No C).' ''

He continues “ Finally, a little bit later, came the line I’d heard my grandmother say when I was a kid, ‘Heaven pours down rain and lightning bolts’– that line kind of sums it all up for me as far as everything, really... Heaven is this beautiful place and yet it pours down rain and lightning bolts on both the just and the unjust. So being mindful of this, I was reminded of one of my wife Judy’s spiritualisms ‘the days I can keep my gratitude higher than my expectations, those are good days.’

“When it’s all said and done and the record is released whether I ride through the streets in a chariot with rose pedals falling upon me and thousands cheering my name or I find myself standing against a wall being asked if I want a cigarette and a blindfold, I am extremely grateful for each of these songs. And if the truth be known, after every song I write I always say, 'thanks' ''

With a keen eye of observation and a wise man’s knowledge, Ray Wylie Hubbard composes and performs songs that couldn’t spring from anywhere else but out of his fertile rock and roll bluesy poet-in-the-blistering-heat southern noggin.

Hint: the answers are all within A. Enlightenment, B. Endarkenment.

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Townes Van Zandt - Pancho and Lefty

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John Townes Van Zandt (March 7, 1944 – January 1, 1997), best known as Townes Van Zandt, was a country-folk music singer-songwriter, performer, and poet. Many of his songs, including "If I Needed You," "To Live Is To Fly," and "No Place to Fall" are considered standards of their genre. AllMusic has called him "one of the greatest country and folk artists of his generation."


While alive, Van Zandt was labeled as a cult musician: though he had a small and devoted fanbase, he never had a successful album or single, and even had difficulty keeping his recordings in print. In 1983, Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard covered his song "Pancho and Lefty", scoring a number one hit on the Billboard country music charts. Despite achievements like these, the bulk of his life was spent touring various dive bars, often living in cheap motel rooms, backwoods cabins and on friends' couches. Van Zandt was notorious for his drug addictions, alcoholism, and his tendency to tell tall tales. He suffered from manic depression, and attempts to treat it with insulin shock therapy erased much of his long-term memory.


Van Zandt died on New Years Day 1997 from health problems stemming from years of substance abuse. The 2000s saw a resurgence of interest in Van Zandt. During the decade, two books, a documentary film and a number of magazine articles about the singer were created. Van Zandt's music has been covered by such notable and varied musicians as Bob Dylan, Lyle Lovett, Norah Jones, Steve Earle and The Meat Puppets.


In 1977, Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas was released. The album showcased Van Zandt solo at a 1973 concert before a small audience, free from the over-production that shackled many of his early records. The album received extremely positive reviews, and is considered by many to be among the best albums that the songwriter ever released. Several points on the album showcased his dry sense of humor, a feature that also showed in some of his songwriting.


According to Susanna Clark, Van Zandt turned down repeated invitations to write with Bob Dylan. Dylan was reportedly a "big fan" of Townes and claimed to have all of his records; Van Zandt admired Dylan's songs, but didn't care for his celebrity. The two first met during a chance encounter outside a costume shop in the South Congress district of Austin, Texas on June 21, 1986. According to Johnny Guess, Dylan later arranged another meeting with the songwriter. The Drag in Austin was shut down due to Dylan being in town; Van Zandt drove his motorhome to the quartered-off area, after which Dylan boarded the vehicle and requested to hear him play several songs.


Van Zandt has been referred to as a cult musician and "a songwriter's songwriter." Musician Steve Earle, a close friend, once said Van Zandt was "the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that." The quote was printed on a sticker featured on the packing of At My Window, much to Van Zandt's displeasure. Van Zandt responded: "I've met Bob Dylan's bodyguards and if Steve Earle thinks he can stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table, he's sadly mistaken."


allmusic profile

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