The Lost Chord #3: Mickey Newbury and Others

I first heard of Mickey Newbury in the early '70s. I was newly married and living in a century-old farmhouse that was supposed to be haunted. My wife, more sensitive than I to the doings of the spirit world, didn't care for it. There was an unused bedroom, behind the door of which you could hear mumbled voices—no decipherable words, just the mumbling, like someone talking to himself who became abruptly silent when you opened the door.

Later that summer of whichever early '70s year it was, I was living alone, my wife having taken a small and unscheduled vacation from me and the house. Well, I wasn't strictly alone. The house was haunted by that voice—and the words of Mickey Newbury. Certain phrases of Newbury's have stuck in my mind ever since.

Joan Baez, on the album called Blessed Are..., which spotlighted the work of new songwriters, recorded three of Newbury's songs. One of them was "The 33rd of August," maybe the best coming-down-from-"recovering-the-satellites" song ever written, where Newbury, perhaps remembering his own days of violence and waking up in the back of squad cars writes, "Where I put my dangerous feelings under lock and key / kill my violent nature with a smile. Though the demons danced and sang their song within my fevered brain / not all of my godlike thoughts, Lord, were defiled."

That summer, I was between jobs (perhaps the reason for the unscheduled vacation). I spent my days trying to write and listening to music. Newbury's version of "The 33rd of August" was on the 1973 album Heaven Help the Child, which I had just bought and played repeatedly. One of the themes that Newbury returned to again and again was the innocent who leaves the country for the city, driven by some creative obsession into a world that does not always wait with open arms. The young wanderer in "San Francisco Mabel Joy" falls in love with a prostitute and follows her to a red-lit door, and falls under the fist of a "merchant-mad Marine"—not all violent nature is killed with a smile. And the protagonist of "Heaven Help the Child" is constantly looking back over his shoulder toward the place he left: "I hate to leave the old man all alone to work the cotton, but the country never seems to bother him," a phrase made at once plain, even poignant, by Newbury's voice, and it is one of the phrases that has been in my head all these years.

Hear This! "Heaven Help the Child" by Mickey Newbury from An American Triology (Drag City, 2011)

Newbury himself, from Houston, Texas, left home early. He joined the Air Force, and after four years of service and a stint with a local group called The Embers, wound up in Nashville determined to succeed as a songwriter. This must have been a heady time to be in Nashville, in the late '60s/early '70s, a far cry from what it is now. In Newbury's own words, it was a little like Paris in the 1920s, the Paris of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and considering the folks writing songs at the time, the description does not feel like an exaggeration. It was a weird time when a Rhodes Scholar like Kris Kristofferson could abandon his novel and decide to write country songs, a time when folks of a literary bent like Newbury and Tom T. Hall and Roger Miller were hanging out together at night and swapping songs and guitar pulls and, without even knowing it, bringing a realism and poetic sensibility back to a music which for too long had been sweetened and made palatable by Chet Atkins's "Nashville sound."

Newbury didn't have a problem getting signed by Acuff-Rose, and almost immediately other artists began to record his songs; at one point, he had songs on the r&b, country, easy listening, and rock charts in Billboard simultaneously by artists as disparate as Andy Williams and Solomon Burke and Eddie Arnold. The song on the rock chart was by The First Edition, a sort of psychedelic drug song (pro- or anti-drug, depending on your perspective) called "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)." (This song turns up on the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski.) Newbury the vocalist was signed by RCA, but didn't care for the production on his first album, Harlequin Melodies, later disowning it and signing with a label (ultimately Elektra) that would give him creative control. He always thought of It Looks Like Rain as his first real release.

This trio of albums, It Looks Like Rain, 'Frisco Mabel Joy, and Heaven Help the Child, are sometimes referred to as masterpieces. Whether they are or not (I think Heaven Help the Child probably is), they're certainly good records and I hope they'll remind audiences what a powerful singer Newbury was, especially when he had material this strong to work with.

Ralph Emery once called Newbury "the first hippie cowboy" and you could make a case for this without expending much effort. With his independence and rough and rowdy ways, he was also the first outlaw Nashville had seen for a while. This reputation was later sort of co-opted by artists like Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, but Newbury was the real thing. The term "outlaw" was coined to describe him. It was not some pose he aspired to.

Newbury abandoned Nashville early on, leaving it in 1974, when the golden age of the literary song had already waned. He wound up in Oregon, where he lived for the remainder of his life. In 1980, he became the youngest writer ever admitted to The Songwriters' Hall of Fame. During his brief reign in Nashville, he had mentored and guided a tremendous number of young singers and songwriters, a lot of them Texans like Townes van Zandt and Guy Clark, and important musicians across generations like Will Oldham and Steve Earle have lauded him.

Sometimes record companies just do things right, and this is one of those times. Drag City are certainly doing right by Newbury. I always identify Drag City with the minimalist sound of Will Oldham and his various incarnations (Palace, Bonnie "Prince" Billy). They've certainly turned out a beautiful boxed set: the three aforementioned albums, plus a fourth disc of rarities and outtakes, a map of Newbury's various wanderings, a lyrics sheet (which is always nice—are you listening, Gillian Welch?), and a ninety-six page book which holds his biography and a critique of Newbury's work. This is the way boxed sets ought to be done.

Hear This! "An American Trilogy" by Mickey Newbury

Tom Paxton: The Best Of Tom Paxton: I Can't Help Wonder Where I'm Bound: The Elektra Years

(Rhino, 1999)

Life is mostly motion, things fall by the wayside, and sometimes you forget how good a particular artist is. Probably nobody much listens to Tom Paxton anymore, which is a kind of shame. I haven't played him much myself for a while, until I got this record in the mail. It's always nice to be pleasantly surprised, and there are several songs on this album that I've been playing ever since.

Paxton was part of the folky boom of the late '60s/early '70s, when record labels were scrambling to find their own Bob Dylan. Paxton, clean-cut and fresh out of the military, wasn't Dylan by anyone's measure. But along with songwriters like Eric Andersen and Phil Ochs and Tim Hardin, he was talented, and he was in the right place at the right time. He was also lucky to have signed with Elektra, a company on the make and pushing to make a name for itself in the folk-rock field (they had just signed The Doors), who supported and promoted him.

Paxton, after being discharged from the military, ended up in Greenwich Village and bought a Martin guitar, taught himself to play it, and began to write songs. This was the heyday of the protest song, a field that Dylan had already deserted for the personal and surreal, but nobody seemed to have noticed yet, and singers like Paxton and Phil Ochs continued to write anti-war songs (like Ochs's "I Ain't Marching Anymore"). But Paxton wrote more personal songs than most of his contemporaries and had the uncanny ability to capture in song a figure who became basically an archetype of the '60s version of a traditional folk song: the restless, rootless wanderer, always walking out the door and heading down the dark side of that fabled long, lonesome road, an antihero personified in life by Woody Guthrie and Ramblin' Jack Elliott and canonized in art in Dylan songs like "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "It Ain't Me, Babe."

The Best of Tom Paxton should have included "Did You Hear John Hurt?" a song Paxton wrote after hearing Mississippi John Hurt perform in a Village coffeehouse. And maybe "Five Card Stud" instead of some of the protest songs, which inevitably sound dated. (Although "Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation" is still funny and still true.) If I were to be nitpicking, Paxton's strength is in his love songs, and "Leaving London" and "The Last Thing On My Mind" don't sound dated at all and that Martin guitar sounds timeless.

Hear This! "The Last Thing On My Mind" by Tom Paxton

Gillian Welch: The Harrow & The Harvest

(Acony Records, 2011)

After over a decade of albums, Gillian Welch's voice and David Rawlings's guitar fit together as smoothly as the right pieces in a jigsaw puzzle sliding into place. One of those albums, Hell Among the Yearlings, is at once rootsy and literary, with characters that stick in your mind and hang around for years (take the girl in "Good Til Now," who sings "bawled out, wasted, and I think I'm going down" walking with the girl "pure as milk, standing on the corner sweating through yellow silk"). Welch's voice never sounded better on a song, smoky and languorous, somewhere between eroticism and detachment, like someone truly bawled out and wasted and whispering in your ear at three o'clock in the morning.

Rawlings, back after his album, The Dave Rawlings Machine (you should check that one out, especially the song "Sweet Tooth") is again listed as producer, and he does his usual impeccable job. Maybe a little too impeccable—much of this album has a smooth, polished feel to it, not exactly easy listening, but not exactly anything else. I don't expect field recordings, but a rough edge or two would have been nice. Rawlings and Welch again share the instrumentation (guitar, banjo, harmonica, hands, and feet) and songwriting credits. Three of the songs ("Hard Times," "Six White Horses,"and "Silver Dagger") are titles reshuffled from traditional music, but the lyrics are new. There's nothing to fault here. (I wasn't crazy about the line "that's the way the cornbread crumbles," an expression I've never heard, which sounds like a bone tossed to listeners who might feel like the music is drifting too far from No Depression shores.)

The high watermark here is "The Way It Goes," with its refrain "that's the way it goes / everybody's buying little baby clothes." This song is getting some radio play, and deservedly so. "The Way It Goes" is like a really good short story—there are lines here that are unforgettable, and the narrator is delineated so clearly that she might have been etched in acid.

It's not easy to simultaneously appeal to people who read The New Yorker and the folks who read The Progressive Farmer, but Welch and Rawlings pull it off time after time. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but next time out, a few sharp corners and a rough edge or two would be appreciated.

Hear This! "The Way It Goes" by Gillian Welch