Masterpiece draws on a lifetime
Tom Russell’s career includes gritty Vancouver gigs in the 1970s
Tom Russell still recalls the three years he spent plying his trade on Vancouver’s skid row.
It’s hard to imagine that the composer behind the 52-track masterpiece The Rose of Roscrae once held down house gigs at some of Main and Hastings’ meanest watering holes.
“You know, I write for a serious ranching journal of the West called Ranch & Reata, and just finished a long piece about Ian Tyson, who is 10 years older,” Russell said.
“But he and I paid our dues at the Golf Club, Club Zanzibar, The Union — playing three sets for eight hours a night of country rock and trying to fit in a few of your own tunes sometimes. I was there 1970 to ’73.”
From Vancouver, the now 68 yearold Los Angeles-born musician moved to Austin, and eventually El Paso.
Along the way, he honed his songwriting craft, releasing acclaimed albums such as the Road to Bayamon and having his tunes covered by everyone from Johnny Cash and k.d. lang, Dave Alvin and Suzy Bogguss, who had a Top 10 hit with his song Outbound Plane.
Russell co-published a book of songwriting quotes (with Sylvia Tyson), his detective novel is sold in Scandinavia and he collaborated on book of letters with Charles Bukowski. He paints, enjoying the lighting in his wife’s home in Switzerland and new digs in Santa Fe, N.M.
He gets around. Perhaps that is why he writes authoritatively on so many topics on The Rose of Roscrae.
He calls the album the end of a trilogy begun with The Man From God Knows Where — a song cycle about his Norwegian/Irish ancestors adventures in the Old West — and the followup Hotwalker, which exposed the art-world fringe inhabited by folks such as his poet buddy Bukowski.
The Rose of Roscrae recounts a story of a lad from Ireland in love with Rose Malloy in County Tipperary, Ireland, in the 1880s who is forced to flee to America, where he winds up a cowboy, becomes an outlaw named Johnny-Behind-The-Deuce and finally returns home to the Emerald Isle.
“I like to hang it on the nail of a trilogy because it fits with my ‘folk operas,’ which incorporated a lot of guests and sampled recordings,” he said.
“This one is a culmination of the previous two, but is the sum of 20 years’ work and deeper. The man and the woman both get to tell their stories set against classic voices and songs of the West, as well as my own.”
Opening with the haunting voice of Texan Jimmie Dale Gilmore singing Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie, the 2-hour-and-30 minute recording includes narration, vintage classics such as Tex Ritter’s Blood on the Saddle and Russell’s new songs performed by him and guests such as Gretchen Peters, Ian Tyson and John Trudell. It’s an in-depth tale bringing in real and imagined characters from history — and a masterpiece.
“What came first was the idea of writing an authentic version of what they used to call frontier musicals like Oklahoma or Annie, Get Your Gun, which were always done by Easterners and Tin Pan Alley songsmiths,” he said.
“Then the story of my former sisterin-law who has eight generations of life in the West crept in and we were off to a man’s side/women’s side story to hang huge concepts on.”
He’d like to see show wind up on Broadway some day. But for now he’s showcasing one set of the “Rough Guide to the Rose of Roscrae” in the first set and tunes dating back as far as those East Hastings bars in the second.