Lee Ann Womack finds her roots
Over a 10-year span that began in 1997, Lee Ann Womack recorded 19 country hits, a pair of which crossed onto the pop charts. During that time, she attended industry eventswhere she would see Nashville fringe-dwellers like Patty Griffin and Buddy Miller — artists whose esteemed work never quite pushed them into the mainstream but who have found a comfortable home in the difficult-to-describe catch-all genre of Americana.
“I saw them and thought, ‘That’s where I need to be,’ ” Womack says, laughing. “So one night at one of these dinners, I see Patty again, and she waved me to her table and said, ‘Come on over.’ You can argue about ‘Americana’ like any other label, but it’s just been a home for a lot of people who don’t have real strict lines around what they do. I felt like it was where I belonged.”
Womack, 51, sees music as the constant; the industry has just changed. She recalls growing up in Jacksonville, just south of Tyler, where her father was a DJ, working at stations in Carthage, Palestine and Nacogdoches.
“His record collection influenced my musical tastes, for sure,” she says. “I was beholden to it until I was old enough to buy my own records.
“That was a time DJs weren’t beholden to what a consultant told them. There was this East Texas independent spirit. I think it’s pretty obviously from this record that I feel strongly about that.”
Womack is talking about “The Lonely, The Lonesome & The Gone,” her eighth album
and the most recent in a sequence of strong releases that have found Womack wresting her career back toward Texas from Music City.
For this one, she set up shop in Houston at the storied SugarHill Recording studio with her husband and producer, Frank Liddell, himself a Houston native.
“I knew for a while I’d make my next record in Texas,” she says. Her engineer was based in Austin, so Houston made sense.
Womack’s path started in Texas and had been snaking back here for years.
Her debut album, “Lee Ann Womack,” came out nearly 20 years ago, when a strong singer doing modern honky-tonk could still find space on country radio. A year later, she had a hit with the ballad “A Little Past Little Rock” on her second album, which also had a Buddy Miller song tucked away on it.
Womack hit pay dirt in 2000 with “I Hope You Dance,” a hit album with a title song that extended well beyond country radio, thanks to a bit of pop radio polish. But Womack enjoyed that breakthrough without really selling out her country roots. The record also included songs written by Miller and Texans Bruce Robison and Rodney Crowell.
She’d managed to put a boot in two worlds.
Country radio demand transformed in the 2000s, and Womack dug in her heels. Her 2005 record, “There’s More Where That Came From,” is a somewhat forgotten diamond that modernizes the lovely balladry of ’70s country music. She proceeded further in that
direction with “Call Me Crazy” three years later and then largely dropped out of sight until releasing “The Way I’m Livin’ ” in 2014 on a smaller, independent label that had more success with bluegrass than country.
Womack says she “definitely just found myself in a spot where I felt like throwing everything out the window. To start making the music I wanted to make. To stop thinking as much and lead with my heart. This record and the last one are what came out of that, I guess.”
Womack co-wrote about half the songs, including “Mama Lost Her Smile,” a standout about aging and reassessing memories that aren’t always as good as they seem.
“You don’t take pictures,” she sings, “of the bad times.”
The record allows Womack to wander where she wants: some soul here, a little gospel there. Womack and her band take a song by storied country songwriter Harlan Howard, “He Called Me Baby,” and give it a Memphis feel. “The way I listened to music when I was younger,” she says. “Not concerned about certain types of music.”
Liddell, she says, instructed the instrumentalists to listen to Womack’s voice and go from there.
“He told them to center everything around the singing,” she says. “I wanted it to be like an old Don Williams record. You play one of those, you can’t tell if it was made today or 50 years ago. They sound as good as when he made them.”