A success at home, Tami Neilson returns to the HQ of country music
New Zealand success has catapulted singer Tami Neilson back to the home of country music.
Early 90s Nashville. A motorhome pulls up outside a laundromat and two kids get out with bags of washing. It’s an important part of this family’s weekly routine: they get paid to look good, regardless of their life on the road.
The kids hump the bags into the laundromat and start separating the everyday from the stage clothes that turn this mom, pop and three kids from Canada into the Neilsons band and occasionally earn them supporting slots for such stars as Johnny Cash and regular gigs on the General Jackson Showboat in Opryland.
Tami and Jay spot a bag of clean clothes next to one of the big machines and recognise the “Brooks & Dunn” label as belonging to honky-tonk-flavoured country rockers Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn, whose debut album, Brand New Man, has already hurtled them to the top of Nashville’s hit parade.
The kids rush back to the motorhome to find a tape of their own songwriting, annotated with their contact details, then slip it into the Brooks & Dunn bag. Maybe this one will work, maybe this hustle will get them noticed.
As Tami Neilson says now, she was born to be a “scrappy little hustler”. Although her incredible live performances, top-10 albums Dynamite! and Don’t Be Afraid and armful of songwriting and Kiwi country music awards point to her having made it to the top in New Zealand, it hasn’t been all through luck and talent.
After all, this is the woman who left behind a successful family country group in North America to follow the love of her life to Greenhithe on Auckland’s North Shore and raise a couple of kids. The woman who, after starting back at square one in a music scene she knew little about (and which certainly didn’t know her), found herself spruiking her albums at other artists’ gigs where she thought the audience might appreciate her brand of bold, colourful and, at times, beautifully poignant country music.
Since then, her success on this side of the world has catapulted her back to Nashville, where she’s just performed two showcases at the Americana Music Festival before heading north for a short tour of her native Canada.
How does it feel to take her Kiwi success back to the home of country music? “I have so many unreal stories connected
to Nashville,” Neilson says. “I’ve spent so much time there at different stages of my life.
“The first time we went was because both my parents were big risk-takers and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. We went in our motorhome and we were just trying to sing anywhere and everywhere. We experienced everything from bizarre and amazing to being down and out and eating from foodbanks.”
As well as the hardscrabble times and 10 years of living out of the motorhome, Neilson has enjoyed working alongside some of the biggest names in the Nashville scene.
Slipping into a Southern belle drawl, she describes her publisher with Elvis’ “taking care of business” ring; Carl Perkins’ tour bus frozen in time, with ashtrays left unemptied; open mic nights with “Cowboy Jack Clement”; and hanging out with Rose Garden singer Lynn Anderson, with her “diamond ring the size of an ice rink”.
“The last time I was in Nashville was on my honeymoon 10 years ago when we took a detour because I’d written this song to record with Joanne Cash – Johnny’s little sister,” she says.
“Whenever we’d go to Nashville growing up, we’d always sing on her and her husband Harry’s Sunday TV programme, Cowboy Church, and we are still really close friends to people there. I said I wanted to record Sister Cash with Joanne, so we did that.
“Even though she had a cold, she was reading the words and saying ‘Darlin’, anything for you … when I grow up, darlin’, I want ta sound just like you.’”
Neilson talks excitedly about her “hometown” of Nashville, but the trip is also emotional as it marks the first time the 39-year-old has returned since her dad, Ron, died in February 2015.
“Dad always said Nashville’s a factory town – only the product is music and the workers are wearing guitars,” she says.
“You sit down to have a coffee and the waitress is a singer – every single person in Nashville is trying to make it, which means it can be a really sad place.
“Going back now is going to bring back so many memories and different experiences, especially having lost Dad. I’m going down there with my mum and she hasn’t been there without Dad, either, so it will be really overwhelming.”
Like her father, Neilson has toiled hard behind the scenes to get her music heard in Nashville at the Americana Music Festival (it’s telling that the other Kiwi hoping to make a splash there, Marlon Williams, has done it with far more biglabel support). But it’s a work ethic that was instilled early on.
“Dad was a man of faith and always said to plant your seed everywhere because you don’t know which one will grow,” she says. “You can do all this work and spend all this money and nothing can happen or amazing things could come of it – but I have to take that risk and do that.
“I guess I have that real crazy risk-taking element to my personality, just like my parents did.”
Following her North American performances, Tami Neilson will perform at the Nelson Arts Festival on October 15.
“Nashville’s a factory town – only the product is music and the workers are wearing guitars.”