Guy Clark’s songs remind us of what country music should be
Some days, the song writes you, Guy Clark sang. I guess the same is true for columns.
I felt like I’d been punched in the gut Tuesday morning after realizing one of Texas’ most beloved songwriters finally got off his L.A. Freeway.
I was a puddle of tears, just as I was a few weeks ago when Merle Haggard spread his silver wings. I grew up on Haggard. His songs on the car radio about Mama trying, about Mama’s hungry eyes, were lullabies for us girls on the country roads back from grandma’s house late at night.
And now it’s Clark. It hits close. He was born in Monahans, and each of his songs seemed to carry our vast, nostalgic, blemished and chili-spiced essence. Like his contemporary Townes Van Zandt, he was a storyteller first.
He wrote songs about fiddle players and trains and cornmeal and tomatoes. He was inspired by winos and wildcatters and one-night stands. He could carve a tune out of a single bent and faded snapshot, as he did in “My Favorite Picture of You,” an ode to his late wife, Susanna.
As we watch Nashville reduce mainstream country music into a Mashable video depicting three essential elements — dirt roads, pickup trucks and catcalls hollered from pickup trucks — Clark’s work reminds us what it could be. What it used to be.
What’s possible even now, when we actually listen to each other. When we tell stories to eyes instead of screens. When we sit still and aren’t afraid to hear what the quiet has to say.
Academics write about the lack of vulnerability these days. How we all live beneath shields and suits and layers of cosmetics. Guilty as charged.
Listening to Clark, I feel real again. What inspired me most was his honesty.
He answered the questions reporters threw at him. In describing the writing process to the Chronicle’s Andrew Dansby in 2007, he explained: “It’s a crapshoot every morning.”
The table was warm for him, it
seemed.
What country-raised Texan hasn’t looked around this bulging, belching city and wanted to say adios to all this concrete? But when Clark pined for “dirt-road backstreet,” it sounded like this:
If I could just get off of this L.A. Freeway // Without getting killed or caught // I’d be down the road in a cloud of smoke to some land that I ain’t bought.
One of my fondest memories is a concert more than a decade ago in the municipal auditorium in Greenville, with its tired seats and a sign on the soda machine that, true to Texas vernacular, read merely “Coke.”
I sat with some friends that night and watched as the man on stage wove stories and lives and lessons with his strings and sagebrush voice.
Clark took us to his workbench and let us pull up a chair in his mind.
Some songs moved the feet, others the heart.
Then he sang “Magnolia Wind,” one of the most beautiful waltzes I’ve ever heard, with its harmonies and fiddle and guitar and mandolin swaying together like long skirts in three-four time. I was in tears before he finished the first verse.
I’d rather sleep in a box // Like a bum on a street // Than a fine feather bed // Without your little old cold feet
I wanted to love like that. For a moment, inside the embrace of that song, I felt as though I had.
That’s what great songwriters can do. That’s how Willie Nelson puts me to bed most nights with “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” playing low on my iPhone.
If I had not fallen – and so often – he would not have found me.
Lucinda Williams kept me alive last week over a tough stretch. Bob Dylan is always down here next to me in this lonely crowd. John Prine is my everything. Neko Case, this tornado loves you. Jason Isbell, yours are among the songs I sing in the shower. And you remind me with each one that there is still beauty and poetry in country music.
Clark’s death reminds me how we should cherish these artists who sing about stuff that works. Stuff that’s real, that holds you up when you’re about to fall. That’s Guy Clark.
To me, he ain’t going nowhere. He’s just leaving.