THROWING THE BOOK AT RAY WYLIE HUBBARD
In the song “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33,” Kris Kristofferson could have easily had Ray Wylie Hubbard in mind: “He’s a poet, he’s a picker, he’s a prophet, he’s a pusher; he’s a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he’s stoned.” Except Hubbard hasn’t been stoned for decades now. Drugs could hardly make him any deeper than he already is.
The Wimberley-dwelling troubadour is now 73 years old, going strong in the middle of one hell of a third act. Revered in Texas for decades, he made his Grand Ole Opry debut only last summer. On July 10, Nashville juggernaut Big Machine released “Co-Starring,” a duets album stuffed with an absurdly wide range of partners: grizzled geezers Joe Walsh and Ringo Starr all the way down to gritty Americana girls Larkin Poe and Ashley McBryde.
Several lifetimes ago, Hubbard escaped a beating in a New Mexico bar and came out with “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” Cut by Jerry Jeff Walker on 1973 album “Viva Terlingua!”, the song pressed its fingers to the jugular of the budding outlaw-country scare and became an irrepressible anthem, the kind of song that never fails to spark a barroom singalong. It also taught its author a valuable lesson: “If you write a song, you better be prepared to sing it for the rest of your life.”
Lesser songwriters would have buckled under the weight of such an albatross, and Hubbard nearly did. He fronted a band called the Cowboy Twinkies and battled the usual music-biz demons until late guitar great Stevie Ray Vaughan helped him reach an acceptable arrangement with his higher power.
Hubbard has since evolved from the idiosyncratic countryfolk singer of ’90s efforts “Lost
Train of Thought” and “Loco Gringo’s Lament” to the growling cuss of the 2000s — the decade that spawned “Screw You, We’re From Texas” and “Snake Farm” — to the mystical bluesman of recent albums “The Ruffian’s Misfortune” and “Tell the Devil I’m Getting There as Fast as I Can.” His musician compadres routinely place him in the same esteemed class as songwriting icons Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt.
About the only way to accurately illustrate the incalculable influence Hubbard exerts over an entire aesthetic — that of the unkempt, soothsaying Texas singer-songwriter — would be a book like “The Messenger: The Songwriting Legacy of Ray Wylie Hubbard.” Even its author, though, is somewhat at a loss to quantify Hubbard’s appeal.
“He’s just cool, and people want to be around him and (be) like him,” says Brian T. Atkinson, who undertook a similar task on 2011’s “I’ll Be Here in the Morning: The Songwriting Legacy of Townes Van Zandt.”
“I think there probably is some sort of spirituality thing going on with him, as far as that goes, and he’s a nice guy,” adds the author. “He’s a magnet for people.”
A-list friends
Is he ever. Atkinson interviewed nearly 70 musicians for the book, originally published last summer, and it’s hard to imagine a more motley cross section of performers. Some of Hubbard’s oldest cohorts — quintessential cosmic cowboy Michael Martin Murphey was two years ahead of him at their Dallas high school — rub shoulders with Texas music A-listers Ray Benson, Steve Earle, Jack Ingram and Patty Griffin, among many others.
From further afield come latter-day Nashville bad boy Eric Church, who co-wrote the title track to his 2018 album “Desperate Man” with Hubbard; blues harmonica maestro Charlie Musselwhite; and Black Crowes frontman Chris Robinson.
“I was kind of worried he’d have some like rock-star thing going on,” Atkinson says of Robinson, who also appears on “Co-Starring.” “And he was just like the mellowest hippie dude, and loves Ray.”
Something other than mellow is one of the book’s wildest interviews: Kinky Friedman, the cigar-chomping smart aleck known for such ’70s satirical songs as “They Ain’t Making Jews Like Jesus Anymore.” When he tells Atkinson, “Ray and I did a lot of (stuff) together, but the problem is that I’ve forgotten the first half of my life,” it’s one of the tamer moments in a streamof-consciousness spiel that goes on for a full three and a half pages.
“I had to go over it with my publisher a few times,” Atkinson says. “We kind of fought about it a little bit, but I said, ‘I am not going to edit anything except punctuation. I’m just going to let him go.’ ”
Loving ‘Snake Farm’
Several musicians seem fascinated with the way Hubbard, on his most recent albums, tends to write songs using only one chord. Others are fixated on “Snake Farm,” the slithering opener from Hubbard’s 2006 album of the same name. In the song, the narrator has fallen for a seductress who works at the infamous roadside reptile house near New Braunfels, a woman who sports a python sleeve tattoo and loves Welsh newwave rockers The Alarm.
Atkinson admits “Snake Farm” is not among his favorites; “I could pick 25 songs that I think are better than that one,” he says.
But to Houston-based Red Dirt firebrand Roger Creager, “‘Snake Farm’ is hilarious.” Respected songwriter and guitarist Gurf Morlix, a onetime Hubbard sideman, thinks it’s “an amazing piece of work — by the second chorus, everyone in an audience that hadn’t heard the song was singing along every time.”
Charlie Musselwhite calls the tune “a classic American folk song.” Even Alarm frontman Mike Peters weighs in.
“I was touched and honored that he name-checked us in ‘Snake Farm,’ ” he tells Atkinson. “It’s not often that happens in a song, especially in such a cool way. I’ve included ‘Snake Farm’ on preshow compilation tapes that have been played over the PA at our gigs.”
Beyond Hubbard’s songwriting skills, many musicians in “The Messenger” express their gratitude for his wisdom and generosity, musically and sometimes as a sobriety coach. Says Hayes Carll, Hubbard’s “Drunken Poet’s Dream” co-writer, “I’d never met anybody who was as kind and open and supportive.”
Atkinson figures he lost count of how many times he heard the word ‘mentor.”
“I had no idea that there was like this whole generation of musicians who he’s had over to his house to either live for short periods of time or just show them a couple of guitar riffs or co-write or whatever,” he says. “Everyone in the back half of the book basically called him a mentor, and it’s true, but only so many people can say it before it gets redundant in a book.”