{"id":345,"date":"2012-06-09T16:17:53","date_gmt":"2012-06-09T16:17:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=345"},"modified":"2012-06-10T01:20:29","modified_gmt":"2012-06-10T01:20:29","slug":"guy-clark-and-darrell-scott-country-troubadours-for-our-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=345","title":{"rendered":"Guy Clark and Darrell Scott: Country Troubadours for Our Times"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A Southerly Cultural Travel Journal \u00a0Vol. 5<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Guy Clark (right) and Verlon Thompson, courtesy Columbus Dispatch.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

A prime motivation for my nearly 800-mile drive from Milwaukee to the Blue Plum Festival in eastern Tennessee was to see the now-venerable Texas singer-songwriter Guy Clark. It was a deeply gratifying experience. Though only 70, Clark is currently walking with a cane (perhaps still suffering from effects of a broken leg in 2008) but when he settled in and warmed up with fellow guitarist and songwriter Verlon Thompson, he quickly offered several fine brand-new songs, proving his creative powers have hardly diminished. \u201cThe High Price of Inspiration\u201d addressed how creativity is almost always inextricably entwined with life when he\u00a0demurrs, \u201cInspiration without strings, I’d like that once.\u201d Another new one “Coyote” (Spanish for trickster or, as Clark said, \u201ccoward\u201d), pointedly conveys the wrenching story of mercenary smugglers who exploit the desperate dreams of illegal aliens along the Mexican-American border: \u201cYou took all my money and left me to die in South Texas sun.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here you gain a sense of Clark’s distinctive artistry as his dusty, understated singing style assured that the song\u2019s pathos would never be oversold with sentimentality. As always with Clark, the feeling are vivid in his voice but tempered by the sense one is overhearing a man almost singing to himself. He often sounds as if he\u2019s just awoken from a dolorous dream. So hearing him is an utterly human experience.<\/p>\n

Lost love, a classic theme of country music, is perfectly recast in his classic \u201cDublin Blues\u201d — amid a beer-soaked rhythmic sway, the protagonist rues the fading object of his love, across the Atlantic Ocean and half of America:<\/p>\n

I wish I was in Austin\/ In the Chili Parlor Bar\/Drinkin’ Mad Dog Margaritas\/<\/em>
\n And not carin’ where you are.<\/em><\/p>\n

The wishful denial expresses the emotional truth, the art of slight indirection.<\/p>\n

Although he is also a master craftsman of guitar-making, Clark understands the proper place the material objects have in life. In \u201cStuff that Works,\u201d he sings about the \u201ckind of stuff you don’t hang on the wall\/ the kind of stuff you reach for when you fall.\u201d<\/p>\n

His handsome face — weather-worn, craggy and now slightly collapsing \u2013 seems a prime candidate for the Great American Roots Singer-songwriter Mount Rushmore.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Just for the sake of argument, I\u2019d also nominate for such a monument Clark’s old compadre, the late Townes Van Zandt (together probably the real-life Pancho and Lefty), Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Neil Young and maybe Lucinda Williams, assuming room for five faces. Coincidentally the visages of all these people show the weight of their gifts and burdens, often interchangeable in nature. Calling all cultural chiselers.<\/em><\/p>\n

Clark\u2019s small wave to the crowd at the set\u2019s end conveyed something, perhaps a slightly amazed humility. He has a reputation as an ornery\u00a0cuss but you get the feeling that — aside from his loving competition with Van Zandt — he never wanted a whole lot\u00a0more than a workbench at which he could fashion his guitars and dream up stories of desperados\u00a0and desolatos\u00a0to sing. Today Clark’s esteem among his contemporaries is underscored\u00a0by a recent 2-CD recording of his songs by the likes of Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, John Prine, Roseanne Cash and others. \u201cGuy\u2019s songs are literature,\u201d said Lyle Lovett, one of the artists heard on the tribute. \u201cHis ability to translate the emotional into the written word is extraordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite all this, I think Darrell Scott deserved the Blue Plum\u2019s closing headliner spot, because he’s a performer in his absolute prime and a songwriter who could arguably crack into the company above. And his style connects more directly with a large crowd.<\/p>\n

His voice can take a lyric line and hoist it from an inner feeling to an outer wail with chilling suddenness. And yet he doesn\u2019t lose the sound of intimate probing that gives the feeling emotional honesty. His baritone-tenor range recalls Paul Simon without the tendency to preciousness.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a special singing skill and his lyrics are an easy match in quality. For example, the jazzy-gospel \u201cRiver Take Me\u201d is about an out-of-work man who wants only \u201cto live within the means of his own two hands.\u201d When Scott sang fervently, \u201cRiver take me, far from troubled times,\u201d you sensed\u00a0human desperation in the reach for a mythological metaphor: The troubled imagination must do the work that those under-used hands cannot, while understanding the risk of the dream. \u201cThe river can drown you or wash you clean.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Scott looks beyond one man\u2019s personal situation. One of his most covered songs* is \u201cYou’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive,\u201d a majestically mournful melody which commemorates the hard coal miner\u2019s life in Harlan County, Kentucky, where \u201cyou spend your life digging coal from the bottom of your grave.\u201d It’s the story of his own grandfather — and of many men whose lives are too proverbially close to \u201cnasty, brutish and short.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scott performed with the band comprises of all his blood brothers who he said had performed together as a whole ensemble since they were teenagers. You could sense the deep history circulating among these men complex yet gone with understanding and affection.<\/p>\n

* Kathy Mattea\u2019s rendition of \u201cHarlan County\u201d is not to be missed on her album Coal.<\/em><\/p>\n

1 Here’s Scott’s performance of “Never Leave Harlan Alive” in Bristol TN\/VA in 2006 http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=69BwNVtyCKs&feature=related<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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  A Southerly Cultural Travel Journal \u00a0Vol. 5 Guy Clark (right) and Verlon Thompson, courtesy Columbus Dispatch.\u00a0 A prime motivation for my nearly 800-mile drive from Milwaukee to the Blue Plum Festival in eastern Tennessee was to see the now-venerable … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-5z","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=345"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":352,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/345\/revisions\/352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}