The Lost Chord #6: Guy Clark, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Others

Several years ago, I saw Guy Clark perform at Doc Watson's MerleFest in North Carolina. The stage was encircled on three sides by hills that formed a sort of natural amphitheater. The crowd was enormous, shoulder-to-shoulder people, and during Clark's performance of a song, there was a hush over the audience—no one spoke or even coughed. Even the children were quiet.

Guy Clark was alternating songs with another singer-songwriter. The odd thing about the concert was when Clark would finish a song, let the other performer take the microphone, and walk back to sit in a folding chair, smoke a cigarette, sip from a paper cup, or tune his guitar, the crowd seemed to still be watching him. They weren't exactly ignoring the other musician, who was a rising star with a few hit records, but they seemed to always be aware of Clark. He had some natural gravitas that made you watch him even when he was just having a smoke. It's a quality he seems to have always possessed—there's an early video, available on DVD now, called Heartworn Highways, which is a sort of cinema verité documentary about Townes Van Zandt and his Texas mafia of protégés and fans. There's a scene in somebody's living room with the group swapping songs. Clark is sitting on a couch, holding a guitar, looking cocky and confident. When it's his time to perform, he does this show-stopping rendition of one of his own songs, "That Old Time Feeling." He really looks and sounds like a star, and he appears aware of it.

In 1975, he broke through with his first album, Old No. 1, on RCA, which was received with nigh-unanimous praise. This was not surprising, since it pretty much consisted of one strong song after another, songs that sounded as if Clark had been writing them for years and picking through them for the album. There wasn't a loser in the bunch.

Clark was heralded in some critical circles as "The New John Prine," who had been hailed, in his turn, as "The New Bob Dylan." There were a few similarities. Songs like "Desperadoes Waiting for a Train" had the empathy and compassion for other folks' lives that was a trait of early Prine and "Rita Ballou" had the same dry humor. His Carter-influenced guitar playing was vaguely reminiscent of Prine. But he was obviously Guy Clark from the get-go and he was good enough that he didn't have to emulate anyone.

After he moved to Nashville, some of his records began to sound over-produced. This is not exactly an unusual complaint about Nashville production. It's also known that Clark wasn't always happy with the results. He kept recording, his work appearing on various labels and he kept writing, amassing a vast catalog of songs like "Boats to Build" and "The Randall Knife," songs that possess a sort of uniquely American integrity. This sense of integrity is the first impression you pick up from listening to a lot of Clark's material. You trust him and he seems to know what he's talking or singing about. He's worked with and recorded with the same group of friends for years. Sidemen Verlon Thompson and Shawn Camp seem to have been around forever.

Now Clark has picked through all his songs and released his selections on a live album. He's on Dualtone now, a small but strong independent label that will probably give him the support he deserves. The album, called Songs and Stories, is just that—Clark and friends performing in your living room, casual and conversational, telling stories about the songs and then playing knockouts like "L.A. Freeway" and the beautiful and poignant "Dublin Blues."

Years ago, Bill Friskics-Warren wrote that if Townes Van Zandt was music's James Joyce, then Clark was its Ernest Hemingway. That's an insightful comparison that still sounds pretty much dead-on to me. His songs are at once direct and poetic, simultaneously brash and sensitive. They seem to embody a sort of rock-hard individualism that says they couldn't have been written by anyone besides Guy Clark.

Every artist is the sum of all his influences, and Clark has assimilated everything from the incantatory style of Beat poets like Ginsberg to the vast history of folk music. But his best quality is something you don't pick up or absorb—he's a Nashville maverick who never sold out or tried to. He's never worn a Nudie suit or one of those postmodern hats Nashville singers seem to favor. He's just kept on being Guy Clark and becoming a national treasure as well as a Nashville one. If they ever get around to having an Americana Hall of Fame, he should be one of the first ones through the door.

"Homegrown Tomatoes" by Guy Clark

Pulphead: Essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan

(Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2011)

John Jeremiah Sullivan used to be an editor at The Oxford American. He's also the guy who gave me the go-ahead to write a profile of John Prine, which was the first of my work The Oxford American ever published. Sullivan attended the University of the South at Sewanee and when I was there for a writer's conference, around the turn of the millennium, folks were still talking about how talented he was, and regarded him as some sort of prodigy and seemed to expect great things from him. From there, he subsequently went North, like Willie Morris, to work for Harper's Magazine and published his first book, Blood Horses, which got a lot of critical praise.

But none of this is why I'm writing about his second book—Pulphead, a book of essays just published—it's simply that Pulphead is an impressive work.

Sullivan touches on everything from Michael Jackson to Southern writer Andrew Lytle, and his intelligence jumps off the page at you—he seems to know everything about everything. The essays here show the influence of what used to be called New Journalism—pioneered by folks like Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese—but it continues to push journalism even further, toward a sort of post–New Journalism journalism.

It's more than writing sharp and insightful sentences (here's one from his sympathetic portrait of Michael Jackson: "His physical body is arguably, even inarguably, the single greatest piece of postmodern American sculpture")—he sees things in a new way, and makes you see them, as well. While his comments are not always completely sympathetic, there is, at all times, a sort of clear-eyed honesty. Sullivan seems to have decided to let the chips fall where they may and the bridges burn where they want to burn.

A few of them are probably already smoldering at the University of the South because of his essay about caretaking writer Andrew Lytle in his final months. Lytle is still regarded as something of a deity around Sewanee, and Sullivan's warts-and-all portrait—not to mention his comments about the sexual doings of some of the fugitive poets—are bound to instigate some outrage.

My favorite essay of the lot is "Unnamed Bard," a piece about the lost and mysterious Mississippi singer Geeshie Wiley and her song "Last Kind Word Blues." Anyone who obsesses over a misunderstood word in an old 1930s country-blues song, gets a dialogue going about it, and then finally figures it out, is my kind of people.

The Dreaming Fields: Matraca Berg

(Dualtone Music, 2011)

Matraca Berg's mother came from Harlan, Kentucky, to Nashville so that her child could be born in Vanderbilt Hospital. So Matraca Berg has lived in Nashville all her life and most of that life she's been involved with Nashville music, a certifiable family business, as she grew up in a clan of session players and backup singers and performers. At eighteen, she saw a song she had co-written with Bobby Braddock, "Faking Love," get recorded by T.G. Sheppard and rise to the top of the country charts. A lot of other hits followed, including the instant-classic "Strawberry Wine," which was a No. 1 hit for Deanna Carter.

Her own recording career is probably similar to that of a lot of other Americana artists: Good reviews at tiny labels that folded just as records were about to be released. But now Dualtone has released a new record, her first album in over a decade, The Dreaming Fields. Berg took a hiatus partly because she felt the country-music business was changing. She was obviously right; the changes were not for the better. Nashville now seems all hats and gowns and photogenic faces (not that she's lacking in that department), all stadium crowds and platinum records—and, of course, money.

So what Berg is doing here would have to be considered alt-country or Americana, though she says that a few years back, it would have been in the mainstream.

However you slice it, The Dreaming Fields is a serious piece of work, and one of the songs, "Your Husband is Cheating on Us," which she co-wrote with country Stratocaster-wielder Marshall Chapman, is already getting some radio play.

Berg said that she doesn't dislike her own voice, and it seems to be the perfect vehicle for these songs, sometimes as pointed and plaintive as Iris DeMint, sometimes intimate as if she's singing into your ear through the microphone, and sometimes bluesy and sexy, as on the aforementioned Chapman collaboration. My favorite is the title track, just Berg's voice and the piano, and John Catchings playing cello. Sometimes less really is more.

Berg says also that she sees her songs as children—the best and prettiest ones get picked up by other artists, and she has to make the occasional album so that the rest of the kids don't feel left out. This time, it sounds like maybe she's kept the best ones for herself.

"Your Husband is Cheating on Us" by Matraca Berg