Country singer-songwriter Tom T. Hall (who recently celebrated his 76th birthday) sings about his childhood hometown hero in “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died.” Hear from more musical poets on this week’s American Routes.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
This world looks like a chain of heavy broken hearts.
The words of Woody Guthrie immortalized in the voice of Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy on the third and final (?) release in the Mermaid Ave. series. Listen to more wordsmiths of American music on this week’s American Routes.
Also, watch out for American Routes’ Woody Guthrie centennial birthday special set to air in the last week of June.
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Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson passed away on Tuesday May 29, 2012 at a hospital in Winston-Salem, NC. He was 89 years old. This simply breaks my Southern heart. There are few people in this world that were both as talented and genuinely humble as Doc.
I remember working as a lighting tech at a show he was performing at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC in the summer of 2008. At one point, Doc was in a picking circle backstage with Riley Vargus Baugus [thanks to birdsong4j for the correction] and a number of other friends and acquaintances. Every single person on that job site - the grips, the lighting techs, the caterers, everyone - stopped working and just stood in silent awe, struck by the graceful power of his words and chords. They broke the mold when they made this man.
Read about Doc’s music and life here.
This Week on American Routes: Words & Music
(Cover photo of ‘Dirtdobber Blues’ by Philip Gould, courtesy of Cyril Vetter)
May 30th, 2012 ~ Do the words make the song or the notes? What does it take to tell a good tale in music or about music? We asked these questions to a few writers of both songs and stories. Singer-songwriter and memoirist Rosanne Cash sits down before a live audience to tell us about her authorial journey, then we chat with novelist Cyril Vetter on translating a musician’s life into fiction. And New Orleans bluesman Little Freddie King spins a few tall tales from the juke joint.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Ralph Stanley & Tom T. Hall are among the Southern songsters that didn’t quite make the cut for this week’s show. Also, we want to wish a happy birthday to Tom, who turned 75 today.
It was real hard. We grew everything we eat. My mother would can stuff through the summer and we’d kill hogs in the winter for the meat and sell the hams for money to get clothes to wear, and we’d just go barefooted all summer and get one pair of shoes during the winter. We didn’t know anything any better, that was good times. We’d all play games and pitch horseshoe and play ball and just get around and love each other.
The late King of Bluegrass, Jimmy Martin, reflected on growing up in rural East Tennessee on this week’s American Routes.
For the past 20 years I do nothing but hunt with my ‘coon dogs - Tom T. Hall and Dolly Parton, Patty Loveless - and I’ve got a squirrel dog named Loretta Lynn… My beagle-dogs are named Little Tater Dickens - Little Jimmy Dickens - and the other is named George Jones, and I got one named Mel Tillis - a little blue-tick. And all the dogs favors who I name ‘em after… [Dolly’s] got real big pretty eyes.
Jimmy Martin talked about his hunting dogs and more in this 2005 interview on American Routes.
This week on American Routes~ Southern Men of Song: Jimmy Martin and Percy Sledge
(Photo of Percy Sledge, via www.psledge.com)
May 23rd, 2012 ~ Working class, self-styled and always opinionated, the late King of Bluegrass Jimmy Martin talks guitar-picking, hunting dogs and the Opry. And singer of songs, Percy Sledge recalls going from hospital orderly to Atlantic Records soul singer with “When a Man Loves a Woman.”
When you’d sit out on the river and you practice, you would end up going to deeper levels of your own conscious. What that did for me was it made me realize or think of the river as like a nurturing force, but it became very inspirational. I realized that it was not only a pathway to other places, but it became like an internal pathway to the deepest part of your own spirit and soul.
Clarinet player Dr. Michael White, on practicing alongside the Mississippi River.
You know what’s supposed to be around there, but you round the bend, and there might be a big vessel aground ahead of you and you’ve got to stop and either go to the shore or turn around and go back to the next town. I think the mystery of the river is what’s down there, and what’s ahead.
Captain Doc Hawley, on the mystery of the Mississippi River.
