by Si Dunn
TEXAS MUSIC
Craig Clifford and Craig D. Hillis, editors
Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas
Texas A&M University Press
John and Robin Dickson Series in Texas Music
978-1-6234-9446-9 (hardcover, $29.95); 978-1-6234-9447-6 (ebook), 280 pages, index
December 2016
Lloyd Sachs
T Bone Burnett: A Life in Pursuit
University of Texas Press
978-1-4773-0377-1 (hardcover, $26.95), 978-1-4773-1156-1 (ebook), 278 pages
October 2016
Texas, it is often said, is a state of mind. It is also a state of music that now is known around the planet for its distinctive blending of cultures, genres, history, current times, and haunting yet sometimes bittersweet or even darkly humorous sounds.
“Texas music” gets much of its strength and widespread appeal from unique performers who sing and play well but, more important, write “ruthlessly poetic” songs that let audiences experience “something from a perspective that we wouldn’t ordinarily have access to,” the two editors of Pickers and Poets contend.
In “ruthlessly poetic” music, the lyrics must be of poetic quality, have substance, and stand front and center in the songs.
To support their opinions, editors Craig Clifford and Craig Hillis offer a collection of entertaining and informative essays written by themselves and several other longtime observers of the Texas live music scene. The contributors include Joe Holley, Joe Nick Patoski, Jan Reid, John T. Davis, and Jeff Prince, to name just a few.
Likewise, the artists highlighted include Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Michael Martin Murphey, Steven Fromholz, Kris Kristofferson, Vince Bell, Marsha Ball, Willie Nelson, and numerous others.
The “notion of the ruthlessly poetic singer-songwriter…had its origins in the coffeehouses and clubs of the late sixties and seventies in Houston, Austin, Dallas, and other Texas cities,” Clifford and Hillis write. What the Texas singer-songwriters did there “was similar to what Bob Dylan was doing in Greenwich Village. In the language of the times, these were ‘folksingers,’” they note.
“Unlike Dylan, however, these were folksingers writing songs about their own people and singing in their own vernacular to their own people rather than trying to imitate Woody Guthrie’s Oklahoma accent and Depression-era sensibilities for the art crowd of New York. This music, like most great poetry, is profoundly rooted. The rootedness of the Texas singer-songwriters is a recurring theme in this book,” they emphasize.
Both of the book’s editors are Texas musicians with intriguing credentials. Craig Clifford is a philosophy professor. He directs the Honors College at Tarleton State University in Stephenville and has written other books. He and his music group, the Accidental Band, perform and record classic Texas singer-songwriters’ music and Clifford’s own songs. Meanwhile, Austin musician Craig T. Hills plays in the Lost Austin Band and remains active in the Texas live music scene. He toured and recorded as guitarist with Jerry Jeff Walker and the Lost Gonzo Band from 1972 to 1976.
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Numerous famous musical performers, Texan and otherwise, flow through Lloyd Sachs’s new book, T Bone Burnett: A Life in Pursuit. But the spotlight generally stays focused on Fort Worth native Joseph Henry Burnett III, better known as “T Bone.”
Burnett is a widely acclaimed musician, songwriter, and soundtrack and record producer, with several Grammy Awards and an Academy Award to his credit (for composing the “roots-based” soundtrack for the Coen brothers’ 2000 movie O Brother Where Art Thou?).
Fans of T Bone Burnett will relish this musical biography, with its discussions of the many artists Burnett has brought together, the many albums he has produced, and his string of successes both in Nashville and Hollywood.
Readers less enamored of the music industry might wish to see and hear more directly from T Bone and from some of his competitors. But the author has done a good job of writing the biography within two restrictions. First, as a veteran music journalist, Sachs is a longtime Burnett acquaintance and has written about him or sought him out for comments many times in the past. Second, Burnett refused to help Sachs with the book, on the grounds that he (Burnett) had no time to “look backward.” But Burnett did not hinder the author from interviewing family members, numerous friends, and others. Most were eager to help, he says.
Burnett also told Sachs: “The one thing I will say, if you do this, please don’t say I have had a career. I haven’t had a career. That is not what I did.”
Indeed, Burnett has preferred the word “pursuit,” Sachs reports. The Texan has devoted his working life to the pursuit of music producing, recording, and performing.
“His success is particularly amazing,” Sachs writes, “because, in many ways, he is an outsider playing an insider’s game. A fierce intellectual, he finds cultural enrichment in a paradise of anti-intellectualism. A man of deep religious faith, he thrives in a den of moneylenders. Burnett is part Don Quixote, charging at digital windmills in his quest to restore analog truth, and part Southern politician, crossing palms with hyperbolic play money: he says that Justin Timberlake is ‘the closest we have to Bing Crosby,’ claims the mandolinist Chris Thile is ‘the Louis Armstrong of his time,’ and calls Alison Kraus ‘the one… [just as] Ray Charles was the one.’”
But there is a less-successful side to T Bone Burnett that has left him partly unfulfilled, Sachs adds in this well-written book. Burnett “has never been able to get past his own self-consciousness and self-doubt as a recording artist. While scoring success after big-time success for others—whether breaking bands, such as Counting Crows, or reviving legends, such as Elton John—he is stuck as a singer-songwriter on the mezzanine level of critics’ favorites. As acclaimed as some of his albums are, they have all withered on the commercial vine. That the once rail-thin, six-foot-five Texan has never been comfortable performing before crowds hasn’t helped.”
Still, the tall Texan looms large and friendly in many successful performers’ minds. For example, Daniel Tashian, a Nashville songwriter and leader of the band Silver Seas, recalls how T Bone Burnett helped him cope with a difficult recording deal that went awry. “He was very kind. It was like having a magician for an uncle.”
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