Mickey Newbury – The Mickey Newbury Collection

Songwriters held in high esteem by fellow artists while remaining largely unknown to the masses are common in Texas music. From the late, legendary troubadour Townes Van Zandt to wordsmith extraordinaire Butch Hancock to psychedelic prophet Roky Erickson to simpleton-savant Daniel Johnston, the state’s songbooks are strewn with names known primarily just to listeners who keep their ears close to the underground.

The mystery of Mickey Newbury, however, is another matter altogether. Born and raised in Houston in the 1940s and ’50s, Newbury became one of Nashville’s brightest boy-wonders in the mid-late ’60s, penning a string of hits for the likes of Don Gibson, Kenny Rogers, Eddy Arnold, Andy Williams and Jerry Lee Lewis. In 1972, Newbury even hit the pop charts on his own, reaching #30 with a single called “An American Trilogy”. The tune, a brilliantly innovative fusion of excerpts from “Dixie”, “Battle Hymn Of The Republic” and “All My Trials”, subsequently became a staple in Elvis Presley’s repertoire. In 1977, Newbury was name-checked in “Luckenbach, Texas”, a #1 country smash and top-25 pop crossover hit for Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson (complete with a reference to “Hank Williams’ pain songs and Newbury’s train songs.”)

All of which suggests Newbury should be a household name in the annals of American popular culture. Yet if you asked even underground music fans about him today, they may well be less aware of Newbury than they are of Van Zandt, Hancock, Erickson or Johnston.

Part of this has to do with the simple passage of time, and how Newbury has chosen to spend it. After a string of solo albums throughout the ’70s that sold to a devoted cult following but never quite found a mainstream audience, Newbury largely withdrew from performing and recording, content to live with his wife and children in Oregon. He’s released just four albums in the last 18 years, and generally plays no more than a dozen live dates annually.

Nevertheless, the 10 albums Newbury released from 1969-81 constitute one of the most remarkable catalogs of music any American artist has assembled in this century, a body of work for which he deserves to be remembered and revered. Gradually, though, these records fell out-of-print, and when CDs came along about a decade ago, the master tapes of Newbury’s records had somehow apparently been lost or misplaced in various record-company vaults.

The last resort was to transfer the albums to digital from virgin-vinyl copies of the original LPs, a project recently undertaken by producers Robert Rosemurgy and Owsley Manier and a staff of studio specialists. The result is The Mickey Newbury Collection, an eight-CD box set that starts with Newbury’s landmark 1969 record Looks Like Rain and concludes with his nostalgic 1981 release After All These Years.

Technically, Looks Like Rain wasn’t Newbury’s debut; in 1968, RCA/Victor had issued Harlequin Melodies, but its by-the-book approach to presenting eleven of Newbury’s better-known songs was a far cry from the vision the artist was developing in his own head. Whereas Harlequin Melodies came across as little more than demos cut-and-pasted together on an LP, Looks Like Rain was an epic cycle of songs and moods woven together by “rain and train sound effects courtesy of Mystic Moods Orchestra (from LP: One Stormy Night),” as the credits plainly stated on the back of the album. Not credited, but omnipresent throughout the record’s 40-minute running time, is the sound of wind chimes, gently tinkling away in the background on every single track, an ingenious thematic device that symbolizes the painstaking care with which Newbury sought to treat his songs.

And what songs they are. Sometimes they’re more suites than songs, actually, as on the opening “Write A Song A Song/Angeline” and the similarly-segued “33rd Of August/When The Baby In My Lady Gets The Blues”. Lyrically, Newbury’s writing is rich with romantic imagery; a typical couplet from “Angeline” rhapsodizes, “Winter’s in labor and soon will give birth to the spring/And sprinkle the meadow with flowers for my Angeline.” Musically, his melodies frequently echo with a melancholy longing ever so eloquently expressed by his soaring, achingly sweet singing. Rarely has such a heavenly voice been possessed by an artist whose reputation is so firmly grounded in his songwriting credentials.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation about these recordings, in fact, is how misleading his reputation has been, even as a songwriter. Generally speaking, Newbury is regarded as a classic country tunesmith, but Looks Like Rain and several subsequent albums in this collection suggest a direct connection to an entirely different direction in modern music. The poetic romanticism and almost gothic grandeur of his most enduring works clearly warrant Newbury being considered alongside such artists as Leonard Cohen and Tim Buckley as influences on scores of similarly styled contemporary acts such as Nick Cave, American Music Club, the Tindersticks and Mark Lanegan.

Not that there aren’t examples of more traditional roots-music forms here as well. Frisco Mabel Joy, the 1970 follow-up to Looks Like Rain, counts among its highlights the rhythmic mid-tempo rocker “Mobile Blue” and the country-folkish album-closer “How I Love Them Old Songs”. But really, these are more the exception than the rule: The hallmarks of Frisco Mabel Joy are dramatic numbers such as the aforementioned “An American Trilogy”, the wistful lament “How Many Times (Must The Piper Be Paid For His Song)”, and the stoically heroic “Remember The Good” — all of which are a far cry from what Nashville represented, then, now, or ever.

And then there are Newbury’s never-ending thematic notions. Beyond the sound effects he often used as segues between songs (in addition to rain and chimes, subsequent albums employ such backdrops as howling wind and honking traffic), Frisco Mabel Joy features two instrumental passages (both titled simply as “Interlude” in the track listings) that revisit and flesh out melodic ideas presented in the songs that precede them.

Newbury also made a concerted effort to connect the dots between different albums. For example: Separate versions of his song “San Francisco Mabel Joy” appear on Looks Like Rain and 1973’s Heaven Help The Child; the one album between those two does not contain that a version of that song, but Newbury titled that album Frisco Mabel Joy. More obvious connections are the snippets of songs and lyrics that continue to resurface throughout Newbury’s catalog — most notably the opening line of “Angeline,” the second song on Looks Like Rain. That line, “Yesterday’s newspaper forecast no rain for today,” pops up at both the beginning and the end of Heaven Help The Child; at one point, he even samples a few seconds directly from the original track. Many years later, in the closing moments of his 1979 album The Sailor, he again references that same opening line of “Angeline”. Shameless recycling? Perhaps — but Newbury’s far too talented and prolific a writer to have resorted to such repetition without a reason.

The first three albums are the crown jewels here; together, they constitute a trilogy that rivals Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home/Highway 61 Revisited/Blonde On Blonde heyday, though comparing those two artists is a classic case of apples and oranges in terms of their stylistic approaches. Looks Like Rain established Newbury’s identity as an utterly unique and original artist; Frisco Mabel Joy upped the ante with the most consistently strong songwriting of his career; Heaven Help The Child added a couple new classics to the oeuvre (the title cut and “Cortelia Clark”), and integrated a handful of older tunes into the musical framework he’d laid with the previous two records.

Live At Montezuma Hall, also released in 1973, is a welcome revelation and a valuable document for a couple of reasons. First, by showcasing Newbury in a solo acoustic setting, it proves his songs and voice to be magical even without the lush, romantic production that adorns them on the studio recordings. Second, on storytelling stints such as his long-winded introduction to “Bugger Red Blues”, Newbury is somewhat surprisingly revealed to be a rather jovial personality, a dimension often lost amidst the exquisitely moody depths of his most moving moments as a songwriter.

Subsequent albums see a slight, gradual decline from his initial outburst, though it’s largely a matter of the difficulty in living up to the impossibly high standard he’d established for himself. I Came To Hear The Music, released in 1974, opens with a typically Newburian suite of the title track (which was first introduced on the live record) sublimely sliding into “Breeze Lullaby”, and closes with an instrumental coda reprising a beautiful melody that appears earlier in the record on “If You See Her”. 1975’s Lovers opens with “Apples Dipped In Candy”, a three-tiered construction that ranks among the most ambitious and fully realized creations of Newbury’s career.

Perhaps to help consolidate costs, the final four albums in the set are presented on two discs, with 1977’s Rusty Tracks and 1978’s His Eye Is On The Sparrow paired together on one, and 1979’s The Sailor and 1981’s After All These Years sharing the other. Rusty Tracks marked Newbury’s most concerted concentration on non-original material since “An American Trilogy”; its final four tracks are covers, including rearrangements of the classics “Shenandoah” and “In The Pines”. After All These Years may be the best of these later efforts, with a three-song opening medley that harks back to the sweeping emotionalism of Newbury’s early work.

Really, there’s far too much to digest and discover here in one sitting, which points to this project’s greatest strength and its inevitable weakness. On the up side, The Mickey Newbury Collection is one of those anchors that ground great record collections, a treasure that offers rewarding musical experiences for years to come. The down side is that such an extensive set doesn’t come without a hefty price tag. And while those who are already fans of Newbury’s work may well be willing to spring for it, an eight-CD box isn’t likely to attract those who are simply interested in an introductory exposure to his music.

And that is a significant matter, because Newbury’s contributions to American popular song are far too valuable to fall victim to a gap in generations, as appears to have largely been the case. The Mickey Newbury Collection offers ample evidence of Newbury’s influence on a surprising range of contemporary performers. All that’s left is for his music to reach the ears of those who deserve to hear it.