Richard Dobson – Global Village Garage

Though he’s not among Texas’ best-known tunesmiths, Richard Dobson has been part of that extended community of songwriters for the past three decades. One of his early songs was recorded by David Allan Coe; later he co-wrote a couple tunes with Guy Clark that appeared on Clark’s albums, and one with Steve Earle that surfaced on Kelly Willis’ debut disc. Perhaps his most significant contribution to the canon, however, is his book The Gulf Coast Boys, a rambling series of adventures that, among other things, provides invaluable documentation of the 1970s heyday of Townes Van Zandt.

Though Dobson spends most of his time overseas these days, having married a woman from Switzerland, he tours occasionally over there and puts out a record now and again. His latest, Global Village Garage, has a reassuring warmth to it, the sound of a weathered survivor still singing and playing because the songs will always run thick in his blood.

Musically, it’s a fair mix of acoustic folk and bare-bones roots-rock, with a little storytelling sprinkled amidst the tracks. The lead-in to “Going To The Roundhouse”, for instance, is an oral recitation about Seymour Washington, a central figure to the mid-’70s Austin songwriters’ community featured prominently in the film Heartworn Highways. “The Ballad Of Chipita And Karla Faye” parallels ancient and recent executions of women in Texas. The closing “They Call It Music City” recalls Nashville high hopes and dashed dreams through the eyes of a man who’s now happy to “catch a big jet airplane/And fly across the sea/I know come tomorrow morning/Someone’s waiting there for me.”