That fall she also met Butch Primm, and he gave her the right nudge. “I didn’t know about the Dave Alvins, Lucinda, X, Joe Ely,” she says. “He really introduced me to that. After he heard me sing, he said, ‘You really need to think about doing your own thing. You know, it doesn’t have to be 24-7, you can do your music and you can have a life, and it doesn’t have to be this big deal all the time.’ And I went, ‘It doesn’t?’
“At that point I was learning how to play guitar,” she goes on. “I grew up playing piano, and I’d never learned how to play guitar. I always wanted to, but Shelby was older so my father taught her, and then he never got around to teaching me. So I started teaching myself how to play, and out came…songs.”
Some of those songs ended up on a tape handed to Robert John Jones at a Nashville party. He lived in New Mexico then, and ran a now-closed label called American Harvest whose roster included Vern Gosdin, Don Williams, and a late incarnation of the Flying Burrito Brothers.
“I listened to it, and it was remarkable,” Jones says from his present home in Tucson. “Initially it was my intent to sign her to my label and to a publishing deal, with the idea of developing her into an alternative artist. But as time went on, it just seemed like she was a country artist with her ideas, very unique to what was happening on radio, but not really alternative.
“She basically spent about a year in New Mexico with her husband and co-writer, Butch, who worked for the company [American Harvest] doing research,” Jones remembers. “She poured coffee and worked on her songwriting and guitar playing. They just lived down the street. And then they moved back to Nashville.”
Butch remembers their stay in New Mexico having lasted just four months, but there’s no question what brought them back to Tennessee. On May 11, 1996, ValuJet Flight 592 crashed in the Florida Everglades, killing 109 passengers, including their friend, Walter Hyatt.
“We came back up here for the memorial,” says Butch, “went home and packed up and came back. Just realized that we didn’t want to be stuck out there, and we had friends here.”
5. What’s going on here ain’t no mystery
Tim Carroll used to live in a house everybody called Coolsville, with roommates Mark Horn, drummer for the Derailers, and Lonesome Bob, formerly of New Jersey. One night Carroll suggested Allison and Butch stop by, maybe drink some beer and pick a few.
“We didn’t have any furniture in our living room,” Lonesome Bob says. “We just had a band set-up, and people would come over and play and we could basically put a band together. I could play either bass or drums, and Mark Horn played drums, and Tim played guitar.
“One night Allison came over with Butch. She picked up a guitar and sang ‘Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain’, this real slow, sultry…and I was like, ‘Oh my fucking god.’ First of all, there’s the voice I’ve looked for all my life.”
More importantly, Bob notes, “We’ve just been really fast friends ever since, just gotten to know each other really well, and we’re always on the same page, even when we pick up different books. Without even having to look, we’re just always there.”
They are always there, the three of them, together in a quiet corner, surrounded by music, maybe a few empty glasses, and a handful of friends.
