The drinking and talking resulted in the loosest sort of co-writing session. Taylor was working up a version of the traditional blues song “Delia”, and he collected a verse from Peg: Two little imps, black as tar/Tryin’ to get to heaven in a ‘lectric car/Wheel just slipped on down the hill/They never went to heaven, went to Jacksonville.
That verse later appeared within Lovett’s “Since The Last Time”, with the liner notes crediting Taylor for suggesting the lyrics.
The oral tradition asserts itself in strange and unpredictable ways, and the same can be said for Taylor’s rambling, informal, blues-based education. He ended up with a guitar style much cleaner than Lightnin’s, yet much closer to the marrow than the fingerpicking used by, for instance, Nick Drake. Lots of pulls and bends, anchored by a thumb that rang alternating root notes in a manner similar to that of a banjo player (a similarity he attributes to a particularly useful study session with John Hartford).
His lyric writing was also informed but not confined by what he heard from bluesmen, as he combined linguistic economy with a Kerouac reader’s blitzkrieg vocabulary. This, more than anything, is the through-line connecting the songs of Townes and Guy and Eric, and it’s the part of their music in which Hopkins’ ghost looms largest. Lines like Clark’s “He was an elevator man in a cheap motel/In exchange for the rent on a one-room cell,” or Van Zandt’s “Ask the boys down in the gutter/They don’t lie ’cause you don’t matter”, or Taylor’s “Hit the spotlight runnin’/With legs so long and pale” — well, the lines are what matter, and that’s where it becomes clear just what the blues mean to those lines.
Back in Houston, the middle of the decade brought the first recorded evidence of songwriter Eric Taylor. A Bicentennial sampler of Anderson Fair acts called Through The Night Darkly (it goes for $50 every now and again on eBay) found three of Taylor’s songs alongside works by Don Sanders, Bill Cade, Stephen Jarrard and Lynn Langham. Included among Taylor’s selections was the disconcerting “Memphis Midnight, Memphis Morning”, a song Lovett later recorded on his Step Inside This House album. In 1977, Taylor’s “Dollar Matinee” won a Kerrville Folk Festival songwriting contest; 1978 found him singing the song with Griffith onstage at the festival and on her debut album, There’s A Light Beyond These Woods.
Also in 1978, Texas A&M student Lyle Lovett heard Taylor play at Anderson Fair. “I remember the imagery, and the detail with which he wrote,” Lovett said. “And the thing I took from watching him play guitar is the idea that the songs could be complete without other instruments.”
Lovett absorbed myriad late-night guitar lessons. Griffith (an underrated guitarist) did the same, and went so far as to adapt Taylor’s method of constructing sturdy homemade thumbpicks.
“Eric came along where he was the kid after Guy and Townes,” said James Gilmer, a percussionist in Lovett’s band whose first recorded work was on Taylor’s 1981 Shameless Love album. “Then Lyle and Nanci and those people came up, and they were looking to Eric to help hone their craft.”
And…shit. Here’s where Eric Taylor often gets depicted as a cracker Tee-tot to Lyle’s tall-haired Hank Williams, or where his “influence” on Nanci Griffith seems like a bigger deal than the songs in his black notebook. That’s the problem with all this. Because, sure, Taylor was both a hero and a friend to Lovett, and Lovett opened gigs for him and wrote an article on him, and one day they drove Lovett’s parents’ 1968 Buick Wildcat square into Robert Earl Keen’s house, just for a laugh. And, yes, he and Griffith were married during some of her early years as a recording artist.
But defining Taylor merely as a precursor to Griffith or Lovett is as useless as defining Lightnin’ Hopkins merely as a precursor to Eric Taylor. The songs, the lines, the guitar work: That’s what attracted those folks to Taylor in the first place, and that’s what’s still there, in a vacuum or in a continuum. In a black notebook within a white pickup truck with Texas tags, on a Louisiana highway on the way to a house concert or a North Carolina radio show or a Shreveport liquor store.
It’s like the time I heard the Mona Lisa
Break down and wail
I told her I’d done a little hard cryin’ like that
Like that myself
— Eric Taylor, “Game Is Gone”
Shameless Love, Taylor’s first album, came out in 1981. Made for John & Laurie Hill’s Featherbed Productions without an established record company’s support, it is a rare artifact and an album marked by superb songs, played by musicians including Gurf Morlix, future Lovett cohorts James Gilmer and John Hagen, and elusive guitarist John Grimaudo (whose “Dress Of Laces” was a highlight of Griffith’s Other Voices, Too album). Taylor now regrets the lead vocals’ amphetamine lisps and some of the period-piece electric guitar sounds, but “Joseph Cross” and “Charlie Ray McWhite” remain two of his most stunning works.
