Such a song, one Brown has performed for a few years and among his finest, is “Billy From The Hills”, written about his father, a fevered errand into the wilderness, sung with a voice that sounds like a sinkhole opening in a soul:
No one now knows too much about these woods;
they got lost, they wouldn’t know where to go–
Tribe’s been gone a long time, small farmers got blowed out–
maybe there ain’t even that much left to know.
You can strip the trees, foul the streams, try to hide in a progressive dream,
ease into the comfort that kills.
Before I do that, I’ll grab my pack & disappear
with Billy from the hills.
“At a certain point, you have to stand away from your folks and establish yourself as your own person,” Brown says. “Paradoxically, once you do that, you see all the things you have in common. That wasn’t such a big deal in my life. I was always pretty close with my folks. I remember when I got back into town after going out and doing my thing. I was gonna live out in the country, my wife and I found a little shack, no running water, had a little garden, and it got to be fall, and I thought, ‘Hmm…heat.’ We bought some surplus oil burning stoves and a tank, but I had to hook them up. I called my dad who was living in Des Moines. He said, ‘You got a flaring tool?’ and I said, ‘A what?’ ‘I’ll be there in a couple of hours.’ He was so into doing things with his hands, carpentry, plumbing and electrical. And I was more in my head, dreaming and writing. That was what we had to bridge.’
Brown has learned to do a thing or two with his hands — big, of course, with a thumb chopped off in a packing plant accident, a fortuitous ticket out of the army. He has developed a characteristic, pulsing rhythmic style, matched with eloquent fingerpicking (less frequent these days). “When I went to New York when I was 19, my first memory was of a club called Gerde’s Folk City. Paul Jeremiah was playing country blues. His whole approach was an eye-opener. I hadn’t really gotten into fingerpicking much, the real heavy-on-the-bass approach. But my guitar playing always grows, because with me, if I’m working on a song, I have to learn to play the son of a bitch. I can hear the voicing of the chords, but I have to figure it out on the guitar.
“When I get in that songwriting mode,” Brown continues, “stuff starts happening. I don’t have to have a notebook or a guitar. I can be in my car or walking down the street. Walking is often where it happens…And this is unusual, but a long time ago I was onstage playing this one tune and I started hearing this other song, ‘Out in the Country’, which I’d been working on earlier. So I tried to hold onto this new song as it was coming and finish the one I was playing. I finished, said, ‘Thank you, goodbye,’ and ran out back into a field and figured it out. It’s a fairly subconscious thing with me. Songs just kinda show up. My job is to get ’em right, best I can.”
The night before, I had seen Brown and Ramsey onstage (accompanied by a friend, Rico, on bass) at The Mill downtown. Ramsey rocked and twisted at the apron, eeking out notes, letting them spiral off like smoke rings. Behind plastic sunglasses that Walgreens wouldn’t sell, Brown selected songs he could stretch out on vocally, his phrasing risky, even scatty at times, the stuff of jazz. He mentioned that the best music in town was happening at Gunner’s. “The Del McCoury Band.” At the end of the night, Brown endeavored a punchy “Big Boss Man”, and someone told told him that some folks wanted to sit in. Two crisply dressed young men came up carrying fiddle and mandolin; they took smart, in-the-pocket leads, and beamed the whole time. You would have thought Ronnie McCoury had found Ira Louvin’s mandolin at a garage sale.
The history of traditional musicians and their fans casting a cold eye on singer-songwriters who, like Brown, weren’t born into twang but were smitten with poetry, is familiar enough. “A lot of times it’s richly deserved. I don’t hear a lot of singer-songwriter stuff that’s tapped in deep into American music. I would say the same thing for the new Nashville country. A lot of singer-songwriters don’t go very deep into anything. It’s about a mood or trying to sell something. A lot of that criticism comes from people who are playing stuff that’s tapped in; they don’t have time to listen to some whiny singer-songwriter.”
One of Brown’s strengths resides in the way he presses beyond songwriterly expectations, toward a voice, instrumental and lyrical, that keeps in countenance American music, those sounds and words outside and against a culture about to implode: the scraping, pinched, slid strings; the spit-soaked harmonica; the hot tubes of an old amp; all the voices like a “scratch scratch at your door.” His songs are wild and wide responses to that “small dark movie” of life, that “nothing that turns away and yawns.” Against a consuming consumerism, Brown, by jolt or by hymn, praises deceptively simple things: spring wind, a ’64 Dodge, a ring around the moon, hard, filial love, or harder, deeper blues.
“I don’t think it’s a mysterious thing at all, writing songs,” Brown says. “Kids do it. It’s easy to make it a big mysterious deal. It’s no different than a kid walking down the street and beating on the sidewalk with a stick. They don’t remember the words, so they make up new ones. I hate that image of the artist with a long frock, and the storm clouds, and the skies part and here comes the song. It’s really just beating on something with a stick.”
Based on a radio interview in which Greg Brown said, “I’ll fall in love with Lucinda Williams if I want to,” Roy Kasten co-wrote a song. He resisted the temptation to play it for Brown.
