Her dad, Gene White, was a partying cotton picker from West Memphis, Arkansas, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, raised on Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, gospel and the blues. He played Luther Perkins/Tennessee Two-style guitar, and sang, as did Joy Lynn’s mother, who’d come from the hills of far Eastern Tennessee. They all moved to South Bend, Indiana, when Joy was three.
“I was always exposed to music and thought everybody’s family was that way,” she recalls. “I can never remember my dad not sitting on the couch, playing an electric guitar. When I was ten months old, in Arkansas, I was already speaking complete sentences; by the time I was a year old, I sang every single thing on the car radio ‘to the T and on key,’ they tell me. People would gather round the car and say, ‘How’d you tache her to do thet?’ Then we had the group, and I was playing everywhere, every Sunday, and sometimes would be on radio shows up in Michigan.”
At about the time some performing kids give up on appearing in public forever, Joy was excited by the sounds of Neil Young, Bonnie Raitt, and especially Linda Ronstadt singing the likes of “Silver Threads And Golden Needles” on the radio. At 17, she would herself be the “girl singer,” fronting various garage bands around town, singing maybe a bit more like the records she’d heard than with the distinctive tones she’d become known for — but already at full tilt and rocking, and occasionally toying with some songwriting of her own.
The outright country music of the Dolly Partons and Loretta Lynns was not what she headed to Nashville for, in 1982, at age 20. She was soon a much-turned-to singer of mainstream country demos, known for passionate and emotionally on-target performances that were getting songs sold. She wouldn’t have an album of her own for ten years, consistently told that her problem was that she didn’t sound like anybody else. Her first record, Between Midnight & Hindsight (released in 1992 on Columbia), was culled from the variety of polished demos she’d cut.
It may surprise some that she recalls her work on that big-label Music Row debut, and its 1994 follow-up Wild Love, in a generally positive light — although her dad died suddenly just as the first disc was coming out, and she was, by her own description, none too successful in dealing with that grief while trying to do what was asked of her. No huge singles emerged from those much-praised albums and, amid an inevitable change of regimes, she was dumped in the mid-’90s, along with fellow mavericks Shelby Lynne and Rodney Crowell.
Bob Kirsch of Welk Music, who liked what she’d done in those days, signed her to a publishing deal in 1999, her first move back into the breach after walking away from it all in 1997 (she writes songs under that deal to this day). She sometimes works with Music Row stalwarts who wanted to write with someone less commercially-oriented, sometimes with the East Nashville-style independent types with whom she has continued to perform around town. There haven’t been a slew of well-placed songs, but along the way, White accumulated a very workable new selection of self-made material.
She could be seen in her “rarely-seen years” alongside Buddy Miller as an occasional onstage fill-in in for his wife Julie Miller; dueting with Robbie Fulks on the Webb Pierce tribute CD Caught In The Webb; playing around Nashville with Duane Jarvis and Phil Lee; picking up session work singing behind Randy Travis and Sara Evans; popping in for a local Neil Young tribute, alternating leads with Allison Moorer. White’s highly justifiable confidence in her live performing never really waned.
“Live is the real thing; ya know what I mean?” she says. “I think it was good that I was doing that, actually getting up onstage, and not caring what Nashville thought about me. I don’t have to have a record deal; if you give me a chance, I’ll knock ’em dead. I’ll step up to the plate every time; I’m an experienced singer.”
In Kyle Lehning, celebrated producer of albums by Randy Travis, Tammy Wynette, Waylon Jennings and the Derailers, she found a willing collaborator when the time felt right to go on record again, in search of a result that would be far removed from any sort of cookie-cutter production. The new sessions reportedly went smoothly throughout, and she attained the sort of sound she was after, reminiscent of ’70s country-rock production but with nods to the sorts of sounds heard on Lucinda Williams or Iris DeMent records of more recent vintage.
“I didn’t want this record to sound like a commercial country record that came out of Nashville,” she says. “I wanted players on this record that I had played with in clubs, that had come out and worked with me and I liked the way they played. They weren’t people down on Music Row doing demos 9 to 5.”
They also worked to avoid the “more raggedy than thou” affectations sometimes associated with alternative-country productions. “I just cannot get on records and not sing in tune — or make it sound like I’m so tired and worn out because it seems cool to be that way — like chicken scratch!” she explains. “Anybody who’d build a house or paint a room, they want the lines to be straight. I want my vocals to be in tune, the harmonies to be good. I’m a perfectionist like that with my singing.”
White hopes to be touring nationally in support of One More Time, but she feels little pull toward deeper involvement with the Music Row side of her career, other than potential cuts of her songs. She rarely does demo sessions now; she’s more likely to be seen working for a cause she’s passionate about — the protection and proper treatment of pets and other animals — than working to promote herself around the industry.
She still drives one of those apartment girls’ beat-up cars, but she’s capable, heading into 2006, of calling herself “fortunate and very blessed.” No less feisty than before, she can be a lot more careful about what she says and doesn’t say. And one thing you won’t find on One More Time is a lot of grievance and complaint songs.
“I can’t write them anymore,” White says, laughing. “I have a million of those. They’re all over my house! But I’d rather see women be strong, be proud of themselves, have a happy life. You don’t have to have what the norm of society says we have to have. I don’t put down people who are in that world, but I’m OK with all of this now. I think…I think I was made to do what I have done in my life.”
ND senior editor Barry Mazor is also a freelance writer for the Wall Street Journal and the Nashville Scene, among others.
