THE READING ROOM: James Talley Weighs Music and Meaning in ‘Nashville City Blues’ Memoir

In 2000, Oklahoma-born singer and songwriter James Talley released an album called Nashville City Blues on his label, Cimarron Records. In the title track, he tells a defiant yet poignant tale of his experience in a town where “the music, it don’t mean a thing / It’s all about the money that’s made.” In the song’s first verse, Talley sings: “I’ve watched the deal go down / I’ve written every kind of song, sung every kind of tune / Been treated every kind of way, I’ve had every kind of blues.” Talley’s portrait of the struggle between commerce and artistry could just as easily have been written today, of course, as songwriters continue to flock to an Oz-like empire in search of the man behind the curtain who will present them with the key to the Emerald City.

Although Talley never rose to a household name among country music fans, he became — like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and Woody Guthrie — a songwriter’s songwriter, trying to capture the ups and downs of human experience in his songs. In his entertaining autobiography, Nashville City Blues: My Journey as an American Songwriter, published last March, Talley, in his conversational style, invites readers into his stories of struggles and triumphs in Nashville and in the music business.

Although he grew up listening to Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash, and Pete Seeger, Talley admits that his first love was visual art: “(F)rom an early age I’d enjoyed drawing and thought I was rather good at it,” he writes. During high school, though, he played in the band and fell in love with the music of The Kingston Trio. In his senior year he formed a little trio of his own called The Ivy Three. The Kingston Trio also led him to discover a songwriter and musician that would shape his own songwriting: Woody Guthrie.

For Talley, Guthrie’s songs were “poetic and powerful. They dovetailed with the Oklahoma stories my mother told me as I was growing up. Woody was an Okie, like us. His songs were about my people from Oklahoma … I began to admire Guthrie. My exploration of Woody Guthrie led me to Pete Seeger and all the great folk music and blues on Folkways and Vanguard Records.”

The confluence of protests over the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement shook Talley out of his graduate school slumber in 1966. “I wanted to participate!,” he writes, and after reading Guthrie’s Born to Win, he wondered if he could start writing songs, since he’d been playing Guthrie’s and other folks’ songs for years. In 1967, as he was learning to write songs, Talley had some special instruction in songwriting from Pete Seeger. Seeger happened to be visiting the University of New Mexico, where Talley was a student, and Seeger agreed to visit him and listen to some of his songs. The advice Seeger gave Talley that afternoon never left him: “You have a good voice, but don’t try to write folk songs like you hear coming out of New York City. You are from the Southwest. Write about the things you have seen in your life, write about your family, write about your world, write about the people here in New Mexico.”

By late summer of 1968, Talley had bought a car, packed up his belongings and his songs, and made the trek from New Mexico to Nashville. Before long, he discovered some hard truths about Music City. “I quickly discovered that the Nashville music business only wanted a certain kind of song,” he writes. “They wanted love songs, and more love songs … Nashville sure as hell didn’t want what I was writing or wanted to write. I was swimming against the current, and the current was strong. I wanted to be an artist. I wanted to write about life — all aspects of American life and our culture. I wanted to write about people and their struggles in this world. I wanted to write from the heart, not for the charts.” While Talley released four records on Capitol, the label couldn’t generate radio airplay or audience exposure, though his albums, he writes, were “getting incredible press.”

Talley is not out to settle scores or complain in his autobiography. He is simply trying to reconcile his successes and failures, he says. He probably had “too much of an artistic bent” to become a star, he writes. Talley concludes: “I am a songwriter who loves his craft … Songs can give us a lot … They let us know we are not alone. I see all my songs as love songs because they are about life and people, and life in its essence is about love — giving love and receiving love.”

Nashville City Blues shines with the rays of Talley’s deep devotion to making music that matters and endures over time. His book serves as an excellent introduction to his music, a story that is still in progress. On his newest album, Bandits, Ballads and Blues, released on Jan. 10, Talley continues to make timeless music in the tradition of Guthrie and Seeger with songs such as “Jesus Wasn’t a Capitalist” and “If We Could Love One Another.”

James Talley’s Nashville City Blues: My Journey as an American Songwriter was published in March 2023 by University of Oklahoma Press.