He began to work with producer/engineer Robb Earls, who initially asked friends to augment House’s vocals for The Neighborhood Is Changing. A tight knot of collaborators emerged, led by mandolinist (and, often, producer) Tommy Goldsmith, with Scott Chase on percussion and the darting harmonies of vocalist Tomi Lunsford. They were able to combine House’s old-time music sensibility with his peculiar poet’s sense of rhythm.
“There’s a great rapport between all of us, [especially] with Tommy Goldsmith, who’s just astounding,” House says. “He points out all the things that I do that other people don’t do, that some musicians get infuriated by. Like, if the story needs an extra line or something like that, where other people work in four-line quatrains, I’ll just add a fifth line. Or this line up here’ll have 20 syllables, this one down here’ll have three.”
His words still line up so as to confront and confound the unwary. “It takes, I would imagine, a weird bird to really get into what I’m doing,” House chuckles. “It takes a certain level of intelligence and a certain amount of attitude. Most people don’t give a damn, but I get a lot of reviews that say, ‘Yeah, all he writes about are these losers and bottom-feeders.’ I don’t look at people like that.”
No, no he doesn’t. He calls one of his new songs “Jesus Didn’t Die For Faggots Like You”, though either for typographic or pragmatic reasons the title appears as “Jesus Didn’t Die…” on the CD. Still confrontational, he has become more subtle about his work. Even so, “that song makes me nervous,” he admits. “It’s kind of odd, but it generally goes over pretty well.
“It’s a combination of the whole Matthew Shepard thing and a newspaper article I read. This woman was found tied up with duct tape and beat up and somebody painted ‘Jesus Didn’t Die For Faggots Like You’ all over her house. I thought, gol, that’s a great song. So I was starting to work on it, and about three days later, the next newspaper I read, she had paid somebody to do that, to raise awareness. She promised him $200 and she only gave him $75, so he ratted her out.
“I kinda threw the thing away, but then the Matthew Shepard thing came up. Sometimes I start writing, I’m not really sure where I’m going with it, but somewhere along the line with that song I realized I didn’t want to write the story about the gay bashing. What I wanted it to be was from the point of view of the other guy, the guy who just didn’t do anything.”
“Can a man be a Christian and a coward too?” he sings. And closes the album with “Love Be Gentle”, meaning it.
The Springwater is a low, twin-chambered building next to a barbecue joint and across the street from Centennial Park, where Nashville’s city fathers erected a more or less exact replica of the Parthenon to cement their claim as the Athens of the South.
It’s cleaned up some, but there’s still a small line outside the Springwater when it opens in the morning. For many years that’s where Tom House held court as part of the semi-regular Working Stiff Jamboree. Their rules were simple: You had to have a job (or at least be plausibly between jobs), and you couldn’t have a songwriting deal.
Tom was a poet, anyway, just strapped on the guitar and wrote songs because his father had and his friends did and it got to be fun. He’d landed a job at the now-defunct Mills Bookstore that lasted 15 years; he wrote some songs and a lot of poems, marrying again in 1982.
House had finally ended up in Nashville in the mid-’70s, after his first marriage finished and he was well and truly done with his hometown in North Carolina. “I just came here because I knew Don Schlitz, he’s [also] from Durham,” House says. “He and I are distantly related, and we kinda started hanging out; actually, he introduced me to my first wife. He was starting to write songs, and I was starting to write ’em about the same time.
“I played guitar for a long time, played folk songs and all. It never had entered my mind to write songs myself. When I was in the hospital in Chapel Hill being mentally evaluated, there was a guy there that played guitar and wrote his own songs. It was kinda like, God, that’s a pretty far-out idea.”
Schlitz and House trotted out their early songs together at guitar pulls in Nashville. “A bunch of ’em I’ve recorded now,” House says. “I wrote ‘Mockingbird’ [from The Neighborhood Is Changing] twenty, twenty-five years ago. We’d have these guitar pulls at people’s houses, and Schlitz would play his thing and everybody would gush, and John Scott Sherrill and Hugh Moffatt and everybody would pat each other on the back.
“It would get to me and I would do one of these songs that I had written, and it would just be stone silence. And I knew it wasn’t that they thought it was a bad song, they just didn’t respond at all. It freaked me out for a long time.
“Somewhere along the line I got a lot wilder.”
That scene split up shortly after Kenny Rogers cut a Don Schlitz song called “The Gambler”.
