Willis Alan Ramsey – Self-Titled
Absence doesn’t just make the heart grow fonder, it makes the mythology multiply. Consider Willis Alan Ramsey, whose career ranks as one of the strangest vanishing acts of all time. He appeared out of nowhere with 1972’s Willis Alan Ramsey, as promising a debut as anyone has ever made. It didn’t sell, but people such as Jimmy Buffett, Jerry Jeff Walker, America and (most infamously) The Captain & Tennille raided it for songs. There was talk of a follow-up album, especially after Jan Reid devoted a chapter to Ramsey in his seminal 1974 book The Improbable Rise Of Redneck Rock.
More than a quarter-century later, we’re still waiting. Ramsey continues to have his champions in the industry, most notably Lyle Lovett (who calls Ramsey’s album “one of the greatest records of all time” on a sticker adorning the front of this reissue). In the late ’80s, Ramsey even played at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, and you still hear occasional rumors of sightings. But his recorded output remains just this one album, and it’s a classic.
The arrangements and instrumental support are quite fine, from Leon Russell’s early-’70s circle of players. But the real magic is Ramsey’s voice. It’s not “old” in the conventional sense people usually mean when they say that, although it sounds too craggy to match the boyish young face on the cover. Neither is his singing particularly “wise,” given the often-foolish misadventures it details (the singer declares himself a fool in the very first song, in fact). But there’s a knowingness to it, a depth that can stop you cold, make you put down whatever you’re doing, and listen.
Such attention is rewarded with surreal songs that don’t belong to any particular century, painting a landscape in which rock stars, robber men, troubadour folk singers, horny insects and amorous rodents run amok. Willis Alan Ramsey comes from the same transitional corner of the Southwest as Lonesome Dove and The Last Picture Show, when a place that was supposed to offer limitless freedom ran smack-dab into a barbed-wire fence — leaving Ramsey’s bemused narrator retreating into himself, muttering “Praise the Lord and pass the mescaline.”
Yes, “Muskrat Love” is here, although Ramsey called his original “Muskrat Candlelight”, and it’s sexy in a way Toni Tennille never was. Also present are “Satin Sheets” (which Shawn Colvin recorded on her Cover Girl album), the Woody Guthrie tribute “Boy From Oklahoma”, the heart-stopping weeper “Goodbye Old Missoula”, and the gorgeously sweet ballad “Angel Eyes” (which Ramsey performed at the wedding of Lovett and Julia Roberts).
All eleven of these songs are extraordinary, causing one to wonder anew about Ramsey’s puzzling withdrawal. Why? Was it lack of nerve? Laziness? Excessive perfectionism?
No matter. Even if Ramsey had made a dozen more albums, this would still be the record that no home should be without.