James Talley – Estate of the heart
It would be another twenty years before Talley recorded the material that became The Road To Torreon, even though he wrote most of it shortly after his visit with Seeger. The project was born of his job with the Bernalillo County Department of Public Welfare, where as a social worker he encountered the resilient Hispanic families living in the mountain villages outside Albuquerque. Around the same time, Talley learned that Cavalliere Ketchum, a fellow grad student at the UNM, had been photographing the denizens of the Northern New Mexico barrios.
“I saw Cavalliere’s photographs and he heard my songs, and we thought they would go together well,” Talley explains. “So I carried a group of his photographs around with me. I moved to Nashville with them and made several trips to New York. I met John Hammond [at Columbia Records], who was probably my first mentor in the record business. Hammond wanted to record my songs and he sent me over to a guy at Holt, Rinehart & Winston, which owned CBS at the time. I can’t remember the guy’s name right now, but he looked at the photographs and basically said, ‘Yes, if CBS is gonna do the record, then we’d be interested in doing the book. But Clive Davis, who was the head of CBS at the time, decided he didn’t want any songs about Hispanics, so that was that. The project was way ahead of its time.”
Indeed, the album didn’t come out until Germany’s Bear Family label released it as a lavish box set in 1992. A powerfully empathic collaboration depicting the lives and struggles of an all but forgotten people, The Road To Torreon is very much in the tradition of another long-neglected work, James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Take Me To The Country
Talley moved to Nashville to pursue music full-time in August 1968. Contrary to stories of how wide-open the city’s music scene was during the late ’60s and early ’70s, Talley found it little different from what most upstarts encounter today. “The business was very rigid back then, too,” he recalls. “And of course a lot of the old-timers who are pissing and moaning now were doing quite well back then, thank you. They weren’t giving most of us an opportunity either.
“Most young people who come to Nashville think that this is a music city when in reality it’s not — it’s a commerce city,” Talley continues. “What they do here is mine a very small spectrum of music that’s designed to fill the slots on a certain format. You can either modify what you do to fit that format, or acknowledge that you don’t make that kind of music and go your own way, like I did.”
Opting out of the industry game altogether, Talley went the DIY route, trading the carpentry work he’d done on a Music Row studio for time enough to cut four tunes there. And as he did with the demos for The Road To Torreon, he sent the tapes to John Hammond in New York, who had by this time become one of Talley’s biggest supporters.
“Hammond liked ’em and, again, tried to get CBS to sign me — not CBS in Nashville, but in New York,” Talley emphasizes. “Hammond saw me as someone like Dylan or Springsteen. He had just signed Springsteen. This was in the early ’70s and he still couldn’t get any interest at CBS, so as he did with Aretha [Franklin, after her career at Columbia faltered], he sent my stuff over to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic. Jerry was at that time contemplating making a foray into Nashville.
“So Wexler came down here in 1973 and signed me, and he signed Willie Nelson and Troy Seals as well,” Talley continues. “He took the four songs I’d sent Hammond and released two of ’em as a single. The A side was a song called ‘One Less Child’ and the B was ‘Mississippi River Whistle Town’ [which later resurfaced on Blackjack Choir, Talley’s third album for Capitol]. But then Jerry got divorced and dropped out of the music business for awhile. Every project he was working on, including mine, got lost in the shuffle.”
Talley made Got No Bread, No Milk, No Money, But We Sure Got A Lot Of Love, an exquisite evocation of his childhood summers in Mehan, while still under contract to Atlantic. The record was a quintessential slice of Americana, a rustic song-cycle that connected the dots between Stephen Foster, Bob Wills, Woody Guthrie, Merle Haggard, Bob Dylan and The Band. It also boasted a cluster of first-rate pickers, notably guitarist Doyle Grisham and Texas fiddle player Johnny Gimble, as well as Talley’s languid drawl, a homey instrument that fit his colloquial narratives as comfortably as a roomy suit of old clothes.
With $1,000 each from three friends, Talley made Got No Bread on his own, pressing 1,000 copies on his Torreon imprint and selling them out of the trunk of his car. He also paid a young promoter named Bruce Hinton (now president of MCA Nashville) $600 to work the record to radio. Before long, Mike Haynes, a DJ at Nashville’s WKDA, started spinning a song from the album called “Give Him Another Bottle”. “Mike just loved the album,” Talley recalls. “He played the fire out of it. And there was another DJ, over at WSIX, which in those days was sort of an easy-listening country station, who was playing ‘Red River Memory’.”
Meanwhile, Talley had given Frank Jones, then head of Capitol’s country division, a copy of the album while he was doing some remodeling at Jones’ West Nashville home. Jones soon started hearing Talley’s songs on local radio and offered to put out Got No Bread on his label. Capitol released the album in 1975 and, on the heels of a glowing Village Voice review by Greil Marcus, critical praise came flooding in.
“Marcus said that my record was as good as anything that Dylan or the Band had done,” Talley remembers. “I couldn’t have hoped for a better review if I had written it myself. Soon everyone and their brother was writing about it. Of course Capitol is just beside themselves at this point. So here they’re flying me out to L.A. to do interviews with all these people, and Dennis White, the vice president of sales at the label, is going, ‘Who the hell is this guy? We only paid $5,000 for his album? How can it be any good?'”
Tryin’ Like The Devil
Talley released his second album for Capitol, Tryin’ Like The Devil, in January 1976. Where Got No Bread addressed larger social and political concerns only indirectly, Tryin’ tackled them head-on, championing the working class and advocating for Robin Hood-style redistribution of wealth. “Well I think I see why Pretty Boy Floyd done the things he did,” Talley sang on “Are They Gonna Make Us Outlaws Again?” Elsewhere, the album’s title track and “40 Hours” offered similarly biting critiques of capitalism and economic injustice.
Convincing radio programmers to slot Talley’s broadsides for airplay wasn’t going to be easy. Capitol nevertheless undertook an ambitious campaign to promote “Tryin’ Like The Devil”, the album’s first single. And the effort might have paid off, had it not been for a reporting snafu at Billboard.
“I’d never been inside a radio station before,” Talley recounts. “So Bill [Williams] takes me on this [radio promotions] tour and invites Peter [Guralnick] to go down with us.” (Guralnick’s chronicle of the ill-fated odyssey appears in his loving chapter on Talley in Lost Highway.) “So we’re driving this new Ford Club Wagon van that I bought to go out with the band in; we’re calling on radio stations. We’ve got ‘Tryin’ Like The Devil’ out as a single and it’s making its way up the charts.