Jim Lauderdale – Parsons, Ol’ Possum, and the Jack of Hearts
All this established a career pattern of carefully plotted missteps and happy accidents. Lauderdale records fine albums, none of which sell enough to turn industry heads. Then country acts come behind him and make lesser recordings of his songs. Those lesser recordings move greater units, piquing record labels’ interest in Lauderdale’s solo work, thus assuring financial freedom to keep his career afloat.
The songwriting success has also resulted in a backlash from some in the alt.country police force who would view flirtations with radio, songwriting or otherwise, as indicative of a sellout. All the while, country radio looms like a distant, wealthy, absentee father, providing Lauderdale with checks but not with understanding: “Proud of you, son. Buy yourself something nice, but be sure not to tell anyone that we’re related.”
So now it’s the summer of 1999, though it suddenly feels like autumn. The temperature outside Lauderdale’s parents’ house in Flat Rock, North Carolina, has dipped into the 50s.
Lauderdale sits on a second-floor porch, sipping green tea his mother fixed for him and trying to tell the whole story: how he began playing blues harp and bluegrass banjo as a kid; how he blew harp and drank Scope one night with medicine show harmonica man Peg Leg Sam; how he used to have recurring dreams about talking with Jerry Lee Lewis, Gram Parsons, and Keith Richards; how Los Angeles opened its arms and ears to him in the mid-1980s after Nashville turned him away; how growing up as a Southern preacher’s kid isn’t so bad a deal; how to count blessings when what you really want remains elusive; how it’s not such a weird thing to ask bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley to sing the words of Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter.
“Robert Hunter understood 30 years ago where Ralph was coming from,” Lauderdale says. “He and Jerry Garcia did bluegrass stuff and old-time duet stuff before the Grateful Dead. Robert has that Clinch Mountain sound in his bones.”
Lauderdale and Hunter are now a part of that sound, thanks to a new Lauderdale/Stanley duet album on Rebel Records called I Feel Like Singing Today. The album, one of two new Lauderdale titles (the other is Onward Through It All, a solo disc for RCA), features two songs with Hunter’s lyrics set to Lauderdale’s music. Those songs, which fit easily in the canon of classic bluegrass, are set alongside a few traditional tunes and a number of Lauderdale’s self-penned efforts.
“I left the songs up to him,” Stanley says. “He did a lot of it when we would take a break. He’d go outside and write a song, then we’d run over and record it.”
Lauderdale says those writing spurts were fueled by deadline-inspired creativity. “Making this record was one of the most self-inflicted pressurized times of my life. I hadn’t finished the songs. I’d tell Ralph and the Clinch Mountain Boys to wait for me, and I’d go off in the other room and write.”
Although Stanley observes, “I don’t know anybody who can do that these days,” he adds that he wasn’t altogether unfamiliar with such a routine. “My brother Carter could do that. I remember him a-doing that back years ago. But he’s the only one I ever knew did that besides Jim.”
Where Steve Earle’s recent collaboration with the Del McCoury Band was a joyous collision of musical forces, Lauderdale and Stanley’s is a more natural fit. “I found out real quick Jim could do bluegrass,” Stanley said. “I met him down at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on a show with Ricky Skaggs, and I liked his singing right off. You can tell Jim likes a lot of the traditional songs. And you can always tell who he is when he starts singing. He doesn’t sound like anyone else.”
Indeed, Lauderdale’s voice is instantly identifiable. Equal parts Bakersfield country, Otis Redding soul and John Fogerty swamp rock, his voice is softened by a gentle drawl typical of people raised in educated Carolina families and made more interesting by dips and slides that sound more like a steel guitar than anything else. It’s quite a pliable instrument, allowing Lauderdale an impressive range of notes and of emotional depth.
“Jim is an incredible singer with such a wide emotional range,” Buddy Miller says. “You can hear him drawing just as much from Otis Redding as from George Jones.” He’s also been sought out frequently as a harmony singer by such artists as Dwight Yoakam and Lucinda Williams, both of whom have used Lauderdale’s harmony vocals on each album they’ve made this decade. (Lauderdale also toured with Williams as a guitarist and backup singer for several key shows in support of her 1998 breakthrough album Car Wheels On A Gravel Road).
His singing is showcased to full extent on Onward Through It All, a 16-song album he co-produced with Tim Coats. “Lost Sunset” and “Calico”, in particular, display Lauderdale’s uncommon range and atypical style, and Coats was instrumental in capturing a richness and immediacy often elusive in a studio setting. It would sound great on the radio, but it won’t.
“With Onward Through It All, there were songs I could hear on mainstream radio, but I know they’re not going to be there,” Lauderdale says. “The label only has so many resources to work with, and they need to put those energies into the people who are going to be really successful. I wish it was different.
“For my last album, Whisper, I wanted to give them a straight-ahead country record so no one would say it was too pop or too alternative,” he continues. “Then I found out it was too traditional and that the radio wasn’t interested. I don’t really fit anywhere. To the mainstream, I’m an alternative act. To certain alternative folks, they think I’m a big, slick mainstream act. I’m too country for country, too rock for country, too country for rock. But if I make a straight-ahead country album and it doesn’t get accepted by country radio, then maybe I’m doing something right instead of something wrong.”
So it’s eight years since that night at the Double Door when he played in front of six people, and Jim Lauderdale’s life is completely different and exactly the same.
“I’m still a new act,” he says, and he is, sort of, though rarely do “new” acts have five major-label albums in their discography. Lauderdale is at once among Nashville’s hottest songwriters and most ignored artists. He is hungry for popular acknowledgment but refuses to compromise his music to find favor with today’s commercial radio programmers.
“I don’t know exactly what drives Jim, but I know he wants and deserves popular attention,” Miller says. “At the same time, he doesn’t compromise his records. He’ll make a bluegrass record if he thinks it’ll be good, even knowing it will never get on the radio.”
“I’m not sure if I can verbalize my motivation,” Lauderdale says. “I’ve been an underdog my whole career, as far as my own stuff. But the songwriting keeps growing. I know I wouldn’t be happy just writing for other people.
“Occasionally, I do wonder, because it gets so depressing sometimes. But I get these opportunities, like recording with Ralph, and it’s really fulfilling. You have to remind yourself that the important thing is being able to make records at all.”
Peter Cooper lives and writes in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he holds down a day job with the Spartanburg Herald-Journal.