Shelby Lynne – Songs in the key of Springfield
“She was so in love with the Motown sound and American soul music,” Lynne said. “That was her passion and she nailed it. So I had to take these songs as if Dusty were here and she chose to do them again. She had already made these huge productions. That was sort of the trend then, to do the horns and the strings and the big rhythm section. They played the kitchen sink. I tried to think about how she would do it now.”
For the most part, this meant cradling Lynne’s languorous, conversational alto in spacious, jazz-tinged arrangements. The music sounds a more subdued, ruminative note than Springfield’s typically does, but thanks to the intimacy between Lynne and the players, it sacrifices none of the pathos — or intensity — of what Dusty originally wrought.
“What I really like about the whole takin’-it-easy vibe on this record is that you really get to fall in love with why these songs have been around so long,” Lynne said. “And it’s because they’re just flat-out, undeniably, great songs. Lyrically, melodically, they just kind of do it for you. I mean, everybody loves these songs.”
Her favorite, she added, is “I Don’t Want To Hear It Anymore”, a Randy Newman composition that had already been given dark night of the soul treatment by Susan Cowsill on the Continental Drifters’ self-titled debut.
“I fell in love with that song when Dusty sings the line, ‘Said the boy in 149.’ The way she sings it just kills me.
“So it was quite a lot to bite off to do it. But I thought, ‘Fuck it; I love the song so much. And she sold it to me, so many times. I’m gonna sell it my way.’
“When you hear that story, ‘Ain’t it just too bad she had to fall in love with a boy who doesn’t care about her at all,’ and [you realize] it’s Randy Newman — it makes me laugh to know that he’s just such a poignant writer. He’ll tear your heart out with lyrics.
“That’s the beauty about the songs on the record. You can’t tell a story that’s not there. These are there. Every one of these songs will take you on some kinda heartbreaking ride.”
Remarkably, given her affinity with the music, Lynne didn’t encounter Springfield’s records until she was in her 20s. By then she’d moved from the burying of her parents in rural Alabama to Nashville’s Music Row, where she was already making records of her own. (Her younger sister, Allison Moorer, has taken different steps along that same, broad path and, coincidentally, has an album of songs saluting strong, self-possessed female singers — including her sister’s “She Knows Where She Goes” — coming out two weeks after Shelby’s new one.)
“Somebody gave me the Memphis record and I fell in love, like we all do,” Lynne said. “That kinda stuff wasn’t around when I was growing up, that’s for sure. In our house it was mainly country and rock ‘n’ roll from the ’50s and ’60s, the Everly Brothers and stuff. People might think that there was a lot of music in our house, and yeah, Daddy played guitar, and we all would sing. But hell, we lived in the country. A record store was 60 miles away. We had some records, but they were Mama and Daddy’s records. And when Daddy would bring home a new record it would be Waylon and Willie, Buddy Holly or something.
“The only album of my very own I had growing up was by Andy Gibb. Somebody got it for me for Christmas and that was great. I loved it. But times were so different then, besides not having a record store around.”
Not coming to the material on Just A Little Lovin’ until later in life, in any event, might have contributed to Lynne’s fresh approach to songs that over the years have become so thoroughly identified with Springfield.
“It’s almost kind of a dumb approach to songs that are fairly new, at least to me,” she said. “I learned ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’ from an Elvis record and then only later heard Dusty’s version.
“And of course, ‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’, that’s Dionne, the definitive, really true version,” she went on, pronouncing Warwick’s first name Dee-ON with her deep Delta drawl. “And ‘How Can I Be Sure’ was the Hollies. Or no, the Rascals. Dusty’s version — ‘High Dusty,’ I call it — it’s just great and dramatic.”
Lynne also includes her friend Tony Joe White’s “Willie And Laura Mae Jones” on the album, another song she first heard someone other than Springfield sing — in this case, Waylon Jennings, who recorded it for his album Good Hearted Woman in 1972.
Lynne didn’t discover Springfield’s version until she picked up a reissue of Dusty In Memphis that included some of the outtakes from the sessions. When she finally heard that rendition, she was knocked out by how such a sophisticated singer — a diva, really — could so completely inhabit a song about the kinship between black and white sharecroppers.
“You wouldn’t have thought it,” she said. “Dusty was so girly, she just oozes this female stuff, and yet she sings that song with such conviction. She’s just so feminine and to sing such an important song that deals with racial issues and still speaks the truth — I just had to do that one.
“Besides, any time you can talk about cornbread in a song and make it work — only Tony Joe could do that.”
Where that’s concerned, maybe only a singer of Lynne’s caliber could drop the final portion of such an indelible song and make it work.
“You know there are several more verses to that song,” she began, by way of explanation. “It goes into a lot more in-depth about the relationship with the narrator and the Willie person. It goes way into more detail, but I wanted to leave the listener with more of a to-be-continued feel. You know, so they have to figure it out for themselves. That drama, it’s in the spirit of Dusty. Anyway, that’s what that fade at end is about.”
The idea for the project, which Lynne first wrote about on her MySpace page, came in an e-mail from Barry Manilow. That might seem like an offhand impetus for such a major, and intrepid, undertaking, but subliminally, the seed was likely planted as far back as 1999, when the British press started name-checking Springfield in reviews of I Am Shelby Lynne. Employing lush arrangements that at times recalled Springfield’s work, the record came out in the United States the following year.