Every geographic area on the planet houses talented musicians, but some areas seem to produce more than their fair share. Ireland, for example, has only 7 million people (North and South), but the island has given us U2, Van Morrison, the Chieftains, the Fontaines D.C. and the Celtic music tradition. Or consider Jamaica, another island with a modest population (3 million) but with musicians such as Bob Marley, Toots Hibbert, Monty Alexander, Sean Paul and genres like reggae, ska, dub and dancehall.
Here in the U.S., certain states yield more great music than their populations would seem to warrant. Louisiana (4.5 million) has given us Louis Armstrong, Clifton Chenier, Mahalia Jackson, Fats Domino, Leadbelly, Wynton Marsalis, Jerry Lee Lewis and genres such as jazz, Cajun, zydeco and second-line. Mississippi (3 million) has provided Elvis Presley, Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers, Lester Young and genres such as Delta blues, rockabilly and Hill Country blues.
Those four locations have well-deserved reputations as musical hot spots, but I want to talk about a place that’s often overlooked: Oklahoma (4 million). This landlocked state has produced Woody Guthrie, J.J. Cale, Garth Brooks, Lowell Fulson, Charlie Christian, Gene Autry, Roger Miller, the Flaming Lips, the Gap Band, Reba McEntire and Leon Russell.
The state has also been an incubator for musical movements beyond its border. Guthrie defined the singer-songwriter folk music that such proteges as New York’s Pete Seeger and Minnesota’s Bob Dylan carried forward. Brooks defined the country-music “hat-act” movement that changed Nashville forever. Cale provided the template for the careers of England’s Mark Knopfler and Eric Clapton. Merle Haggard was born in California, but his Oklahoma parents imbued him with enough of that heartland culture that Haggard could convincingly claim himself to be an “Okie from Muskogee.”
Texan Bob Wills, the greatest of Western Swing bandleaders, enjoyed his best years leading the house band at Tulsa’s Cain’s Ballroom. New Jerseyite Count Basie, the second greatest of the East Coast swing bandleaders, got his start in the Oklahoma City Blue Devils. Kansas City’s Charlie Parker, who invented bebop jazz, first made his name in Oklahoman Jay McShann’s band. But it’s not just outsiders who are benefiting from Oklahoma’s musical history. The state’s native sons and daughters have done superb work in those traditions, even if the state’s flyover status keeps the word from getting out.
No artist better personifies that paradox of great achievement and small recognition than one of Guthrie’s finest disciples: James Talley. Though the Oklahoma native spent much of his life in New Mexico, Washington State and Tennessee, his parents were Okies and his passion and skill for translating the lives of working-class folks into story songs—both witty and sobering—were frankly modeled on Okema, Oklahoma’s prodigal son Woody.
Now, the University of Oklahoma Press has published Talley’s memoir, Nashville City Blues, the archetypal story of a singer-songwriter who wowed music insiders—producers, artists and critics—but never found an audience large enough to sustain a career. The buzz was so great that he was invited to perform for Jimmy Carter at the White House. Between 1975 and 1977, he released four terrific albums for Capitol Records, full of songs that were eventually covered by Johnny Cash, Alan Jackson, Moby, Gene Clark, Johnny Paycheck and Hazel Dickens. But he wound up selling real estate to pay the bills.
Talley is a better lyricist than prose stylist, but he tells his story clearly and compellingly enough. He explains how his original ambition to be a painter was diverted to songwriting when he realized how his favorite records framed images in his mind. He found all the pictures he needed in the poor working people he met in early jobs in the New Mexico welfare department and the Nashville rat control program. He realized that his faith in social justice was better served by stories than slogans and by western-swing music than strident anthems.
One legend, John Hammond Sr., who discovered Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, tried to sign him to Columbia Records. Another legend, Jerry Wexler, who produced Dylan and Ray Charles, tried to sign him to Atlantic. Finally Talley signed with Capitol, where his albums garnered glowing reviews and meager sales. In his frustration, he followed some bad advice and severed ties with Capitol, which retaliated by taking his four albums out of circulation.
Talley was unable to land a new deal, and his best work was suddenly near-impossible to find. The book is at its best in evoking the purgatory of an artist who goes from the White House to music-biz exile in one short year. This is not the story of drug addiction, alcoholism or adultery. Talley relied on his work ethic and his wife’s support to keep his family housed and fed, but his anguish and anger are vivid—because he knew how good he was. He went eight years without releasing an album. He finally released three albums of new songs on the German label Bear Family, which failed to pay him any money. Then Talley created his own label, Cimarron Records and released five studio albums and three live recordings and eventually reissues of the Capitol and Bear Family records.
His first album in 16 years is this year’s Bandits, Ballads and Blues. It’s not a departure from his earlier work—and that’s a good thing. He still has a knack for making up a story with a beginning, middle and end, so suspenseful that you don’t even notice that he’s implying something important about American society. And the words link up with the traditional, fiddle-driven country music so seamlessly that it’s hard to imagine one without the other. This time the narratives paint pictures of a borderland bandit, a stoic Vietnam veteran, a horse thief, a misunderstood father, the 1863 Indian wars, the North New Mexico landscape and a wife who still looks “good in red.” When he sings ballads such as “In These Times” and “If We Could Love One Another,” he still has that Willie Nelson-like ability to sing behind the beat just enough to squeeze a sigh out of the listener. Talley’s Capitol albums are classics, but they are far from the end of the story.
Meanwhile, over the past decade, a surprisingly vigorous singer-songwriter scene has blossomed in Oklahoma, featuring artists such as John Fullbright, Parker Millsap, Samantha Crain, John Calvin Abney and John Moreland. Moreland has a new album, Visitor, that bolsters his case as one of the best. His deadpan baritone voice and his deft fingerpicking guitar are out front, though a tasteful rhythm section backs most of the tracks. Except for guitar on one song and a female vocal on another, Moreland has created all the vocal and instrumental tracks himself. Fiddle and harmonica lend a country/folk flavor to the proceedings, while an organ adds a touch of church. But it’s all designed to support the singer’s words, and the sharply focused images and conversational monologues can carry the weight. Sometimes, like Guthrie, he sings of a world going to hell in a handbasket. At other times, he describes personal relationships headed in the same direction.
Sometimes, Moreland is hopeful, as on “Ain’t Much I Can Do About It,” when offers the catchy refrain, “Can you hear the bells a-ringing? Yes, it all comes down to that pendulum swinging.” Other times he’s bleak, as on “Gentle Violence,” when he concludes, “We’re suicidal, flags and false idols, god’s own precious guns won’t ever turn back the tide.” Either way, Moreland brings a much needed clarity to our perilous times, allowing us too to enjoy the perspective of the “Visitor,” as Moreland describes himself on the title track.
Perhaps the most ambitious musical piece about the state is the legendary 1943 Broadway hit, Oklahoma!, written by a pair of New Yorkers, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Almost as ambitious is Kaitlin Butts’s new album, Roadrunner, which retells the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical from a modern Oklahoman’s perspective. The liner notes suggest that you should listen to the album while watching the 1955 movie, even listing the specific times during the film for playing each track.
Butts is such a smart writer and such an appealing singer that it works better than it should. While Hammerstein has the male lead Curly bragging about his “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” drawn “by six snow-white horses,” Butts has him bragging about a muscle car fueled by “fist fights, Coors light” and “a stick of dynamite.” Where Rodgers sets Ado Annie’s declaration, “I Cain’t Say No” to operetta music, Butts turns the same sentiments into a power ballad. Rodgers has Laurey ponder her mixed feelings in “Many a New Day” over an orchestra, Butts has her mull the same questions over a spirited western-swing band.
Butts slows down Rodgers’ “People Will Say We’re in Love,” and sings it word-for-word over a string band. But she also covers Ke$ha’s country-rock stomper “Hunt Me Down” and Sonny & Cher’s ‘60s-pop classic “Bang, Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down).” Like an Okie Ashley McBryde, Butts can handle all these styles with a confident sassiness, and her originals match the covers in their clever wordplay and chorus hooks. Even if you never heard of Richard Rodgers, such Butts songs as “Wild Juanita’s Cactus Juice” and “You Ain’t Gotta Be Dead (To Be Dead to Me)” are strong enough to work as stand-alone tracks.
Though J.J. Cale spent his later years in California cashing royalty checks from Clapton, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Waylon Jennings, the sound he crafted in Tulsa never lost favor in his hometown. One of his most devoted and most capable disciples has been Paul Benjaman, who has just released a new album, My Bad Side Wants a Good Time. The singer-guitarist is backed by an all-star Tulsa band of keyboardist John Fullbright, steel guitarist Jesse Aycock, drummer Paddy Ryan and bassist Aaron Boehler. The hard-rock production on the album’s first half too often obscures the laid-back, slinky groove Cale was famous for. But that infectious, push-and-pull rhythm emerges gloriously on such second-half tracks as “Outlaw Land” and “Detroit Train.” Benjaman pays worthy tribute to Leon Russell on “Church of Space and Time” and to Café himself on “Blues Skyline” and pulls off a terrific 6/8 R&B ballad on “How Bad I Want You.” But if you want an unadulterated dose of Benjaman channeling Cale, check out the younger man’s 2015 album Sneaker.
Jared Deck, another Tulsan, has released a new album, Head Above Water. He’s a likable singer and guitarist, but the arrangements here are generic modern blues unrooted in any particular time or region. It’s only when Deck finally nods to his local roots on the fiddle-spiced “Two of a Kind” that he stands out from the crowd. That’s the direction he should take in the future. Oklahoma music is not something to escape; it’s something to embrace.