A country way of life, Episode 2 (Ken Nelson, Pig Robbins, Mac Davis)

Author: Jonny Brick.

Producer: T-Bone Burnett

When O Brother Where Art Thou was released in 2000, the Coen Brothers set in place the revival in the popularity of American roots music. Around the same time, although it had never been away, the blues came back thanks to The White Stripes.

The man who produced the O Brother soundtrack, which featured Alison Krauss, Dr Ralph Stanley and the voice of Dan Tyminski (that’s him on Man of Constant Sorrow) was T-Bone Burnett. Born Joseph Henry Burnett III in 1948, T-Bone was a guitarist who played in the band that backed Bob Dylan on his famous Rolling Thunder Revue in the mid-1970s. His friendship with Dylan led to a new version of The Basement Tapes, a project which more or less invented Americana as a genre; T-Bone recruited acts including Elvis Costello, Marcus Mumford and Rhiannon Giddens to set Dylan lyrics to new music.

His credo as a producer is ‘just listen until it sounds right’. T-Bone is also one of those producers who wants a band to play in a room, which has informed his work with Los Lobos, Costello and Roy Orbison. T-Bone played in Orbison’s band when he recorded his Roy Orbison & Friends TV special, which was famously shot in black and white.

He was also behind the board when Robert Plant and Alison Krauss made their magnificent roots album Raising Sand, and for Brandi Carlile’s album The Story. His work on August and Everything After, the debut album by Counting Crows, taught me about the sensitivities needed in arranging personal songs, framing the lyric with appealing sounds.

Fun fact: T-Bone’s wife is Callie Khouri, the showrunner of the TV serial drama Nashville.

Player: Harold Bradley

Born in 1926, Harold Bradley’s name will echo through the ages just as his guitar sounds have done. Bradley was a pivotal part of the A Team in Nashville, the city of his birth, who toiled in the studio of Harold’s brother Owen. The two Bradley brothers were architects of how country music sounded in the 1960s, and their productions still inform the modern sound of classic country, if you know what I mean.

To evoke the Nashville Sound is to replicate the genius and originality of parts played by Bradley and the rest of the A Team. They were in the studio for Crying by Roy Orbison, King of the Road by Roger Miller, Harper Valley PTA by Jeannie C Riley and Stand By Your Man by Tammy Wynette.

Bradley was a man of many instruments. He played the banjo on The Battle of New Orleans by Johnny Horton and the electric guitar on the Christmas standard Jingle Bell Rock. He also developed a ‘tic-tac’ style of playing the electric bass, which he adopted on Only The Lonely by Roy Orbison, Crazy by Patsy Cline and Devil In Disguise by Elvis Presley.

Songwriter: Tom Douglas

Tom Douglas was born in Atlanta in 1953. An MBA graduate from Georgia State University, he moved to Nashville and opened a publishing company but moved to Dallas to sell commercial property.

In his late thirties, he turned his hobby into a job and wrote a song called Little Rock which was cut by Collin Raye. Tim McGraw cut several Douglas compositions, including Meanwhile Back at Mama’s, Grown Men Don’t Cry and My Little Girl. Lady A’s I Run To You, Brett Eldredge’s One Mississippi and the Eric Church/Keith Urban duet Raise ‘Em Up are also Douglas copyrights.

Douglas would make an annual pilgrimage to Texas to see the house which was built by his father and in which he lived. Famously, The House That Built Me, the song that was inspired by this, sat on a shelf for years until Miranda Lambert felt it summed up her own life. It has since become a country standard, and one of ten compositions on a soundtrack album to accompany the documentary Love, Tom, on which Douglas performs either solo or with the artists who cut them.

Love, Tom is based on a one-man show which, Douglas told one interviewer, ‘is a story of failure’. He calls songwriting ‘bleeding on a page…I wanted to give up, but I can’t give up on something I love.’

All Episodes can be found here

For more country music evangelism, go to countrywol.com where you can read Monday essays, Friday reviews and Sunday Hymn Sheets. Follow Jonny’s Country Music Calendar at the Country Way of Life Facebook page (facebook.com/acountrywayoflife).