Back when Kris Kristofferson used to take the stage alongside his comrades in the Highwaymen, he was the relative young gun of the group, his stature overshadowed by the outlaw legends of Waylon and the Red Headed Stranger and the Man in Black. Sure, he’d written songs that each of them had recorded and performed, but he hadn’t yet put in the years, the hard time and bitter tears it took to become such a larger-than-life figure. Well, now he’s 80. And in listening to him sing a batch of his own classics on the newly released double-disc set, The Cedar Creek Sessions, it’s clear he belongs in their rarified company.
Recorded over three days in June 2014 at the album’s namesake studio in Austin, Texas, these performances reflect Kristofferson’s craft and bone-dry conviction with the sort of integrity that can only be achieved when such a seasoned songwriter revisits his own history.
His voice, grizzled with age and hard-won experience, imbues these songs new character and insight, his gruff inflections now revealing flashes of stoic resignation. He wrings more pathos from “For the Good Times” than have seemed possible in the classic’s countless other incarnations. He delivers “Sunday Morning Coming Down” like a dirge. And when he aches out the opening lines, “Busted flat in Baton Rouge…” in “Me and Bobby McGee,” the enduring image is of man down to his soul’s last ounce of will and resilience. Thankfully, Kristofferson’s maverick spirit still thrives.
By the time Johnny Cash’s tenure with Sun Records concluded in 1958 he’d already recorded some of his career’s most iconic, indispensable classics, songs like “I Walk the Line,” “Big River,” and “Folsom Prison Blues.” However, having subsequently signed with Columbia Records—the storied label had already boasted such giants as Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, and Miles Davis—Cash was on the precipice of even greater success and, he recognized, a much broader platform from which, should the spirit move him, to make a stand.
Released in 1964, Bitter Tears (Ballads of the American Indians) elucidated and empathized with the travails of Native Americans.
In honor of the album’s fiftieth anniversary, Sony Music Masterworks has released Look Again to the Wind: Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears Revisited. Produced by singer/songwriter Joe Henry, the all-star collection features such artists as Emmylou Harris, Kris Kristofferson, and Steve Earle interpreting Bitter Tears and thereby reasserting its fundamental defense of human dignity.
“It’s shameful that this is still a relevant conversation,” Henry tells Write on Music about the album’s often polemical subtext, “but all the more reason why we need to wake up to how significant it is for all of us, not to [let it] become a dead conversation simply because it’s an old one.”
Taking on this project must’ve been a tall order, not only in light the sensitivities involved with the album’s subject matter, generally speaking, but also because in remaking this classic Johnny Cash album you of course hoped it would complement his legacy. Did that run through your mind when you were working on it?
Of course it did. Keep in mind that Johnny Cash was the first musical hero of my life. I sort of discovered him when I was about seven years old living in Atlanta, 1966 or ’67, so he’s always stood in front of me as a seminal figure both historically and personally. I suppose if I had been thinking about recreating the record it would’ve been additionally daunting, but it was really important to me and I think to everybody involved that we stay conscious to the fact that we weren’t trying to recreate it. We were trying to engage it and put a light on it, bring the conversation into the present tense, remind everybody that the subjects of these songs still matter, and carry the torch a little farther down the road. But of course I felt a responsibility that was unique from anything I’d ever taken on before.
It seems as though in your responsibility of finding the artists for this project you had to look beyond matters of talent and how well they could deliver the song to, at the same time, appreciate what sort of empathy they’d bring to these songs as well.
Of course. A leading factor in my mind was not just “think of artists who could deliver a particular song.” My fear there was that this would end up feeling like a tribute album, a compilation from disparate sources. I wanted to cast the record in a way that the whole thing could be as collaborative and real-time as possible. So it wasn’t just finding people who could deliver songs, but deliver them in ways that the whole album could speak as a unified whole. That was supremely important to me. It should feel like a play happening in front of you, and in that regard I tried as much as I could having everybody participate where they could on some track other than the one they maybe sang lead on. For the most part that’s true.
Aside from these factors of collaboration and the empathy the artists bring to these songs, was there any guiding objective that you had on a basic level in navigating your way through this project?
Chiefly it was that we not be looking over our shoulders and not be working from any point of nostalgia. We were charged by a work that was preexisting, but I was really determined that this not feel in any way like we were trapped by the source music. We were inspired by it and we wanted to begin at that point, but it was really important to me that we made a record that was alive to this moment and significant to this moment. I thought it would’ve been death to this project if our whole drive had been nostalgic as opposed to working toward real-time engagement.
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| Joe Henry |
There must’ve been certain artists who brought something more to a particular song than maybe you had anticipated or revealed something in their interpretations that opened up these songs in different ways to you.
Absolutely true. I think the first thought I had when you asked that was the song from Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings that opens the record [“As Long as the Grass Shall Grow”]. The version on Johnny’s original was sort of a spoken-word, almost a recitation except for the sung chorus. It was Gillian and Dave who imagined a musical tableau for it that makes it move narratively speaking with the power of a Woody Guthrie song. I didn’t know where they were gonna take it until they sat down that moment—that was the first take—and played, for me, this very hallucinatory, nine-minute re-imagining of that story.
I will just add that Kris Kristofferson’s appearance on the record was significant to me and wildly so for a couple of reasons, not least of which I believed somewhere on that record and for that song in particular, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” which is the one song that people know if they don’t know anything else on the record, I felt that really needed to be delivered by somebody who could stand in for Johnny’s very particular sort of authority and bring a very particular sort of gravitas to the situation. I thought it was important, too, to have somebody be involved who had a deeply invested personal relationship with Johnny Cash. There are really only two people alive I could imagine, and Kris was the first.
Was Willie Nelson the other one?
No, actually it was Merle Haggard. He’s got a voice of such incredible depth, as Kris does. At first I thought, one of these cats has got to be brought to the table; we need that connection.
Kristofferson is as much a fan of Cash as he was a friend.
Indeed. Roseanne Cash is a really close friend of mine, whose blessing I sought before I was going to say yes to this job invitation myself. She has certainly shared with me that Kris is her most direct link to her dad that remains.
What do you hope listeners take from Look Again to the Wind?
That these songs are still alive, that this is still a living conversation, and that the power of song transcends a lot of political rhetoric and has a chance to take people straight to the heart of the matter in a way that no other vehicle can.
Look Again to the Wind: Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears Revisited is available now from Sony Music Masterworks.
As one of country music’s most venerable artists and ambassadors, Marty Stuart wasn’t about to stand idly by while witnessing what he saw as the integrity of its heritage being compromised.
“The roots of country music were being ignored and disregarded,” says Stuart, a native of Philadelphia, Mississippi, “and it was slipping away. It seemed to me that the right thing to do was to play it.” That steadfast determination underscores his current album, Ghost Train: The Studio B Sessions, its title not only referring to the hallowed Nashville room in which it was made but also to the history it holds.
“So much of country music’s legacy has been forged there," he says of Studio B, where such classics as Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colors,” Hank Locklin’s “Please Help Me, I’m Falling,” and Waylon Jennings’ “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line,” among hundreds upon hundreds of others, were recorded.
“And it was the first place I ever recorded as a kid with Lester Flatt,” Stuart adds, recalling when while barely a teenager in 1972 he landed his first job in music, playing mandolin in the bluegrass legend’s band. His tenure lasted until shortly before Flatt's death in 1979, after which he joined Johnny Cash’s band before ultimately setting out in the mid '80s to pursue a solo career.
Scoring hits like "Hillbilly Rock," "Burn Me Down," and "The Whiskey Ain't Working Anymore," the latter a duet with fellow maverick Travis Tritt, Stuart earned both commercial success and critical acclaim, including four GRAMMY Awards. Over time, however, his creative goals conflicted with those of an ever-changing country-music industry, forcing him to assess his purpose and relevance as an artist.
Where did you get the whole idea for Ghost Train, to stand your ground and say, “This is where I am now?"
In reality for me it started about ten years ago with a record I did called The Pilgrim, and I was kind of penalized for playing country music. I had one recording left on my contract with MCA Records at the time. I felt like The Pilgrim was probably going to do me in commercially for a moment, but I knew I had to take that walk because I had no choice in the matter in order to live with myself. So I made that record and it brought the curtain down on a decade-and-a-half commercial run, but it was time to do something different. You can only have so many radio songs. You can only have so many of the trinkets of hillbilly stardom. Then all of a sudden it becomes a hollow victory. That’s what it did for me. I wanted a deeper, more meaningful career for the back half of my life. So I started over.
I’ve finally found my mark inside of this decade that I’ve been drifting through the woods looking for. It really is the deepest place in my heart, traditional country music. And country music needs traditional country music, in my opinion, now as much as ever before. It gives a sense of balance.
Is it disheartening that what is considered mainstream country today is essentially a tangent of country music?
Well, I think it’s in the ear of the beholder. A lot of listeners probably couldn’t put up with listening to the records I listen to, that I consider country music. Also, there are a couple kinds of country music that have come back up. I think that most everybody around this town thought the kind of music that Ghost Train represents was dead and gone except for some pioneer acts at the Opry. So I stood up and said, “I beg to differ!” I helped create the way country music sounds on the radio these days and I’m also encouraged to go back and help create it another way now.
Because you were part of that late ‘80s surge with Dwight Yoakam and Steve Earle—
Right. And the job at that time was to get it away from fluffy, poppy records and get some grit back in it, put a rock ‘n’ roll flair to it and attract a younger audience. Well, we did that. And it just kept going and kept going and kept going ‘til, as Tom Petty says, “One day I woke up and it looked like bad rock ‘n’ roll with a fiddle.”
It seems that commercial radio and other outlets where most people get their music from pander to what’s popular rather than to what’s genuine and, for lack of a better term, good.
Absolutely. It’s the homogenization of America, which is a bigger subject. Then again, we can’t overlook the fact that a lot of those face-value-of-the-chart, in-the-moment country artists, they’re entertaining a lot of people out there. There’s a lot to be said for that. They’re taking care of that end of the business.
How has your approach to songwriting changed in recent years?
I think as life goes on the songs get more honest. That’s the thing I love about Ghost Train. Those songs feel to me like they’ve really been lived through, and they were. They were.
Going back to when you left Johnny Cash’s band to start your solo career, was it difficult to find a creative voice that was yours and not just a mirror of your influences?
Oh, without question. Looking back on some of that early work, I can see the glimmer of where it was headed, but there were two bands I was having to play myself out of the shadow of... The bottom line is the song. You’ve got to have the right song. You can be the coolest guy in town—have the best bus, the best band, the best everything—but until that song comes along that gives you a job with the masses, you’re stuck just being the coolest guy in town. “Hillbilly Rock” was the song that opened the door and gave me a reason to get a bus and a band and cowboy clothes to go out there and figure it out in front of everybody. And the hits started coming. We stumbled into a sound and we had a good run with it, but every time I had commercial success I tried to use it wisely to balance out a credible career along with a commercial career. I did not want to wind up being 50 years old, stuck on stage being a parody of myself just hoping everybody remembered my hits from any particular decade. That was not what I had in mind.
Going back even further, when you were starting out as a teenager—which is a rebellious age to begin with and the ‘70s were a licentious time—what drew you to country music as opposed to, say, Led Zeppelin? What made country the music that moved you most?
The Beatles were exploding even further back in the early ‘60s when my light kind of came on musically, but the first two records I ever owned were Lester Flatt and Johnny Cash. Then there was The Porter Wagoner Show that I watched on Saturdays. Rock ‘n’ roll entertained my head but there was something about country music that touched my heart. When I was 12 years old I discovered Bill Monroe and my dad got me a mandolin. There wasn’t really a lot of difference from a Mississippi perspective between what Elvis did on “Mystery Train” or “Milkcow Blues” or what Bill Monroe was playing or what Flatt and Scruggs was playing; it was rock ‘n’ roll to me. Bluegrass had a lot of fire about it. So I unplugged my electric guitar, put it under the bed and began playing the mandolin. And getting offered a job with Lester, I mean it was beyond belief. It went from cutting yards one day and going to school and the next thing I knew I was on stage at the Grand Ole Opry playing with a cool band.
Even at that young age, did you appreciate who you were playing with?
Absolutely, because I loved those guys. That’s all I wanted to do from the time I was nine years old and had my first band. I wanted to go to Nashville and play country music.
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