December 4, 2018 • 27 mins
Malcolm Gladwell talks to three songwriters who helped transform country music in the 1970s. Gone were cowboy hats, train whistles and church suppers. In came songs about desperation, loss, changes, and regret that changed how Nashville made music and spoke to a new generation of audiences. Bobby Braddock, Don Schlitz and Don Henry talk about their influences, trade stories, and play acoustic versions of their classic hits.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Pushkin. Just a quick note here. You can listen to
all of the music mentioned in this episode on our playlist,
which you can find a link to in the show
notes for licensing reasons, each time a song is referenced
in this episode, you'll hear this sound effect. All right,
(00:28):
enjoyed episode. In the nineteen seventies and eighties, there was
a revolution in Nashville that was every bit as important
to country music as the Beatles were to rock and roll.
A new generation of songwriters came along who didn't just
want to write about cowboys and pickup trucks. They wanted
to write about emotion and conflict and to bear their souls.
(00:52):
My name is Bobby Braddock and I'm bald, and I
write songs and borderline mentally ill. I'm Don Henry and
I've been very spoiled being able to enjoy what I
love doing for the longest time, and I still continue
to do it to this day. I'm Don Schlitz and
I'm with no particular talent at all. I was twenty
(01:13):
years old and eighty dollars and got off a bus
and I was in Nashville. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
You're listening to Broken Record. For this episode, I went
to Nashville and sat down with three of the leaders
of that revolution. Don Schlitz, who has written some of
the greatest country music songs ever, Don Henry, the junior
(01:35):
member of the Revolution, and the great Bobby Braddock, elder Statesman.
Those of you who listened to my other podcast, Revisionist History,
know that I can't set foot in Nashville without checking
in with Bobby Braddock. It would be like going to
Iceland and not saying Hi to New York. We all
met at Sony Tree Studios on Music Row. We talked
(01:58):
for hours and could have talked for a lot longer.
In fact, we could devote an entire season of Broken
Record just to those crucial Nashville years. So consider this
a start chapter one in the oral history of the
New Nashville. I made sure there was a piano for Bobby,
and the two dons brought their guitars. I told them
(02:20):
all they had to sing for their supper. Don Schlitz
kick things off, and it only took two years to
get cut. Why because it was it was too long,
It's too linear melodically, there's no romantic situation. It took
(02:43):
too long to go to the course. I don't know.
I liked it. A lot of people liked it, and
it finally nobody would cut it. And my publisher put
out the demo and send it to radio, and they
started playing a couple a friend of mine and and
Hume Moffit cut it and put it out, and Conway
(03:05):
Twitty's son put it out Charlie Tango, and suddenly there
were three cuts of it on the on the charts,
and then it was gone. I was still working as
a computer operator. Oh you just you was still in
Oh yeah, yeah, sure, oh yeah, you know, you know,
writers got writers got to eat. But why I think
is great about that song? It's full of life lessons
(03:27):
like I don't play poker, but I don't think then
I played a lot of poker, and I would always
think about the lines in that song. Okay, no wonderful,
you know, And I use that and and that's like
a metaphor for the real life lessons that matter more
than poker. And it's it's full of those. And you
can just you could write that down and carry it
(03:48):
when you and get it out and look at it
when you're in an a tight situation. You know, does
that does that song change? Does the success of that
song change what people consider to be acceptable in a
country song? I think it, I know, and with all humility,
what it changed for me. For eventually Kenny Rogers cuts
(04:08):
it and with that great voice, they make it up tempo,
they move the chorus up. And that made it so
I could write whatever I wanted to write the rest
of my life. And I one thing I did not
want to write was that song over and over again.
So I got to write different songs. I got to
emulate my pals who were also my heroes, though you
(04:31):
know you wouldn't tell them that. And you write what
you want to write, and you learn that you can
amazingly enough. You have good taste. There's an an interesting
thing that happened with Braddock and Harlan and Manny Bob
(04:52):
McDill in this town that you can see a difference
between Nashville songs or the songs that were written on
music Row that stopped being corny, stop being that you'd
sit on a haybell and sing, or on a barstool
and have to sing, But you could sit by yourself
(05:16):
quietly in a room and go like that song is
about me. That song is about real issues that I have.
It is not uh and and we While we have
heroes from that era like Randy Newman, Bob McDill, Bob McDill, sorry,
Bob Dylan and as you know, Gordon Light for those
(05:39):
and great writers Joni Mitchell, I know you were, Paul Simon, Yeah,
Paul McCartney and John Lennon and the Keith Richards and
Emma Chair who we're writing songs that we love. There's
an awful lot of and Holland does your Holland do
not leave out notice writing a motown and stack that
(06:01):
were feeling feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, and we're
writing a story. I think Christofferson had an awful lot
to do in popularizing that. I think Braddick had a
lot of doing popularized that there is a sequence of
events that happens. And as opposed to telling you I
feel this way, I feel this way, we're saying this
(06:22):
is what happened, period. And I think feelings go beyond words.
That's why some of my me it's hard to differentiate
between maybe if I say my favorite song, it might
be one of my favorite records like I put Gold
Restou on that Mountain on my list because just what
happened in that studio and Ricky Skaggs and Petty Lovelace
(06:44):
was singing with Vins on that thing. I still get
tears in my eyes and chilled much when I hear
the thing, And you know, it's a great story, but
they could be singing it in Greek, you know, and
I still love it. Well. You know. We also had
the advantage, at least Don and I did it of
tuning in the country radio and having people like like
(07:04):
Christofferson or Tom T. Hall who were writing stories and
a lot of times you had to sit in that
chair and listen all the way to the end to
get the payoff. So you had people that is unlike
today where you want to payoff in ten seconds. Uh.
People were willing to listen a little longer for something.
There's there's there's a collective ADHD now where people don't
(07:28):
want to I mean A and R people that they'll
if it takes too long, like I song he started
levering her today, whichever curly putman, nobody would possibly cut
that now because it takes too long to get to
the payoff. They even they're even wanting now the second
verse to be just a little tiny verse, you know,
whereas the second verse for us was, you know, we
(07:51):
were told if we had a great first verse, that
might be your second verse. Yes, it has to be,
because you want something to build up to mean, what's
what's a what's a A great example, another great example
of a a song with a delayed payoff. Well, that
that was one for sure. Is long? Is long? Is longok? Vail? Well,
(08:13):
you you find out pretty quick that it's his best friends.
He was in the arms of his best friend's wife
kind of by the second and yeah, so you know
he can't he's got a decision to make. And well,
and then you know that if she wants do you
guys know that song well enough to play it? John
probably can you. The most powerful part of that, I
(08:34):
think is when you say she walks these hills in
her long black veil. Danny Dill and Mary John welcome
Danny deal. I think was primarily the lyricist on that
I heard they now is this true or not? They
wrote it on the way of the session. Is that true?
I don't know if that's true or not. But but uh.
I had a song called Golden Ring. We were talking
(08:57):
about where we should sue Conway when you had I
Love to Lay You Down, and I said, and I
told my publisher, I said, but they do that. Then
Danny Dill and Mary John Welcome may sue me for
stealing the melody from Long Black Veil. And I told
that story to Mary John Wilcom. She said, we came
pretty damn close to doing. Really, my goodness, that's strange. Well,
(09:19):
I like this theme that we're on well, of these
kind of story that are because a lot of you
guys are seemed to be have worked in that well.
I was a huge and still I am a huge
Randy Newman fan. And the thing that struck me about
Bobby before I even really got to know him, was
that he was basically the country music version of that.
(09:42):
And I think the thing that really woke me up
to that was, Unfortunately, when I heard he Stopped Loving
Her Today. I knew the title of it before I
heard the song. I wish I'd heard it without knowing
what the name of the song was, because the first
line is he said I love you till I die,
and I I just started laughing. So hard. I took
(10:02):
the record off, I went because the title is he
Stopped Loving Her Today, and the first line is he
said I love you till I die. And I went, oh,
he's dead. This guy's dead man instantly, and I just
started and I think, what I loved about Bobby and
what I loved about the Lubin Brothers and Tom T
(10:23):
Holmes so much stuff. Is that a threat of irony
that you wouldn't call it laugh out loud humor, but
it's it's just so ironic, And to me, that's what
Randy Newman taps into constantly. And so when I heard
that song, and you know, every verse of he Stopped
Loving Her Today ends with a joke. I mean, you know,
(10:44):
you know we all went to see her, she we
all wondered if she would It kept running through my
mind those time he's over her for good. And then
the thing about the smile, first time we'd seen him
smile in years, Well, that's a joke. It is. Those
are joke, and almost every one of them ends with that.
But by the time you get that joke, it doesn't
(11:05):
make you laugh. It makes you just get this biggest
lump in your throat and you realize what a comedy
tragedy life is. See. I always love the juxtaposition between
something that me too, and I have written songs that
I thought were funny songs and people took them very
seriously and vice versa. Absolutely, it's happened to me over
and over for year. I love writing a song that
(11:28):
it's it's really very serious, but it's kind of taboo
subject matter, so people laugh nervously over that. And that's
what happened to me when I heard he stopped Loving
Her today, and I use it today to this day.
I get to tour and teach on some of these
shows that I do, and I put that song up
right away because I show people what you can do
(11:49):
in such a short amount of time, how you can
tell a huge story. And it uses all the little
technical things about about that little running joke, even theduction
of it, which is brilliant. Billy Cheryl, I think to me,
I hold it up there with a song like we
talked about earlier, like sale Away, which you can almost
use and show students or anybody who's interested how you
(12:12):
can unfold a story. We'll be back with more of
my conversation with Bobby Braddock Don Schlitz and Don Henry.
We're back with Bobby and the Two Dons. Don Henry,
a self described hippie from California, wrote a hit record
(12:34):
from Miranda Lambert with songwriter Philip Coleman, who's from West Tennessee.
The song All Kinds of Kinds is an ode to diversity.
I asked Don to play it for us. You know,
we knew when we wrote that we had to kind
of as oddballs go. We were odder than the people
we were picking out the front, so we had to
(12:55):
put ourselves in there at the end to show you that.
It's that you know that we were there too. Otherwise
it's just a you're getting on a soapbox and you're
pointing fingers, and you really got to pay attention at
point and the finger at yourself to make that kind
of stuff work, at least from my experience, and that
that's how it finally came together at the end for us.
I love what she did. She she twisted it around
(13:18):
a little bit. One of the things she said on
that tag was and sent to some point of fingers.
She says at some point the finger. Yeah, that's why
she says it, which I think is great because she
kind of owns that song. It sounds like she wrote it,
and I like that. She's she's impish, perfect song for her,
She's perfect. It sounds and that's what she told frank Lydell,
who produced that record. She said, it just sounds like
(13:40):
something I would write. And that made me feel good
because she's a really good writer. Yeah. Yeah, were you
thinking about her when you well, you know, we were,
in fact when we wrote that. It was it was
probably probably ten years before she moved to town. She
was probably fifteen years old. Do you guys, do you
when you're when you're writing songs and if you're not
writing with the artist, but you're writing a song, do
(14:02):
you have in your head anybody singing it other than yourself? No?
I don't. I mean, I just want to sing it
at the Bluebird Er. If I'm trying to emulate one
of my heroes, like a Jonie or something, I'll say, Okay,
what would Jonie do? And I'll try to bring that out.
But it's not like I'm writing to pitch that you
have Mitchell in your head. I love Joni Mitchell. When
I'm looking to write a song and I can't really
(14:23):
get into the groove. I'll get up early in the
morning and get things going and put on Joni Mitchell, wow,
Ry Newman, Paul Simon, sometimes people like Van Morrison. I
really liked that because I just like the way he
writes words. The great music can pump you up and
make it. If you could only listen to one Joni
Mitchell song in the morning to get you going, what
(14:44):
would it be well for writing and for working on
that It's it's a tough one, but but for me
it's it was on my list, and it's both sides.
Now it's clouds because I remember distinctly as a youngster
hearing that song and going, oh see what she did there?
You know, that kind of a thing, And that's that
same anchor of a chorus that has a little bit
of a twist each time it comes back around, and
(15:07):
I think, well, that keeps the lessener from being bored,
doesn't it. And yet it's just filled with life lessons
written by such a young person at the time, and
I think by hearing something like that at an early age,
it helped make me wiser quicker, you know, as much
as I loved bubblegum pop, to hear Joni Mitchell sing that,
it was like, oh, this is what you can do
with It's pretty cool changes, it's pretty amazing. Yeah. But
(15:30):
the one Man Man by the Quick Lunch Down, he's
playing real good for free. I mean, what a great
country song that is. Can you guys do a little
bit of that altogether? Is that possible? I don't know
enough of it. Clouds from both sides now, from up
(15:54):
band down, and then give or take and win or lose.
It's cloud clouds illusions. I recall, I really don't know
clouds at all. It's funny because she originally did it
in that day. Yeahbody knows. Well. What I like about
(16:15):
that thing is is it's kind of it's it's very
textbooking and it's very technical, but when it's when it's
going down, it's seamless, and it doesn't feel that way
When you were talking about how to hear that from
someone so young, it's a totally better song written sung
by someone who's obviously really young, right, because it's no
(16:35):
longer that it's not the cliche of the older person
looking back. It's this weird, fascinating thing of this super
young person saying you're not going to believe this amazement.
But I have looked at life from both sides now
right by constantly, you know, looking at his I mean
it was the first time I heard the Girl from
the North Country. My dad used to sing that one
(16:55):
all the time to me, and I didn't even know
who Bob Dylan was when he my dad would sing it.
And then he had that Free Willing album, and I
remember thinking that this was completely different than anything I'd
heard because this guy was really young writing about such
wise stuff. It was really cool. We'll be back with
more broken record after this. I'm back with Bobby Braddock,
(17:23):
John Henry and Don Schlitz. Drawing back to you can
you give us? Now? I'm interested in a song that
really not one of your own, a song that really
kind of changed the way, transformed the way you thought
about songwriting, that opened a door for you. Fairly easy
(17:44):
to explain. My first company I went to in Nashville
when I was twenty was Pete Drake Music because Pete
Drake had played on John Wesley Harding and there was
a young man named Buzz Raven was listening to song zero,
but I played, you know, I walked in that hair
(18:05):
down halfway down my back, and I was twenty years
old and didn't look like a person that would be
in wanting to be a country singer. And so I
went up and played a few songs for him at
the publishing company and he said, well, I don't really
know what we're doing here yet, what I'm doing here yet,
but let me make a phone call for you. You You
(18:26):
gave me a number person to go see. He says,
you go see him in a couple of days, he'll
be expecting you. So I go over this company, this
building walking. I didn't have a car in this hot
day in April, you know, heavy guitar case. And I
walk in and back then you could walk in, and
(18:46):
I said, I'm supted to see somebody. My name is
and somebody yells back, oh, I know what this is about.
He comes out, and this guy with curly hair and
wireroom glasses comes out and says, coming back and play
some songs. So I went back and I pulled my
guitar out and I've played a couple of songs and
he says, we'll play me another. And I'm pretty sure
(19:06):
that I'm this guy's big break. You know that I
am it for him? And I'm going through and I
play about eight or nine songs, and I'm thinking I'm
being discovered. This is absolutely amazing and wonderful. I'm twenty
years old and this is how great for this guy.
He's like ten years older than me. And he says,
let me show you what I do. And he's coming
(19:29):
in here. It takes me into the little record room
and says, well, it's just a single, and I knew
that didn't mean it was very much because it wasn't
on an album and it's a small label. It's a
friend of mine. It's the B side, And he puts
on this song in the and it starts to play,
and live held it all in me. Lord knows, I've tried.
(19:51):
It's an awful awake now you boys. The song was Amanda.
I wish I could, but I can't do it justice
because the singer was Don Williams, and it was on
JMI Records. It was its twelve lines, uh, and it
was a song called a Man. And that he didn't
(20:13):
tell me that he'd written it by himself, or that
he'd also written the A side, which was Come Early Morning,
which was the number one song in America at the time. Uh,
And I'm sitting there listening, going like, oh, you know,
I've got a long way to go. And I think
that what had changed for me was realizing that I
didn't know a whole lot and talk about Bob McDill
(20:35):
was the man, and he became my mentor and basically
the only person that would see me for a few
years when I was first here, and the only person
I would go in and take songs to. And Gorcy
passed on the Gambler, which was, you know, so he
everybody makes mistakes, but he went on to write a
large portion of the Don Williams songs that that that
(20:57):
helped change this town. And I wrote, good old Boys
like good old Boys like Me. It is his masterpiece.
Give us, give us a taste of it. Hey, we
were we were lucky, at least I was. I had
just come to town at seventy nine, so all this
stuff was happening. The Gambler had just been a huge hit,
(21:18):
and then a year later he stopped loving her. Today
was of course good old Boys like Me and stuff
like that. So that was the bar that I had
to come in, and I thought, well, that's an impossible
bar to reach. But It was glorious and it was
fun to try, but it was a wonderful club to join.
It was it was, And I think that that's frustrating now.
(21:41):
Is that a song that would say something like Hank
and Tennessee, or a song like he stopped loving her
today or unfortunately the Gambler would not be recorded today.
And that's frustrating feeling. And so that bar that I
held so high, it's a different bar now. I'm not
saying that I don't know because I don't participate in
that world like I did back then. But what I
(22:04):
wanted to say about Amanda being so simple is then
we ended up going with when Paul over Street, and
now we're writing songs and actually I would find oh
goodness gracious in the in the middle, I would find
an idea, real simple, that's your song? Yeah? Really, yeah,
(22:29):
I had no idea. It hit twice. It's one of
my favorite songs. I've only ever heard the I think
it's an astounding song. I haven't even heard the version
by Elson kraus Reed. Keith Whitley recorded it first and
then he passed away. Sadly, he was one of our
great singers and tragically and there was a tribute album
(22:56):
made it, and Alison Krause sang it, and then there's
this movie comes out, And my understanding is in the
movie The People, Ronan Keating is the guy who's name
from a group called Boyzone, calls Alison Krause's office and
asks for permission to sing the song, at which point
(23:18):
I think they said, you know, you really probably should
talk to the publisher and the writer, and they put
it in a movie called notting Hill, and it was
a pop record all over the world. Actually, actually it
occurs at forty five and a half minutes into notting Hill.
So if you see it, as I often do on
television because it runs all the time, and you can
just time it, DOLLI yell Stacy, it's on, It's on.
(23:42):
If there was ever ever, if it was ever a
perfect voice at Salison Kraus an amazing voice when you
sing a song, I would love to sing when I
sing a song rather than one of the my favorite
thing I've done in two or three years, and show
you how I just changed a line. I knew that
I needed to change that line to make it fit
today's market. I hope I can read these lyrics here,
(24:06):
and I'll probably just make all kind of mistakes and
blow the whole thing. But I don't try this anyway,
thank you. I don't. I couldn't even hear all the words.
What is what is the line you changed? Here's a
line I changed. Okay, That's why I was wondering if
I should take the top down off the pen. Uh.
(24:27):
What I had originally said, I try to be a
good man and everything. I try to put myself in
the character of this guy who's kind of a typical
Southerner and being a Southerner. Even though I really evolved,
I mean, I still have a lot of these things
in here that that I don't like about the South.
I was that way myself. I mean, well was it.
I was a teenager. I was a hardcore secret segregationist.
(24:49):
I didn't think blacks and white people should go to
school together. I really believe that shit. So the line
I have here was I try to be a good
man and everything I do. And the line I had was,
you know, I love Jesus and I love my country too.
And in the early two thousands, you could do that.
(25:12):
You could do that when the country demographic was very
conservative and there were all these patriotic songs and country radio. Now,
if you had something like God and country right together,
I think they wouldn't play it because it would sound
like it was political, and they just don't want to
go there because of the demographic country demographic. It's like
(25:33):
it's like America itself. It's split right down the middle,
and it's controversial. They don't want controversial. They don't want
somebody to turn the dial. They don't want to lose
half of their audience. So but you can still sing
about Jesus occasionally, you know, you'll hear Jesus in the song,
and you sure sing about whiskey. So I thought, what
(25:53):
I'm going to do there? Then it said, yes, I
love my whiskey, but I love Jesus too, And I
think that made it probably exceptable. Can I can I
point out the the hilariously absurd irony of that that
it's moreible now for us to talk about whiskey than country. Huh.
You can talk about whiskey's fine. Whiskey is not divisive,
(26:16):
but country is. Like Bobby, I played Indeep, I played
a little bit of Forever and Ever. Can you play that? Yeah? Alright?
Second little backup vocals, Are you a union? Are all right? Adam?
(26:40):
He's not union? No card. That was Don Schlitz, Don
Henry and Bobby Braddock from Sony Tree Studios on Nashville's
Music Row. Broken Record is produced by Justin Richmond and
Jason Gambrel, with help from Bruce hadlam Me Label Jaquita Pascal,
(27:02):
Jacob Smith, Julia Barton, Jacob Weisberg, and of course el Hafe,
Rick Rubin. Special thanks to Adam Engelhardt, who engineered the
session in Nashville to hear the song speech you in
today's episode, sung by the artists who made them famous.
Check out Broken Record podcast dot com. This show was
(27:23):
brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Pushkin. Just a quick note here. You can listen to
all of the music mentioned in this episode on our playlist,
which you can find a link to in the show
notes for licensing reasons, each time a song is referenced
in this episode, you'll hear this sound effect. All right,
(00:28):
enjoyed episode. In the nineteen seventies and eighties, there was
a revolution in Nashville that was every bit as important
to country music as the Beatles were to rock and roll.
A new generation of songwriters came along who didn't just
want to write about cowboys and pickup trucks. They wanted
to write about emotion and conflict and to bear their souls.
(00:52):
My name is Bobby Braddock and I'm bald, and I
write songs and borderline mentally ill. I'm Don Henry and
I've been very spoiled being able to enjoy what I
love doing for the longest time, and I still continue
to do it to this day. I'm Don Schlitz and
I'm with no particular talent at all. I was twenty
(01:13):
years old and eighty dollars and got off a bus
and I was in Nashville. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
You're listening to Broken Record. For this episode, I went
to Nashville and sat down with three of the leaders
of that revolution. Don Schlitz, who has written some of
the greatest country music songs ever, Don Henry, the junior
(01:35):
member of the Revolution, and the great Bobby Braddock, elder Statesman.
Those of you who listened to my other podcast, Revisionist History,
know that I can't set foot in Nashville without checking
in with Bobby Braddock. It would be like going to
Iceland and not saying Hi to New York. We all
met at Sony Tree Studios on Music Row. We talked
(01:58):
for hours and could have talked for a lot longer.
In fact, we could devote an entire season of Broken
Record just to those crucial Nashville years. So consider this
a start chapter one in the oral history of the
New Nashville. I made sure there was a piano for Bobby,
and the two dons brought their guitars. I told them
(02:20):
all they had to sing for their supper. Don Schlitz
kick things off, and it only took two years to
get cut. Why because it was it was too long,
It's too linear melodically, there's no romantic situation. It took
(02:43):
too long to go to the course. I don't know.
I liked it. A lot of people liked it, and
it finally nobody would cut it. And my publisher put
out the demo and send it to radio, and they
started playing a couple a friend of mine and and
Hume Moffit cut it and put it out, and Conway
(03:05):
Twitty's son put it out Charlie Tango, and suddenly there
were three cuts of it on the on the charts,
and then it was gone. I was still working as
a computer operator. Oh you just you was still in
Oh yeah, yeah, sure, oh yeah, you know, you know,
writers got writers got to eat. But why I think
is great about that song? It's full of life lessons
(03:27):
like I don't play poker, but I don't think then
I played a lot of poker, and I would always
think about the lines in that song. Okay, no wonderful,
you know, And I use that and and that's like
a metaphor for the real life lessons that matter more
than poker. And it's it's full of those. And you
can just you could write that down and carry it
(03:48):
when you and get it out and look at it
when you're in an a tight situation. You know, does
that does that song change? Does the success of that
song change what people consider to be acceptable in a
country song? I think it, I know, and with all humility,
what it changed for me. For eventually Kenny Rogers cuts
(04:08):
it and with that great voice, they make it up tempo,
they move the chorus up. And that made it so
I could write whatever I wanted to write the rest
of my life. And I one thing I did not
want to write was that song over and over again.
So I got to write different songs. I got to
emulate my pals who were also my heroes, though you
(04:31):
know you wouldn't tell them that. And you write what
you want to write, and you learn that you can
amazingly enough. You have good taste. There's an an interesting
thing that happened with Braddock and Harlan and Manny Bob
(04:52):
McDill in this town that you can see a difference
between Nashville songs or the songs that were written on
music Row that stopped being corny, stop being that you'd
sit on a haybell and sing, or on a barstool
and have to sing, But you could sit by yourself
(05:16):
quietly in a room and go like that song is
about me. That song is about real issues that I have.
It is not uh and and we While we have
heroes from that era like Randy Newman, Bob McDill, Bob McDill, sorry,
Bob Dylan and as you know, Gordon Light for those
(05:39):
and great writers Joni Mitchell, I know you were, Paul Simon, Yeah,
Paul McCartney and John Lennon and the Keith Richards and
Emma Chair who we're writing songs that we love. There's
an awful lot of and Holland does your Holland do
not leave out notice writing a motown and stack that
(06:01):
were feeling feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, feeling, and we're
writing a story. I think Christofferson had an awful lot
to do in popularizing that. I think Braddick had a
lot of doing popularized that there is a sequence of
events that happens. And as opposed to telling you I
feel this way, I feel this way, we're saying this
(06:22):
is what happened, period. And I think feelings go beyond words.
That's why some of my me it's hard to differentiate
between maybe if I say my favorite song, it might
be one of my favorite records like I put Gold
Restou on that Mountain on my list because just what
happened in that studio and Ricky Skaggs and Petty Lovelace
(06:44):
was singing with Vins on that thing. I still get
tears in my eyes and chilled much when I hear
the thing, And you know, it's a great story, but
they could be singing it in Greek, you know, and
I still love it. Well. You know. We also had
the advantage, at least Don and I did it of
tuning in the country radio and having people like like
(07:04):
Christofferson or Tom T. Hall who were writing stories and
a lot of times you had to sit in that
chair and listen all the way to the end to
get the payoff. So you had people that is unlike
today where you want to payoff in ten seconds. Uh.
People were willing to listen a little longer for something.
There's there's there's a collective ADHD now where people don't
(07:28):
want to I mean A and R people that they'll
if it takes too long, like I song he started
levering her today, whichever curly putman, nobody would possibly cut
that now because it takes too long to get to
the payoff. They even they're even wanting now the second
verse to be just a little tiny verse, you know,
whereas the second verse for us was, you know, we
(07:51):
were told if we had a great first verse, that
might be your second verse. Yes, it has to be,
because you want something to build up to mean, what's
what's a what's a A great example, another great example
of a a song with a delayed payoff. Well, that
that was one for sure. Is long? Is long? Is longok? Vail? Well,
(08:13):
you you find out pretty quick that it's his best friends.
He was in the arms of his best friend's wife
kind of by the second and yeah, so you know
he can't he's got a decision to make. And well,
and then you know that if she wants do you
guys know that song well enough to play it? John
probably can you. The most powerful part of that, I
(08:34):
think is when you say she walks these hills in
her long black veil. Danny Dill and Mary John welcome
Danny deal. I think was primarily the lyricist on that
I heard they now is this true or not? They
wrote it on the way of the session. Is that true?
I don't know if that's true or not. But but uh.
I had a song called Golden Ring. We were talking
(08:57):
about where we should sue Conway when you had I
Love to Lay You Down, and I said, and I
told my publisher, I said, but they do that. Then
Danny Dill and Mary John Welcome may sue me for
stealing the melody from Long Black Veil. And I told
that story to Mary John Wilcom. She said, we came
pretty damn close to doing. Really, my goodness, that's strange. Well,
(09:19):
I like this theme that we're on well, of these
kind of story that are because a lot of you
guys are seemed to be have worked in that well.
I was a huge and still I am a huge
Randy Newman fan. And the thing that struck me about
Bobby before I even really got to know him, was
that he was basically the country music version of that.
(09:42):
And I think the thing that really woke me up
to that was, Unfortunately, when I heard he Stopped Loving
Her Today. I knew the title of it before I
heard the song. I wish I'd heard it without knowing
what the name of the song was, because the first
line is he said I love you till I die,
and I I just started laughing. So hard. I took
(10:02):
the record off, I went because the title is he
Stopped Loving Her Today, and the first line is he
said I love you till I die. And I went, oh,
he's dead. This guy's dead man instantly, and I just
started and I think, what I loved about Bobby and
what I loved about the Lubin Brothers and Tom T
(10:23):
Holmes so much stuff. Is that a threat of irony
that you wouldn't call it laugh out loud humor, but
it's it's just so ironic, And to me, that's what
Randy Newman taps into constantly. And so when I heard
that song, and you know, every verse of he Stopped
Loving Her Today ends with a joke. I mean, you know,
(10:44):
you know we all went to see her, she we
all wondered if she would It kept running through my
mind those time he's over her for good. And then
the thing about the smile, first time we'd seen him
smile in years, Well, that's a joke. It is. Those
are joke, and almost every one of them ends with that.
But by the time you get that joke, it doesn't
(11:05):
make you laugh. It makes you just get this biggest
lump in your throat and you realize what a comedy
tragedy life is. See. I always love the juxtaposition between
something that me too, and I have written songs that
I thought were funny songs and people took them very
seriously and vice versa. Absolutely, it's happened to me over
and over for year. I love writing a song that
(11:28):
it's it's really very serious, but it's kind of taboo
subject matter, so people laugh nervously over that. And that's
what happened to me when I heard he stopped Loving
Her today, and I use it today to this day.
I get to tour and teach on some of these
shows that I do, and I put that song up
right away because I show people what you can do
(11:49):
in such a short amount of time, how you can
tell a huge story. And it uses all the little
technical things about about that little running joke, even theduction
of it, which is brilliant. Billy Cheryl, I think to me,
I hold it up there with a song like we
talked about earlier, like sale Away, which you can almost
use and show students or anybody who's interested how you
(12:12):
can unfold a story. We'll be back with more of
my conversation with Bobby Braddock Don Schlitz and Don Henry.
We're back with Bobby and the Two Dons. Don Henry,
a self described hippie from California, wrote a hit record
(12:34):
from Miranda Lambert with songwriter Philip Coleman, who's from West Tennessee.
The song All Kinds of Kinds is an ode to diversity.
I asked Don to play it for us. You know,
we knew when we wrote that we had to kind
of as oddballs go. We were odder than the people
we were picking out the front, so we had to
(12:55):
put ourselves in there at the end to show you that.
It's that you know that we were there too. Otherwise
it's just a you're getting on a soapbox and you're
pointing fingers, and you really got to pay attention at
point and the finger at yourself to make that kind
of stuff work, at least from my experience, and that
that's how it finally came together at the end for us.
I love what she did. She she twisted it around
(13:18):
a little bit. One of the things she said on
that tag was and sent to some point of fingers.
She says at some point the finger. Yeah, that's why
she says it, which I think is great because she
kind of owns that song. It sounds like she wrote it,
and I like that. She's she's impish, perfect song for her,
She's perfect. It sounds and that's what she told frank Lydell,
who produced that record. She said, it just sounds like
(13:40):
something I would write. And that made me feel good
because she's a really good writer. Yeah. Yeah, were you
thinking about her when you well, you know, we were,
in fact when we wrote that. It was it was
probably probably ten years before she moved to town. She
was probably fifteen years old. Do you guys, do you
when you're when you're writing songs and if you're not
writing with the artist, but you're writing a song, do
(14:02):
you have in your head anybody singing it other than yourself? No?
I don't. I mean, I just want to sing it
at the Bluebird Er. If I'm trying to emulate one
of my heroes, like a Jonie or something, I'll say, Okay,
what would Jonie do? And I'll try to bring that out.
But it's not like I'm writing to pitch that you
have Mitchell in your head. I love Joni Mitchell. When
I'm looking to write a song and I can't really
(14:23):
get into the groove. I'll get up early in the
morning and get things going and put on Joni Mitchell, wow,
Ry Newman, Paul Simon, sometimes people like Van Morrison. I
really liked that because I just like the way he
writes words. The great music can pump you up and
make it. If you could only listen to one Joni
Mitchell song in the morning to get you going, what
(14:44):
would it be well for writing and for working on
that It's it's a tough one, but but for me
it's it was on my list, and it's both sides.
Now it's clouds because I remember distinctly as a youngster
hearing that song and going, oh see what she did there?
You know, that kind of a thing, And that's that
same anchor of a chorus that has a little bit
of a twist each time it comes back around, and
(15:07):
I think, well, that keeps the lessener from being bored,
doesn't it. And yet it's just filled with life lessons
written by such a young person at the time, and
I think by hearing something like that at an early age,
it helped make me wiser quicker, you know, as much
as I loved bubblegum pop, to hear Joni Mitchell sing that,
it was like, oh, this is what you can do
with It's pretty cool changes, it's pretty amazing. Yeah. But
(15:30):
the one Man Man by the Quick Lunch Down, he's
playing real good for free. I mean, what a great
country song that is. Can you guys do a little
bit of that altogether? Is that possible? I don't know
enough of it. Clouds from both sides now, from up
(15:54):
band down, and then give or take and win or lose.
It's cloud clouds illusions. I recall, I really don't know
clouds at all. It's funny because she originally did it
in that day. Yeahbody knows. Well. What I like about
(16:15):
that thing is is it's kind of it's it's very
textbooking and it's very technical, but when it's when it's
going down, it's seamless, and it doesn't feel that way
When you were talking about how to hear that from
someone so young, it's a totally better song written sung
by someone who's obviously really young, right, because it's no
(16:35):
longer that it's not the cliche of the older person
looking back. It's this weird, fascinating thing of this super
young person saying you're not going to believe this amazement.
But I have looked at life from both sides now
right by constantly, you know, looking at his I mean
it was the first time I heard the Girl from
the North Country. My dad used to sing that one
(16:55):
all the time to me, and I didn't even know
who Bob Dylan was when he my dad would sing it.
And then he had that Free Willing album, and I
remember thinking that this was completely different than anything I'd
heard because this guy was really young writing about such
wise stuff. It was really cool. We'll be back with
more broken record after this. I'm back with Bobby Braddock,
(17:23):
John Henry and Don Schlitz. Drawing back to you can
you give us? Now? I'm interested in a song that
really not one of your own, a song that really
kind of changed the way, transformed the way you thought
about songwriting, that opened a door for you. Fairly easy
(17:44):
to explain. My first company I went to in Nashville
when I was twenty was Pete Drake Music because Pete
Drake had played on John Wesley Harding and there was
a young man named Buzz Raven was listening to song zero,
but I played, you know, I walked in that hair
(18:05):
down halfway down my back, and I was twenty years
old and didn't look like a person that would be
in wanting to be a country singer. And so I
went up and played a few songs for him at
the publishing company and he said, well, I don't really
know what we're doing here yet, what I'm doing here yet,
but let me make a phone call for you. You You
(18:26):
gave me a number person to go see. He says,
you go see him in a couple of days, he'll
be expecting you. So I go over this company, this
building walking. I didn't have a car in this hot
day in April, you know, heavy guitar case. And I
walk in and back then you could walk in, and
(18:46):
I said, I'm supted to see somebody. My name is
and somebody yells back, oh, I know what this is about.
He comes out, and this guy with curly hair and
wireroom glasses comes out and says, coming back and play
some songs. So I went back and I pulled my
guitar out and I've played a couple of songs and
he says, we'll play me another. And I'm pretty sure
(19:06):
that I'm this guy's big break. You know that I
am it for him? And I'm going through and I
play about eight or nine songs, and I'm thinking I'm
being discovered. This is absolutely amazing and wonderful. I'm twenty
years old and this is how great for this guy.
He's like ten years older than me. And he says,
let me show you what I do. And he's coming
(19:29):
in here. It takes me into the little record room
and says, well, it's just a single, and I knew
that didn't mean it was very much because it wasn't
on an album and it's a small label. It's a
friend of mine. It's the B side, And he puts
on this song in the and it starts to play,
and live held it all in me. Lord knows, I've tried.
(19:51):
It's an awful awake now you boys. The song was Amanda.
I wish I could, but I can't do it justice
because the singer was Don Williams, and it was on
JMI Records. It was its twelve lines, uh, and it
was a song called a Man. And that he didn't
(20:13):
tell me that he'd written it by himself, or that
he'd also written the A side, which was Come Early Morning,
which was the number one song in America at the time. Uh,
And I'm sitting there listening, going like, oh, you know,
I've got a long way to go. And I think
that what had changed for me was realizing that I
didn't know a whole lot and talk about Bob McDill
(20:35):
was the man, and he became my mentor and basically
the only person that would see me for a few
years when I was first here, and the only person
I would go in and take songs to. And Gorcy
passed on the Gambler, which was, you know, so he
everybody makes mistakes, but he went on to write a
large portion of the Don Williams songs that that that
(20:57):
helped change this town. And I wrote, good old Boys
like good old Boys like Me. It is his masterpiece.
Give us, give us a taste of it. Hey, we
were we were lucky, at least I was. I had
just come to town at seventy nine, so all this
stuff was happening. The Gambler had just been a huge hit,
(21:18):
and then a year later he stopped loving her. Today
was of course good old Boys like Me and stuff
like that. So that was the bar that I had
to come in, and I thought, well, that's an impossible
bar to reach. But It was glorious and it was
fun to try, but it was a wonderful club to join.
It was it was, And I think that that's frustrating now.
(21:41):
Is that a song that would say something like Hank
and Tennessee, or a song like he stopped loving her
today or unfortunately the Gambler would not be recorded today.
And that's frustrating feeling. And so that bar that I
held so high, it's a different bar now. I'm not
saying that I don't know because I don't participate in
that world like I did back then. But what I
(22:04):
wanted to say about Amanda being so simple is then
we ended up going with when Paul over Street, and
now we're writing songs and actually I would find oh
goodness gracious in the in the middle, I would find
an idea, real simple, that's your song? Yeah? Really, yeah,
(22:29):
I had no idea. It hit twice. It's one of
my favorite songs. I've only ever heard the I think
it's an astounding song. I haven't even heard the version
by Elson kraus Reed. Keith Whitley recorded it first and
then he passed away. Sadly, he was one of our
great singers and tragically and there was a tribute album
(22:56):
made it, and Alison Krause sang it, and then there's
this movie comes out, And my understanding is in the
movie The People, Ronan Keating is the guy who's name
from a group called Boyzone, calls Alison Krause's office and
asks for permission to sing the song, at which point
(23:18):
I think they said, you know, you really probably should
talk to the publisher and the writer, and they put
it in a movie called notting Hill, and it was
a pop record all over the world. Actually, actually it
occurs at forty five and a half minutes into notting Hill.
So if you see it, as I often do on
television because it runs all the time, and you can
just time it, DOLLI yell Stacy, it's on, It's on.
(23:42):
If there was ever ever, if it was ever a
perfect voice at Salison Kraus an amazing voice when you
sing a song, I would love to sing when I
sing a song rather than one of the my favorite
thing I've done in two or three years, and show
you how I just changed a line. I knew that
I needed to change that line to make it fit
today's market. I hope I can read these lyrics here,
(24:06):
and I'll probably just make all kind of mistakes and
blow the whole thing. But I don't try this anyway,
thank you. I don't. I couldn't even hear all the words.
What is what is the line you changed? Here's a
line I changed. Okay, That's why I was wondering if
I should take the top down off the pen. Uh.
(24:27):
What I had originally said, I try to be a
good man and everything. I try to put myself in
the character of this guy who's kind of a typical
Southerner and being a Southerner. Even though I really evolved,
I mean, I still have a lot of these things
in here that that I don't like about the South.
I was that way myself. I mean, well was it.
I was a teenager. I was a hardcore secret segregationist.
(24:49):
I didn't think blacks and white people should go to
school together. I really believe that shit. So the line
I have here was I try to be a good
man and everything I do. And the line I had was,
you know, I love Jesus and I love my country too.
And in the early two thousands, you could do that.
(25:12):
You could do that when the country demographic was very
conservative and there were all these patriotic songs and country radio. Now,
if you had something like God and country right together,
I think they wouldn't play it because it would sound
like it was political, and they just don't want to
go there because of the demographic country demographic. It's like
(25:33):
it's like America itself. It's split right down the middle,
and it's controversial. They don't want controversial. They don't want
somebody to turn the dial. They don't want to lose
half of their audience. So but you can still sing
about Jesus occasionally, you know, you'll hear Jesus in the song,
and you sure sing about whiskey. So I thought, what
(25:53):
I'm going to do there? Then it said, yes, I
love my whiskey, but I love Jesus too, And I
think that made it probably exceptable. Can I can I
point out the the hilariously absurd irony of that that
it's moreible now for us to talk about whiskey than country. Huh.
You can talk about whiskey's fine. Whiskey is not divisive,
(26:16):
but country is. Like Bobby, I played Indeep, I played
a little bit of Forever and Ever. Can you play that? Yeah? Alright?
Second little backup vocals, Are you a union? Are all right? Adam?
(26:40):
He's not union? No card. That was Don Schlitz, Don
Henry and Bobby Braddock from Sony Tree Studios on Nashville's
Music Row. Broken Record is produced by Justin Richmond and
Jason Gambrel, with help from Bruce hadlam Me Label Jaquita Pascal,
(27:02):
Jacob Smith, Julia Barton, Jacob Weisberg, and of course el Hafe,
Rick Rubin. Special thanks to Adam Engelhardt, who engineered the
session in Nashville to hear the song speech you in
today's episode, sung by the artists who made them famous.
Check out Broken Record podcast dot com. This show was
(27:23):
brought to you by Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
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