THE BOY FROM ALABAMA
THE DAY I WAS IN DALLAS talking to B. W. Stevenson, on the way out of town I stopped to see an old friend. “Are you writing about Willis Alan Ramsey, too?” she asked.
I hadn’t heard of him. She pulled an album out of a green cover and said, ““He’s from Austin.” She put the LP on the turntable, set the needle down between cuts, and said, “This is the one they play on the radio.”
The voice that came through the speakers, backed by a leisurely bass, an erratic fiddle, somebody banging on a coke crate, and a yowling vocal accompanist toward the end, was bluesy in a Southern white kind of way. It was whimsical, as if it belonged to a boy shuffling barefoot down a sandy backwoods road. It was out of the Austin ordinary, and the lyrics were done with flair:
North of Waxahachie
east of old Cowtown
them Dallas women standin’ up
beat the others lyin’ down
God bless the Trinity River
and any man who is unaware
of the Northeast Texas women
with their cotton-candy hair
(“Northeast Texas Women”)
Willis Alan Ramsey hadn’t gotten airplay in Austin yet, but his album sleeve was impressive. The self-titled album was a Shelter product recorded in Memphis, Hollywood, Nashville, and Tyler, Texas, from May of 1971 to March of 1972. Ramsey was backed by J. J. Cale and Leon Russell—who had launched the Shelter label—and Greg Allman was thanked for his encouragement.
Ramsey seemed to have borrowed much of his vocal delivery from Russell. It was a fine tenor voice that could have done without some of Russell’s affectations, but the songwriting was always self-assured. The lyrics that best illustrated Ramsey’s orientation were a tribute to Woody Guthrie:
I’m just a boy from Oklahoma
on an endless one night stand
I wander, and I ramble
I drift with the midnight sand
I play the blues and the ballads
and all that’s in between.
My heart is in the union
and my soul is reachin’ out
for the servants’ dream
(“Boy from Oklahoma”)
The blues and the ballads and all that lay in between. Ramsey acted out lively fantasies in his songs, weaving just enough of himself into his lyrics to lift them from the realm of ordinary ballads. The first cut on the album, “The Ballad of Spider John,” proposed to take place in a railroad yard. Ramsey’s bum begged his fellow hoboes’ company while he told the story of the way he squandered his only love by continuing to be the kind of man he was, and professing to her that he was not.
And that is all my story
It’s been these thirty years
since I took to the road
to find my precious jewel one
Now if you see my Lily
won’t you give her my regards
Tell her old Spider got tangled
in the black web that he spun
Ramsey’s music owed its allegiance to the South, the vanquished Confederacy extending into Texas as far as the fertile blackland strip separating the pines from the mesquites. East Texas was lovely countryside—the red velvet bloom of clover in the spring, the fragrance of running sweet gum in the fall—but it was hidebound by its past. Some blacks were going to college, then returning to their hometowns and running for the school board; and occasionally one would find a black farmer, courteous but proud, living in a new home on three hundred acres of productive land with a new pickup in the garage. But just down the road would be a family of poor whites living in a shanty with a broken-down Ford in the front yard, and those whites were seething with resentment. Yet whatever the faults of the South, it was in many ways a more human place than the West. People in the South thought less about animals and machines than people in the West. They thought more about people, whether they loved or hated them, than the land around them. Their passions were closer to the surface; it was the difference between Faulkner and Steinbeck. And though its passions were severely inhibited by the Bible Belt around its girth, East Texas was more sensual than the other regions of Texas. Its summers were sultry, and so were its people.
WILLIS ALAN RAMSEY
Prodigy. Willis Alan Ramsey, seen here in a rare appearance at the Armadillo, released a debut album that astonished music professionals with its assurance, inspiration, and consistency. His subsequent career was marked, though, by the sound of one hand clapping. 1974.
Ramsey knew that when he wrote his song about Texas women, and most other songs on his album bore sexual themes. One soft song read human gaming into the mating dance of muskrats. Another, called “Watermelon Man,” evoked thoughts of a summer day in the South and skillfully turned the old poetic trick of confusing the act of eating with making love. The sexual drift of Ramsey’s lyrics surfaced most clearly, however, in a coy, playful song about a honeybee entranced by a chrysanthemum.
Oh Geraldine have you forgotten?
I have come for your sweet pollen
I might go crazy, I might go blind
but I’m never goin’ back
to the honeysuckle vine
Long as you’re alive
I’ll buzz around your hive
(“Geraldine and the Honeybee”)
The artist photographed on the front of the album cover wore a cowboy hat and a crooked, cocky grin; he looked like a talented young smart aleck. Then again, Ramsey had a right to be cocky. There wasn’t a bad cut on the album, and when it came to the subtlety of his use of language, not a songwriter in town could better him.
Ramsey, I gradually learned as we tried to find him, was born in Alabama, though his parents moved to Dallas when he was a boy. He was not yet twenty-two, and according to the copyright dates on his album, he couldn’t have been more than twenty when he wrote the songs for it. In late summer of 1970 he was playing a coffee shop on the University of Texas campus when Leon Russell and the Allman Brothers came to Austin for a concert on the baseball field. Ramsey had already been discouraged by James Taylor’s producer, but he approached Russell at his motel and said he’d like to sign a contract with Shelter Records.
“I’d have to listen to you,” Russell said.
“Well, I think you ought to,” Ramsey answered, and he played well enough that Russell invited him to California for another audition. Shelter was designed as the American equivalent of the Beatles’ Apple Records. It was owned by an artist and designed for artists, thus Russell was practically a god to many struggling musicians. Yet Ramsey’s record was already a year old when I found it, and it had flopped commercially.
Ramsey was a hard musician to find. I obtained a number that supposedly belonged to him, but a girl answered and said, “He doesn’t live here anymore, and I don’t know where he is.”
At the Armadillo I asked Eddie Wilson one day, “What about Willis Alan Ramsey? Why isn’t he a part of all this?”
Eddie grunted. “Ramsey. He’s got a terminal case of the kid. He’s always running around worried about his attitude. But he writes some damn nice songs.” He said he didn’t have any idea where to find him.
I tracked him down to a makeshift studio in an alley behind a dry-cleaning establishment near the university. The cleaners had closed, and a young kitchen helper from the restaurant next door poured his garbage into the can and laughed when we asked if he knew anything about a recording studio. If it existed, it had to be one locked metal door. I scrawled Ramsey a note asking him to call and left it underneath a rock by the door.
I had just about written off Ramsey when he called one day and said he had found our note in a pile of dirty clothes. He offered directions to a small, flat-roofed building surrounded by knee-high weeds. A junked Buick was abandoned in the rear. The young man who opened the door bore little resemblance to the one on the album cover. He was slender, dressed only in jeans, and his hair curled wildly. He appeared in a state of shock.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Come on in.”
Inside the building was a small recording booth, a beat-up piano, walls insulated for sound by fruit cartons, a large toolbox, a litter of kittens brawling in mock combat, and Eddie Wilson. An awkward silence fell over the room. Eddie stood to leave and told Ramsey, “Willis, come see me. You know where we live.”
Ramsey sat on the piano stool and stared after Wilson a minute, then said, “Uh, just what is it you’re doing?”
I explained as best I could without saying I had no fixed plan. I asked him about his past, and he briefly confirmed what I had heard. I asked him if he going to record another album.
“Not right now,” he said. “As soon as I get the material together I will. I haven’t written enough new songs to warrant making another record yet. Shelter gave me this equipment, and I’m into fooling around with it right now.”
He led us into the recording booth and showed us a four-track recorder, then flipped a switch and we listened to some backwoods country harmony that sounded like something out of the movie Deliverance.
“Who is that?”
“It’s a group called Uncle Walt’s Band,” he said. The acoustic trio would go on to be one of Austin’s most popular acts. “They’re fine, aren’t they? I’m just learning how to work this thing. I’m not very good yet. That you hear there sounds like a drum, but it’s really a bass.”
Why did he want his own studio?
“It took me a year to make my record. I went through a whole lot of shit that I’d prefer not to go through again. I want this in order to do any further recording efforts on my part, and also to help some of the other musicians around here—maybe release local singles for the Austin audience. It’d be small-time again. I want to make it regional instead of national. Bring back Texas color, bring back all those differences between Texas and New York, Texas and Nebraska.”
“Are you still under contract with Shelter?”
“Oh, yeah, very much,” Ramsey said with a laugh. “A normal record contract runs for five years, with an album a year. If you don’t deliver you wind up in one of two places. Number one, you’re in trouble, you’re liable to get sued.” More likely, someone in his marketplace position would just get dropped from the label. But Ramsey went on, “Number two, you can accept their generosity, which I just did. Shelter has said to me, Now the second year of your contract is up, we’re suspending the contract until you deliver your second album.
“It’s a real lenient type thing, and I really prefer it this way. First of all, my first album wasn’t a real hot item, you know. It hasn’t sold very much.”
Was he satisfied with Shelter’s promotion?
UNCLE WALT’S BAND
Bluegrass Jazz. Uncle Walt’s Band (at the Kerrville Folk Festival, left to right: David Ball, Walter Hyatt, and Champ Hood) moved to Austin and quickly set the standard in Texas for well-crafted, perfectly harmonized folk music. 1979.
“I asked them not to promote it,” he said. “And they haven’t, except they back me when I go into a gig. Then they say I’m on Shelter Records, and they pay for some of the spots.”
Why in the world did he do that?
“I just don’t like advertisement. I don’t like somebody to feel like they’ve got to shove something down my throat before I’ll find out about it. Because I know that people who listen to records as much as I do will gradually hear one if it’s any good. Let it stand the test of time. Just float it out there and see what happens. If the record company can afford it, I can.
“The second reason I like my current arrangement with Shelter is that I’d rather not put out something I didn’t write. I don’t want to tote my songwriting too much, but right after my album came out I tried to get into writing again; I said I’m going to go ahead and write my second album and put it out at my leisure. But the songs on my first album didn’t come out at my leisure, and these didn’t either. It just didn’t happen that way. I sorta choked on my end. I’ve started writing some good songs again here lately, but too often people in the music profession nowadays think of a career as, like, five years. Now you see ’em, now you don’t. Well, I want to make music for a long time. So I’d like to stretch it. I’d like to put out a good one every time, if possible.”
He grinned and shrugged. “It’s not always possible.”
I asked him how he paid for his groceries.
“Out of the money I made last year. Also, America recorded one of my songs lately, so I hope to get some living off that for a while. It was the ‘Muskrat Candlelight’ song. They called it ‘Muskrat Love’.” The song would play on elevators and easy listening stations for years.
He offered a letter signed by a booking agent in Los Angeles who said he found Ramsey very unprofessional to suddenly cancel his first major concert tour. “It’s my fault,” Ramsey explained. “I screwed up. I canceled out of a tour where I’d of been second act on a coffeehouse tour behind Delaney Bramlett, and granted, it would’ve been the Troubadour and Bitter End, but I don’t want to play those places. They’re pressure gigs, they’re prestige gigs, and they’re not gigs that I covet. That guy said that the only other performer who ever canceled a tour on him was Van Morrison, then he said, ‘You never hear of him anymore, do you?’” Ramsey laughed. “So I figure I’m in pretty good company.
“I don’t know how those people operate out in L.A. I don’t know anything about what an agent does. I’ve since learned that it’s a considerable amount of trouble for them to talk on the phone and get these things set up, because that man told me. But I didn’t know you couldn’t say you’d do something and then decide not to do it. I told him I didn’t want to play that tour, and he said this was totally unethical, you know, it was totally unreasonable and I didn’t know what this meant—I didn’t want to end my career at such an early date. He was literally saying he could make me or break me, baby, and anytime somebody says something like that . . .”
Ramsey studied the letter. “And then I don’t understand this thing at the end here. ‘When you’re ready to be represented at a later time, please contact me.’ You’re through, you’re finished, but if you ever want to be booked again after a period of lengthy punishment . . .”
He picked up one of the kittens and grinned. “You couldn’t have come out here at a more opportune time. All of a sudden Eddie and I got into this really heated discussion. I really admire Eddie, the success he’s had with the Armadillo. I think it’s an amazing place. I also admire him for his integrity in dealing with musicians. He’s respected among musicians more than just about any other manager or agent-type person I know of. But I don’t agree with everything he says or does. So we were just finding out we weren’t agreeing.
“Eddie is very confident about what he’s doing. He goes about doing business in a perfectly assured manner; he’s just out to get all the kinks out of it. I’m not that way. I’m hesitant, questioning, I admit I don’t know everything about it—not to imply he does. But he thinks I’m green as shit.
“I said that the booking agent and manager should be at the mercy of the musician. He got real violent, you know—well, he didn’t get violent—but what I was saying is that when it comes right down to it, the artist, since he makes the music, is the whole reason for the agent or manager being there. He didn’t like that at all. People don’t realize today how the managers and agents dictate the lives of the performers. The more you need somebody to handle your money and affairs, the more separated you become from the whole thing of getting up and playing for people who come to pay money. That’s the first thing that ever went wrong—people getting up and paying money to see somebody. I’ll never pay money to see anybody again, I don’t believe.
“What I’m trying to do here in the studio is just a compromise, in that the people I’m working with musically are aware there’s no set way of doing things. I’m just as amazed and befuddled by the way things come about sometimes, the way they get on tape, the way they’re written, as anybody else.
“But people in L.A. are not. Man, they know. So-and-so sits in a room for such-and-such number of hours, and he’s going to write a hit tune. Put him out on the road, expose him before so many people so many times, and he’ll get known. They just know that, and they also know that’s ‘good.’
“I don’t know. I guess I’m one of those sensitive-artist types that ends up being broke and at odds with everybody in the music industry. It seems like I’m fast working myself there. But I don’t give a shit. If I’ve got something to say I want to be able to say it from start to finish and not have somebody come in and edit it and have somebody decide for me how to present it.”
SHELTER RECORDS, which was officed in a little house off Hollywood Boulevard in the hated Los Angeles, was actually being very patient and understanding with Ramsey. They took the attitude that it was his career and the only thing they could do was re-release the album, though those plans were pending indefinitely. Ramsey’s stock as a songwriter was also rising. In addition to America’s recording of “Muskrat Love,” the Florida singer Jimmy Buffett had recorded “Ballad of Spider John,” and on his first record, Rusty Wier was going to do “Painted Lady.” But Ramsey passed his time in his studio, appearing in public rarely. Finally he showed signs of venturing out. In 1974, he agreed to play first act ahead of Michael Murphey and Jerry Jeff Walker in a large auditorium on the campus of Trinity University in San Antonio. I found Ramsey backstage pacing back and forth in tattered jeans and faded plaid shirt. He looked even younger because he had a fresh haircut.
He was extremely nervous as he waited to go on. He drummed his fingers on the neck of his guitar, and when a student who wanted to interview him for his television class walked by, Ramsey stopped him and said, “Now just what is it you’re going to ask me in this interview?”
The student shrugged. “I don’t know, what goes through your mind before you go on, that kind of thing.”
Ramsey grinned. “Well, I’ve already been to the John about forty times. I’ll tell you that much.”
Murphey and Walker had arrived for the concert with large complements of sidemen, but Ramsey went out alone with his guitar and harmonica, took a seat on his stool, and blinked at the audience of nearly two thousand. He lacked the knack of chatting with the audience when he tuned his guitar, he forgot the name of the writer of one of the songs he borrowed, and after a few songs he said, “Turn up the lights, I can’t see. I’m sorry, I don’t know. It’s like playing to a big clapping machine.”
He was also having a difficult time with the sound system. The Austin sound crew was working with unfamiliar equipment, and the performances of all three entertainers became one large, amplified shriek. Walker laughed about it, Murphey got disgusted, but Ramsey turned red and tried to cope with it. He instructed the technicians while the audience squirmed. At last he got going again.
I wish I was a millionaire
I’d play rock music and grow long hair
I tell you boys
I’d buy a new Rolls Royce
Pretty women’d come to me
I’d give ’em all the third degree
I’d give ’em satin sheets
keep ’em off the streets
(“Satin Sheets”)
A man standing by my side shook his head and sighed. “The boy’s a genius,” he said.
After Ramsey’s performance was over he sat down on a sofa in the backstage lounge, squinted into the television lights, and talked to the student interviewer.
“What do you think about the Austin music scene?” the interviewer asked. “The Armadillo and all.”
“I’m not really a part of that Armadillo scene,” Ramsey said. “That’s not all the music there is in Austin.”
The interviewer quickly ran out of questions and asked Ramsey to play a song, then moved closer and sang along. Ramsey glanced at him but gamely forged ahead.
Following the stars through the honky-tonks and bars
Dream away on a country-music pride
Start the evening by myself, you can bet by the hour of twelve
I’m gonna have a pretty painted lady by my side
And I’ll tell that woman how it used to be
When the West was wild, and the land was free
How a western word could travel for a country mile
How then one day the drugstores came
and forced my hand to play a truckin’ game
Wishin’ to be cowboy all the while
(“Painted Lady”)
“Okay, that’s enough, Willis,” the student said. “Thank you.”