J. R. 'Robbie' Robertson, who 'turned old American folklore into modern myths' with The Band and others, dies at 80

Robertson at his Santa Monica studio in 2019. (Photo by Carolyn Cole, L.A. Times)

Robbie Robertson, a native Canadian who helped create the muscal genre Americana or "roots music," did Wednesday in Los Angeles. He was 80.

James Royal Robertson was lead songwriter and guitarist of The Band, which started out as The Hawks, often a backup group for rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan, and "ended up as The Band — a conceit their fans would say they earned — because people would point to them when they were with Dylan and refer to them as 'the band'," writes Hillel Italie of The Associated Press. "The Band profoundly influenced popular music in the 1960s and ‘70s, first by literally amplifying Dylan’s polarizing transition from folk artist to rock star and then by absorbing the works of Dylan and Dylan’s influences as they fashioned a new sound immersed in the American past. . . . They remain defined by their first two albums, 'Music from Big Pink' and 'The Band,' both released in the late 1960s." Robertson's works "offered a rustic vision of America that seemed at once mythic and authentic," writes Jim Farber of The New York Times.

Robertson "had the knack of making everything he recorded sound fashioned by hand, produced in a barn and played from the heart," Ty Burr writes for The Washington Post. "But his influences and inspirations came from all over the map: the lost colony of Acadia and Louisiana’s Cajun diaspora, deep-blues juke joints in the Mississippi Delta and rockabilly rave-ups at a Midwest county fair. There was jazz in there, and folk music and country; there was a lot of backwoods front-porch hootenanny. There were the atmospheric orchestrations of modern film scoring, too, and underneath it all and increasingly on the surface there was Robertson’s birthright: the sounds of Ontario’s Six Nations people and, by extension, the indigenous tribes of an entire continent — the roots music whose roots go deepest of all. Robbie Robertson didn’t make Americana. He made North American music."

The Band's songs, sung by drummer Levon Helm, keyboardist Richard Manuel and bassist Rick Danko, "were unlike anything on the AM or FM dial — older, wiser, sadder and friskier, with bones that went back to a time before electricity," Burr writes. "Parables like 'The Weight,' which straddled the Bible and the tall tale; 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,' which sounded like it really was sung by a defeated Confederate soldier in 1865; ''King Harvest Has Surely Come', a busted Depression-era farmer’s lament; 'Up On Cripple Creek,' a truck driver coming home to Bessie in 'Lake Charles, Looozeyana'. . . . Like Dylan, Robertson was a self-taught musicologist and storyteller influenced by everything American from the novels of William Faulkner to the scorching blues of Howlin’ Wolf to the gospel harmonies of the Swan Silvertones." Farber says Robertson's lyrics "conjured a wild place, often centered in the South, peopled by rough-hewed characters," such as "the shady creatures in 'Life Is a Carnival'."

In death, Robertson has a final hit: His 2017 memoir Testimony "has returned to the top of the bestseller lists," Variety reports. Here are "15 essential Robbie Robertson songs," from the Los Angeles Times, whose Stephen Thomas Erlewine says "Robertson turned old American folklore into modern myths" and "acted as the ringleader in 'The Last Waltz,' widely regarded as one of the greatest concert films ever made." Erlewine reports on Robertson's later work and notes, "In lieu of flowers, the family has asked that donations be made to the Six Nations of the Grand River to support a new Woodland Cultural Center."

Bluegrass-music innovator Bobby Osborne dies at 91, little more than a month after last Grand Ole Opry appearance

Osborne in 2017, the year of his last album
(Photo by Larry McCormack, The Tennessean)

Bobby Osborne, the older but persisting half of a duo that brought innovation to bluegrass music, helping it keep a commercial foothold, died Tuesday. He was 91.

"Osborne may be best known for cutting 'Rocky Top' with his longtime brother-bandmate Sonny Osborne, but his mandolin playing and familiar tenor vocal stretched far beyond the licks of a Tennessee state song," Matthew Leimkuehler reports for the Nashville Tennessean. "The brothers built a legacy that led to a White House performance and Country Music Association Award win. At the height of popularity, they bridged a space between country and bluegrass music, receiving radio play and adopting amplified instruments on concert bills — a rarity among string bands at the time."

The New York Times' Bill Friskics-Warren writes, "Employing a wider repertoire than the Appalachian wellspring from which most of their peers drew, the Osbornes also worked with a more expansive musical palette, embracing country, pop and rock material associated with the likes of Ernest Tubb, Randy Newman and the Everly Brothers. . . . They built a bridge between first-generation bluegrass royalty like Bill Monroe and the duo of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs and intrepid latter-day inheritors like New Grass Revival and Alison Krauss. . . . Osborne earned a reputation as one of the first bluegrass mandolin players to expand the instrument’s vocabulary beyond what Monroe, the father of bluegrass, had established early on."

Sonny Osborne retired in 2005, and died in October 2021 at 83, but his brother was still performing and teaching when he told Steve Hensley of WYMT-TV in Hazard, Ky., near their native Leslie County, in May 2022, "I was born to do it, and I ain’t going to quit." He "took his final Opry bow on May 19, 2023, nearly 60 years after being asked to join," Leimhuehler reports.

"The Osborne Brothers premiered in Knoxville, Tenn., in 1953 and became the first bluegrass group to appear on a college campus with their 1960 performance at Antioch College," WYMT reports. Their use of drums and electric instruments rankled bluegrass purists, but their commercial success held sway. They got "Rocky Top" from prolific writers Boudleaux and Felice Bryant and made it the B side of a December 1967 single, but WSM DJ Ralph Emery flipped the disc and made it a hit. Five years later, it was the signature tune of the University of Tennessee marching band. The brothers would open and close shows with it, and after Sonny retired, Bobby's band was named the Rocky Top X-press.

Willie's 90th birthday bash covers a century of American music, whose course he changed by moving back to Texas

Willie Nelson greeted Keith Richards at the Hollywood Bowl Sunday.
(Photo by Randall Michelson of EB Media, via Los Angeles Times)

"It’s not much of an exaggeration — and yet it defies logic — to say that you could trace the history of American music’s last 100 years during the two nights of “Willie Nelson 90: Long Story Short” at the Hollywood Bowl over the weekend. Jazz, country, gospel, blues, rock, Nashville pop, Americana, even hip-hop (well, he smokes with Snoop) are all seamlessly part of Nelson’s DNA, and all were represented over the dozens of tributes paid to him as he turned 90," Mikael Wood and Erin Osmon report for the Los Angeles Times.

More than 45 artists took the stage to honor Nelson; Osmon and Wood chose 10 outstanding moments, including Roseanne Cash and 86-year-old Kris Kristofferson, who sang “Lovin’ Her Was Easier (Than Anything I’ll Ever Do Again).” Sturgill Simpson "said the only reason he went to Nashville to make country records was 'because I grew up listening to country records by Willie Nelson' — records, he added, that exist 'outside of the box of what most people think country records can be.'" Other standoiuts: Beck, Chris Stapleton, George Strait, Allison Russell and Norah Jones, Lukas Nelson, Emmylou Harris and Daniel Lanois, Sheryl Crow and Keith Richards, who joined Willie for "a beautifully crusty version of Waylon Jennings’ 'We Had It All,' which sounded about a million years old, and Billy Joe Shaver’s very aptly titled 'Live Forever.'"

In advance of the concert, Michael Granberry of the Dallas Morning News did an overview of Nelson's career, which began in rural Texas, went to Nashville for songwriting, and returned to his home state: "Willie did more than change the course of American music with his risk-taking move from Nashville to Austin. Nearly half a century after the release of "Red Headed Stranger," his legacy extends to performances in the White House. To his fans and friends, Willie is a timeless icon. He shows not a shred of shame as the country’s most alluring pot smoker. And he somehow manages to rise above political and cultural divides, appealing to young and old, rich and poor, even to the most outspoken on the left and right." Joe Nick Patoski, who wrote the 2008 biography Willie Nelson: An Epic Life, told Granberry that Nelson is “the single most important Texan of the 20th and the 21st century, because he not only reflects — he defines Texas culture. No single person epitomizes the qualities that make Texans different from other people and separates Texas from the rest of the world, not just the United States.”

The Everly Brothers are both gone now; Don passes at 84

Brothers Phil and Don Everly performed at the 10th annual Everly Brothers Homecoming concert in Central City, Kentucky, in 1997. They had a fraught relationship and broke up in 1973, but reunited. Phil, who was two years younger, died in 2014. (Photo by Suzanne Feliciano, Owensboro Messenger-Inquirer, via The Associated Press and The New York Times)

Don Everly, who with his brother Phil influenced popular music well beyond their first stint as a duo, and are in both the rock and country music halls of fame, died in Nashville Saturday. He was 84.

Don was born in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, made most famous by John Prine's "Paradise" and next door to Ohio County, the home of Bill Monroe. That's in the West Kentucky Coalfield, not the one to the east, but there are other similarities with Appalachia, and they all tapped into the culture of the rural upper South; the Everly famiily also lived in Indiana and Iowa.

The brothers' "fusion of Appalachian harmonies and a tighter, cleaner version of big-beat rock ’n’ roll made them harbingers of both folk-rock and country-rock," Bill Friskics-Warren writes for The New York Times. Their first big single, “Bye Bye Love”, spent four weeks at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and hit No. 1 on the country chart. "Many of their early recordings, including the No. 1 pop hits 'Bird Dog' and 'All I Have to Do Is Dream,' 'Bye Bye Love' was written by the husband-and-wife team of Felice and Boudleaux Bryant." Don wrote hit songs before they recorded their own; he "tapped into a strain of Appalachian gothic despair that was absorbed by audiences as teenage heartache,"  notes RJ Smith of the Los Angeles Times.

The duo "rivaled Elvis Presley and Pat Boone for airplay, placing an average of one single in the pop Top 10 every four months from 1957 to 1961," Friskics-Warren notes. Even as they faded, "They influenced generations of hitmakers, from British Invasion bands like the Beatles and the Hollies to the folk-rock duo Simon and Garfunkel and the Southern California country-rock band the Eagles."

“Phil and Don were the most beautiful sounding duo I ever heard. Both voices pristine and soulful,” Paul Simon told the Times after Phil's death. “The Everlys were there at the crossroads of country and R&B. They witnessed and were part of the birth of rock 'n' roll.” They sang on the title track of Simon's Graceland and were guests on Simon and Garfunkel's reunion tour in 2003-04. In 1986 they were inaugural members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Some of the duo's influence stemmed from Roots, a 1968 album "that found the duo interpreting material by pioneer Jimmie Rodgers and contemporary star Merle Haggard," Chris Morris writes for Variety. "Some critics rank it with the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, released the same year, as among the most important early country-rock albums. A 1958 album that was a commercial dud but an artistic success, Songs Our Daddy Taught Us, which "a pronounced impact on country-rock, alt-country and Americana performers of all stripes," Morris writes. Their parents were musicians Ike and Margaret Everly, who survives; Ike was a contemporary of fellow singer-guitarist Merle Travis and Mose Rager, who taught Travis the thumb-picking style popularized in the coalfield by Black musician Arnold Schultz, who had taught it to Bill Monroe, Smith notes. Ike's regular trade was barbering, and one of his customers in Nashville was Boudleaux Bryant.

The downside comes most from Terence McArdle of The Washington Post, who reports that Don "twice attempted to kill himself with an overdose during an English tour in 1962," during addiction to uppers and downers. "When they returned stateside, he received electroshock therapy, which he said blocked his ability to write songs for several years." After long-simmering conflicts, they broke up at a 1972 concert where Don "came onstage drunk. Irate, the venue’s manager stopped the duo in the middle of the show, causing Phil Everly to smash his guitar and walk offstage." They reunited in 1983, and Don told the Sydney Daily Telegraph, “We have separate lives, but when we walk out onstage, it comes back, and it amazes me that we can do it. It’s like riding a bicycle. I don’t know how it’s done but I know it can be done.”

Tom T. Hall, who did 'a rhyming journalism of the heart,' dies

Tom T. Hall (Photo by Robert Oermann)

Tom T, Hall, who chronicled the everyday experiences of rural America in plain language that was always understood, died Friday at his home in Franklin, Tennessee. He was 85.

Hall practiced "a rhyming journalism of the heart that sets his compositions apart from any other writer," Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum CEO Kyle Young said. "They are bound by his ceaseless and unyielding empathy for the triumphs and losses of others."

Country-music pioneer dubbed Hall "The storyteller." He "joined Kris Kristofferson and Billy Joe Shaver in bringing a class of storytelling to country music unlike those before them," writes Matthew Leimkuehler of the Nashville Tennessean. "Hall timelessly an empathetically chronicled the human spirit — from barstool stories to cemetery caretakers — with words that would influence generations of wordsmiths to follow."

Sperling's Best Places map

Hall was born in Olive Hill, Kentucky. He was a performer while in the Army, and wrote humorous songs about Army life. His big break was “Harper Valley PTA” in 1968. "The record skyrocketed to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and County Music singles charts, an impressive feat in a rich music era," writes Bruce Haring of Deadline.

"It freed Hall to record his own work, which included songs about burying a man who owed him 40 dollars [which you don't learn until the song's last line], mourning the death of the local hero who taught him how to drink and play guitar, and 'Trip to Hyden,' a journalistic tale of a drive to the scene of a mining disaster that was part Woody Guthrie, part Studs Terkel," says Rolling Stone's list* of 100 Greatest Songwriters, which ranks him No. 99. ["I guess the old man thought we were reporters," one line goes.] "Hall was an English major who said he learned to write songs by osmosis, soaking up everything from Dickens to Hemingway. His best work was charged with literary irony but unfolded with the ease of spoken language," as he wrote for Jeannie C. Riley in "Harper Valley PTA." Here's the next-to-last stanza:

"Well, Mr. Harper couldn't be here 'cause he stayed too long at Kelly's Bar again.

And if you smell Shirley Thompson's breath you'll find she's had a little nip of gin.
And then you have the nerve to tell me you think that as a mother I'm not fit!
Well, this is just a little Peyton Place, and you're all Harper Valley hypocrites."

*Other country writers on the list: 94.John Prine; 89.Felice and Boudleaux Bryant; 87.Kris Kristofferson; 79.Lucinda Williams; 76.Loretta Lynn; 60.Willie Nelson; 43.Johnny Cash; 33.Merle Haggard; 30.Dolly Parton; 28.Woody Guthrie; 13.Hank Williams

Jerry Jeff Walker, writer of 'Mr. Bojangles' and a godfather to 'Texas outlaw' and Americana music, dies at 78 in Austin

Jerry Jeff Walker at Nashville's Ryman Auditorium in 2016
(Photo by Erkia Goldring, Getty Images)

Jerry Jeff Walker, who was best known for writing "Mr. Bojangles" but was also an influential figure in the music of his adoptive Texas and the development of the genre now known as Americana, died of throat cancer Friday at a hospital in Austin. He was 78.

He was born Ronald Clyde Crosby in Oneonta, N.Y., "in northernmost Appalachia," The New York Times notes. He got his stage name (soon afterward his legal name) in New Orleans, reports Melissa Roberto of Fox News. He wrote 'Mr. Bojangles' in the mid-1960s after a night in a New Orleans jail where he met a man who 'danced a lick across the cell'," writes Peter Blackstock of the Austin-American Statesman. The song languished, and Walker "was ready to give up on the music business" in 1971 until the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band had a Top 10 hit with it, reports Matt Schudel of The Washington Post. "It soon became recognized as a standard." More than 100 artists have recorded it, Blackstock reports.

Walker's own recording career "spanned 51 years and he released 36 albums, including compilations," Roberto notes. "He became known as a mentor to musicians such as Garth Brooks, Jimmy Buffett, Guy Clark, Todd Snider and Lucinda Williams." He "had some trouble with alcohol and drugs," and his obituary notes his "rowdy performances and offstage excess." He settled in Austin in 1971, and "The Austin outlaw music scene he helped launch came to include Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Townes Van Zandt," Schudel writes. He "formed a group called the Lost Gonzo Band, evoking the untamed spirit of 'gonzo' journalist Hunter S. Thompson." He told Rolling Stone in 1974 that “Texas was the only place where they didn’t look at me like I was crazy," The New York Times reports.

His 1973 album Viva Terlingua, recorded in the virtual ghost town of Luckenbach, Texas . . . practically defined the new Texas sound, combining elements of country, rock and folk music with a touch of sagebrush poetry," Schudel reports. Walked had only five songs on the album, and the best-known "were by other writers, including Guy Clark’s cinematic 'Desperados Waiting for a Train,' Ray Wylie Hubbard’s honky-tonk anthem 'Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother' and Gary P. Nunn’s 'London Homesick Blues,' about a Texan stranded in England who longs 'to go home with the armadillo, good country music from Amarillo and Abilene'."

None of Walker's songs "has had the staying power or emotional resonance of 'Mr. Bojangles,' Schudel writes, citing in part a 2004 profile in Texas Monthly: "He said he was reading the poetry of Dylan Thomas and was conscious of using internal rhyme. He strummed a descending chord figure in the lilting time signature of 6/8, and the words and music came together. . . . Many people assume that the dancer described by Mr. Walker was African American, like Bill 'Bojangles' Robinson, but that was not the case. In his autobiography, Mr. Walker noted that because the jails were segregated in New Orleans in 1965, the Bojangles he met was an elderly white dancer down on his luck."

John Prine, a songwriter for the ages and our times, dies

John Prine died in Nashville of covid-91, the coronavirus disease. He was 73. (Photo by The Associated Press)

There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes. ("Sam Stone")
Mostly they made love from ten miles away. ("Donald and Lydia")
Broken hearts and dirty windows make life difficult to see. ("Souvenirs")
She reminds me of a chess game with someone I admire. ("Christmas in Prison").
The wind was blowing, especially through her hair. ("Lake Marie")
Stop wishin' for bad luck and knockin' on wood. ("Dear Abby")
Well done, hot dog bun, my sister's a nun. ("Illegal Smile")
Old people just grow lonesome, waiting for someone to say, "Hello in there, hello."
. . . make me a poster of an old rodeo. Just give me one thing that I can hold on to. To believe in this living is just a hard way to go. ("Angel from Montgomery")
"Nobody but Prine could write like that." (Bob Dylan)

John Prine, who died Tuesday night of covid-19, was a songwriter for the ages and for our times. He knew rural America. The only full stanza in The New York Times' obituary was from "Paradise:"
The coal company came with the world’s largest shovel,
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land;
Well, they dug for their coal 'til the land was forsaken;
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.

Post office and grocery at Paradise, Ky.

For many people in America's coalfields, that said it all. Prine, a Chicago native, wrote it about a town in "Western Kentucky, where my parents were born," one of his hundreds of plain but unusual lines. But that was the genesis of the story he wanted to tell, and Prine was a superb storyteller: evocative, somber, silly, thoughtful and surprising. His "ingenious lyrics to songs by turns poignant, angry and comic made him a favorite of Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson and others," William Grimes writes for the Times. Kristofferson and Steve Goodman were the magic slippers of what Prine called his "Cinderella story" of becoming a performer, retold by Annie Reuter in Billboard.

Prine "wrote rich, plain-spoken songs that chronicled the struggles and stories of everyday working people and changed the face of modern American roots music," Stephen L. Betts and Patrick Doyle write for Rolling Stone. "Prine helped shape the Americana genre that has gained popularity in recent years," and "explored a wide variety of musical styles, from hard country to rockabilly to bluegrass; he liked to say that he tried to live in a space somewhere between his heroes Johnny Cash and Dylan." He said his "songwriting hero" was Gordon Lightfoot. James Hohmann of The Washington Post notes that Prine is the latest of several musicians to die from covid-19.

Prine was "known for his ability to mine seemingly ordinary experiences — he wrote many of his classics as a mailman in Maywood, Illinois — for revelatory songs that covered the full spectrum of the human experience," Betts and Doyle write, in a story worth reading. They quote Bonnie Raitt, who sang "Angel from Montgomery" into the American canon: "The combination of being that tender and that wise and that astute, mixed with his homespun sense of humor — it probably the closest thing for those of us that didn’t get the blessing of seeing Mark Twain in person."

"He sang his conversational lyrics in a voice roughened by a hard-luck life, particularly after throat cancer left him with a disfigured jaw," writes Michael Warren of The Associated Press, in a story well-sprinkled with Prine stanzas. But his last album, The Tree of Forgiveness, was his biggest hit, and early this year he won another Grammy award, for lifetime achievement. Warren's piece ends with a stanza from Prine's "When I Get to Heaven," which you can see and hear him perform on the "House of Strombo" show in 2018, with Gordon Lightfoot in the audience:

When I get to heaven, I’m gonna shake God’s hand
Thank him for more blessings than one man can stand
Then I’m gonna get a guitar and start a rock-n-roll band
Check into a swell hotel; ain’t the afterlife grand?
That one, in spoken word and song, can be heard here. Prine's "Summer's End," with its chorus of "Come on home," is also a fitting farewell, and many in Kentucky would surely prefer this one:
When I die, let my ashes float down the Green River
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester Dam
I'll be halfway to Heaven, with Paradise waitin'
Just five miles away from wherever I am.

Bill Withers, a son of W.Va. who understood everyday lives and stuck to his songwriting muse, dies; his songs live on

Bill Withers (2006 photo)

For a guy who hadn't made a record in 35 years, Bill Withers got a great (and deserved) sendoff from writers after he died March 30 at the age of 81. The Rural Blog shares some of them here, because for the first 17 years of his life, Withers was a rural American -- born July 4, 1938, in Slab Fork, W.Va., where his father was a coal miner and his mother was a maid. When they divorced, he "was raised by his mother's family in nearby Beckley," Mark Kennedy reports for The Associated Press.

Withers joined the Navy, became an aircraft mechanic and factory worker and was inspired to become a musician when he saw Lou Rawls sing and attract women. He taught himself to play guitar, wrote dozens of songs and got a recording contract. Hits came quickly; he won a Grammy award in 1971 for “Ain’t No Sunshine,” and another in 1981 for “Just the Two of Us.” But he couldn't get along with Columbia Records, so when his contract ended he quit the business and lived off royalties from his often-covered songs; he won his third Grammy in 1987 for “Lean on Me,” re-done by Club Nouveau. The song was performed at inaugurations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and is the theme of a Walmart TV commercial responding to the covid-19 pandemic.

Withers "wrote some of the most memorable and often-covered songs of the 1970s," and "had an evocative, gritty R&B voice that could embody loss or hope," Neil Genzlinger writes for The New York Times. But the deeper story in the Times is from the paper's longtime chief pop-music critic, Jon Pareles, who notes Withers' background and writes, "He hadn’t been sheltered from the everyday lives that he would write about," such as a Vietnam amputee in “I Can’t Write Left-Handed.” He wrote about his West Virginia childhood in "Railroad Man" and "Grandma's Hands."

Pareles puts Withers on a par with early 1970s "community-minded" soul artists like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield and Earth, Wind & Fire: "His voice was at the center of every song, reedy and gritty, strong enough for preacherly declamations and smooth enough to carry a lover’s endearments. Yet he chose to treat that utterly distinctive voice modestly — as a vehicle, not a centerpiece. He sang his stories with down-home fervor, but he was also more than willing to let the sense of the words dissolve into rhythm and incantation, into impulses and feelings. Withers made it seem — with deep-rooted knowledge and virtuoso skill — that each song was creating its own borderless style and groove on the spot, steeped in but never beholden to blues, gospel, country, jazz, folk, rock or any other defined idiom."

Slab Fork is about 11 miles from Beckley. (Google map)

"Withers went with his heart and his desire to write and record great songs, whether they would be pop hits or not," Mark Anthony Neal, a professor at Duke University, writes for NPR.

Ashley B. Craig reports for the Charleston Gazette-Mail: "Michael Lipton, the director of the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame, said Withers was, in many ways, the inspiration for the state’s music hall. Withers was among the first class of inductees and came to the inaugural induction ceremony in 2007. He also attended three other induction ceremonies, Lipton said, and . . .when Withers was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the morning after the induction ceremony, Withers hosted a brunch that was only attended by West Virginians."

Joe Diffie, who had 'a voice as pure and rich and note-perfect as any baritone in Nashville,' dies at 61 of covid-19

Photo by Suzi Pratt, FilmMagic/Getty, via Rolling Stone

Country-music singer Joe Diffie, 61, announced Friday that he had covd-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. On Sunday, he was dead of complications from it.

Diffie "helped set the standard for upbeat, rock-influenced country music in the 1990's," Randy Speck writes on his Notorious Meddler blog from Albany, Ky., at the northeast corner of the Nashville TV market and home of Howard Perdew, who wrote or co-wrote three of Diffie's biggest hits: "Pickup Man," "Prop Me Up Beside the Jukebox (if I Die)" and "So Help Me Girl."

Born in Tulsa, Diffie grew up in a musical family. He said "His parents claimed he could sing harmony when he was three years old," Speck reports. Perhaps the best appreciation of him was written by David Von Drehle of The Washington Post (which adds Spotify clips of Diffie's big hits):

Joe Diffie’s secret was a voice as pure and rich and note-perfect as any baritone in Nashville. A secret, because that wasn’t what country music fans wanted from him during his time at the top of the charts in the 1990s. They wanted a fellow with a friendly air, 30 extra beer pounds and a proud, bad mullet — Diffie rocked the worst/best mullet in the business. Diffie had, in other words, a “Honky Tonk Attitude,” to borrow a title and a vibe from one of his toe-tapping hits. He was a “Pickup Man” — that Middle American hero whose identity begins with his truck and goes from there. (Because you can’t have a tailgate without a truck.) Some Diffie hits, such as the sci-fi novelty “Third Rock From the Sun,” were so light they evaporated before their three minutes were up, leaving only the stickiness behind. But back in the last years before the iPod changed everything, when radio was still king, Diffie made hits that played well as background music, but had hooks that sent you grabbing for the volume knob.

Von Drehle concludes by noting Diffie's "breathtaking duet with Mary Chapin Carpenter in 1992, 'Not Too Much to Ask.' Their meeting is the high point of Carpenter’s magnificent album, 'Come On Come On,' and it shows why Diffie had not just fans, but admirers, too."