Country Heritage: Gail Davies

During the late winter & early spring of 1979, listeners of country radio were treated to the unusual strains of “Someone Is Looking For Someone Like You”. Amidst the clutter of the last vestiges of the Outlaw Movement, the dying gasps of the Nashville Sound and the nascent Urban Cowboy movement, this lilting and beautiful melody was unlike anything else being played. Released on the independent Lifesong label, the song suffered from spotty distribution (which turned into no distribution at all when Lifesong’s distribution deal fell apart) yet made it to #11 on Billboard’s Country Chart. For Gail Davies, this song turned out to be her career breakthrough, leading to a record deal with Warner Brothers.

Gail Davies (originally Patricia Gail Dickerson) was born into a musical family in Broken Bow, Oklahoma, on June 5, 1948. Her father, Tex Dickerson, was a country singer who occasionally appeared on the Louisiana Hayride. When Davies was five, her parents divorced and her mother took her and her two brothers to the Seattle area. At some point, her mother remarried and she and her brothers were adopted by their stepfather, Darby Davies, and took his surname. One of her brothers was Ron Davies, a renown songwriter and performer, who wrote songs that were recorded by such luminaries as David Bowie, Three Dog Night, Joe Cocker, Dave Edmunds, Jerry Jeff Walker and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

After graduating from high school in 1966, Davies moved to Los Angeles where she was briefly married to a jazz musician. After her divorce, she found work as a session singer at A&M studios. While at A&M she was befriended by songwriter Joni Mitchell and A&M recording engineer Henry Lewy who introduced her to the production end of the business, where she was able to sit in on a number of noteworthy recording sessions, including a John Lennon session that was being produced by Phil Spector.

Things moved rapidly for Davies, and by 1974 she was touring with the legendary Roger Miller and made her national television debut as his duet partner in 1974 singing on the Merv Griffin Show. During this period, she began writing songs and signed with EMI Publishing in 1975. Her first major success as a songwriter came when Ava Barber, a regular cast member of television’s Lawrence Welk Show, had a hit single with “Bucket to the South,” which reached #14 in 1978 on the Billboard Country Chart. This led to a contract with CBS/Lifesong Records in 1978 and the release of her first album simply entitled Gail Davies.

Album Review: Mary Chapin Carpenter – ‘Time*Sex*Love’

After 1996′s A Place In The World, Mary Chapin Carpenter went on a 5-year hiatus from recording, only touring sporadically during that period.  During her off-time from studio albums, Carpenter found time to record a track for the John Lennon tribute album Working Class Hero, and her version of ‘Grow Old With Me’ became a top 20 hit on the Adult Contemporary charts.  Meanwhile, her own ’10,000 Miles’ was featured as the title track to the movie Fly Away Home. In 1998, she began work on Shane, a Broadway adaption of the 1953 film starring Alan Ladd.  Creative differences with the producers caused Carpenter to pull out of the project in 2000.  When she returned to the recording studio in 2001, the album she created was a stretch from her country albums in the 90s.

Perhaps buoyed by her adult contemporary successes, or her 5 years off the country charts, Carpenter’s new style was coffeehouse folk meets mainstream pop, with all the sensibilities of a hard-core folkie. She’s still singing about the plight of the middle-aged woman, but age and maturity was certainly starting to show, and the themes behind the relationships and emotions became wrapped in darker and more complicated emotions with this album.

Naturally, the singles didn’t find much favor at radio, even though they’re just as good as some of her past hits.  Leading off was ‘Simple Life’, a very slick, pop-sounding tune produced to full effect with echoes and a wall of sound in the chorus.  The basis is of a middle age woman whose life is ‘getting complicated’ and overwhelming her.  The chorus offers that she should ‘just enjoy the view and be glad she made it’.  It’s a smart song that didn’t find an audience, stalling at #53 on the country charts, and not being released elsewhere.

Second to radio, and failing to chart, was ‘This Is Me Leaving You’.  Similar to her most famous songs, the driving force behind it is the melody, plucking along throughout.  As the title suggests, it’s a portrait of a woman leaving a man, guided by the voice of conscience.

‘Slave to the Beauty’ follows in the highly produced fashion with a small orchestra of brass behind the singer.  ’Maybe World’ is also beefed up musically.  The flute is a nice touch.  ’The Long Way Home’ is a neat song.  It tells the stories of two very career-successful individuals and how that doesn’t add up to happiness for them.  It’s the one who ‘takes the long way home’ and just stops to enjoy his existence that’s the most content.

My favorite on the album is ‘What Was It Like’, a soft ballad where the narrator is asking her former lover for the details to the demise of their relationship.  She simply can’t remember because time has managed to shield her from the most painful of the memories. ‘King of Love’ is another soft ballad, with a Celtic influence.  A woman is a slave to her desire for a man who will ‘never make her queen’.  It’s a strange song lyrically. Many of the songs fall into a category best defined on The Simpsons as ‘too smart for the corn dog crowd, too dumb for the bagel crowd’.

Time*Sex*Love didn’t sell as well as her past works.  Moving just over 300,000 copies, it was her first not to be certified gold since her 1987 debut, thought it did chart at #6 on the Country Albums chart.  Fans of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s country records may want to avoid it.  Likewise, those who regularly spin Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, and Sheryl Crow will want to give it a listen.  Time*Sex*Love marked Carpenter’s shift from country radio renegade to Americana mainstay.  Changing styles allowed her to deliver another smart and cohesive set of songs, all written or co-written by Carpenter, and even though it’s not my taste as much as her past work, I can appreciate it for what it is.

Grade: C+

Time*Sex*Love is available in digital and CD format at amazon.

Slaid Cleaves live at the Lantern Theatre, Romsey, 9 October 2009

Living in England, I don’t often get the opportunity to see acts live. Although some artists who have had airplay here do tour (usually small) venues, it’s not often both someone I’m interested in is appearing at a venue that’s very convenient for me to get to. So it was exciting for me when the excellent singer-songwriter Slaid Cleaves included the fairly small town where my parents live on his current European tour. It turns out that he’s actually been there before, a couple of years ago, but I missed out on it that time. I’m glad I caught him this time, on the first English stage of his tour.

The venue was not all that prepossessing – a theater attached to a school, with no formal stage, and seating for a couple of hundred. It even offered a bar during the interval. But the acoustics seemed fine, and the intimate atmosphere was ideal for this kind of show. Slaid is very much the travelling troubadour, who best fits under the Americana umbrella, with probably more folk influences than conventional country ones, but his songs are beautifully crafted and his voice is a little rough-edged but distinctive and compelling.

Slaid Cleaves and supporting guitarist/occasional harmony singer Michael O’Connor played great songs, mostly from Slaid’s records, to a raptly attentive audience for roughly a hour and a quarter, interspersing the music with conversation. Everything was as effective live as on record. Highlights included the excellent ‘Drinkin’ Days’, ‘Broke Down’, ‘One Good Year’, ‘Everette’, Karen Poston’s ‘Lydia’, and several songs from Slaid’s latest album, Everything You Have Will Be Taken Away, including ‘Cry’, the song which provides the title, ‘Hard To Believe’, and ‘Black T Shirt’.

A Beatles cover offered in part as a tribute to John Lennon, whose 69th birthday it would have been that day, was slotted in between two of the songs Slaid has written with childhood friend Rod Picott, and introduced with reminiscences of bonding with Rod as self-confessed ‘nerdy’ eight year olds on the school bus up in their home state of Maine.

The request spot was filled by the choice of a couple who had driven three hours to get there, the audience participation eight-minute Canadian folk of ‘Breakfast In Hell’, a tragic and very convincing story song about a lumberjack’s fatal struggle breaking a log jam. Slaid told us he had been trying to drop it from his regular set, but it was obviously requested the previous night in Wales, so he may have to think again as it’s obviously one of his most popular numbers.

It was followed by one of my favorites, the cheerful ‘Horses’, which Slaid explained was written about a 60 year old neighbor of his parents in Maine, reduced to penury thanks to “horses and divorces”. It’s one of the more conventionally country-sounding of his songs, featuring a very effective yodel, and he then moved away from the microphone to accommodate the yodeling cover of mentor Don Walser’s 1960s hit ‘I’m A Rolling Stone From Texas’, introduced with more reminiscences. After that Slaid needed some time to recuperate so handed over center stage to Michael to sing his own song ‘Getaway Car’ which Slaid Cleaves has recorded. He too has a fine voice, and a recovered Slaid joined him on harmonies midway through the song.

He seemed a little unsure as to what to offer for the obligatory encore, saying he didn’t want to end on a downbeat note, but had already played his one cheerful song. Eventually, he took the advice of an audience member, and played ‘Flowered Dresses’, another Karen Poston song from Slaid’s album of covers of songs mainly by his peers, Unsung.

The show was a great experience. Slaid is well worth catching if he comes your way: tour dates are available on his myspace.

The show started with a five-song set from Dan Raza, a skinny English boy with an engaging presence and Americana-infused folk material, who accompanied himself on guitar and occasionally harmonica. The best of his songs were his first number, ‘Bad Luck’, about a woman about to be hanged with a memorable hook (“It’s glory, glory, and maybe Hallelujah”). I enjoyed his segment, although his songs lacked variety in tempo, and the strong Americana/Texas singer-songwriter influence, admirable enough, had encouraged him to write using some Americanized language, which didn’t sound like his natural songwriting voice and definitely jarred on the more personal material like ‘40 Miles From Home’ which was written about living in London,. He definitely shows promise, though.