True to the Roots (13 page)

About making the new CD, he says, "We've been smoking a lot of reefer, but . . . nah . . . really more cigarettes than anything else."

I think they would've played all night had the patient management of the Tea Room not gently nudged the group to, well, head in the general direction of adjournment.

LaRue stares into the spotlights and asks, "Hey, can we do, like, two more songs? Two more? ok, man, two more."

The two songs take about ten minutes each, and they include forays into four or five other songs, with all five onstage taking part. It's after two in the morning when the group shuffles back to the dressing room and the crowd wanders unhurriedly onto the street.

None of my interviews is anything approaching formal, but my conversation with LaRue is particularly unorthodox; he plays guitar nearly throughout. He answers my questions in the form of songs; some he makes up on the spot, and others he lifts from his cosmic psyche.

"Red dirt music as a movement, huh? If you're going to put it like that . . . one thing I can say about that, whatever you're surrounded by, whatever musicians we're surrounded by, and I say this coming from Stillwater, where I felt like . . . Let's put it in music," he says.

I'm from Stillwater and the Red Dirt Rangers, Bob

Childers, Tom Skinner. . .

And Medicine Show, for sure.

They got a lot of honesty in Red Dirt Rangers, one of the first songs I heard. . .

Not only did they have the hook but Woody Guthrie kind of started it a long time ago in the Depression.

Jimmy Lafave is part of it, I mean, everybody from Oklahoma, really, has at least heard about it.

My dad was a honky-tonker, and he showed me all the chords one day at my grandpa's house down in southeast Oklahoma.

Was a rainbow rocker from way back when—

Well, I never found it hard to find a friend.

If you want to take a spin, you can count him in.

Was a rainbow rocker from way back when.

He came from California.

No, that guy they wrote the song about. . . Andy Rainwater?

He had a motorcycle accident. The Red Dirt Rangers wrote about it.

He was the rainbow rocker from California back in the sixties. Kind of pre-hippie, or maybe right there in the middle of it.

LaRue abandons the chords for a while and tries to convey the camaraderie he feels with the whole movement and everyone in it.

"Oh, this is a great example," he says. "We just got done doing my album, and this song I wrote with Childers . . . I was with him in his trailer right before the van came and picked me up, and I thought, man, well, I'm doing this new album, and he's like, what Childers song do you want to do, and it was, like, my ode to him. I want people to know what this whole thing is about. The last album ended up being an ode to every red dirt musician. There's co-writes there pretty much from everybody in the scene.

"The getting-along part is not the hard part. The hard part is watching other people play music who don't really accept the lifestyle, and they just dwell on, you know, I'm going to be the next big thing. Our whole thing is, if we play a song, with Scott Evans or Mike McClure, it's, hell, yeah, brother, that's the song. Whenever I look at myself in the mirror, what I see is kind of the tail on the donkey of all the people who came out of Stillwater. This guy [Evans] is the saddle. Mike's the fucking head. Childers, you know—"

"That is genuine respect," says Evans. "Genuine respect."

I remark that the level of humility among the five musicians seems remarkable, given their talent, and this observation leads Evans off on a tangent, a parable, of his own.

"Here's a story related to me by a guy from Leadville, Colorado, when Medicine Show [my band] was setting up one night," Evans recalls. "We were getting ready to play, breaking all the gear out, this guy came up, and it was obvious he was jangled on some kind of hallucinogen, right? He was mostly on the pay phone, which was right beside the stage. As soon as he got finished, he came over and said, 'I got it!' and we all said, 'What?'

"He said, 'The music is the water, the dancers are the flowers, and the band is the hose.' Upon reflection he was exactly right. That's where humility comes in. On those good nights, when I plug in, it comes through me, and I can share it with people. It's a channel, and my blessing is to be the guy that it's coming out of, but I feel like it comes from somewhere else. The difference and the similarity to that is the honest approach. I mean, you guys can't see that right now but—"

LaRue politely interrupts. "I was talking with Childers when I was writing this song, and I said, what's better than a two-chord song? And he said, a one-chord song. That's what we named it."

And LaRue, joined by Evans and McClure, starts singing again. It's called "One Chord Song," and it's about simplicity: in life, in love, and in music.

Now it's after three o'clock. I'm beginning to wonder if I will be seeing the sun rise over the Dallas skyline when Mc-Clure brings the interview to a suitably cryptic close.

"If he can't share it, I mean, you're all just pissing water, anyway," he says, and we all walk out into the street and go home.

The Soul of Marty Robbins

Nashville, Tennessee I april 2004

Jesse Lee Jones completes the old country standard "Talk Back Trembling Lips" and basks in the warmth of applause from a near-capacity crowd at the lower Broadway honky-tonk called Robert's Western World. He raises his arms triumphantly and declares to the audience, "This is real country music, not the crap that passes for it nowadays."

There's more to this scene than just a singer, a band, and a honky-tonk.

Jones's story is rather unique. He came to this country in 1984 and is Brazilian by birth. He is part owner of the club where he performs each Friday night, usually from 10:30 p.m. to 2:00 a.m.

Jones's band, Brazilbilly, is a diverse, modern incarnation of Ernest Tubb's Texas Troubadours. The fiddler, "Pappy" Eugene Merritts, is an old Nashville hand who, over the years, has played with Patsy Cline, Dottie West, Bill Monroe, and others. On the standup bass is Elio Giordano, native-born but of Italian descent. Jimmy Clark—who plays steel, accompanies "Pappy" when twin fiddles are required, and also plays lead, pedal steel, lap steel, and, from time to time, the trumpet and accordion—grew up playing with his father's Iowa band, the Ellsworth Clark Orchestra. The drummer, John McTigue III, is a graduate of Berklee College of Music in Boston.

The name dates back to the mid-1990s, when members of the band BR549, then playing at Robert's, dubbed Jones "the Brazil hillbilly." Jones, a Mormon, came to the United States alone from Sao Paulo in 1984 with five hundred dollars in his pocket. "I had an old guitar and a dream to play in Nashville, Tennessee," he says.

On a bus from Miami to Salt Lake City, while he was sleeping, someone robbed him of everything he had. He wound up being taken in by a church family in Peoria, Illinois.

The most striking aspect of Jesse Lee Jones's music is his obvious love of and unerring similarity to the great Marty Robbins, who had been dead two years when Jones arrived in the United States. Jones didn't discover Robbins's music until he listened to an old Robbins cassette while driving between Peoria and Nashville, yet they share almost identical voices and have many of the same mannerisms. It is, as many people have told him, eerie, almost as if the legendary singer's vagrant soul had found a refuge in Jones.

"I didn't get to know Marty until I came to America," says Jones, sounding as if Robbins occasionally happens by. "Unfortunately, he's not popular in Brazil. Of course, anyone who comes here now [from Brazil] hears me now as Bra-zilbilly. I turn them on to Marty Robbins, and they go back and have to take with them the boxed sets and all that. They leave here loving him.

"I was at a garage sale—a yard sale, of sorts—and they had this Marty Robbins Christmas cassette. I got it for a dollar, whatever. I just loved his voice. I said to myself, 'My God, I can sing his stuff. That sounds like me.' It's weird."

It's easy to see how a farmer's kid from Kentucky, or a rancher's kid from Oklahoma, can become obsessed with honky-tonk shuffles and the simple hopes, dreams, and failures of the American working class. Growing up with blue-grass or trail songs or western swing can certainly cultivate a love of the particular genre and a desire to see it preserved.

But Jesse Lee Jones has it
bad
, and it's difficult to come up with a logical explanation. Running a rundown honky-tonk—and playing for tips in it each weekend—is certainly no way to get rich. He didn't mold himself into the reincarnation of Marty Robbins—and, by the way, yes, he performs songs of many other artists, and with extraordinary skill—for commercial reasons. The market for Marty Robbins impersonators hardly rivals that of Elvis Presley, though perhaps it ought to.

Jones owns a jacket worn by Robbins on one of his album covers. Fans, fellow musicians, and local businesspeople have brought him mementos: photographs, prints, concert posters, ticket stubs. One result is that Jones actually owns a funeral plot next to where Robbins and wife, Marizona, are buried.

He's had plenty of help feeding the obsession.

But he is much more than an impersonator. Jones has immersed himself in Robbins's legacy but also in that of many other artists, from Hank Williams to Buddy Holly to Ray Price to Johnny Cash. His simple office above the little bar is crowded with CDs and cassettes of dozens of artists, many of whom enjoy as little national acclaim as he. In fact, the music lying around is the only aspect of the office that seems disorderly. Jones seems to be a highly organized man in all respects other than the music, where the burning obsession still takes root.

It's just that the voice is so similar to Robbins and the passion for the music so achingly sincere.

"I used to drive to Peoria, Illinois, because I still played music up there on weekends," Jones says, "and, while this may sound difficult to believe, I would play Marty's music, and it would make me cry from the time I left my house all the way to Peoria. Eight hours. The passion in his voice, the passion in his music . . . I'd just feel it in my heart.

"I just love it. There is nothing like it. I get emotional just talking about it."

Jones takes great pride in the acceptance he has earned within the ranks of those like him, the ones who sacrificed almost everything to carve a little niche for themselves in Music City.

"Jimmy Clark, who plays for me, is a genius," says Jones. "He plays the steel, the lap steel, the flute, the trumpet, the fiddle, everything else. He grew up with this music. When he was three years old, he was already playing fiddle with his family. He asks the same questions. 'Pappy' played with Patsy Cline and toured for many years. Elio, of course, is of Italian descent, but he has been around this music all his life.

"When I first came to Nashville, these very guys right here didn't like me.
This foreign guy coming here
. 'Who are you? You don't know this stuff. You're just exploiting it.' But after they got to know me, after they hung out with me, they realized I was sincere. After nine years of being together, Jimmy [Clark] says, 'If you're not going to be here, I'm not going to be here either. I'm not playing behind anybody else. That's it.' See, I don't understand
that
, because I know there was a time when he thought, you know, that this whole thing with me was bogus."

When Jones arrived in the United States, he says he barely spoke a word of English. His early lessons came from watching
Sesame Street
on TV in Peoria.

Robert's Western World has been, at various times, a guitar shop and a western store. Cowboy boots are still on sale as sort of a testimony to how the place has evolved. Its former owner, Robert Moore, greatly encouraged Jesse Lee Jones's career by putting together a band to back him. What is now known as Brazilbilly began as the Tennessee Travelers.

"I came here and asked Robert what would I have to do to audition and get a chance to play here," says Jones. "You know, he's just a good old boy, and he looked at me and said, 'Well, son, can you sing country music?' [Jones makes a fairly awful attempt at mimicking a Southern accent.] I said, 'Well, yes, sir, I can.' He said, 'Well, can you sing four hours of it straight? If you take breaks, I ain't interested.' And I said, 'Yes, sir, I love to do it.'

"He got me up there with a band, and the next thing I knew, he had walked up and down the street and brought all these other club owners down to see me. We became friends. Never once do I remember Robert making any comments about my accent or my being from Brazil, and he's gung ho about country music and what he believes in. He just took me in."

Jesse Lee Jones seems uncomfortable at the art of self-promotion, perhaps because of his work ethic and the fact that he has been able to survive, at least make a living, in this country by simply being true to himself and his love for the music. One would think, at the very least, there would be a natural appeal for this self-made man on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry.

His voice gets even softer than it has been during the course of the entire interview.

"I can't really understand or comprehend their point of view," he says. "I don't know what that is. I think the Opry would be a great honor, though. I don't even know if I could make it. I'd probably pass out."