True to the Roots (4 page)

The names Cross, Canada, and Ragsdale, of course, bear responsibility for the band's name. Then there's the weed.

I tell Canada that my first impression from listening to the band's CDs is that the band seems really passionate about two subjects: Jesus Christ and smoking marijuana.

His reply? "Pretty much."

"As you get older, though, I think it's fair to say that Jesus gets more and more important . . . in relation to the weed," he concludes, wearing a thoughtful and serious expression. I have a bit of trouble keeping a straight face.

The band has been "growing up musically" together since i"4.

Canada is a charismatic stage presence. He may be on his way to becoming the Willie Nelson of his age, although, in fairness to both him and Willie, his age is a bit different.

On the CD
Cross Canadian Ragweed
—often called "Purple" by their fans because of the color of the artwork—they sing about being kids, prison, suicide, booze and drugs, and quite a bit about Jesus. Canada lists Steve Earle, Merle Haggard, Gram Parsons, the Grateful Dead, and Lynyrd Skynyrd as influences. Those guys all sang about the same things at one time or another.

Theirs is a music that speaks directly to the alienated youth of the heartland. It aches with a timeless resonance that exists in every generation. The crowds that gather to hear what young Oklahomans refer to as "Red Dirt Music" carry with them a certain hopelessness that this music embraces and articulates. It's a Beaten Down Generation, not a Beat Generation.

In the wee hours of Sunday morning I sit at a table with the members of the band and Canada's wife, Shannon. In passing, I mention that I think Elvis is overrated (as if he could be underrated). I suppose it's not every day that a grotesque icon of American pop culture is openly derided, so I find roles being reversed and me the center of conversation.

"Hey, man, I love Elvis," Canada says.

"To each his own," I reply. "I only speak for myself. I like him. I just don't like him as much as others seem to."

Then I go into a comparison of Elvis and Roy Orbison, pointing out that Orbison could sing just as well, wrote great songs in marked contrast, and paled in comparison to The King only in the crucial area of sex appeal. I point out that Presley appeared in what, by almost any measure, would include half of the worst twenty movies ever made, whereas Orbison appeared in only one—though it,
The Fastest Guitar Alive
, is truly a stinker redeemed only by the fact that it is so obscure. I further contend that for much of his career Elvis really didn't produce anything but commercialized crap. The early stuff was great, and he had kind of a creative burst in the early 1970s.

In my mind I've made my case. In the minds of Cody and Shannon Canada, what it amounts to is more like an irrational rant. Finally, when my diatribe runs its course and winds down apologetically, there is a short period of silence while the Canadas digest the information.

"That's cool," Canada says quietly.

Home on the Range

Dallas, Texas I December 2003

In a sense Ed Burleson came along after his time. His style of country music belongs in the 1960s, and he would have felt right at home on Broadway in Nashville, playing at Tootsie's Orchid Lounge after a set at the Grand Ole Opry, back when the Opry was held each Friday and Saturday night at Ryman Auditorium. The side door of the Ryman opened right across an alley from the back door of Tootsie's.

It being the twenty-first century, Burleson stands with his guitar on a modest stage at the back of Bill's Records & Tapes, an establishment on the northeast edge of Dallas in a little shopping center at the intersection of Spring Valley and Coit. A crowd of perhaps fifty stands in the aisles, sipping beer from a keg and munching on pizza. The occasion is a weekly gathering called "Fridays at Bill's" sponsored by radio station KHYI-FM, nicknamed "The Range."

Bill's features a healthy selection of music by Texas artists like Burleson, Max Stalling, and Bryan Burns, but the Ska/ Punk Rock section is just as large, and while country fans
are listening to Burleson tunes like "A Honky Tonk Heart and a Hillbilly Soul," they're rolling their eyes at little cardboard signs directing patrons to CDs by Hagfish, No Class, the Swinging Utters, Propagandhi, the Jesus Lizards, and the Meat Puppets.

Burleson, his baby face darkened a bit by several days' stubble, makes no apologies for his love of the old honkytonk sound of Hank Williams, Faron Young, and Buck Owens. One of his new songs, a tribute to Owens, is entitled "All Bucked Up," which epitomizes the good natured mischievousness of a onetime rodeo cowboy with a twang in his voice and a twinkle in his eye.

At age thirty-five Burleson is growing up with only token and wistful resistance. He has a new wife and a new baby. "I don't never drink beer no more," he said. "Don't have time to." But he sips a little from the plastic cups that keep arriving mysteriously on a stool located next to him on the Bill's stage, and he winks slyly at the audience when he belts out an unflattering depiction of marriage, "Bitch and Moan."

There is no nation more pretentious than the United States, no state more pretentious than Texas, and no city more pretentious than Dallas. Patriotism is evident everywhere in these times, but it has a double edge in Texas, where huge, garish Lone Star flags fly everywhere. What takes a little getting used to is the realization that the Texas state flags often fly alone and without accompaniment from Old Glory.

The singer songwriter's young son is Bennett Edward Burleson V The original Bennett Edward Burleson fought alongside Sam Houston in Texas's war for independence, or so says the bio at www.edburleson.com. The name skipped a generation because Burleson's grandmother lost a young son in infancy. Her second, Richard Edward Burleson, is Ed's father.

One of two singers who performs ahead of Burleson at Bill's, Brett Watts, unveils a composition of his own entitled "Between the Red and the Rio," and at the traditional talking point for so many country songs—the beginning of the final verse—Watts delivers a soliloquy that would have made George W. Bush, another patriotic Texan, proud.

Watts concludes by growling, apparently in reference to all states other than Texas, "Don't take me wrong, you forty-nine others . . . aw, what the hell, Texas has it all."

Out in the audience Burleson is a bit more thoughtful but no less boastful.

"There is no more soul than there is in Texas," he says. "Texas doesn't get any credit for what it has. It doesn't matter what kind of music—it's here, more than anywhere. I don't care if you got the Mississippi Delta blues. There's more blues here than there is there. There's more country than anywhere, more rock than anywhere. Texas is the melting pot of all music, if you ask me."

Burleson may get a little carried away, but his love of Texas is heartfelt and genuine. So is his music. When he moans and yodels, there isn't any of the posturing for effect that marks similar devices in the music of, say, Garth Brooks. Even though Burleson's version of Hank Williams's "Long Gone Lonesome Blues" is as true to the original as anything I've ever heard, it's also natural. He doesn't sing that way because he thinks it will sell records; he sings that way because it's the way he loves to sing. As a practical matter, it's the only way he
can
sing.

"That's what I grew up listening to," Burleson says. "I guess part of it's because I had a good daddy."

Richard Burleson, who is both the singer's father
and
drummer, is the lone holdover from his son's original band. That band got together at a place called the Three Teardrops Tavern in Dallas, site of Burleson's first regular gig. Ed gravitated toward music partly because he suffered a knee injury in a Fort Worth rodeo. While recovering, he started hanging out at the Industrial Boulevard dive—what else could it be on a street named Industrial Boulevard?—where he literally gravitated, with his guitar, toward the stage. What began as a bashful solo stab at a Sunday afternoon "newcomers' showcase" became a regular Thursday night performance with a hastily recruited band.

"I was very serious about rodeo," Ed says. "That's all I thought about. I rodeoed in high school. I was into it all through high school and went to college on a rodeo scholarship. I rode pro for three years, and then I started playing music.

"I rodeoed after [the injury], but when I was hurt was when I first really
learned
music. The knee injury laid me up. I'd been playing guitar and singing, but I hadn't written very many songs, so, when I was laid up, I started writing. When I had my knee injury, I started writing, and over time I got out of rodeos and into songwriting."

"Eddie has that knack," says his father. "You can't really tell him anything about what songs he ought to sing or what songs he ought to write. He's got to have a song in his head, whether it's an old one somebody else did or an idea that he's going to end up turning into a song himself."

"I don't try to write a family or a drinking song or any particular kind of song," says Ed Burleson. "I just try to write a song. I don't to do anything
extra-ordinary
[Burleson's pronunciation]; I just write what's on my mind. Sometimes it's a help, sometimes it's a hindrance. I just roll with the flow."

Burleson's career got a boost from a friendship with the late Doug Sahm, a musical wunderkind who once played onstage with Hank Williams at the age of eleven and also played with Webb Pierce, Faron Young, and Hank Thompson. Before his death at age fifty-eight, on November 18, 1999, Sahm would branch out in an almost endless array of musical genres. He fronted groups like the Pharaohs, the Dell-Kays, and the Markays, and his Sir Douglas Quintet produced a smash rock hit, "She's about a Mover," in 1965. Sahm lived in San Francisco for five years and spent most of two years in Europe before returning to Texas in 1988. In 1996 he teamed up with Flaco Jimenez, Freddy Fender, and Augie Meyers to form the Texas Tornados. In these circles the reverence reserved for Sahm is almost messianic.

Sahm, in the final year of his life, produced Burleson's album
My Perfect World
. It was a bow to his own musical roots.

"He was crazy yet smart," says Burleson of Sahm. "One of a kind. One reason we got along so well is that he and my dad are a lot alike on musical influences, and they're a lot alike personally. I understood Doug real well. He used to scare a lot of people off. I just liked him. The first time we met, he asked me where I was from, and I said Lewisville, Texas. He was into pro wrestling, of all things, and he mentioned the Von Erichs [a wrestling family based in Lewisville]. That's how we got to talking. I gave him my album, and then he realized I played pretty much traditional country music, and we just got to be friends from there. He started coming over, and we started writing together, contriving different little songs together, and got to be good friends."

Yet Burleson is as simple and straightforward as Sahm was complex and relentless. Simple musings run through his titles and lines.

Another Texas songwriter, Chris Wall, once observed, "A bad songwriter can write a good song, but a good songwriter can't write a bad one."

Ed Burleson has an agreeable stubbornness about him. He plays to an audience varied in age but not attitude. They're as set in their ways as he is.

Don't ever change, Eddie
.

"I'm sure I never will," he says. "It ain't in me."

Charlie Dunn, He's the Man to See

Gainesville, Texas I December 2004

In north Texas I've never ventured beyond Denton, and the first stop on the latest little informal Texas tour doesn't take me far beyond it. I drive up north from the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport to the most modest of locales. East of Gainesville, only a few yards past the Tabernacle Baptist Church and down a rutted dirt road, is Pawless Guitars. A red Ford Escape sits out front. There's a 1964 Ford Fairlane, waiting for restoration, nestled on the left side of the simple, flat topped building.

This is where Vince Pawless works his magic. This is where he builds guitars, some of which are crafted from the stands of cedar on the adjoining family farm. Pawless grew up attending the church that is within walking distance. I don't realize it until I get inside, but he lives in this simple little shop.

When I arrive, Pawless is working on four of Jack Ingram's guitars. Jack's about to hit the road again on the weekend. It's Wednesday, and Jack just realized that he was out of working guitars. He's hard on them, and Pawless is the soft spoken, patient, unassuming man uniquely qualified to come to the rescue.

So, I just stand around, admiring all the homemade guitars in various stages of construction, while Pawless methodically fiddles, adjusts, shines, grinds, restrings, tunes, and, quite often, just steps back a moment to consider. All the while we chat about guitars. There is little sense of urgency in Pawless, who obviously takes pride in the fact that he doesn't work by a clock. The little shop, which includes within its walls his simple little residence, is perfect for a man used to setting his own hours. He may finish Ingram's guitars now, or he may get the job done at two in the morning, depending on what mood strikes him and whether or not he wants to work on it right now or maybe take a little detour to the next stage of construction in his own custom made design. Here is a man whose livelihood depends not on a fancy location or regular business hours.