The wall behind Harlan Howard’s empty desk is covered with dark cherry built-in bookcases. Behind the doors of the bottom shelves, Mary says, are stacks of CDs containing demos of his roughly 4,500 songs. Only about a thousand of them have been cut, including (just to pick a handful from his own 1965 Monument LP, All Time Favorite Country Songwriter) “Busted”, “Heartaches By The Number”, “I’ve Got A Tiger By The Tail” (co-written with Buck Owens), “Pick Me Up On Your Way Down” and “I Fall To Pieces” (co-written with Hank Cochran).
Gauthier has been spending a lot of time in her publisher’s office, listening. “The demos are from every decade that he wrote in town, starting in the early ’50s,” she says. “The demo singers, everyone from the Judds before they had their record deal to Tompall Glaser [with whom Howard co-wrote "The Streets Of Baltimore"] to Rodney Crowell and Kevin Welch to Vince Gill. You can tell from the instrumentation what decade it is, and it’s just awesome.
“It’s like a history of songwriting. It’s a heck of an education to just sit back and listen to ‘em. His batting average is so high, you know, Harlan used to say that he had an eighth-grade education and he really didn’t know how to play the guitar, and those were his two strongest assets as a songwriter.”
(At least one of those claims wasn’t true; he finished high school, and was said to be a voracious reader.)
“His emphasis had to be on the words. I agree. I agree that the simplicity with which he approached the songs was the genius, and made his songs universal. He was able to get to the heart of the matter. He’d write from the title, and his songs were always about one thing: The title. He wasn’t writing Dylan songs, you know? If the title is ‘I Fall To Pieces’, the song is about falling to pieces. Two and a half minutes, boom, done. So he’s got like 3500 of them in there that haven’t been cut yet. I found one that I loved, called ‘Just Say He’s A Rhymer’ — of course he wrote it about himself and one of his five marriages that didn’t work out, and it just spoke to me.”
Of course it does. She has spent much of her life on the road, first running, then touring. Now she must grapple with the possibility of having found a home in Nashville. She sighs. “I think I’ve found it. I hope I’ve found it. I’ve always had a very antagonistic relationship with any idea of home but I think I’ve found it. I wouldn’t be surprised if it all unraveled and I had to keep moving, but I think I found it.”
Gauthier has been listening carefully to Howard not simply as an astute student of songwriting, but because her publisher, his widow, has entrusted her with a banker’s box full of his notes. Unfinished songs. Cocktail napkins, mostly, with overheard phrases written in his left-handed scrawl in spreading felt-tip pen. She has talked about recording an entire album of these songs, though at the moment only one is finished.
“Mary is always thinking like a student,” Harmon writes. “She is trying to learn as much as she can from everyone she comes in contact with. That’s a big reason for her success.”
Though her albums have always been country-tinged full-band affairs, her live shows almost always find her alone on the stage with her guitar. With the possibility of some major label tour support, that may change. Slightly.
“I’ve been out for two or three weeks now with John Prine,” she says. “He’s got two guys, and that seems to be manageable, and it’s a full enough sound for what he’s doing. What I don’t want to have, and what I can’t handle emotionally or mentally, is an entourage of people. I just don’t want to be an employer anymore at that level. The restaurant just killed the need for me to ever to do that again.
“I like simplicity. I need simplicity. I get really stressed out and worked up if there’s all these competing needs and demands put on me. With the restaurant I had 22 employees, they all had families and needs and wants and I’ve been responsible for a lot of people, before. And, to be honest, I don’t like it. I prefer to keep it real simple.”
That simplicity, in part, is how she stays sober. “I’ve been rendered neutral when it comes to drugs and alcohol. I’m not drawn or repelled. And that’s based on my spiritual condition, so I’ve gotta make sure that I’m spiritually in good shape. That I’m not too hungry, not too angry, not too lonely, not too tired, not too worked up. Then I’m OK. If I let my soul get out of whack, then I become vulnerable again.”
Vulnerable is not a word one would choose to describe the woman so clearly at ease on Harlan Howard’s couch, so clearly at one with herself. Fearless, maybe. (Perhaps both, in equal measure.)
“I could fail dismally. It has [not worked] for a lot of people on this label. I don’t see an end to the pain,” she says, and then she laughs wildly. “Dreams coming true don’t end your pain. Brings me back to that Fred Eaglesmith song — ‘Alcohol and pills, it’s a crying shame, you think they might have been happy with the glory and the fame.’ Fame doesn’t take away the pain, it just pays the bills.”
Grant Alden is co-editor and art director of No Depression. His brother, too, could sure use a little mercy.
