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Guy Clark

A Texas-born songwriter and guitar maker who wrote "L.A. Freeway" and "Desperados Waiting for a Train" and taught a generation of Nashville writers how a plain line is built.

Origin
Monahans, Texas
Years active
1970s-2016
Genres
country, outlaw country, Texas country, folk
Labels
RCA, Warner Bros., Sugar Hill, Elektra/Asylum, Dualtone
Also known as
Guy Charles Clark

Texas, Houston and Los Angeles

Guy Charles Clark was born in Monahans, Texas on November 6, 1941. His family moved to Rockport on the Gulf Coast in 1954, and he finished high school there in 1960. He then spent most of a decade in the Houston folk revival, working in the 1960s as an art director at a CBS television station in Houston. MPR News reports that his future wife, Susanna, urged him to commit to songwriting; he went to Los Angeles, where he took a job at a Dobro factory. He was also a luthier, and building guitars stayed a second trade for the rest of his life.

Clark and Susanna Talley married in 1972, and she became a songwriter and painter in her own right; she painted the cover of his first album. Their Nashville house became a gathering place for writers. A photograph by Al Clayton from 1972 shows Clark, Susanna, Townes Van Zandt and Daniel Antopolsky on a porch, and Van Zandt remained his closest friend until Van Zandt's death in 1997. Accounts differ on when the Clarks reached Nashville: one blog says Sunbury Music signed Clark as a songwriter and the couple moved in 1971, while Wikipedia says only that they settled there.

The songs and the records

Other people recorded Clark's songs before he made a record of his own. Jerry Jeff Walker released "L.A. Freeway" as a single in May 1973, and it reached number 98 on the Hot 100 that July. Walker also put "Desperados Waiting for a Train" on Viva Terlingua in 1973. Clark's own debut, Old No. 1, came out on RCA in November 1975, followed by Texas Cookin' in 1976 and a self-titled Warner album in 1978. The South Coast of Texas followed in 1981 and Better Days in 1983.

The later records moved between labels: Old Friends (Sugar Hill, 1988), Boats to Build (Asylum, 1992), Dublin Blues (Asylum, 1995), Cold Dog Soup (1999), The Dark (2002), Workbench Songs (Dualtone, 2006), Somedays the Song Writes You (2009) and My Favorite Picture of You (2013). His singles charted modestly: "Fools for Each Other" reached number 96 on the country chart in 1979, "The Partner Nobody Chose" reached 38 in 1981 and "Homegrown Tomatoes" reached 42 in 1983. His songs did better in other mouths. Ricky Skaggs took "Heartbroke" to number one in 1982, Bobby Bare had a Top 20 with "New Cut Road", and the Highwayman record of "Desperados Waiting for a Train" reached number 15 on the country chart in 1985. Vince Gill, John Conlee, Steve Wariner, John Denver and Rodney Crowell all recorded his songs in the 1980s.

Craft, mentoring and the last years

MPR News reports that Clark wrote ideas down the moment he had them, often on bar napkins or wrappers, and then worked them over at length. He mentored Steve Earle, Rodney Crowell and Noel McKay, and arranged Earle's first songwriting job in Nashville. Emmylou Harris told MPR News that there is no judgment in Guy's songs. The New York Times obituary, as Wikipedia reports it, called him a king of the Texas troubadours, and he was sometimes called the fifth Highwayman.

Honors came late. The Americana Music Association gave him a lifetime achievement award for songwriting in 2005, Workbench Songs was nominated for a Grammy in 2006, and My Favorite Picture of You won the Grammy for Best Folk Album at the 56th ceremony in 2014. A tribute album, This One's for Him, produced by Tamara Saviano, was released in late 2011 and won Americana Album of the Year in 2012. Susanna Clark died of cancer on June 27, 2012. His last show on setlist.fm is March 16, 2013, at Poor David's Pub in Dallas, and poor health kept him off the road afterward. He died on May 17, 2016, aged 74, after a long fight with lymphoma. AP and NPR place his death at home in Nashville; one other outlet says Austin, which the main sources do not support.

On stage and on film

Setlist.fm lists 275 shows from 1970 to 2013. "L.A. Freeway" leads his played songs at 36 performances, then "Homegrown Tomatoes" at 29, "Dublin Blues" at 24, and "Desperados Waiting for a Train" and "Texas - 1947" at 23 each. In his later years he often worked as a duo with the guitarist Verlon Thompson, returning to the stage with him at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on July 4, 2008 after a broken leg. His 1995 promotion tour had his son Travis on bass.

Heartworn Highways, filmed in Texas and Tennessee in late 1975 and early 1976 and released in theaters on May 13, 1981, caught him at the height of that Nashville circle; it includes "L.A. Freeway" and ends with the Christmas party at Clark's house. Later books and films include Tamara Saviano's biography Without Getting Killed or Caught (2016) and a documentary of the same name in 2020.

Records

Songs

Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, Nanci Griffith

Where to go next

Official

  • Guy Clark Albums, videos, and the family foundation.

Reference

Writing and criticism

Live performance archives

Sources

  1. Guy Clark, Wikipedia
  2. Old No. 1, Wikipedia
  3. Dublin Blues, Wikipedia
  4. L.A. Freeway, Wikipedia
  5. Heartworn Highways, Wikipedia
  6. Farewell, Guy Clark, MPR News (2016-05-17)
  7. Guy Clark, setlist.fm