"My dream already came true," Jamey Johnson says. "All I
ever wanted was to just to get to ride around and sing
country music."
For a lot
of country music fans, Johnson is their dream come true. He’s
the real deal, a true country singer, rather than a pop artist
who owes what little country he can claim to a cowboy hat, a
pair of boots, a swagger, and a sometimes affected twang in the
voice. The mainstream audience has occasionally embraced such
pretenders and made them multi-millionaires, but they fade
faster than a pair of Levis. True aficionados of country music
prefer the artist whose boot heels are worn down from walking
the hard, rocky roads of life, whose struggles and hardships
inform his songs. He sings from the heart and soul, the way Hank
Williams and Waylon Jennings did, and the way that Merle Haggard
still does. Johnson’s manager, Arlis Albritton, says "Jamie is
most distinctive because he is himself. As a songwriter he
writes what he knows and lives what he writes."
"I just
take stuff from life and put it to sound," Johnson says.
"Whatever the hell is going on in your life is going to come out
in your music. You can never go wrong, coming out and just
bearing your soul."
With his
long hair, beard, penetrating blue eyes, and a snarl in his
voice, Johnson has been called Nashville’s "gruffest and
grittiest star" by Rolling Stone. He doesn’t look or
sound like a man you’d want to fool with, and some have
suggested he’s leading a new Outlaw movement in country music.
Interviewed by The Washington Post before an appearance
on David Letterman’s late night show, Johnson dismissed such
notions. "There ain’t anything more outlaw about us than being
double-parked out here in New York City."
Born July
14, 1975 in Enterprise, Alabama, Johnson was raised in
Montgomery. "Music was fundamental in my family," he recalls.
"Sang at bars, all the way to church on Sunday. Music in school,
played guitar pulls at the house, go to other people’s houses
and break out the guitars, it was fun. It was always there, I’ve
just been a part of it."
Unlike
most country musicians, Johnson was formally trained and was
studying music theory while still in high school. He listened to
different kinds of music, including gospel and heavy metal, but
country music cast the strongest spell. "We lived in a trailer
off in the wilderness," he remembers. "Metallica don’t sound
right when it echoes off the trees. But Don Williams does quite
well out there."
It’s
hardly surprising that Johnson cites Hank Williams as an
influence. "One of the first songs I learned how to play was a
Hank Williams song that I’d learned from a book." In his teens,
Johnson sometimes visited the great man’s grave in Montgomery,
singing songs before his tombstone. "Hank Williams was the first
rock 'n’ roller just by lifestyle."
He spent
two years studying at Jacksonville State University in
Montgomery, then served eight years in the Marine Corps Reserve
but was discharged without having seen combat. "I enjoyed it
while I was in and I also remember that I couldn’t wait to get
out," he told Melissa Parker of Smashing Interviews. Johnson may
have carried a rifle as a Marine, but his guitar was always
close at hand. "I used to take my guitar out into the fields
with the marines, sit around and play them boys songs."
Once free
of academic and military life, he moved to Nashville to pursue
his passion for music, arriving in the country music capital on
New Year’s Day 2000. Success did not come overnight, but Johnson
wasn’t expecting it to. "You know, everything works out the way
their supposed to, anyway. The doors didn’t necessarily open for
us, but we managed to kick them in over time."
At first,
he didn’t let anyone in Nashville know that he wrote songs. "I
didn’t want to share that stuff with anybody. I didn’t want to
go out and play those personal songs in a bar. I’d go out and
sing covers. I played everyone else’s music, but not my own." To
pay the bills, he worked assorted jobs, including construction.
"Every job I’ve ever had I felt like it was something to do
until I could get started doing music full-time. Life’s too
short to be doing something you have no passion for fifty years
then die." In 2002, he self-released his first album, They
Call Me Country.
Johnson
downplays the importance of commercial success. "I got no time
for hits. I write songs. I write music." But hits he’s had,
first as a writer of songs recorded by others, including Trace
Adkins who took "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk," which Johnson
co-wrote, to the top in 2005. In 2007, Johnson won the Song of
the Year award from the Academy of Country Music and the Country
Music Association for "Give It Away," a hit for George Strait.
With 2008's Grammy nominated "In Color," Johnson had a hit of
his own. It, too, earned best song honors from the ACM and CMA.
The song was inspired by memories of his grandfather to whom "I
always wanted to pay tribute back to thank him for the lessons
growing up, all the conversations with him. Nobody ever pays
attention to that stuff until they’re gone, I’m afraid." In the
song, his grandfather is showing him a photo album filled with
memories of life in the Great Depression and WWII:
"If it
looks like we were scared to death,
like a couple of kids just trying to save each other,
you
should have seen it in color."
Johnson’s
second album, The Dollar, was "refreshingly straight and
honest," in the words of Amazon.com, while All Music called it a
"debut that can only be described as countrified brilliance."
The title song, in which a boy saves his money in a piggy bank
in the hope of buying time with his father, reached number 14 on
the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, but his label, BNA,
dropped him after a second single failed to chart, and the
company was swallowed up in a merger between Sony and BMG.
"They were
bringing in so many hit artists from Sony that they had to focus
energy on," Johnson explained. "They had to shift up their game
plan for how they do their business. I think at that particular
time it didn’t involve trying to grow new artists."
He moved
to Mercury where his third album, That Lonesome Song, was
released in 2008 and earned a gold record. A bitter chronicle of
his divorce, Johnson had raised eyebrows earlier when he thanked
his ex-wife while accepting a Song of the Year award for "Give
It Away."
"I just
didn’t see standing on that stage, holding that trophy,
accepting an award for a song I wrote about our unfortunate
divorce without giving her the credit for the kind of woman she
is. She’s a great woman, still one of my best friends."
When his
fourth album, The Guitar Song, was released in 2010,
Rolling Stone hailed Johnson as country music’s "most
reliable traditionalist, a Music Row pro who can write a song
for every emotional season."
A double
album, The Guitar Song is "a tale," Johnson says. "The
first part of it is a very dark and sordid story. And then
everything after that is progressively more positive, reassuring
and redemptive." The first disc, dubbed the "Black Album,"
contains such songs as "Poor Man Blues" and "Can’t Cash My
Checks" whose lyrics speak to the current economic malaise ("You
can bring me down, but you can’t make me beg"). The second disc,
the "White Album," is lighter, and features "Porch Swing
Afternoon," another song inspired by personal memories:
"That old
dog is laying under grandpa’s chair,
He
ain’t looking for nothing to do. . .
I
can see grandma now in her old checkered dress,
Beat’n a rug with her broom"
Johnson
also tips his hat to country music’s past with covers of such
classics as Kris Kristofferson’s "For the Good Times" and Mel
Tillis’ "Mental Revenge."
Releasing
a double album, and one with a concept at that ("Each album
bleeds into the other without stopping," he says), is an almost
nostalgic gesture at a time when such epic works have gone the
way of vinyl records. But Johnson is determined to do things his
way, and, besides, "It’s my favorite, number-one preference at
home, to go put a vinyl record on my great grandmother’s old
record player."
Johnson
can summarize his life in a few words: "Wake up everyday, play
some country music, and have another drink." Sometimes, though,
the memories that inspired the songs can make them hard to sing.
"There are some times when I get choked up. I’ve done some songs
where people will sing the lyrics back to me - and when it’s
something that means that much to you, that’s a whole other
level. One of my favorite sounds is when the audience is louder
than the band. I just wanna back up and let them have it. This
is your song, go ahead and do it!"
It’s a
sentiment that Johnson has also expressed in song, on a track
from The Guitar Song:
"You fell
in love or threw it away,
You’re looking for the perfect thing to say.
You’re no good with words, well, that’s okay,
That’s why I write songs.
Might make you laugh or make you cry,
might help you make it through a bad goodbye.
'Cause you’ve been through it all and so have I,
That’s why I write songs."
by
Brian
W. Fairbanks