Guy Clark
Guy Clark (1941–2016) was a Texas singer, songwriter, guitarist and guitar maker who wrote “L.A. Freeway” and “Desperados Waiting for a Train” and gave Ricky Skaggs a number-one country hit with “Heartbroke” in 1982. He repaired guitars and built Dobros before he made records, he often played guitars he had built himself, and his own albums, made with players such as Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas, Darrell Scott and Verlon Thompson, ended with a Grammy for Best Folk Album.
He was born on 6 November 1941 in Monahans, in west Texas, and spent his early years in his grandmother’s hotel there, among whose residents was a wildcatter named Jack Prigg, the subject of “Desperados Waiting for a Train.” After the Second World War the family moved to Rockport on the Gulf coast. His interest in music came from his father’s law partner; he took to Mexican folk songs and flamenco guitar, and most of the first songs he learned to sing and play were in Spanish.
He joined the Peace Corps in 1963 but turned down a posting to India and settled in Houston, where he opened a guitar repair shop with his friend Minor Wilson and sang folk songs at the Houston Folklore Society, the Sand Mountain coffee house and the Jester Lounge, beginning lifelong friendships with Mickey Newbury, Townes Van Zandt and Jerry Jeff Walker. In 1969 he worked in another repair shop with Wilson in San Francisco. Then, with the painter Susanna Talley, he moved to Los Angeles, where he built Dobros at the Dopyera brothers’ Original Musical Instruments Company, played in a bluegrass band at weekends and pitched songs to publishers.
A publishing contract with Sunbury Dunbar took him to Nashville in the fall of 1971. He and Susanna married in January 1972, with Van Zandt as best man, and in that first year in East Nashville he wrote “Desperados,” “L.A. Freeway,” drawn from his unhappiness with life in Los Angeles, and “That Old Time Feeling.” Walker recorded “L.A. Freeway” before Clark had a record of his own. His first album, Old No. 1 (RCA, 1975), on which he sings and plays guitar, has one of Susanna’s paintings on the cover and includes “She Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” and “Texas 1947,” which Johnny Cash also recorded. He moved to Warner Bros. in 1978; Skaggs took “Heartbroke” to number one in 1982, and Clark reached the Billboard country chart himself with “Homegrown Tomatoes” in 1983. Bobby Bare, Vince Gill and John Conlee also recorded his songs, and his home became a gathering place for younger writers such as Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle.
From 1989 he recorded for Sugar Hill, then Asylum and Dualtone, with Verlon Thompson as his touring partner for almost thirty years. He produced Dublin Blues (Asylum, 1995), singing and playing acoustic guitar with Darrell Scott on guitar and his son Travis Clark on bass, and co-produced Cold Dog Soup (Sugar Hill, 1999), with “Sis Draper,” and The Dark (Sugar Hill, 2002) with Scott. On The Dark Shawn Camp and Tim O’Brien play fiddles on “Soldier’s Joy, 1864,” and the album also has “Magnolia Wind,” a Clark and Camp song that the bluegrass singer Amanda Cook later recorded on Deep Water (2017). A tribute album, This One’s for Him, with Rosanne Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and John Prine among the singers, was named album of the year at the Americana Music Association’s awards in 2012.
Susanna Clark died in 2012. His last album, My Favorite Picture of You (Dualtone, 2013), whose title song was inspired by her and whose cover shows her photograph, won the Grammy for Best Folk Album in 2014. He had been inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2004 and received the Academy of Country Music’s Poet’s Award in 2012. Guy Clark died at his home in Nashville on 17 May 2016, aged 74, with Verlon Thompson at his side.
