Guy Clark - My Favorite Picture of You

"I have no reason to sit home and write songs all day without going out and playing for the folks. And I have no reason to go play for the folks unless I'm writing new songs so they can sort of feed off one another. And I just try to do the best I can."
Guy Clark

There are songwriters, and there are Texas songwriters. No one has been able to really pin down why such a thing should exist, but it does. Maybe it's something in the air, or in the water. Maybe it's in the blend of cultures evident across the state, or a nostalgic hold on to an old west-style ethos that still is embraced to an extent.

Or maybe it's just a combination of hard work, hard playing, a dedication to art and craft and maybe a little luck. A healthy dose of great music and great musicians damn sure doesn't hurt.

And few people define Texas songwriter quite as completely as Guy Clark.

The list of artists who have recorded Clark's songs reads like a who's who of great performers: Johnny Cash, David Allan Coe, Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs, Steve Wariner, Hayes Carll, Brad Paisley, John Denver, Alan Jackson, Rodney Crowell, The Highwaymen and Kenny Chesney are but a few those who have found some greatness in Clark's writing.

His best friend, the legendary songwriter Townes Van Zandt, is the man he credits as his biggest influence, and it shows. But Clark has his own voice, and it is a finely-tuned one. He also has acted as a mentor to other songwriters, such as Steve Earle and Rodney Crowell, both fiercely talented songsmiths. He is as dedicated to passing along his knowledge to others as he is to his own music.

"There aren't any rules, as far as anything-and that applies especially to writing songs, whatever gets the point across. So you're just kind of brought up to feel-in any field, if you say you can do it, do it. There it is."
Guy Clark

Guy Clark isn't just a songwriter and performer; he also is a luthier, and he builds the guitars that he plays. As he puts it, "It's just something I've always done. In South Texas, the first guitar you get is a Mexican guitar. And the first one I got, the first thing I did was take it apart." He applies that same skill to songwriting. He takes his songs apart, learns what works and what does not. He tweaks, he tinkers, he sweats the small details. And only until he is satisfied does it become worthy of performance.

He has lived in Nashville for quite a few years, a town that songwriters need to live in to keep connected to the music industry. Clark has kept busy in that town, writing alone as well as collaborating with others, and his songs are as strong as ever, evidenced by his Grammy Award for Best Folk Album in 2014 for "My Favorite Picture of You." But despite the location change from Texas to Tennessee, Clark will always be a Texas songwriter.

From the Texas Monthly profile He Ain't Going Nowhere, published in January 2014 and written by John Spong:

The title track to Guy Clark’s most recent album, My Favorite Picture of You, may be the finest song he’s ever written. This is no small feat. For one thing, there’s his catalog to consider. Guy wrote “L.A. Freeway,” one of American music’s greatest driving songs and the final word for small-town troubadours on the false allure of big cities. His lyrical detail in “Desperados Waiting for a Train” and “Texas, 1947” presents a view of life in postwar West Texas that is as true as Dorothea Lange’s best Dust Bowl portraiture. When he wrote about the one possession of his father’s that he wanted when his dad died in “The Randall Knife,” he made a universal statement about paternal love and respect. Bob Dylan lists Guy among his handful of favorite songwriters, and most of Nashville does too.

And then there’s the equally significant matter of his timing. Those songs were written in the seventies and eighties, when the hard-living coterie of Guy, Townes Van Zandt, and Jerry Jeff Walker was inventing the notion that a Texas singer-songwriter practiced his own distinct form of artistry, creating the niche in which disciples like Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, and Robert Earl Keen would make their careers. Yet Guy penned “My Favorite Picture of You” a mere three years ago, just after turning 69, an age to which most of his contemporaries had chosen to coast, provided they were still living at all.

The song originated the way most of them do, with a line.

The story continues here...

Sometimes it only takes a line, a phrase, a simple rhyming couplet. Maybe a sing-song little melody that gets stuck in your head, and you don't know where it came from. But there it is, and it won't leave. And you don't mind...if you have a pocket recorder of some sort handy, you might even sing that melody just so you won't forget it, maybe give it some words, any words at all, to put it into context. And maybe those words will find a life within that melody.

Songs are born in funny ways. The trick is in being there when they happen.

Guy Clark has been there for the birth of some of the finest songs written. And we got to watch them grow up.

"We're gonna play you some songs we know and some we don't. But we're pretty good at it. We have no set list, no agenda and no fear."
Guy Clark