Willis Alan Ramsey - Satin Sheets

Willis Alan Ramsey is an enigma not just in Texas musical lore, but among his fans worldwide. He burst upon the scene in 1972 with his self-titled album "Willis Alan Ramsey," a recording rich with great songs from start to finish. One of those songs, "Muskrat Candlelight," became a huge hit under the name "Muskrat Love" by the group Captain & Tennille. It also continues to get slammed as one of "the worst songs ever" by multitudes of music press publications and reader polls.

I doubt that Ramsey cares.

But that album is a thing of music legend. Those songs, the product of a 20-year-old, middle-class singer/songwriter, didn't sound like what you'd expect from their source. He wrote tightly-constructed tunes that were rich in detail. And his voice...it was not the voice of a young man. It was an old voice, a mature-sounding voice with the burrs and scrapes of road wear, the voice of a man who had experienced more life...good and bad...than many will experience in a full lifetime.

And now, 42 years later, that album is the only one he has ever released.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama and raised in Dallas, Ramsey had the sort of high school experiences you'd expect from a young musician...a succession of rock bands with his classmates. But there was one friend from that time who changed his approach to music and led him toward songwriting.

From the story Ballad of Spider Willis, Texas Music Magazine, Fall 2012
By Geoffrey Himes

While attending Highland Park High School in Dallas, Ramsey belonged to several bands that played the usual covers: Beatles, Stones, Young Rascals. But he was also in a folk duo with Brice Beaird who wrote all his own songs. “I said, ‘God, how do you do that?’” Ramsey remembers. “He said ’It’s easy. You think an original thought and write it down.’ I didn’t know you could do that. Every time he said, ‘Here’s another song I wrote,’ it aggravated me so much that I started writing my own songs.”

Ramsey made two stabs at college, in the fall of 1969 in Memphis and in the spring of 1970 at the University of Texas. He lasted one month the first time and two months the second. “I just liked music too much,” he explains. “I had an English lit class with a great teacher who encouraged us to write what we knew. I was too young to know anything, so I decided to drop out and learn some things.”

He started hanging around with fellow singer-songwriters such as Ray Wylie Hubbard, Steven Fromholz and Allen Damron at a coffeehouse called the Chequered Flag Coffeehouse and bar at Lavaca and 15th in Austin. Before long Ramsey was getting out of town to play at the Rubiyat in Dallas, Sand Mountain in Houston and ultimately the national college coffeehouse circuit. He admired Townes Van Zandt and Keith Sykes, but his biggest heroes were Guthrie and Robert Johnson.

An old acquaintance of mine knew some of Ramsey's friends and family in Dallas, including his ex-wife. He once told me about how Ramsey was signed to Shelter Records, the record label founded by the great Leon Russell and producer extraordinaire, the late Denny Cordell, because his management figured that Shelter would be one of the only labels around that could provide an atmosphere that would allow Ramsey to give free reign to his more wild impulses.

Apparently, even the Master of Space and Time couldn't provide enough space or time to Ramsey, and he left Shelter at the end of his contract, citing "creative differences."

More on today's featured song from the Willis Alan Ramsey Press page:

Satin Sheets
This was the only song on the debut album that Ramsey recorded the way he played live—without accompaniment. Over a relaxed finger-picking pattern, he drawled, “I wish I was a millionaire; play rock music and grow long hair.”

“That was me wishing I could be as great and incredible as Leon Russell and the Allman Brothers,” Ramsey confesses. “I was trying to make light of my deep, hidden, infantile desire to be a rock star.”

The song was recorded by Waylon Jennings for 1977’s Ol’ Waylon album (and later by the Bellamy Brothers and Shawn Colvin). “Waylon was such a sweet guy when I met him a couple times,” Ramsey says. “He had this nobility in that rich baritone of his, especially when they recorded him on analogue tape early on. I had a problem imagining that Waylon Jennings would even cut one of my songs, especially after hearing the way he cut Billy Joe Shaver’s stuff. Now there’s a real writer for you.”

So here we are, 22 years after that single album was released. Where has Ramsey been? For a while in the 1980s he lived in Great Britain. By some accounts, he was studying traditional Celtic music; others maintain that he was tracing his family roots. During that time, other artists were covering his songs, among them Widespread Panic, Jerry Jeff Walker, Jimmy Buffett and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. In 1989, he returned to the United States and began performing again in Austin, often appearing with Dallas singer/songwriter Alison Rogers. They married in 1991 and continued to perform together. They co-wrote a hit for Lyle Lovett in 1996, the song "That's Right, You're Not From Texas."

He appeared on Austin City Limits in 2000, performing new material alongside his classic tunes, and he has a follow-up recording titled "Gentilly" that has been in the works for years, but that album still seems like a promise adrift in the ether. Perhaps it will come. Perhaps not.

But maybe neither Ramsey nor the rest of us necessarily need that second album. We got one great one. Maybe one is enough.

Most of us never get that much.