R.B. Morris revisits the majesty of youth and the grandeur of the West on his latest
It’s hard to say how many cars passed him by that day and how many gave him a lift, but by the time R.B. Morris blew like a tumbleweed into the Mojave, somewhere in the rugged high desert, he was ready to get home.
Knoxville, however, was still 1,900 miles to the east, and despite the rides he’d thumbed through California’s Central Valley, he was having no luck as the sun made its inexorable descent to the west. And so, as he told BLANK Newspaper recently, he sat down to write a song. The result, “Red Sky,” is the first (proper) track on his new record, “Going Back to the Sky.” And in the longing ache of his familiar voice, the forlorn defeat of that day comes pouring out, more than four decades later.
“I wrote it after a day of thumbing and walking, somewhere west of Needles, trying to get back to East Tennessee,” said Morris, who released the new album with sold-out shows at Boyd’s Jig & Reel (for the WDVX “Tennessee Shines” program) and the Laurel Theater earlier this month. “That one and ‘Walking Song’ [the album closer], both of those songs were written on the side of the road while I was thumbing across the country, and that’s the truth. They’re hitchhiking songs.
“I wrote ‘Red Sky’ the next morning, by the side of the road, and just wanted to put it and ‘Walking Song’ together. That’s just a little esoteric thing about the record, that it’s bookended with those moments that are way out there somewhere.”
The entirety of “Going Back to the Sky” is way out there, and not in the cosmic sense. The album is Morris’ love letter to the American West – specifically the byways and backroads he walked, thumbed and drove across along the way. There’s a majesty and grandeur to the album that makes it a spiritual cousin, in a sense, to “Western Stars,” last year’s similarly themed album by the iconic Bruce Springsteen.
The difference between The Boss and R.B., however, is that while the former was grinding it out in the sweatbox bars of Asbury Park, the latter was trying not to run out of gas in a Montana snowstorm during a harrowing overnight drive from Canada to Whitefish (as detailed on the slinky, groovy track “Montana Moon”). The son of a railroad man – his father worked for the L&N for almost four decades – he fell into a complicated relationship with East Tennessee as a young man. His introduction to writer James Agee in high school sparked a lifelong love affair with the author of “A Death in the Family,” set in Knoxville and winner of the Pulitzer Prize (posthumously, three years after Agee died).
As the co-founder of the Hard Knoxville Review, an independent publication in the early 1980s, Morris dedicated an entire issue to Agee, and his one-man play, “The Man Who Lives Here Is Loony,” is based on Agee’s life and works. In March, he’ll appear with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., for a performance of “Knoxville: Summer of 1915,” a work for voice and orchestra based on a 1938 Agee prose poem.
In addition to a project with the University of Tennessee Special Collections Department, he’s already eying another album – perhaps even two – that he would like to get to work on sooner rather than later, he said. But for now, he’s more than content to ride the new record, playing shows to promote it and revisiting those people and places through song.
“I’m really into this record, and I think it’s a good one,” he said. “I feel good about it. I don’t know what kind of music it is – folk, Americana, it’s all in there. It’s dusty old songs, I think.”
It helps, of course, that his band, both in the studio and onstage, is an assemblage of some of the best musicians in the local scene. Jazz maestro Hunter Deacon is behind the kit, while Daniel Kimbro – an in-demand sideman who spends a good chunk of his time playing with Jerry Douglas – handles bass. Multi-instrumentalist Greg Horne had big shoes to fill after Morris’ longtime musical compatriot Hector Qirko moved to Charleston, South Carolina, but he’s risen to the occasion and even given the new material some nuance and texture, playing at various points throughout the album everything from electric guitar to slide to pedal steel to fiddle to mandolin.
Horne and Kimbro get writing credits on a song apiece, as well, and noted guitarist, songwriter and producer Bo Ramsey was also involved in the creation of the album.
“They’re all brilliant, and they rose to the occasion,” Morris said.
That brilliance is what brings “Going Back to the Sky” to life. There’s a reason Morris calls it his “Dust Bowl record,” but to actually hear the West take shape in the mind’s eye thanks to both the lyrics and the composition is a breathtaking thing to behold. The dual guitar work of Ramsey and Horne on “Montana Moon” turns the pacing into the steady rhythm of worn-thin tires slapping a steadily worsening Big Sky Country highway … the languid groove of “Missouri River Hat-Blowing Incident” captures the majesty of a young man struck dumb by the expanse of plain and sky … the lament of “Once in a Blue Moon” bottles the ache and angst of a cowboy’s broken heart. Morris’ posse paints these songs with the muted tones and understated complexity that’s reminiscent of the stark Western landscape: the browns and reds of canyons and arroyos, the tans and golds of desert sand, the whites and blues of snow-capped peaks against an azure sky.
They’re not all downbeat songs, however. “Me and My Wife Ruth” cuts to the quick with a bluesy shuffle hammered into place beneath the tale of an amiable and effervescent driver who sings the praises of his wife’s coffee, sweets and breakfast meat as a beckoning invitation to a wayward traveler.
The traveler, of course, is Morris; while “Ruth” and her husband are partly fictional, he said, they’re also amalgamations of the better angels of human nature that took pity on a poor boy from East Tennessee who stuck his thumb out all those years ago to get from one far-flung outpost to the next.
“It’s kind of like a hitchhiker’s dream ride – not quite the farmer’s daughter, but more like somebody who really gives you a hand,” Morris said. “I must say, I was pretty lucky on the whole in those days. I’ve heard a lot of people say, ‘I’m too scared to pick up a hitchhiker, because you never know who you’re going to pick up.’ I remind them that the one who’s in potential trouble is the hitchhiker because they’re very vulnerable. These days, somebody’s just as likely to swerve off the road and hit you and go on. It’s very dangerous.”
If that sounds like the retreat into safety and comfort that older men trade for a young man’s sense of adventure, you wouldn’t be far off, Morris acknowledged. Of course, older folks have been handing down portents of doom regarding hitchhiking for decades; even Kerouac mentions it in “Big Sur,” Morris pointed out. But while his own experiences back then were mostly good, his more contemporary one was not.
“I guess it was about three months ago, I blew a tire on the interstate in West Knoxville – and I discovered that my wife had taken the spare out to load some stuff in there,” he said. “I couldn’t get any reception on my dadgum phone, but I knew there was an exit not too far ahead, so I just stuck my thumb out. But I couldn’t get a lift from anybody, hardly. It was already dark, and nobody wants to give you a lift after dark, I’ll tell you that.
“I wouldn’t want to do a whole lot of that nowadays, and in fact, when you are doing it, hitchhiking is not the way to go, unless there are no other options. I always loved being in a car with your best pal or your best gal, and if it’s modestly serviceable and you’ve got it going with a few bucks in your pocket to catch a motel room if you have to, there’s nothing better. I still love traveling like that.”
