Most Personal Stories of All

Rodney Crowell

Thirty-nine years ago, Rodney Crowell left Houston for Nashville to become a songwriter, joining compadres Guy Clark, John Hiatt and Townes Van Zandt in their transformation of what Nashville songwriters, and singer-songwriters in particular, might aspire to be and to do. Beginning three years later, when he was a key player and harmony singer in Emmylou Harris's Hot Band, songs of his such as "Bluebird Wine," "Ain't Livin' Long Like This," "Till I Gain Control Again" and "Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight" reached public consciousness in Ms. Harris's able hands. By 1978 he was recording on his own and artfully producing the increasingly celebrated records of his wife at the time, Rosanne Cash.
A full decade later, for a few years, he found his greatest country-hit-making success as a front man with chart-topping singles such as "I Couldn't Leave You If I Tried," "She's Crazy for Leaving" and "After All This Time." There was also considerable, not always sought-after attention as a celebrity. It's been a decade now since Mr. Crowell's work took a more personal, less pop-ready direction, with such pointed Americana albums along the way as "The Houston Kid" and "The Outsider."
But that career arc is not the subject of Mr. Crowell's already much-acclaimed memoir, "Chinaberry Sidewalks," published by Knopf. The book is, instead, a story-rich, penetrating and often adroitly literary look at the stormy family environment and generally impoverished surroundings from which Mr. Crowell, now 60, emerged.
"I'm just a working artist," he said during a conversation on the patio of a Nashville luncheonette. "A lot of my success has been well below the public's radar—and, really, back when it wasn't, it wasn't that much fun. I figured that it would be a flat bore for me to write about my career; that, instead, I was going to have to strive with all my might to achieve something literary. And when my editor-publisher read the manuscript, he said: 'You know what I like best about this? That it's not about your career.'"
The book's special focus is the tempestuous, often violent, yet lasting and dedicated marriage of Mr. Crowell's late parents: his epilepsy-stricken, Pentacostalist mother, Cauzette, and his often-alcohol-fueled sometime-musician father, J.W.
We meet their son as an aware, observant young boy in the 1950s. One time, as the anger between his parents threatens to explode, young Rodney deflects their attention by shooting off a .22; on another occasion, he hits himself over the head with a Coke bottle. Such stories are related with riveting clarity, and from the perspective of a generous adult who, in the course of the book, comes to terms with the hard facts portrayed.
"What I want people to understand about my parents," Mr. Crowell told me, "is that the young man and young woman in this story—though they were uneducated, disentitled, disenfranchised and abused—were whip smart. These were people who labored in obscurity, and you'd never have known about them, but they were also creative, imaginative people who were inventing their lives in a most unlikely way. I'm not telling you what a bastard my father was for the sake of drawing attention to me, or evoking your sympathy. I would never have told a lot of the dark things about my mother and father that I do if I hadn't known that, if I were to succeed, by the end of the book I'd get you to love them as much as I did."
While we learn that J.W. Crowell took his son to a Hank Williams show as a toddler, and to a memorable triple-bill of Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins and future father-in-law Johnny Cash at age 8, the memoir is suggestive but not explicit about the role that the boyhood played in shaping Rodney Crowell the songmaker. He agrees that the connections are there, however.
"My father was a savant sieve about songs. If it was a country, folk or bluesy song—all things not too far away from three chords—he could hear it once and he just had it, and he would give it back in song. My mother, on the other hand, was an absolute running-commentary storyteller. A lot of the early family stuff I relate, I'm just telling what she told me, and making a narrative out of it. Well, if you take my father's natural instinct and my mother's natural instinct and stuff them together, you get me."
Songwriting and book-length narrative being far from the same thing, it was not Mr. Crowell's natural instinct to attempt a memoir. The book was a byproduct of his switch to more personal songwriting, after a career hiatus in the 1990s marked by his divorce from Ms. Cash, his marriage to singer Claudia Church and his widowed mother's relocation nearby—even as his four daughters were growing up.
"If it had continued on the way it was going," he noted, "I wouldn't have written this book. I would have been busy being a star. I started noticing that when I'd walk into a room, people would look at me and say, 'Oh, there's that guy.' And I found myself changing my body language, trying to step into their image of me. I sensed that if I lost myself in that, what I would produce would nosedive. Later, when I wanted to work again, I made a commitment to myself that from now on I would do work worthy enough for my children to want to point to it as my legacy. 'The Houston Kid' songs started seeping out of my subconsciousness, songs that were for the most part memoir. At the same time, Rosanne Cash was editing a book of songwriters rewriting their songs as prose ["Songs Without Rhyme: Prose By Celebrated Songwriters" (2001)]. She asked me to contribute, which I'm forever grateful for. I wasn't thinking about writing a book till that intersection happened."
Mr. Crowell is in the midst of demonstrating links between some of his songs and passages from "Chinaberry Sidewalks" on a national tour that resumes Wednesday, with stops across New England, the South and Northwest (see rodneycrowell.com). Despite his decades of fronting rock and country bands, this tour will be solo.
"Part of what I've learned and come to revere in this process is the intimate relationship that develops between the writer and the reader. Performing solo, you have to stand and deliver, and I have a lot more confidence now being alone like that."
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