Songwriters recall hit maker, mentor, Harlan Howard
Balecox
By PETER COOPER
Staff Writer
The printing press clacked away while 30-year-old Harlan Howard tried to take a
business call in a somewhat professional manner.
''It's a hit,'' said Charlie Walker, whose 1958 version of Howard's Pick Me Up
On Your Way Down was dominating the country airwaves while Howard kept on
working in Los Angeles, driving the printing factory forklift.
''What'd you say?'' Howard asked. Then he raised his voice and asked again.
''I said, 'It's a hit,' '' Walker hollered. ''Write me another one.''
Harlan Howard never wrote another one for Walker, but he ultimately quit the
forklift gig, moved to Nashville and wrote more than 100 top-10 hits for
artists including Ray Price, Patsy Cline, Buck Owens, Kitty Wells, Patty
Loveless, George Jones and Conway Twitty.
Howard died Sunday night at age 74. Visitation will be 11 a.m.-2 p.m. today and
tomorrow and this evening from 6-8 at the Roesch-Patton-Austin-Bracey &
Charlton Funeral Home.
After a private family service, a public memorial service is to be at the Ryman
Auditorium at 2 p.m. on March 19. Howard leaves behind wife, Melanie Smith
Howard, children Harlan Perry Howard Jr., Clementyne Rucker Howard, Carter
''Corky'' Howard and Jennifer Carmella; and a granddaughter.
He also leaves a plaque in the Country Music Hall of Fame and several
generations of Nashville songsmiths who count him as a mentor and a touchstone.
''Harlan dying in Nashville is like Peter Pan dying in never-never land and
leaving all the children behind,'' said friend and fellow songwriter Pat Alger,
sitting in a booth at the Longhorn steakhouse near Music Row. The restaurant
was a favorite haunt of Howard's: He'd eat there, chat with friends and wait
until the stroke of noon before he began drinking White Russians.
Yesterday, some of Howard's friends and proteges gathered at the Longhorn to
raise glasses, tell stories and marvel at a mind that produced some of country
music's most enduring classics.
''He was the closest thing I've ever known to a sage,'' said Jim Lauderdale, a
hit songwriter (Halfway Down, The King of Broken Hearts) who often co-wrote
with Howard. ''The lyrics would just pour out of him.''
At a time when the whole thing really did start with a song, Howard produced a
truckload of the finest variety. And as the industry changed to accommodate
stylized images and expensive videos, Howard's songs remained in demand. He had
hits in each of five straight decades and very much wanted a capper for the new
millennium. ''He'll get it, soon,'' Nitty Gritty Dirt Band member Jeff Hanna
said.
Hanna's wife, singer-songwriter Matraca Berg, met Howard when she was a
teen-ager. As he did with Lauderdale, Bobby Bare, Nanci Griffith, Vernon
Oxford, Sara Evans and others, Howard supported Berg's career in several
capacities. He was a buddy and a backer, albeit one with an intimidating
catalog of classic songs.
''He was an uncle figure in a way, but in another way he was untouchable,''
said Berg, wedged in the corner booth between Lauderdale and He Stopped Loving
Her Today writer Bobby Braddock. Berg has penned hits for Trisha Yearwood, Reba
McEntire and others, but she retains a certain level of awe when talking about
Howard.
''He was the standard for country songs,'' she said. ''If this were Greek
mythology, he'd be Zeus.''
Fortunately, this Zeus was affable and willing to lend a hand. Griffith
recalled moving to Nashville from Texas in the mid-'80s — somewhat
apprehensive about the shift in landscape and social circles — and finding a
message from Howard on her answering machine.
''He was the first to call me when I got here,'' Griffith said. ''Chet Atkins
was the second, and I still have the tapes: I took them out of my answering
machine and saved them. Harlan said he'd heard my Last of the True Believers
album, and he said, 'Don't you know women don't write songs like that anymore?'
''
At that time, Griffith had authored a few critically acclaimed, independently
released albums. Howard's credits included Ray Price's Heartaches By The
Number, Buck Owens' I've Got A Tiger By The Tail, multigenre hit Busted
(recorded by Johnny Cash, Ray Charles and others) and the Judds' Why Not Me?
But Griffith's songs provided the only resume she needed to enter Howard's
sphere of friends.
''When Harlan sanctioned somebody, there was no doubt it'd be somebody good,''
songwriting veteran Richard Leigh said.
Among Howard's best friends was country legend Waylon Jennings, who died last
month and whose passing was said to have deeply distressed Howard. Jennings
recorded numerous Harlan Howard songs, including The Chokin' Kind and Green
River.
''One time I was talking with Harlan and I said, 'Hey, you had some cuts with
Waylon, didn't you?' '' friend and songwriter Ralph Murphy said. ''He said,
'Yeah, 78.' I said, '1978?' He said, 'No, 78 cuts.' ''
That figure may be about right, or it may be something of an exaggeration.
Poetic license is a treasured songwriters' tool, and Howard didn't have to
actually grab a tiger by the tail to recognize a good hook line.
''When we say, 'Real country music,' Harlan's songs pretty much defined that,''
Braddock said. ''I've always loved his line in Too Many Rivers, where he wrote,
'When you try to put love back together/ There's always a few little pieces you
can't find.' ''
Howard, of course, knew something of heartbreak. His childhood was nomadic and
impoverished, and his adult life was marked by great loves and difficult
divorces. Those experiences — like the characters and conversations he
discovered in bars and captured in songs — found their way into his lyrics
and, therefore, into the fabric of country music history.
''They are pieces of his heart those voices sing / Living vignettes of the
lives he's seen,'' wrote Griffith in a biographical song called Home on the
Radio (Song For Harlan Howard).
Beloved in Nashville, Howard felt himself occasionally underappreciated by
out-of-town sophisticates who hold high the works of Cole Porter, George and
Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin and other acknowledged songwriting masters. But
Howard's songs were recorded by decidedly noncountry artists, including gospel
queen Shirley Caesar, R&B great Ray Charles, jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald and
folk act The Kingston Trio. And Howard's life in song was of equal consequence
to the country genre as Berlin was to the pop songbook or Chuck Berry to rock
'n' roll.
''Irving Berlin?'' Braddock asked, rhetorically. ''You mean the pop Harlan
Howard?''
Maggie Smolkovich
recorded them and it blew me away!!
Maggie
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