The Gospel According to Blind Willie Johnson 
SXSW 2010 
Music
Rare Byrd
Beaumont’s Tracy Byrd is a hat act who can actually sing, a country hunk who prefers substance to style. Does that mean his hitmaking days are numbered?
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When Byrd does traditional songs—whether swing or straight country—there is a spooky, uncommon richness to his voice that’s not present on his hits (with the exception of “Don’t Take Her”). “We find songs that just fit me like a glove, and it’s easy for me,” he says. In fact, while a singer normally does a song several times for a CD, leaving the producer to digitally master a final cut from the best versions, some of Byrd’s songs (including “Heaven in My Woman’s Eyes”) are his track vocals, which means he sang them only once. “When Tracy does a song like ‘Big Love,’ which is pretty much right down the middle of what radio likes and will play, it’s hard to distinguish him from Clay Walker or the next guy,” says Tony Brown, the president of Byrd’s label, MCA Records Nashville. “But when he does something like ‘Heaven in My Woman’s Eyes’ or ‘Don’t Take Her,’ that’s Tracy. It sounds so believable.”
And there’s the rub. As country radio continues its love affair with pop, songs like Joe Diffie’s “Bigger Than the Beatles” and a Lonestar hit that actually mentions Pearl Jam and the Grateful Dead dominate playlists. Program directors aren’t interested, for the most part, in the songs Byrd does best, as he learned when he released “Heaven in My Woman’s Eyes” as a single in 1995. It became the fastest-rising song of his career to that point, shooting to number twenty on the charts. It stalled there for two weeks before edging to sixteen, but it ultimately died because a majority of the radio stations refused to play it. “It’s frustrating to hear that something is too country for a country radio station,” Byrd says. “But, yet, the other stuff isn’t too rock and roll for a country station. It makes you mad.”
Another problem for Byrd is that his fans aren’t necessarily thrilled with his soulful warbling. It’s painful to watch him finish the most wilting, sublime version of “Faded Love” to polite applause, and worse yet to hear a fan holler, “‘Watermelon Crawl’!” in the middle of his oldies parade. “I’ve actually had people come up to me and say, ‘You know that song “Heaven in My Woman’s Eyes”—why’d you cut that? Why didn’t you cut more “Watermelon Crawls”?’” says Byrd. “I just look at ’em and think to myself, ‘You know, they really don’t get it. They just don’t get it.’”
Byrd, as it happens, has always been the odd man out. When other six-year-olds in Vidor were listening to Paul Revere and the Raiders, he was stealing off by himself to listen to Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys on the 78’s his father had bought out of an old jukebox. Jerry and Brenda Byrd were country music fanatics who took Tracy to the Grand Ole Opry when he was six months old.
When he graduated from Vidor High School in 1985, Byrd was too young to get into Texas clubs, so he and his friends made the nineteen-mile drive to Louisiana. They were duded up in a rigid uniform: starched Wranglers, starched shirts, ropers, and Stetson or Resistol hats. Once inside, they milled around, too scared to ask girls to dance. “Girls would come up and ask him,” says Byrd’s best friend, Trey Robertson. “And sometimes he would and sometimes he wouldn’t, ’cause he couldn’t dance very good.”
At eighteen, while he was studying business at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, Byrd got a Mel Bay book of guitar instruction and taught himself to play chords. A couple of years later he recorded “Your Cheatin’ Heart” at a shopping mall studio for $7.95 and then, at the saleswoman’s behest, tried his hand on a monthly amateur show, The Charlie Pruitt Show, where he got a standing ovation. He was hooked. He got together a band and for two and a half years did steady gigs in bars from Houston to Lake Charles, Louisiana. Eventually he was recruited to take over Mark Chesnutt’s regular slot at the Beaumont honky-tonk Cutters, where he stayed for three and a half years.
By then Byrd had transferred to Lamar University in Beaumont. Although he was three semesters short of graduating, he decided to drop out, sending his parents into a tizzy. “They said, ‘That’s a pipe dream,’” he recalls. “They said that one in a million people who wanna be singin’ make it.” Undaunted, he signed a management contract with two Beaumont music veterans—one of them a nephew of Tex Ritter—and traveled with his band to Nashville to get a record deal. His first showcase, at 328 Performance Hall in April 1991, drew top executives from Warner Bros., Liberty (now Capitol), and Sony. MCA sent only a lower-level employee because, Byrd says, they thought they had all the traditional male singers they needed. But the MCA representative was so bowled over that he got Tony Brown to give Byrd a private audition in his office the next morning. After Byrd nailed a sweet low note on a Haggard tune, Brown agreed to come to Beaumont to see a show at Cutters a few weeks later. When he got in line at the club, he was standing behind a delegation from Warner Bros. Both labels made an offer, and Byrd’s attorney played them off one another for six months until each offered a multi-album deal; MCA ultimately won the bidding war.
Byrd’s first CD, a self-titled effort released in 1993, went gold, meaning it sold at least 500,000 copies. His second record, 1994’s No Ordinary Man, sold more than 2 million copies and went double platinum, fueled by the wedding favorite “The Keeper of the Stars” and four novelty tunes, including “Watermelon Crawl.” Love Lessons, released in 1995, didn’t sell quite as well but still went gold. So did Big Love, which has put two singles, “Big Love” and “Don’t Take Her,” as high as number three on the country charts—a hopeful sign for Byrd.
Right now Byrd is considering songs for his next CD, which he begins recording in October. He’s co-writing at least half the material himself, including “Try Tellin’ That to My Heart,” a new swing number. “It has real slow brushes on the snare—you know, real smoky,” he says. “Instead of the up-tempo swing, we’re gonna cut the jazzy, bluesy swing.” He’s also considering a four-four shuffle by Ray Price.
All that’s left to settle on are the hits, the songs that radio will love and that he can also live with. “I hear songs all the time,” he says, “and I’ll go, ‘That’s a hit. Sooner or later someone’s gonna have a hit with it.’ But I just say, ‘Do I really wanna sing this thing for the rest of my life?’ These days, I’m lookin’ a little further. I’m lookin’ a little deeper.”
Freelance writer Jamie Schilling Fields was born in Canyon and grew up in Amarillo. 
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