Pitch Perfect

We asked five Texas musicians—Guy Clark, Patty Griffin, Sonny Throckmorton, Robert Earl Keen, and Jack Ingram—to tell us the secret to writing a great country song. Their answers were predictable (avoid Nashville), surprising (read Rumi), and downright quirky (two words: “graph paper”).

by John Spong

August 2009

(Page 2 of 3)

Throckmorton: I’d say “Green, Green Grass of Home” [a number four hit for Porter Wagoner in 1965] is a pretty damned good song. I like it because of that turn, when the guy wakes up and he’s only dreaming. That gets me big-time. And I like it because Curly Putman, who wrote it, has probably had about a hundred hits, and that song has made more money than all the other hits put together. I like songs that make a lot of money. But really I like it because it’s simple, and that’s the hardest kind of writing there is. The easier it sounds, the harder it is.

Ingram: Simplicity is not dumb.

Clark: Uh-huh. It’s learning what to leave out. Like with good guitar players—it ain’t the licks they play, it’s the holes they leave. Or when you listen to Hank Williams and think, “How’d he do that?”

Griffin: When you hear a Hank Williams song, it sounds like it’s always been there.

Spong: Jack, do you have a song in mind?

Ingram: When I first started playing music, I had 25 songs, and 24 of them were either Robert’s or Guy’s or Jerry Jeff Walker’s or Willie Nelson’s. And then every week I’d learn a new song, and one of theirs would have to go. It’s pure Darwin. One that has been speaking to me lately is Billy Joe Shaver’s “Old Chunk of Coal.” It means more and more to me every day that I walk around. He does what a lot of guys I’ve always loved do. Their songs feel like they were written in three and a half minutes. And I love the way John Anderson attacks that song in his version. Done different ways, a song can make you laugh and party or make you cry.

Clark: I was thinking today about Joe Ely’s “Indian Cowboy.” The first night I met Joe, we were in Antone’s [the famous Austin blues club], and afterward we went over to Gary P. Nunn’s yard with a guitar. We sat there and played songs and drank all night long. The sun came up, and Joe said, “I got one more,” and he played that song. And it has charmed me from that moment. So we all went inside and made Joe record it, and I took that tape with me. Then I recorded it. And Joe said he heard me doing it on the radio one day, three or four years later, and that there was something familiar about it. But he didn’t remember it. So he went and bought the record and saw it was his name on it and had to relearn it.

Spong: Did he want part of it?

Clark: He wanted all of it.

III. “IF YOU GET TIRED OF WRITING, GET UP AND WHITTLE.”

Ingram: Guy, somebody told me that you write on graph paper?

Clark: I do. I drafted structural steel for a while when I was younger, and there’s just something about graph paper that makes you write straighter. And I can always find whatever I’m writing because there’s nothing else lying around that looks like it.

Spong: I think I even read that you took a while trying to find the right grade of pencil lead.

Ingram: He went to therapy for that.

Clark: There’s something about the feel of graphite on paper that I just adore. I don’t like ballpoints, and I don’t like computers, and I don’t like typewriters. But a really good, dark piece of lead on a really good piece of paper just makes you write better.

Griffin: I like red Flair pens. My mom and dad were teachers, so it’s probably genetic.

Clark: I had a song lying around once when Billy Joe Shaver was in the house, and after he left, I looked down at it and he’d written, “B minus. Needs work.”

Spong: Robert, how do you put songs together?

Keen: I sorta keep them in my head till I’m finished, then write it down. I don’t know if it’s some test to see if I can remember the words while I’m doing it or see if it can all stick together. And it doesn’t mean I won’t edit it. I learned from Guy that editing is a good idea instead of a bad idea. When I first started, I used to think the voice of God was going through my brain and onto this piece of paper. That was not true at all.

Clark: Sometimes, not very often but once in a while, I’ll write a song and finally get it down on paper and find that I know it without having to go back and learn it. Those are the ones that are really cool.

Keen: Yeah, I hate relearning songs. I think there is something wrong with ’em if you have to relearn ’em. They should just stick.

Throckmorton: That’s funny—I always said that if you can remember the words to your songs then you’re not writing enough.

Spong: Patty, you’ve said that you don’t write down melodies or music when they first come to you, because if they’re good enough, they’ll stick.

Griffin: Pretty much. I don’t mind tweaking a song for a few months. I think that’s part of the fun of writing, just kind of shaping it and seeing where you can take that formality and turn it just slightly different here and maybe make this bridge pop out. But mostly it just shows up or it doesn’t. I think melody writing is the easy part.

Throckmorton: What’s that ol’ boy that had “Polk Salad Annie”?

Ingram: Tony Joe White.

Throckmorton: Yeah, Tony Joe White. He used to say, “I like to get in E and be still.”

Griffin: B flat is my favorite.

Spong: Robert, where do you write?

Keen: I’ve got a little shack between Bandera and Kerrville I call the Scriptorium. I go out there and stay by myself and eat venison sausage and bang on guitars and read books for ten days at a time. I’ve got Graham Greene and [Cormac] McCarthy and [thirteenth-century Sufi poet] Rumi. I’ve got a bunch of westerns too, a whole series of Zane Grey—things I read when I get to thinking that I think I’m too smart.

Spong: And Guy, your place in Nashville is kind of a famous spot. People go there just to write with you in your woodworking room.

Clark: I always wrote by myself for years and years, wrangling words, figuring stuff out. But when you’re writing with somebody else, you actually have to say it out loud. If you’re writing alone, you can sit there and mumble it for two weeks and think it’s the greatest thing in the world. But when you have to play it for somebody, it’s just like, “Oh, man, that’s sorry.” I love having a good place to write, and I love building guitars, so what can be better than doing it in the same room? If you get tired of writing, get up and whittle; if you make a mistake there, sit down and write.

Throckmorton: I gotta come write with you. I’ve never done that.

Clark: We’ll work on your guitar. But none of the formality of Music Row co-writing. I am pretty much against that.

Throckmorton: I am too. I’d never work in Nashville anymore, cause I’d tell them to kiss my butt real quick on that deal.

Spong: But clearly you’re not opposed to co-writing.

Throckmorton: No, but let’s do it in a bar, not an office. Like when I wrote “Why Not Me” for the Judds [a number one hit in 1984]. I got a phone call from Harlan Howard, and he said, “Sonny, we’ve got to write a song for this wonderful woman and her little girl.” And he kept on and on, and finally I went over to his house. And I hummed a little bit of this melody that I’d been humming for years that I called “How ’Bout Me” and he said, “Why not make it ‘Why Not Me’?” And I said, “Gold!” And then he wrote most of the lyrics while I sat and watched. So I had the melody—it was half mine—but that was one of those instances where I probably got more than I gave.

Griffin: When I first got to Nashville, in 1994, I played the Bluebird Cafe, and this big songwriter guy saw the show and said, “I’d love to write a song with you that’s left of center.” I met him the next day in his little office, and I had never tried anything like that before, going and collaborating. So I’d throw out a melody idea and he’d go, “Now, let’s not go all Sarah Vaughan here.” I got this splitting headache and just thought to myself, “This day will end, and I’ll remember not to do this again.”

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