R.I.P., Charlie Louvin

In honor of the great Charlie Louvin, who passed away today at age 83, let's revisit a phone interview I did with him in 2007. He had just released "Charlie Louvin," and album on which he duetted with a host of guest stars, including Jeff Tweedy, Elvis Costello, George Jones and others.

I think I had to suppress a laugh when he referred to Uncle Tupelo as "Uncle Tom." Some years before, when I interviewed Johnny Cash (who is mentioned at the end of this piece) he referred to the band as "Uncle Jethro." Now, Louvin and Cash are among the best of the best and they obviously have more on their minds than a little ol' band from Belleville, IL. But is the name Uncle Tupelo that hard to remember?

Anyway, here's to you, Charlie.


Where are you?

I’m sitting in front of the Louvin Brothers Museum. They hung these stupid no smoking signs up in Tennessee today, and I’m sitting out on a bench in front of the place.

Is that a new law?

Oh yeah. Our wonderful state senators voted it in. They didn’t ask nobody, they just voted it in.

So you’re sitting outside having a smoke?

That’s true.

Where is the museum?

It’s in a little place called Music Valley Village. It’s right across from the Opryland Hotel. Right by the Fiddler’s Inn and right by the Ernest Tubb Record Shop.

So if people come there, you’re often there, huh?

If I’m not on the road, I’m here. Today, we’ve got this show coming up Friday night at the Mercy Lounge and we’ve got a rehearsal a little later this evening with the band. We’re doing some songs that we’ve never done. Other people requested that they help on a certain song. So we’ve gotta rehearse so we sound a little bit like we know what we’re doing.

Let me ask you about this new record that you’ve made and touring around that. This is your first record in some time, isn’t it?

It’s the first record that’s had national distribution (in a long time). They said it’s the first one I’ve had in 10 years, but I just got tired of playing the game, Dan. ‘Cause I’ve cut, in the last 12 years, I’ve cut a dozen independent CDs. But they went nowhere because they had no distribution and you know how those things go. Radio stations won’t play them, either.

This one’s interesting because it bring you together with a couple other generations of singers. What was it like working with them?

All the people that helped on the record, they’re very familiar with Louvin Brothers material. And although some of it is not Louvin Brother material, they were familiar with the 1927 music of the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and the 1930s music of the Delmore Brothers and the Monroe Brothers. We threw it all in there.

Were you at all familiar with the younger artists? I mean, obviously Geroge Jones and Tom T. Hall, but what about the others?

Jeff Tweedy, I’m pretty familiar with him. Will Oldham. Uncle Tom (sic) a few years back cut “The Great Atomic Power,” which got me familiar with them. For the most part, the majority. Joy Lynn White, I’ve enjoyed her music. She can sing when she wants to. Some of them I haven’t got to meet yet because when I did my part, Mark Nevers, the producer, he just sketched in whatever he could. And he was the one that brought Lambchop back and a few of the other people. He knew these people and as he could catch them… I live 75 miles from downtown Nashville. I live out towards Chattanooga. Sometimes they would say I could come by at 11:15 and they’d say that at 10:30. They didn’t have time to get me downtown. So he took ‘em as he could catch ‘em. But I got to meet most of them since. I did some pictures with Jeff Tweedy at Bonnaroo. And I met Will in…ah shit, I believe it was Cincinnati.

Bonnaroo – what was that like?

It was the 17th of June. It was hot, Dan, and it was dusty. We’re extremely dry here. So it’s gotten real dry and dusty. But the shows themselves – we got real nice crowds. They knew what we were doing and acted like they appreciated it. So that’s all an artist can ask for.

A couple years ago, you toured with Cheap Trick. Is it strange to you that the rock audience has embraced you more than country?

Well, thanks to guys like you. I never went to one place when I was working with Cake and Cheap trick that the people didn’t know that I was going to be there. Newspapers prepared ‘em for that. It was a pleasurable trip. John – with Cake, he’s an avid Louvin Brothers fan. He and I would do a couple Louvin Brother songs and I would do one of my own. And before the tour was over I was singing “I’m a California Man” with Cheap Trick. So all the guys, regardless of the genre of music that they’re in, they’re just nice people.

The rock audience seems more accepting of your music – which is very traditional – than country is these days. It’s moved away from that.

There’s a lot of radio stations coming to alternative. If you’re going to call it that. I hate to have to change my name every time I come out with a record. Because I still do country. And I’m fixing to do something in August, I’m going to record in August, that will probably blow your hat in the creek.

What’s that?

Mark Nevers says he knows the best piano player in the world, who just happens to be black. And he wants to record me with a piano only and three black girl singers. And we’re gonna cut gospel music that they have taken out of the churches. If you go to church, all you’re gonna hear is a three word song: “praise the lord, praise the lord.” I don’t enjoy church done that way. So we’re going to record some of the old stuff like “In the Garden” and “On the Stormy Banks I Stand” and “I’ll Fly Away” and we’ll do a good number of uptempo stuff and then some serious songs. I’m hoping that it’ll work out. I don’t know. He wanted to know if I would be offended recording with blacks, and I said, shit, I’ve been working with black people since 1946. I once had a black bass player. I don’t care if you’re black green or yellow, if you play the music, I just call you a musician.

This’ll take you back to where you started in black music.

It will. I’m looking forward to that.

One of the songs on the record that you wrote that is just heartbreaking is “Ira.” Talk about him a little bit.

I had a couple friends of mine, the LeClair twins, and they’re big Louvin Brother fans and they came to my house one day and said, “Why haven’t you ever wrote a tribute song?” So this one, although it’s not a religious song, it has a religious intonation. It checks your morality. So we just sat down and wrote it together. Because I never did think of Ira and heaven in the same breath. We didn’t part on good terms. Ira was always a drinker. And people ask me what happened to the Louvin Brothers, why did we break up? I can answer that question with two words: Jack Daniels. I didn’t then know how to handle a drunk and I don’t know how to handle one today. I’m basically a non-drinker and back in Ira’s days, people just thought you were being mean. That you could quit that crap if you wanted to. Well, today they call it a disease. Drinking is a disease like so many other things. Ira didn’t get killed instantly. He was coming to your city. Half way between Kansas City and St. Louis – Kingdom City is where he got killed. People always told Ira drinking’s going to kill you, and ironically, it did. He wasn’t on the wheel, he was riding in the back seat. But a couple of people in another car, according to Missouri law, was nine times drunk. They was on the wrong side of the road and I really don’t know what happened. I’ve lost a lot of good friends, including my brother from drinking and driving. I just don’t agree with that at all.

Before that, you did have some amazing years of singing together. What is it about family harmonies that are so special?

I think mostly, Dan, it’s the fact that you were born to the same parents. If you were a singer, and you found somebody who lived five miles down the road from you, I don’t care how often you can get together and sing with this partner, it would never equal the time that you spend with a brother or sister. It was just kind of born in us. We heard a lot of great singing in our growing years and we took that and our love for other duos, like the Delmore Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, the Monroe Brothers, which kind of was a rough duet. And we did our own style and we change parts a lot and it was almost impossible for a novice to tell when you changed. And that was the Louvin Brothers style.

On this record you got to do some songs by those other acts. The Carter family, the Delmore Brothers, Bill Monroe. Was it fun to revisit some of those songs?

It was. We grew up listening to the Carter Family. They didn’t have records, they had transcriptions. And they played on XERF in Acuna, Mexico. We could get that station in northeast Alabama when we were kids. We would listen to some of that, then we would listen to WJJD in Chicago that played good country music. Of course, we were limited on the time that we could spend on the radio because of the batteries. But there were certain shows that we would actually sit down and listen to. The same way with the Opry, back when the Opry was the Opry… you knew what time Roy Acuff was coming on, you knew what time each artist was coming on. They came on the Opry at the same time each Saturday night. So we would listen to maybe the 10 o’clock show to Roy Acuff and that might be the only show we would listen to that Saturday night. That was back in the days when there was nothing but radio and you could hang a few names on a placard and people would come out.

It’s hard to imagine that today, isn’t it?

Today, it’s hard to get the people to come out because they can sit in their living room and see any kind of show they want to see.

Johnny Cash once told me the story of you guys coming to his home town in Northeastern Arkansas. He was waiting for you when you got there and he showed you to the way to the bathroom or something.

I remember that day very well. I made a statement that I’m sure he didn’t take it that way, but thinking back, I think it was a smartass answer. I came out of the bathroom, I had a little pack of two soda crackers. I opened those and started to eatin’ one of them, and he said, “Why are you eating those crackers?” Well, he was 11 I think and I was about 18. And I gave him a smart remark like “to keep from starving to death.” He said in his “Man in Black” book that for the first three or four or five years that he was in the singing business he would always eat two soda crackers before he went onstage – which would be the worst thing you could do. Anyway, it was a great honor. I admired Mr. Cash. I think he did a super job on the tribute album, almost the last thing he ever cut was “Keep Your Eyes on Jesus.” Carl Jackson produced that. He was a man among men, John was.