This One’s For Him: A Tribute To Guy Clark, CD review
Guy Clark is honoured in a marvellous tribute album featuring Willie Nelson, Lyle Lovett, John Prine, Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris
Guy Clark, who celebrated his 70th birthday yesterday, on 6th November 2011, is one of the great storytellers of modern music.
You can tell merely from the queue of country giants who have lined up to record his songs on This One’s For Him: A Tribute To Guy Clark the esteem in which he is held. There are 30 brilliant tracks from, among others, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Rosanne Cash, Patty Griffin, Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett, John Prine, Emmylou Harris, Joe Ely, Rodney Crowell and Robert Earl Keen. It’s like a who’s who of country music.
And what quality songs they have to work with. Clark is a musical poet. His craggy, sparse songs – less is always more with Clark – are deceptively simple but deeply moving.
Clark, whose early songs such as Desperadoes Waiting For A Trainwere set in Monahans, Texas, where he grew up, has described the feeling of “exhilaration” when you know you have written a great song. “It’s like being like on Cloud Nine,” he said once. Desperadoes is a tour-de-force and it’s no surprise that it fell to Willie Nelson to record that song. If anyone can summon up the right voice for an epic old desperado, it is Nelson.