1/29/11: Featuring Willis Alan Ramsey

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A complete list of songs and artists for this show is available under the “playlists” tab.

• “The Ballad of Spider John”, a favorite song from Jimmy Buffett’s 1974 classic album Living and Dying in ¾ Time
• “Satin Sheets”, recorded by Waylon Jennings in 1977
• “Geraldine and the Honeybee”, a concert favorite for Widespread Panic
• “Northeast Texas Women”, which shows up on many “Best Of” Jerry Jeff Walker compilations
• …and “Muskrat Love”, a #5 smash in 1976 for The Captain & Tennille

Despite the improbability of there being any reasonable explanation for Widespread Panic and the Captain & Tennille appearing on any list together, all the songs above do have one thing in common: They were included on Willis Alan Ramsey’s 1972 self-titled debut. And not only was Willis Alan Ramsey his first album- it was his only album.

Willis Alan Ramsey was born in 1949 in Birmingham, Alabama. His mother was musically inclined, his brother collected rhythm and blues records, and the family never missed a Grand Ole Opry broadcast. Willis Alan was also deeply steeped in African-American traditions, spending much of his time with the black women who took acre of him. In a 2000 interview with the St. Louis Riverfront Times, he recalled, “We had maids back then- everybody in the South had maids-and they were singing all the time. So that music was in the air. Segregation didn’t mean that people didn’t associate with one another. I was raised more by my black maid Letty. I spent more time with her than I did my parents.”

The Ramseys moved to Dallas, Texas in 1960, much to the dismay of young Willis Alan, who thought too many people there “were always acting like they better than everybody else”. By the late ’60s, he began to make a name for himself in front of those big shots by turning in memorable performances at the folk clubs in Dallas, Houston, and Austin.

During an engagement at the Villa Capri hotel lounge in Dallas, Ramsey found out that Leon Russell and the Allman Brothers were checked in. Armed with his songs and not a small amount of chutzpah, he knocked on their doors: “Leon was nice and receptive, and I was kind of cocky at that point. I thought I was writing some tunes that he should hear. Leon told me to break out my guitar. He and his road manager listened and gave me their numbers in California.”

“They said I should come see them. Greg Allman and Dickey Betts were really nice as well. They invited me to come down and see them in Macon. This was right before the Allman Brothers took off. So I went to see all of them. Greg recorded a demo on me, and then I went out to see Leon, and he made a demo on me. Leon said, ‘I’m getting ready to tour. If you like, you can stay in my house and record in my studio at night.’ That pretty much sold me! It all happened quickly. I was pretty confident in what I was doing, and suddenly I was over my head. I went from playing college coffeehouses and then I’m in Leon Russell’s home studio and people like George Harrison are coming over. It was a completely different environment.”

Rather than being impressed by the fast-paced new world in which he found himself, Ramsey soon felt overwhelmed. Despite his discomfort and the fact that the recording sessions took place over the course of a year in five studios in three states, he produced the eleven tracks that made up the album that came to ber evered as an almost flawless classic.

When it came time to promote the record, Ramsey balked. He was already miserable and couldn’t abide the thoughts of having to hit the radio/magazine/TV interview and performance circuit. He told the folks at Shelter Records “just to float it out there and see what happens”. What happened was not very much at all, even though his fellow musicians took notice in a big way.

After the disappointing sales of that first album, there were a few aborted attempts to produce a second one. When the Urban Cowboy craze hit the country music world a couple of years later, Ramsey headed for the exits, recalling in the Riverfront Times interview, “…about the time mechanical bulls showed up in the rooms I was playing, I stopped playing”.

Lovers of great music didn’t stop playing his album, though, and word of its perfection continued to spread. Lyle Lovett caught wind of it while he was in college in the late 1970s and learned to play every song on it, later calling it “one of the greatest records of all time”. (A decade or so down the road, Lovett and Ramsey would collaborate on “That’s Right, You’re Not From Texas”, and Ramsey would sing at the wedding of Lovett and actress Julia Roberts.) In the 1980s, Willis Alan moved to Great Britain to study Celtic music and to explore his own ancestry. Meanwhile, other performers kept mining “the album” for material…

In 2000, Ramsey was lured to the stage of Austin City Limits to help honor his old friend and fellow Texas troubadour Walter Hyatt, who had perished in the 1996 ValuJet crash. That performance, along with his work with Lyle Lovett and the CD reissue of his debut, finally brought the name Willis Alan Ramsey to the tips of the tongues of fans of quality singer-songwriters. Talk of a new album began, and as of 2009 it was still “in the works”.

Thirty-nine years after the release of his debut, Willis Alan Ramsey is performing on a fairly regular basis, and even though he has lots of newer material, it is not unusual for him to include seven or eight songs from that original collection in his shows. If anyone in the audience asks him when he is going to release a second album, Ramsey’s half-joking reply is, “What’s wrong with the first one?”

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