Peter Cooper

The Tennessean

Guy Charles Clark, the gravel-voiced troubadour who crafted a vast catalog of emotionally charged, intricately detailed works that illuminated and expanded the literary possibilities of popular song, died in Nashville Tuesday morning after a long illness.

Mr. Clark, a Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer, had been in declining health for years, including a lengthy cancer battle. He was 74 years old, and the author of 13 compelling studio albums.

Born in Monahans, Texas on Nov. 6, 1941, and raised in the Lone Star State, Mr. Clark was a Nashville songwriting fixture for more than 40 years.

His songs were recorded by Johnny Cash, Ricky Skaggs, Rodney Crowell, Emmylou Harris, Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, Alan Jackson, George Strait, Bobby Bare, Jimmy Buffett, Kenny Chesney, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and legions of others.

Mr. Clark and his wife, Susanna, were ringleaders in a Nashville roots music circus that included luminaries like Harris, Crowell, Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, Mickey Newbury, Billy Joe Shaver and many more.

“The patron saint of an entire generation of bohemian pickers, Guy Clark has become an emblem of artistic integrity, quiet dignity and simple truth,” wrote Robert K. Oermann in the 1995 liner notes to Clark’s “Craftsman” collection.

Exacting but inspired

Mr. Clark was quick to emphasize the measured, constructed nature of his process, releasing albums called “Workbench Songs,” “Keepers” (a 1997 Grammy nominee) and “Boats to Build,” and receiving interviewers in a basement room where he built guitars and wrote songs on graph paper, in longhand.

But, in spite of his protestations, his genius also involved significant inspiration. Yes, he was exacting with his material, but the raw material had already arrived at a higher level than did most others’.

“I’d play ‘The Red River Valley,’ and he’d sit in the kitchen and cry,” begins “Desperados Waiting for the Train,” a song about a young boy’s friendship with a grandfatherly old cuss. “Run his fingers through 70 years of living, and wonder, ‘Lord, has every well I’ve drilled run dry.’”

Another of his classics, “That Old Time Feeling,” opened with the lines, “That old time feeling goes sneaking down the hall, like an old grey cat in winter, keepin’ close to the wall.”

Both “Desperados” and “That Old Time Feeling” were featured on Mr. Clark’s debut album in 1975, “Old No. 1.” Recorded at RCA Studios along Music Row, that album was a work of remarkable wisdom and maturity for its 34-year-old author, or for any other songwriter at any age.

“That album was received really well, right from the start,” Mr. Clark told The Tennessean in 2009. “I got this great review in ‘Playboy,’ and Willie Nelson’s ‘Red Headed Stranger’ got kind of panned in that same issue.”

History would protect the good name of “Red Headed Stranger,” and it would also confirm Mr. Clark’s significant place in the songwriting continuum.

Nashville icon and sage

Mr. Clark, the son of a lawyer, was raised in dusty west Texas and moved to the Gulf Coast town of Rockport, Texas, at 16.

In the late 1960s, he headed to Houston, where he played Bob Dylan-inspired folk music on a club circuit that included contemporaries Van Zandt and Eric Taylor as well as blues legends Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb.

Mr. Clark spent time in San Francisco and Los Angeles, inspiring later songs “Madonna w/ Child ca. 1969” and “L.A. Freeway,” before signing with publisher Sunbury Music and moving to Nashville in 1971.

Jerry Jeff Walker recorded “L.A. Freeway” for a 1972 album, and “Desperados Waiting for the Train” the following year, and Mr. Clark garnered a reputation for uncommon poetic perception. In his early Nashville years, he spent many evenings swapping songs with friends, passing a hat to collect tips at Bishop’s Pub on West End Avenue and playing for slightly better wages at Elliston Place’s Exit/In.

By the time “Old No. 1” released, Mr. Clark was a local icon, an arbiter of taste and song sensibility, and a vodka-fueled sage. He maintained each of these reputations throughout the remainder of his life.

Mr. Clark and wife Susanna were often in the 1970s company of Van Zandt, who wrote his own classic, “If I Needed You,” in the spare bedroom of the Clarks’ home on Chapel Avenue in East Nashville.

“Townes Van Zandt is one of the reasons I started writing songs,” Mr. Clark told musicologist Ben Sandmel in 1992. “He writes serious, he writes seriously funny. But he never rhymes moon-june-spoon to make a buck. It’s more of a literary approach. His work is a great yardstick. He consistently keeps me honest.”

Johnny Cash was the first major Nashville country music figure to record Mr. Clark’s songs, in the mid-1970s. Bobby Bare had a Top 20 country hit in 1982 with “New Cut Road,” and Mr. Clark’s “Heartbroke” became a No. 1 country single for Ricky Skaggs later that year.

Mr. Clark later co-wrote No. 1 song “She’s Crazy for Leavin’” with Crowell as well as Top 10 country songs for Vince Gill (“Oklahoma Borderline”), John Conlee (“The Carpenter”) and Steve Wariner (“Baby I’m Yours”). His own recordings did not fare as well on the country charts.

“The most talked-about single both on Music Row and among country fans is Guy Clark’s ‘Homegrown Tomatoes,’” Oermann wrote for The Tennessean in 1983. “According to early radio reports, it looks like the summertime hit record from Nashville this year.”

Early radio reports sometimes lie: “Homegrown Tomatoes” topped out at No. 42 on the “Billboard” country singles chart, and Mr. Clark remained beloved in writerly circles but underappreciated by the masses.

He lived his professional life quietly creating in workrooms and playing to supportive audiences in clubs and small theaters, and these venues seemed to suit him more than an arena ever could.

His music allowed him to travel the world and experience what he viewed as its prime pleasures, some of which he detailed in 1995’s “Dublin Blues”: “I have seen the David / I seen the Mona Lisa, too / And I have heard Doc Watson play ‘Columbus Stockade Blues.’”

The Mona Lisa portion of that equation was nothing Mr. Clark took for granted.

He and wife Susanna Clark were both painters: She painted the portraits on the covers of his “Old No. 1” album, Harris’ “Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town,” Willie Nelson’s “Stardust” and other works, while Mr. Clark’s self-portrait was the cover of his own, Grammy-nominated (for best contemporary folk recording) “Old Friends” album.

‘The greatest storyteller’

Painting intrigued Mr. Clark, but songwriting compelled him.

His songs often traded on highly personal specificity that wound up striking universal chords, as with “Randall Knife,” a song about Mr. Clark and his father that sent Vince Gill into tears when he first heard it, in a recording studio where Gill was attempting to lay down a guitar track.

“I started weeping, bawling all over my guitar,” Gill told Country Weekly magazine in 2011. “I couldn’t sniff, because there was a live mike.” Gill went on to say of Mr. Clark, “I think he may be the greatest storyteller of all, for me. He paints the coolest pictures of all.”

In the 1990s and in the new century, Mr. Clark relied increasingly on others to help him paint those pictures.

His co-writers included friendly peers like Verlon Thompson and Darrell Scott and youthful writers such as Shawn Camp, Patrick Davis, Ashley Monroe and Jedd Hughes. The younger set sometimes approached their gruff elder with trepidation, but Mr. Clark told The Tennessean he learned something at each session.

“With the young writers, I pretty much have my way with the lyrics, the final say, but even then there are things that come out of their mouths that wouldn’t have come out of my mind,” he said. “I enjoy sitting at a table and wrangling with words. I find that inspiring, and I learn from these people.”

Compadre Van Zandt died in 1997, of hard habits that failed his heart. Wife Susanna died in 2012 after years of ailing.

Over the past decade, Mr. Clark was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award for songwriting by the Americana Music Association.

“People come up and say, ‘What was it like back then?’” he told The Tennessean in 2013. “Well, how would I know? I was (messed) up. I don’t remember. Things changed, and you’ve got to be true to yourself. You’ve got to do the work. But when someone asks what that was like... it was like yesterday.”

Mr. Clark earned Grammy nominations for two of his studio albums, and the two-disc, multi-artist “This One’s for Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark” album was nominated for a Grammy. The latter album featured contributions from Lyle Lovett, Shawn Colvin, Emmylou Harris and John Prine, Patty Griffin, Kris Kristofferson and others. “This One’s For Him” won the Americana Music Association’s album of the year honor in 2012, the same year Susanna Clark died of cancer.

The past decade brought battles with cancer, circulation problems and other health issues.

Mr. Clark’s hair fell out during chemotherapy, then grew back, lush and white. His bushy mustache, determined countenance and linguistic authority made latter-day concert appearances reminiscent of the lecture tours Mark Twain embarked on in Twain’s final years. In July of 2013, his “My Favorite Picture Of You” album was released to critical acclaim, though his health made it impossible for him to tour.

Like his early Nashville fan Johnny Cash, Mr. Clark conveyed strength and endurance, even at his frailest and most transitory.

“Something else that’s important,” he told Sandmel,” “is dignity. ... I’ll bet that when you’re dying, you’re not going to think about the money you made. You’re going to think about your art.”

In the end, then, Mr. Clark had something fine and gleaming on which to dwell.