The Great Lost Career of Marty Brown

Posted on April 28, 2011 by chimesfreedom
http://www.chimesfreedom.com/

I am fascinated when I read about people who traveled around the United States in the early and mid-twentieth century discovering great blues musicians and folk songs. The music was always there, but more of it might have dwelled permanently in obscurity had the music not been recorded. Those tales seem stuck in the past, because with modern technology and the Internet almost anyone can post something on YouTube.

But there remains talented artists who fall through the cracks, leaving one to wonder if the future may hold a revival for some late in their careers or after they are dead — modern legends who are ghosts to us, just as Robert Johnson’s image and music embrace us across time. I hope that some day the world will rediscover Marty Brown.

Marty Brown had some success in the 1990s with several outstanding albums. In 1990, he released his debut album, High And Dry, which was not a big hit but did modestly well. One music critic gave the album an A+, saying Brown is “the sweetest surprise to ride the train in a long, long time and so authentically country he probably still has a tick in his navel.” Small radio stations played his songs, but the big country radio stations ignored him, opting for less twangy artists. Brown’s voice and his heartbreak songs led writers to compare him to Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers, such as on the title song to the album. But I first heard of Brown when I saw the video for “Every Now and Then,” perhaps playing on VH-1 or CMT, with his Everly Brothers-type vocals.

Marty Brown was born in 1965 in the tiny Ohio River tobacco farming community of Maceo, Kentucky featured in the above video. He began writing his own songs when he was fourteen, sneaking away with a friend to play music at honky-tonk bars. Later, he began making numerous trips to Nashville seeking a record deal while sleeping in an alley on Music Row. In 1991, the CBS news magazine show 48 Hours featured the artist in a story on country music, leading to his record deal with MCA.

During the Autumn of 1991, Entertainment Weekly and People Magazine described Brown’s tour to promote High and Dry as he rode in the record company’s 1969 Cadillac convertible to perform at fairs and Wal-Marts throughout the South. At each Wal-Mart, he performed on a small stage in a store aisle with little amplification. Fans brought him homemade cookies and fishing lures. At that time, the 26-year-old was already divorced with custody of two kids and living with his parents. Just months before starting the tour, he was working as a plumber’s helper, making $5 an hour. While on his first tour, he stated that his goals were to buy his dad a bean field, put his kids through college, get a nice trailer for himself, and “not live no highfalutin life style.”

The comparisons to Hank Williams continued. Somewhere around this time, Brown was filmed backstage at the Grand Ole Opry singing Hank’s “Moanin’ the Blues” for a German documentary about the country-music legend.

In 1993, Brown tried to reach a wider audience with the more diverse Wild Kentucky Skies, which is one of my favorite albums. The album features break-up songs like “It Must Be the Rain,” love songs like “God Knows,” and a folk ballad about his grandmother’s death, “She’s Gone,” which would not be out of place on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. During this time, he toured with Jimmie Dale Gilmore. The title song, below, features a more lush production than a lot of his other honky-tonk songs, but there is still an aching country sound. One of his family members told a story about how Brown kept the Nashville Symphony Orchestra waiting the morning of the recording because he had a craving for a Big Mac, but then he nailed the song on the second take. “Wild Kentucky Skies” should be the official Kentucky state song.

In 1994, Brown released another excellent album, Cryin’ Lovin’ Leavin’, making a run of three outstanding albums in four years. AllMusic rates each of these three albums 4-5 stars out of 5. Brown did not sound like slick Nashville country, but the record company still could be hopeful because it was the early 1990s when other neotraditionalist and alternative country artists like Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam were breaking through and building audiences. Brown received some critical acclaim, but again the sales were not as high as the record company wanted. MCA Records dropped him.

Brown then signed with the independent label Hightone and released Here’s to the Honky Tonks in 1996. For the most part, Brown wrote or co-wrote most of the songs on his four albums, and on Here’s to the Honky Tonks, he co-wrote almost all of them. The CD again garnered critical praise but weak sales. He performed one of the songs from the album, “You Can’t Wrap Your Arms Around a Memory,” on Prime Time Country on TNN, where he also explained that he was inspired to write the song while watching The Honeymooners late at night.

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Brown Throws Hat in Country Music Ring

By RANDY LEWIS
LOS ANGELES TIMES TIMES STAFF WRITER
http://www.latimes.com/
March 18, 1992

Ask a man about his politics, you might learn what his parents were like. Ask about his religion, you'll probably discover what church he grew up in. But if you want to ascertain the very essence of a man--that unique thing that sets him apart--try asking about his hat.

"I bought that when I was 16 years old, working in a grocery store and making $90 a week," recalled country-music newcomer Marty Brown, talking about the crumpled, camel-colored cowboy hat that seems as integral to his persona as his earnest honky-tonk yodel and gee-whiz humility.

"I was entering a talent show. I went to the Western wear store and found this one, but it cost $80. Well, I bought it anyway and took it home . . . but I didn't like how (the man at the store) shaped it.

"I got out the teakettle, put some water in it, got the steam going real good and held the hat over the kettle," Brown continued in the sweet Kentucky drawl he developed growing up in Maceo, a tiny town in the northwest section of the Bluegrass State. "I tied it up with my work tie to keep it bent, then I sprayed it with hair spray to keep it that way.

"I was in Nashville (recently) and a hat maker offered to make me another one just like it for $500, but he just couldn't catch it right."

Brown's approach to music--he's a honky-tonk singer in the classic Hank Williams mold--is a lot like his approach to hats: it may not be the most efficient or the most glamorous, but as long as it makes him happy, that's the way he'll do it.

Just 26, Brown, who plays the Coach House tonight with maverick Jimmie Dale Gilmore (see accompanying story), was the toast of Nashville for a time in 1991. CBS-TV's "48 Hours" featured him prominently in a segment on the country-music explosion, and record labels were bidding anxiously against one another to sign this unknown farm boy who had slept in the back alleys of Music City before the words "Trust Jesus," scrawled on a sidewalk, led to his discovery.

He'd been making trips to Nashville since he was a teen-ager, whenever he had enough time and money from jobs that included harvesting tobacco--"that's hot, sweaty work."

"I'd go to bed at night, crying myself to sleep," he remembers. "I'd ask the Lord why he gave me this talent to write these songs just to have them sit in a drawer."

He said he was on the verge of throwing in the towel--he'd just spent the night sleeping on an air-conditioning grate--when he saw that sidewalk with "Trust Jesus" on it. He looked up and noticed he was standing outside the offices of Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), a performance rights agency.

He'd been there once before, years earlier, and he'd met an executive who encouraged him to write from the heart. Asking for the same man, he was welcomed in, given an audition and within two days he found himself singing for officials at several major labels.

He signed with MCA, and his debut album, "High and Dry," has earned some strong critical notices. It hasn't caught fire with radio programmers, but that hasn't dampened his spirits.

"It's just a matter of time," Brown said from a Pizza Hut in Nashville. "George Jones gave me some good advice one time, and that's what's kept me staying at it so long, and kept me true to country music. He said it's his fans that make him, and that once you develop those die-hard fans, they'll stay with you forever. I want longevity. I'm gonna be around a long time."

Actually, Brown's most obvious influences predate Jones and Merle Haggard--the most imitated singers around Nashville these days--stretching all the way back to the two most towering figures in all of country music: Hank Williams Sr. and Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman.

In terms of both material and execution, many of Brown's songs sound as if they could have been lifted straight off a honky-tonk jukebox from the first half of this century. The title tune of his album is about a forlorn man who gets dumped and juiced up and is so devastated he can't summon even a single tear. "Nobody Knows" closes the album on a note of the utter loneliness that lies at the bottom of depression.

Radio and nightclubs seem to be emphasizing songs that are "upbeat and positive," but Brown rejects the suggestion that his music is a throwback to a time, and an audience, that have passed.

"Country music that's good country music--it don't never die," he said. "That's what I chose to listen to: early Johnny Cash, early Elvis Presley, Hank Sr., George Jones, Merle Haggard, and my biggest influence, the Everly Brothers."

Brown had an older brother who drove him to school and made him listen to such rock groups as Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Seger and Foreigner in the car. But as Brown tells it, his mother had laid the foundation for his musical tastes years earlier.

"They tell me I was listening to Hank Sr. when I was in my momma's womb," he said. "She loved Hank Sr. and Jimmie Rodgers. She remembers where she was at the day (Williams) died. . . . She was bawling all day long. She remembers her father came out and said, 'There she goes, crying over that Williams boy again.'

"My music is real," he continued, after pausing to apologize to another Pizza Hut customer for having hogged the pay phone for some 45 minutes. "I'm not trying to be something that I'm not, and there's a lot of that around--people throwing on a cowboy hat and boots as soon as they get a record deal. My heart and soul is in country. If I have to come through the back door, I will."

He's not kidding. Last summer, he did a six-week, 12-state tour--of Wal-Mart stores.

"Every Wal-Mart I'd go to, I wondered, 'What if I go and there's nobody there?' But every one there were a couple hundred people there, in with the cameras and the VCRs and they seemed to know everything about me, and knew all the words to my songs. They'd say, 'We saw your momma on the Ralph Emery' " show on the Nashville Network, one media outlet that has been hospitable toward Brown and his music.

"I'd never been nowhere--except across the Ohio River to Indiana. . . . I caught the biggest bass I ever caught, got to see the ocean for the first time (on that tour). I got out there on a jet ski and was chasing sea gulls. Now I get to go to California. It's a dream come true for me."

Helping to keep Brown on an even keel through the ups and downs of the music biz is his family: two children from a previous marriage he doesn't talk about much, and a fiancee who will become his wife this fall.

"I'm thankful I come from the background I come from," he said. "I'm gonna get married, I've got my two children. I could be playing anywhere, I've always got my kids and fiancee in the back of my head."