Words matter most to songwriter

Thursday, June 23, 2011 (updated , 2011 3:00 am)

By Carole Perkins 

 

If you get the pleasure of seeing Jonathan Byrd perform, don’t make the mistake of complimenting his music.

With careful politeness, the tall, lean cowboy and poet will let you know he is first and foremost a songwriter over a musician or performer.

It’s the reason why The Chicago Tribune named Byrd one of the top 50 songwriters of the last 50 years alongside Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and John Prine to name a few.
His new CD, “Cackalack,” premiered at No. 1 on Roots Music Report’s folk radio chart within weeks of its release earlier this year.

Byrd is weaving his way back from a four-month tour to promote “Cackalack,” which he calls his “homeland manifesto.”

“These songs are memoirs, photos from my family album,” Byrd says. “They are songs about real, everyday places. The Outer Banks, where wild ponies still run; Rockwell, where I sang 'Amazing Grace’ to my father’s ashes; Cape Fear, the namesake of the hospital where I was born; and 95 South, a great river of humanity that brings me rolling back from a hard tour.”

The Carrboro native was surrounded by music all his life, singing Southern gospel songs in the church where his father preached and his mother played piano.
“We had a piano in the house, and Mom gave me some lessons. I did really well, but I got bored with the workbook/lesson plan style,” Byrd says. “My brother had a guitar, and that was cooler.”

His brother, Gray, gave him his first guitar lesson at age 8, and he later learned music theory in his high school jazz class. But when he got his own guitar, Byrd was hooked.

“Once I got my own guitar, I found a place to put all my teen angst, but it didn’t help my schoolwork at all,” he says. “I probably set records for non-attendance and spent a lot of time running around in the deep woods of western Orange County.”

After a four-year stint in the Navy, Byrd spent time in Virginia Beach playing in a rock band, and then moved back to Carrboro where some friends told him about Rockbridge Festival, an old-time fiddler’s convention in Buena Vista, Va. That trip became a life-changing experience.

“It changed my life, and it changed my music, just banging away on an A chord for hours at a time and sipping corn liquor,” Byrd says. “I didn’t know the songs, and I didn’t care.

“Whatever these people had a hold of, I wanted some of it. It shot straight down into my veins like lightning and made my hair stand up on end. The music was intense, lyrically cut down to the bone.”

With a determination to write songs that “sounded old not because they were old but because they were written in an old style,” Byrd wrote tunes such as “Velma,” the story of the woman who killed his grandfather . Velma was a friend of the family when Byrd’s grandmother died in 1969.

“Six months later, my grandfather, Jennings Paul Barfield, married Velma,” Byrd says. “Two years into their marriage, Velma killed with arsenic poisoning. About six years went by, and Velma poisoned her boyfriend. She eventually confessed to killing her own mother and a few more people. She was executed in 1984.”

Byrd started touring in 2000 as a solo performer, winning the North Carolina Songwriters CoOp Song Contest in Carrboro that year and the coveted New Folk Competition at the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas in 2003.

As Byrd makes his way across the country, from camping out in the Texas hill country to meeting with publishers and managers in Nashville, Tenn., he’s looking forward to coming home. He is excited to do the simple things in his life, much like the subject matter of his songs: mowing the grass and playing with his little boy.

“It feels really great to be going home, although it doesn’t feel any closer yet,” Byrd says from the road. “I think nothing but my driveway will do.”

Contact Carole Perkins at CPGuilford@aol.com