BY THOMAS CONNER
© Tulsa World In 1971, Willis Alan Ramsey cut his first record. The self-titled debut, released through Leon Russell's Tulsa-based Shelter Records, sold modestly, but it packed an influential wallop in Ramsey's adopted home state of Texas. That one record, it has been claimed, single-handedly spawned the alternative-Nashville stance that has made Austin, Texas, the so-called live music capital of the world. Just don't ask Ramsey when his next record will appear. "That's an area I really don't want to go to," he says, dodging the requisite inquiries about his work since that first — and, thus far, only — album ("Have you been writing all this time?" "Has anything been recorded?" "Will we ever see a second album?"). "Willis Alan Ramsey" remains the songwriter's one-hit wonder, and nearly 30 years later many musicians still invoke it as the fountainhead of their inspiration. A Ramsey show was the first concert a young Lyle Lovett ever attended, and he has reported that it inspired him to start writing songs. Lovett also has covered songs from that "Ramsey" album, as have such artists as Jimmy Buffett, America, Waylon Jennings, Sam Bush, Shawn Colvin, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Kate Wolf, Jerry Jeff Walker and, of course, the Captain and Tenille, who made Ramsey's "Muskrat Love" a Top 5 hit in 1976. Indeed, never has one batch of 11 songs had such stamina, and rarely does one find a songwriter so humble -- almost insecure — about such influence. While remaining enigmatic about his affairs during the last 29 years, Ramsey frequently writes off his initial experience to the pure luck of youth and happenstance. "I was just a kid knocking around," he said, in a rare interview last week, in which Ramsey eked out a tale of time, Tulsa and tenacity. Seeking Shelter Born in Birmingham, Ala., and raised in Dallas by his Georgia-native parents, Ramsey graduated high school and "got away as quick as I could." He dropped south to Austin where he explored some of the guitar-picking he'd been tinkering with. Ray Wylie Hubbard's fledgling band took notice of his skills and asked Ramsey to open some of its shows in 1969. "I was playing the UT coffee house, and I heard that Leon (Russell) and Gregg Allman were in town playing a festival and staying at the same hotel. So I walked in, knocked on both their doors and told them I thought they should give me a listen," Ramsey said. "It was a pretty asinine thing to do back then, and I guess they thought I was so cocky they gave me the chance. I played my songs for Leon and his roadie, and then for Gregg and (Allman Brothers guitarist) Dickey Betts, right there in their rooms." Both musicians heard promise in Ramsey's material, and both offered him contracts on their record labels — Allman's Atlanta-based Capricorn Records and Russell's Shelter, based then in Los Angeles. Ramsey sought Shelter — with possibly purely personal motives. "I've never really thought about this," Ramsey chuckled, "but I guess since my whole family was from Georgia I liked the idea of going to L.A. better than being closer to Atlanta." Mad dogs and Southerners Ramsey headed to L.A. to cut his record in Russell's home studio, "probably the first professional home studio anyone had in the world," he said. He was largely left to his own devices, as Russell had decided to move back to Tulsa. "At that point, Leon decided he'd had enough of North Hollywood and wanted to move back to Tulsa," Ramsey said. "He and Denny (Cordell, Russell's and Ramsey's producer and manager) had good luck with Shelter, so they took it home. Leon bought that whole block with a church on it and put in a studio . . . He left me in his L.A. place, so I got to learn how to work in a studio — by myself. I learned how to write in the studio. That's something Leon taught me: how to use the studio as a writing tool." Most of Ramsey's record was completed in L.A., with Russell helping out and adding piano to one track, "Goodbye Old Missoula." It was that work directly with Russell that made Ramsey feel every bit the lucky kid just knocking around. "I was a kid musically, and I was stretched and stretched to the point where I was way past my musical abilities," he said. "Leon would put you in a studio with Jim Keltner on drums, Carl Radle on bass and Don Preston on electric guitar, and he'd sit at the piano. He'd say, `Well, this song needs an acoustic guitar solo. Willis, why don't you just play a solo here.' I was 20 and not in the space where I could just do that on the spot yet. I was definitely over my head." Ramsey's record came out in 1972 and sold moderately -- not well enough to give Ramsey the escape he needed. Ramsey -- like nearly all Shelter artists, from Russell to Phoebe Snow — fell out with Cordell, but without big profits he couldn't get out of his Shelter contract. "I didn't have enough sales to be able to just leave and tell my lawyers to clean it up. Tom Petty did, Phoebe Snow did, I couldn't afford to," he said. So he sat out his contract — all eight years of it. By the time it ran out, it was 1980, Ramsey was in the doldrums of a divorce and had been all but forgotten by non-musicians. He bought some synthesizers and "fooled around with those," but he quickly found that there was no place for a shy, sensitive songwriter in the "Urban Cowboy" '80s. "I just didn't want to play in a place with a mechanical bull in it," Ramsey said. I will survive Since then, Ramsey says, cryptically, he's been writing. He wants to record again, but he's not sure he'll ever get to do it on his terms — which is the only way it'll happen, he said. "My No. 1 goal right now is to have more kids. No. 2 is to make more records," he said. "But making records these days requires a record label, and label budgets are small these days. That record of mine cost $80,000 to make, which would be about $300,000 in today's dollars. It was a pretty expensive first-time record in 1972. I'm not the kind of guy who can make a $30,000 record. It takes me longer. There's too much I want to do." He still performs around the region — "some old songs, some new" — drawing a sizeable cult following. He's even appeared on a record recently, coming out of the woodwork to sing on two Lovett records in the '90s, "Joshua Judges Ruth" and "I Love Everybody." Last year, Koch Records reissued "Willis Alan Ramsey" on CD, and the record has begun to find a fresh audience. "It still gets around," Ramsey said. "It's been a real work-horse all this time." Ramsey on Oklahoma Willis Alan Ramsey recorded his one and only record for Shelter Records back in Leon Russell's heyday. That meant hanging out in Tulsa at Russell's many area studios, where "you'd go to pick up the phone, and it would be George Harrison or someone," Ramsey said. Here are a few of his recollections and praise of his Okie counterparts: "I was in the process of finishing up my record and got to work with people like Leon and Jamie Oldaker. J.J. Cale took me in the studio. I was hanging out with guys like Gary Gilmore and Jesse Davis, both of whom played with Taj Mahal. Chuck Blackwell, too. Some pretty serious musicians came out of Tulsa. I mean, Jimmy Lee Keltner — he and Oldecker . . . if Tulsa can produce two drummers like that, well, they're the best, in my opinion. Those Tulsa boys raised me in the studio." "When I was playing the Cellar Door Club in (Washington) D.C., this long-haired kid would come sit on the back steps, and I'd get him in for free. He was going to the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. When he finally got up enough nerve to play the acoustic guitar for me, he turned out this amazing stuff. He said, 'What should I do with this?' and I said, 'I dunno, but you'd better do something.' It was Michael Hedges." "I still say this, and most people I know say it, too: Leon Russell is a musical genius. He still is. He's so incredibly talented, and he's a free thinker. Lots of Tulsans are . . . But I don't think he ever really scratched the surface of his ability." "It was in the '60s when I figured out I wanted to write and say some things. In New York, I found a book called Born to Win, a compilation of Woody Guthrie's songs, stories, poems, letters and drawings. It was this fabulous direct hit from his pen, with his own unique voice. Even when I think about that book today, it still really does motivate me. He was another free-thinking Okie. There was something about the way he could connect with the thought and deliver it to you totally unvarnished. So visceral, but so elegant . . . (My song) 'Boy From Oklahoma' is sort of a romanticized version of Woody." Comments are closed.
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Thomas Conner
These online "clips" reproduce a self-selection of my journalism (music etc) during the last 20+ years. It's a lotta stuff, but it only scratches the surface. I do not currently possess the time or resources to digitize the whole body of work. These posts are simply a bunch of pretty great days at the office. Archives
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