The Last Laugh

Willis Alan Ramsey is the most reluctant and least likely of Texas singer-songwriters. With the requisite three names (the calling card of most Texas singer-songwriters, from Townes Van Zandt to Robert Earl Keen, and, of course, serial killers), the dashing looks, the heroic narratives, and the memorable songs that became hits for others, he nearly defines the icon--nearly. Ramsey has made only one record, released exactly 28 years ago, and has lingered in the shadows ever since. But he never quite disappeared into the darkness. Those who know have never, ever forgotten.

Note this endorsement from The New York Times only weeks ago--a love letter, delivered nearly three decades after the fact by a writer named John Schulian. He's a Yankee whose heart was melted by a slab of Lone Star vinyl, presented to him by a girl from Texas who wanted to share with him her love for Willis Alan Ramsey, the man and the album. "Trace my fascination with Willis Alan Ramsey to a honky-tonk girl from Austin, Texas, a sweet hellion who coveted her reputation as a provider of favors," Schulian wrote in the Times, apropos of nothing. After all, Ramsey has but a single album to his credit--it was re-released in the summer of 1999 by Koch Records--and no more are forthcoming anytime soon. As Ramsey likes to say, ain't nothing wrong with the first record, so what point is there in making any more?

"What she gave me 28 years ago, however, was no mere kiss or longneck Lone Star," Schulian continued. "It was a freshly pressed album by Mr. Ramsey that marked both his debut and Austin's emerging musical confluence of hippies and rednecks. Only later would I realize that owning the album was also the equivalent of induction into a secret society."

Ramsey has hardly dropped from sight: He played a church coffeehouse in Hurst only last Saturday, and he will return to Dallas on December 29 with a performance at Poor David's Pub; he has also co-written two songs with Lyle Lovett, "North Dakota" and "That's Right (You're Not From Texas)." But hiding in plain sight has made him only more mythical--a cult leader.

Born in 1949 in Birmingham, Alabama, and forced to move to Texas 11 years later--"pretty much against [my] will," he says--Ramsey came to music through his musically gifted mother, a brother who collected rhythm-and-blues records, clear-channel radio broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry, and the black women who sang all day long and raised him as a boy. "We had maids back then--everybody in the South had maids--and they were singing all the time," he recalls. "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."

That vision of a dispossessed South--romantic, sensual, and inwardly tragic--pervades Ramsey's music. "I might go crazy/I might go blind/But I'm never goin' back to that honeysuckle vine," he sang on his 1972 debut; no matter that the song is a lark about a randy honeybee. For Ramsey, Southern flowers flourish amid the refuse.

Ramsey's family moved to Dallas in the summer of 1960, and he has always loathed the city. "In the South," he says, "if you acted like you were better than someone else, the whole group took you down a peg. In Dallas, you'd find people always acting better than everybody else." Starting in the late 1960s, Ramsey, still in his teens, began making a name in the Dallas, Houston, and Austin clubs, drawing his inspiration from James Taylor and Laura Nyro and getting the performing nerve from Texas country-folk singers such as Ray Wylie Hubbard and Steven Fromholz.

"There was the Sand Mountain in Houston," Ramsey remembers, "the Checkered Flag in Austin; the Rubiayat in Dallas; Café York in Denver; the Out Post in Red River, New Mexico. You had a string of clubs you could play if you were young and enthusiastic and willing to make a spectacle of yourself. At that time, it was a listening thing, before all the progressive-country bullshit. It was in the tradition of the Newport Folk Festival or the better rooms on the East Coast, the Cellar Door or the Bitter End."

Willis Alan Ramsey, his one and only album, at once captures that intimate milieu of folk songs and stories, then leaps well ahead of its time, owing in part to Ramsey's idiosyncratic tastes and a fortuitous encounter with Leon Russell. "I was booked into a motel called the Villa Capri in Texas, and staying at that hotel were The Allman Brothers, Leon Russell, It's a Beautiful Day, and Pacific Gas & Electric. I saw their show and made it a point to knock 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.