Hype Yourself: David Cantwell on Rodney Crowell's "The Houston Kid"
An excerpt from David's liner notes to the album's new reissue from Vinyl Me Please
I had the opportunity to write the liner notes for a new vinyl reissue of Rodney Crowell’s The Houston Kid, available now through the folks at Vinyl Me Please. Really proud of these, I have to say. Can’t share all of it with you, but here’s an excerpt from the intro. —DC
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Notes for The Houston Kid by David Cantwell
The conventional way of talking about The Houston Kid, Rodney Crowell’s 2001 release and the greatest achievement of his now half-century long career, is autobiographically. From this way of thinking, the album pretty straightforwardly looks back at Crowell’s life growing up in the poor white-working class parts of Houston, Texas in the 1950s and 1960s, the only child of J. W. and Cauzette Crowell’s tempestuous, dysfunctional union. Hearing The Houston Kid this way isn’t wrong, of course. But it is incomplete.
For starters, if it’s Crowell’s actual life story we’re after, we’d be better off reading Chinaberry Sidewalks: A Memoir, the book project he began around the same time but didn’t publish until 2011. For another thing, The Houston Kid is every bit as forward looking as it is backward glancing, and its details and effects are autobiographically inspired, sure, but also rife with exaggerations, omissions, and flat-out fictions. You know, art.
“I Walk the Line Revisited,” a song about hearing a Johnny Cash record and having your life changed, is The Houston Kid’s epicenter. Shaping that experience into a song, Crowell sings:
I’ve seen the Mona Lisa
I’ve heard Shakespeare read real fine
It’s just like hearing Johnny Cash sing “I Walk the Line”
There’s a sly tip of the hat there to Crowell’s friend and mentor Guy Clark, who in “Dublin Blues” a few years earlier had also namechecked The Mona Lisa, along with The David and hearing Doc Watson sing “Columbus Stockade Blues.” But the lyric also captures what we might as well call the Rodney Crowell Aesthetic: worldly and deeply rooted both, keenly aware of the supposed class conflict between highfalutin objets d’art and Sun Records singles, and eager to mix and match it all as needed.
“I Walk the Line Revisited” was released as a single to radio at the end of 1998, nearly a year and a half before The Houston Kid was released. The finished album was cut over several years at four Tennessee studios, on Crowell’s own dime, and he’d shopped the album to several major labels before landing with Sugar Hill. As he explained to Billboard, Crowell trusted that the rootsy indie was excited about the project precisely because it was “a special piece of work.” The bigger labels, he felt, were only interested in his new record “because of who you are.”
Who was he?
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Okay, that’s the opening. You’ll have to get with VMP if you’re interested in checking out the rest.
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I remember as a Country PD receiving the "I Walk the Line Revisited" single in '98 on the CDX service (that compiled all the current singles onto one CD for airplay every two weeks). I added it into medium rotation on the AM I was programming. The album, however, didn't come out until I'd left country and was the PD at an FM Oldies station. Thanks for jogging my memory! The Houston Kid is an incredible piece of work. Congrats on the liner notes. Love the opening!
Great album, great notes.