Seven years ago, much-traveled musician David Lynn Jones sat at a piano on his Arkansas farm and, in less than half an hour, wrote two-thirds of a song.
Inspired by Southeast Asian refugees whose emaciated faces and empty hands pleaded from the covers of newsmagazines, he ”got to thinking about what the Statue of Liberty says about `Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free . . . .`
”The whole song,” he says, ”came off that line, having to do with what was promised and what was delivered-without throwing mud on us any more than on the people who came here expecting us to give them something.”
If you recognize the above as a description of Willie Nelson`s 1986 hit
”Living In the Promiseland,” go to the head of the class.
But the song had to be finished before it could become a hit, and that didn`t happen for a couple of years.
”I abandoned it, didn`t like it,” recalls Jones, whose Nashville-recorded debut LP ”Hard Times on Easy Street” has just been released by Mercury/PolyGram Records.
”Then I sold a bunch of songs to a publishing company, and I had to get together all the titles I had-finished or unfinished-because this company wanted everything that hadn`t already been cut. So I had to demo (make demonstration records of) the stuff, and about 10 minutes before the demo session I wound up writing the end of the thing.”
Even that didn`t end the song`s quest for public notice, though. Two or three more years had to pass before a tape of it finally made its way through four people to get to Nelson.
All of which goes to show that a songwriter often must wait a long time for success-and, conversely, that a good one who keeps writing rarely waits forever.
A couple of months ago, a standing-room-only crowd of music business insiders jammed Nashville`s Music Row Showcase to hear a highly touted new recording artist whom Waylon Jennings, with comparisons to Kris Kristofferson, introduced that night as ”the next leader of the new generation”-David Lynn Jones.
”It`s like a dream come true,” Jones says of the praise. In his case, that seemingly hackneyed clause is no cliche; he has been dreaming a long time. And his is no usual show-business dream.
In 1976, he wrote a country hit titled ”Heart Don`t Fail Me Now” for singer Randy Cornor, only to turn away from mainstream country songwriting in disgust. He didn`t want to be just the usual hit country songwriter and singer, he decided.
He wanted to be an innovator, a Bob Dylan or a Hank Williams who would write and sing ”the truth,” he says.
”In the early `70s, I was writing about getting my heart broken, which had never happened,” he goes on to explain. ”I`d turn the situation around and write about it as if I was the one who had gotten hurt, but I wasn`t. I was always the one who walked.
”So I wanted to find a way to write about what I felt.”
To do so, he gave up a profitable, $1,000-a-week job singing in nightclubs in Houston and returned home to write songs and raise horses in little Bexar, Ark., where he had grown up with a postmaster-farmer father and a mother who was a sometime Nazarene preacher.
Beside his picture in the high school annual, he remembers, the editors put the caption, ”He never let his studies interfere with his education.”
”That really sums up my whole life,” he adds. ”Knowledge is everywhere, and if your ears are open you hear it, and you can`t help but absorb some of it.”
He absorbed it in a lot of places. After high school, he took a highway department job for a while, then did some carpentry work and a stint at dairying.
But since age 13 he had been playing music in bars (”it would`ve been a peach-tree limb for me if my mother had known”), and in 1965, during his sophomore year in high school, a trio he assembled won a three-state talent contest.
Around age 20, having already written songs for several years, he quit his non-musical work and began playing bass with a road band in bars and lounges across the nation. He also did a lot of Houston studio session work, from which he eventually graduated into the top nightclub scene.
”My last job in Houston, I was the featured singer with the biggest band in town, about 10 pieces, at the biggest club in town, which seated about 1,200 people,” he recalls.
Except for one summer-long recording project, a tape of which got Jones signed by country-rocker Charlie Daniels` publishing company for a while, he has spent most of the last decade in Arkansas writing songs whose lyrics strike a listener like lightning, his rock-influenced music like thunder.
Filled with the wry humor and mundane tragedy of real life, these songs concern such people as Jones` truck-driving older sister Bonnie Jean; such things as telephone calls he used to make home to his mother from the road;
and such attitudes and ideals as the cowboy ones he has revered from childhood.
Among the latter, ”High-Ridin` Heroes”-on which Waylon Jennings joins him in a duet-contains a line about a hard-drinking old cowboy that is characteristically eloquent, simple and unforgettable: ”Fallin` off the wagon and under the wheels.”
There is even a highly unorthodox gospel song, on which Jones is backed by Lynn Anderson, titled ”Valley of a Thousand Years.” It has to do with Jones` non-denominational belief that the world is self-destructing.
”You can see it,” he says. ”Whether you want to take the Christian Bible at face value or whatever, its point has been made and proven time after time. You read history, and it`s as obvious as the nose on your face.
”I think everybody has a responsibility-the same responsibility I feel I have-to try to make a difference. We`re all supposed to grow and get better and smarter. What we`re trying to do is get back to the Garden of Eden, which is what `Valley of a Thousand Years` is about.”
Jones` album is no religious diatribe. He notes the LP`s strong doses of humor and adds that he had no wish to ”bombard people, storm `em with message.”
But neither is it stereotypical country cheatin`, drinkin` and cryin`-in- your-cocktail fare. Waylon Jennings` ”leader of the next generation” says that kind of country is passe.
”Randy Travis is having success with that, and there`ll always be a place for it, but in the real world, that kind of music is over,” Jones contends. ”Nobody, outside the few really die-hard, country-Nashville kind of fans, wants to hear that.
”I think too much of the time country music has been a real negative thing, glorifying the blues of people. We all want to sing the blues sometimes, but not all the time, and there`s been too many times in country music when that was all you heard; if you weren`t beer-drinking and two-stepping, you weren`t happening.
”Now, though, the world is talking about alcoholism and drugs in a different way: how it`s a big thing not to drown your troubles, how you need to face `em and deal with `em. That`s the new faith of all people, and I think if country music can`t see that-if it refuses to grow and go beyond that-then I think it`s shortchanging the public.
”There`ll always be a place for that kind of stuff, but it`s not the future of music.”
What is, then?
”Truth.”
