“I wanted my version to sound like a drag queen in a horny vaudeville act. I think we nailed it.”
That’s what Willi Carlisle writes about his cover of “Crying These Cocksucking Tears,” a tune by Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country (the band that made the first widely-released “gay country music” effort in 1973), off his latest album, Winged Victory.
So much about that song choice and description seems telling about Carlisle’s artistry. He is, deeply at heart, a soul-bearing, class-conscious folk troubadour baptized in the lineage of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. But he’s also a queer artist who has absorbed all of the wild and weird Americana of Harry Smith’s folk anthologies and sees not only himself, but a long, rich lineage of rural folk who were comfortable coloring outside the lines and finding their own space of resistance in the music they made.
