Townes is dead and Guy is co-writing these days. Eric Taylor is drinking Hennessy cognac, watching people watch him, then flipping through a black notebook where he keeps the songs.
It's Anderson Fair in Houston, or the Sandwich Factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, or a house concert in Jackson, Tennessee, or Eddie's Attic in Atlanta. And people are waiting on him. Maybe someone works up the nerve to request "Deadwood, South Dakota."
"'Deadwood'," he says. The title is "Deadwood." Nanci Griffith recorded it and called it "Deadwood, South Dakota," and Eric says her take on it was top-dollar but the title is "Deadwood."
Then he flips some more, puts down the drink, fingerpicks piano intervals on his guitar until he feels like singing, then finally begins the story: Well, the good times scratched a laugh from the lungs of the young men...
Nanci Griffith and Lyle Lovett and Joan Baez and June Tabor. Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and Houston, Texas. And none of this matters a bit, as the story unfolds.
And it's not the story, it's just one of them. There's a black notebook full of them. Griffith says they're great, and she's not even married to him anymore. Lovett learned a lot of them, and a lot from them. Baez called to get the chords to "Strong Enough For Two" right, Tabor recorded two of them, and Clark and Van Zandt...well, they were around. Hell, they were the kingpins around Houston, at least when Lightnin' Hopkins wasn't in the room. And none of this matters a bit, as the story unfolds. Man, Eric Taylor will get on with a story.
He's got eleven of them on his new Scuffletown album (out March 20 on Eminent Records), though two of them are Townes'. One's about a family that sticks together until the well comes in and allows them to disperse. Two are about murder and escape. Another's about a Southern albino. They're all good, and that's nothing new. Eric Taylor's been getting on with stories for years.
Eric Taylor: I was probably about six or seven, in Greenville, South Carolina. One night, I was standing at the end of the street, along with many others on the block, looking into the night sky at a beautiful moving curtain of colors. There were obviously some weird atmospheric conditions allowing a glimpse of the aurora borealis. I had no idea what it was at the time, but I heard someone say that it was the Northern Lights. Northern Lights? I remember thinking, "How come the Yankees get all the good shit?" Mickey Mantle and the Northern Lights. Fuck me runnin'.
Eric Taylor was born. The year was 1949, and the city was Atlanta. He soon moved to Greenville, spending formative years learning things he later dismissed.
"My old man was a tried and true racist," he said. "He would have been a tried and true racist if he'd lived in Boston, just like the tried and true racists of Boston would be if they lived in South Carolina. Certainly, he was consumed with it, and he demanded the company of his family. My old man was not about the South, but he liked thinking he was. I stood and postured along with the rest of the children, and used 'nigger' to define any and all that confused and angered me. When I grew out of that, as many do, the seeming separation was personal, familial and lasting."
As a child, Taylor played Yankees and Rebs. Like Cowboys and Indians, only Yankees and Rebs. He attended Stone Elementary School and visited his grandmother, and once in a while he went with his dad to a place called the Cotton Bottom Lounge.
The Cotton Bottom parking lot was where his mother once fired a gun in anger, and the Cotton Bottom jukebox was where white men would sometimes forgo the Faron Young stuff and play Lightnin' Hopkins' "Short Haired Woman". They'd play it for a laugh, chortling at the part about buying rats all the time. Taylor was in there with his father one time and heard this going on. That was the blues, for the first time, and it was a big deal to a nine-year-old kid who had no damn business being in the Cotton Bottom Lounge.
"I thought it was great," he said. "Great."
Taylor wrote about his father later on. Killed him off in "Charlie Ray McWhite", referenced him in "Walkin' Back Home", and offered a clear, pained recollection in "Depot Light", a song set in Greenville's since-demolished Southern Railway depot. That song's full of lines. "He gives his coat to the one-armed man/Empty sleeves and safety pins/And the all-night waitress just talks too much/So he steals her spoon and her coffee cup." Denice Franke says Eric Taylor is always true to the line. "We'll be home by nine if we take the tracks/And if she'd come home, boy, I'd take her back."
"You take them laigs of yorn right there," he said, pointing, as if there were some question as to which legs we were there to consider. "I cain't see as I ever seed laigs jest like them. But them is the Lord's laigs an He's seed them laigs and He's laid His hand on them laigs.
- Harry Crews, A Childhood
Take my legs, man, I think they'll tell it best/They turned me 'round, and then I headed west.
-Eric Taylor, "Sweet Sunny South"
There was no interstate when Eric Taylor moved with his mother to what was then rural central Georgia and what is now suburban Atlanta. No Beatles, either.
"I had friends I liked hanging out with, and we learned to play guitar together," he said. "We were just dumb little kids, and we didn't even know you needed an amplifier for an electric guitar. We'd seen the surfing movies and none of those guys had amps. My cousin, his mother took him to Atlanta to buy an electric guitar. They brought it home, and it took my friend's brother to say, 'You stupid little shit.' That's how we figured out about the amp."
Then came the Beatles, and high school. Poetry, R&B and folk music. Richie Havens at the 12th Gate Coffee House. Tim Hardin, the Temptations, Phil Ochs and Dylan on the record player. Accepted at Georgetown, Eric Taylor never accepted the acceptance. He stuck around D.C. for six months or so, trying to decide what to do. He left, and ended up in Texas, in Houston, in 1970.
Eric Taylor: I first saw Townes at Mac Webster's apartment in 1970. There was a guy face down on the bed there at Mac's, I mean literally face down, hands up to his face. I didn't think much of it, but Mac said it was Townes and he might be sleeping. The next day, Mac comes to this place where I'm working [washing dishes] called the Family Hand, and this guy Townes is with him. I think every girl in the place knew him. He was sweet, and kind of goofy, doing card and coin tricks for the girls, none of which worked, and that seemed to delight him even more.
I think it was the next night that he played the show there at the Family Hand. Goes without sayin', I had never heard or seen anything like it. His guitar playing was as clean as any I'd seen. That slap flatpick thing that he did so well. His voice fit the songs that he was singing -- and I don't want to sound weepy here -- the best fucking songs, without a doubt. Spiritual. There were a couple of members of the Bandito motorcycle gang in there that night and he had these guys cryin', man. They were actually tearing up about these songs. I saw Lightnin' play there the next night.
Have you seen the smokin' Lightnin
Hit the music in the back?
And have you seen Rodriguez
Playing with his cane?
-- Eric Taylor, "Sweet Sunny South"
So there was the Harlem Renaissance, and there was San Francisco's Beat revolution and Dylan's Greenwich Village, and then there was Houston in the early 1970s, and that's no joke. Townes and Guy and Eric and an odd lawyer/genius songwriter named David Rodriguez, and gathering spots the Family Hand, Sand Mountain, the Old Quarter, Liberty Hall and Anderson Fair. Lightnin' Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb. Vince Bell. Rodney Crowell, first with ears open to Van Zandt's sets at Sand Mountain, later as half of a duo that played at Popeye's supper club. Steve Earle wore denim shirts, trying hard to look like Guy Clark, and took in everything Townes said or sang.
There were more, too. Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, Robert Earl Keen and Darden Smith came to listen to all this. Eventually they were sharing stages with their mentors.
Among Taylor's tutors was Mike Condray, who ran the Family Hand and Liberty Hall. Taylor often worked for Condray, and that work often involved the aforementioned dishwashing. It could also mean running the lights (he tells a great story about getting cussed out by an uncomfortably spotlighted John Lee Hooker), or it could involve going door-to-door in an (ultimately successful) attempt to secure apricot brandy for Mississippi Fred McDowell.
"What Condray offered me for years of my life was like college," Taylor said, "He'd say, 'You need to be over here, looking at this. Sometimes I was too stupid to know what I was in the midst of."
Hopkins provided the graduate study. Taylor watched him play, listened to his advice ("Quit watching my fingers and watch the strings, boy"), observed him getting knocked offstage (literally, and violently) by an irate Big Mama Thornton, played bass for him once, and visited him at his modest residence.
"He always refused to get any of our names right," Taylor said. "He called me Larry, and then I'd correct him, say, 'It's Eric, Lightnin,' and he'd say, 'I know your name, Larry.' He called Rex Bell 'Rick.'"
Clark's line is that Hopkins' attitude towards the younger, paler Houston musicians was one of tolerance, not encouragement. But the blues legend did show Taylor some tunings, one of which Taylor used to write a tale of embittered philandering called "Hey Little Ryder". Later, Taylor taught the tuning to Lovett, who used it to write "The Waltzing Fool", "Old Friend" and "The Fat Girl".
Taylor's first real gig in Houston was not received as any sort of historical turning point. It was, however, amusing for Van Zandt.
Eric Taylor: It was at the Family Hand. During that time, I was playing a version of "Will The Circle Be Unbroken", and I think it was probably just terrible. Townes claimed to like that song as I did it, and he talked me into playing it twice in the set. I mean, back in the warmup room he actually said, "Man, I like the way you do that song, and I think you should play it twice tonight."
"Really?"
"Yeah, man, really. I think it would be cool. Just play it twice."
"I don't know, man."
"Well, all I'm sayin' is, it's a great song and you ought to play it twice. And if you don't, I will."
So, when it came time to go on, sure enough, I played it twice. Finished it and did it again! Of course, the audience is looking around and thinkin', "This poor bastard." Well, when I got off Townes was laughin' his ass off, and Condray was reading me the riot act.
When Townes got up to play, he was still laughing and said, "I want to thank Eric for playing a medley of his hit."
Hey now, look comin' through that mission door
It's Tokay Sam and his best friend, Dollar Bill Hines
I ain't really a preacher, I'm Tommy the Frenchman
And I like Lucky Strikes, Jesus and wine
-- Eric Taylor, "Mission Door"
It sounds like a largely joyous, if at times problematic apprenticeship. And it was, and it wasn't. It was music and drugs and drink, laughter and all-night friends. It was also a busted marriage and an unhealthy dose of wind-whipped poverty. Taylor's 1995 self-titled album included a song called "Mission Door", which brush-sketched characters such as Dollar Bill Hines, Tokay Sam and Blind Sally (who "talked back to the preacher," saying she "can't tell one sin from another"). Some listeners assumed Taylor had once worked with the mission in some capacity.
"No, I didn't work with these people as a counselor or something," he said. "I lived in the same mission house they did, down on San Jacinto Street. Those were people I met not long after I came to Houston. Bill [Hines] just wanted to know if I'd worked that day -- you know, day labor shit. If I said, 'Yeah,' he had a smile on his face because he knew we'd have something to eat and a bottle to drink."
Once in a while, Taylor would take off on what he calls "sabbaticals" from an ultimately doomed marriage. During one of these, he followed a carnival and wound up in Aiken, South Carolina. There he met a fiddling juggler named Kasaban and had a brief but fruitful encounter with Piedmont blues harpist Peg Leg Sam.
"I hung out on the outskirts of that little carnival for a couple of days, and he was there every day," Taylor said. "One night, I was playing guitar and we got to sharing a few drinks and talking."
Peg had experience as a medicine show draw man, which meant he knew how to attract a crowd.
"A lot of it was cut-up stuff, like minstrel stuff," Taylor said. "I thought he was blind, but I guess he wasn't. He had a real fucked-up looking eye, I know that. He could roll his eyes around back in his head. He'd do a little bit of a song, then whistle real loud, dance and kind of walk off."
The drinking and talking resulted in the loosest sort of co-writing session. Taylor was working up a version of the traditional blues song "Delia", and he collected a verse from Peg: Two little imps, black as tar/Tryin' to get to heaven in a 'lectric car/Wheel just slipped on down the hill/They never went to heaven, went to Jacksonville.
That verse later appeared within Lovett's "Since The Last Time", with the liner notes crediting Taylor for suggesting the lyrics.
The oral tradition asserts itself in strange and unpredictable ways, and the same can be said for Taylor's rambling, informal, blues-based education. He ended up with a guitar style much cleaner than Lightnin's, yet much closer to the marrow than the fingerpicking used by, for instance, Nick Drake. Lots of pulls and bends, anchored by a thumb that rang alternating root notes in a manner similar to that of a banjo player (a similarity he attributes to a particularly useful study session with John Hartford).
His lyric writing was also informed but not confined by what he heard from bluesmen, as he combined linguistic economy with a Kerouac reader's blitzkrieg vocabulary. This, more than anything, is the through-line connecting the songs of Townes and Guy and Eric, and it's the part of their music in which Hopkins' ghost looms largest. Lines like Clark's "He was an elevator man in a cheap motel/In exchange for the rent on a one-room cell," or Van Zandt's "Ask the boys down in the gutter/They don't lie 'cause you don't matter", or Taylor's "Hit the spotlight runnin'/With legs so long and pale" -- well, the lines are what matter, and that's where it becomes clear just what the blues mean to those lines.
Back in Houston, the middle of the decade brought the first recorded evidence of songwriter Eric Taylor. A Bicentennial sampler of Anderson Fair acts called Through The Night Darkly (it goes for $50 every now and again on eBay) found three of Taylor's songs alongside works by Don Sanders, Bill Cade, Stephen Jarrard and Lynn Langham. Included among Taylor's selections was the disconcerting "Memphis Midnight, Memphis Morning", a song Lovett later recorded on his Step Inside This House album. In 1977, Taylor's "Dollar Matinee" won a Kerrville Folk Festival songwriting contest; 1978 found him singing the song with Griffith onstage at the festival and on her debut album, There's A Light Beyond These Woods.
Also in 1978, Texas A&M student Lyle Lovett heard Taylor play at Anderson Fair. "I remember the imagery, and the detail with which he wrote," Lovett said. "And the thing I took from watching him play guitar is the idea that the songs could be complete without other instruments."
Lovett absorbed myriad late-night guitar lessons. Griffith (an underrated guitarist) did the same, and went so far as to adapt Taylor's method of constructing sturdy homemade thumbpicks.
"Eric came along where he was the kid after Guy and Townes," said James Gilmer, a percussionist in Lovett's band whose first recorded work was on Taylor's 1981 Shameless Love album. "Then Lyle and Nanci and those people came up, and they were looking to Eric to help hone their craft."
And...shit. Here's where Eric Taylor often gets depicted as a cracker Tee-tot to Lyle's tall-haired Hank Williams, or where his "influence" on Nanci Griffith seems like a bigger deal than the songs in his black notebook. That's the problem with all this. Because, sure, Taylor was both a hero and a friend to Lovett, and Lovett opened gigs for him and wrote an article on him, and one day they drove Lovett's parents' 1968 Buick Wildcat square into Robert Earl Keen's house, just for a laugh. And, yes, he and Griffith were married during some of her early years as a recording artist.
But defining Taylor merely as a precursor to Griffith or Lovett is as useless as defining Lightnin' Hopkins merely as a precursor to Eric Taylor. The songs, the lines, the guitar work: That's what attracted those folks to Taylor in the first place, and that's what's still there, in a vacuum or in a continuum. In a black notebook within a white pickup truck with Texas tags, on a Louisiana highway on the way to a house concert or a North Carolina radio show or a Shreveport liquor store.
It's like the time I heard the Mona Lisa
Break down and wail
I told her I'd done a little hard cryin' like that
Like that myself
-- Eric Taylor, "Game Is Gone"
Shameless Love, Taylor's first album, came out in 1981. Made for John & Laurie Hill's Featherbed Productions without an established record company's support, it is a rare artifact and an album marked by superb songs, played by musicians including Gurf Morlix, future Lovett cohorts James Gilmer and John Hagen, and elusive guitarist John Grimaudo (whose "Dress Of Laces" was a highlight of Griffith's Other Voices, Too album). Taylor now regrets the lead vocals' amphetamine lisps and some of the period-piece electric guitar sounds, but "Joseph Cross" and "Charlie Ray McWhite" remain two of his most stunning works.
As Shameless Love began to make its way into the Texas folk canon, taking a place in line behind Clark's Old No. 1, Van Zandt's Live At The Old Quarter and Willis Alan Ramsey's self-titled album, Taylor began withdrawing from the music business. He co-produced Griffith's Poet In My Window (released in 1982), played around the state, got divorced and vanished.
"Are you talking about when I pulled off drugs in '83?" he asked. "Is that what you mean? What made me do that? I think pretty much the same reason that everybody does. People can give you a lot of fiery reasons as to why you pull off of something like that. The thing for me is that it didn't work, and I was dying. There wasn't anything left. There's not room for anything else when you're strung out."
This was not a quick trip to a rehab center, or a year spent away from the temptations of the road. This was, as the blues songs say, gone, solid gone. Years passed. Taylor became a licensed drug counselor, worked with other addicts and swore off the music business.
"Whenever it would come up, he'd say he didn't miss it at all," said Denice Franke. "He just came to a place where he'd had enough. He was very clear about that when he would talk to people."
Lovett, whose career as a national recording artist began during this time, didn't even broach the subject of returning to music with Taylor. "Oh, gosh no," Lovett said. "I wouldn't get in his business like that."
After awhile, some people assumed Taylor had died. If anything, his audience was expanding at the time, largely as a result of the efforts of Lovett and Griffith. She recorded his "Storms" and "Deadwood" during this period, as well as the co-written "Ghost In The Music"; Lovett often played "Whooping Crane" in concert, and he spoke of Taylor in interviews.
Texas folk duo (Doug) Hudson and (Denice) Franke would play "Joseph Cross" and other Taylor songs as well. British folk singer June Tabor recorded "Shameless Love" and "Joseph Cross". Taylor actually appeared once every six months or so for shows at Anderson Fair, but he didn't end his silent treatment of the larger music industry until 1993, when he sought a publishing agreement.
To that end, during Lovett's I Love Everybody recording sessions in Los Angeles, Taylor spent a late night cutting guitar-vocal versions of numerous songs. Lovett produced the session, occasionally reminding Taylor of forgotten lines or guitar riffs, and the songs found favor with Polygram International publishing. When I Love Everybody appeared in stores in 1994, it also included another Taylor co-write, a song called "Fat Babies" that he won't play in concert to this day.
"Lyle and I wrote that on the way to the Kerrville Folk Festival one year," Taylor said. "We knew people would sing along, and we wanted something they'd feel stupid singing along with." They succeeded.
Then, newly married and having moved from irrevocably altered, musically dispirited Houston to tiny Columbus, Texas, with his wife and young daughter, Taylor decided it was time to show his cards. The cards were in the black notebook.
"For me, it came out of the blue," said Franke, who by then was often singing onstage with Taylor at his Anderson Fair gigs. "I remember that he had a different tone at that time. He was very positive, very excited about going back. I was like, 'Who is this guy?'"
Mark Hallman and British folk-rock icon Iain Matthews produced the comeback album, which came out in 1995 on Watermelon Records.
"I saw Eric play live several times before we made the record," Matthews recalls. "Live, it was just him and James [Gilmer] some of the time, and Denice. The first night I saw him was at Anderson Fair, which is Eric's crowd. It's a big occasion when he plays there -- idol worship, really. That night, he came onstage, played three songs and excused himself. He said he had to go backstage and throw up. Five minutes later, he came back, and you could only believe that's what he'd done."
For the first song on his first album in 14 years, Taylor chose "Dean Moriarty", a six-minute, down-tempo masterpiece that demands a level of attention not normally afforded by casual radio listeners or program directors. It was a typical story of Jack Kerouac's pal, and of auto theft and hammer throws and girls who smell like Juicy Fruit gum, leading to the same old conclusions about restlessness and emptiness. Radio ready.
"He doesn't really have too many of those 3 minute, 30 second songs," Matthews said. "He could have started with something else, but that doesn't make quite the statement. Anyway, I think that album is an instant classic, on all levels."
Matthews has spent a lifetime around some of the world's finest musicians. Asked to compare of them to Taylor, he paused before answering, "Nobody I can think of is a parallel."
The material [Charlie Rich] does is very much his own personal brand of soul...Where Elvis is stiff and forced into a mold which is not entirely of his making, Charlie Rich is free to be whatever he likes. He feels none of the terrible constraints of stardom.
-- Peter Guralnick, Feels Like Going Home
When he walks onstage with his guitar, Taylor presents himself. There is no act. He plays the way he feels, whether up, angry, depressed or drunk.
-- Lyle Lovett, Texas A&M Battalion, January 1979
I saw Charlie Rich singin' at the Continental Ballroom
He let the whiskey do what whiskey does the best
Here's a song about Kentucky with a big, bright blue moon
Put a little something in my glass
Can you put a little something in my glass?
-- Eric Taylor, "All The Way To Heaven"
Eric Taylor has no Hank Williams complex. Taylor's performing life is closer to the Charlie Rich thing, at least the pre- and post-countrypolitan Charlie Rich (difficult to imagine Taylor as a 1970s country star). They say Rich would play what he felt, sometimes performing different versions of the same song two and three times in a night. Rich at the Vapors in Memphis was one thing, and Rich at the Continental Ballroom in Houston was another. Taylor's performances may vary wildly from night to night, not in quality but in mood. He brings the day's events, a disruptive phone call or an angry conversation or a book he's reading, into the things he says and the way he sings.
"If you want to know something, don't ask me in an interview," he said. "Ask me when I'm onstage. That's when I'm the most open."
And so it's a strange life. Eric Taylor, a man introduced to much of America by his ex-wife or ex-protege, walks on stages and acts the way he acts, sings the way he sings, speaks his mind. No matter what audiences like to believe, that's not the way it often works. Too risky.
The albums? God, they're great. There's three of them now, four if you count the hard-to-find Shameless Love LP. Nobody's getting rich. The self-titled album on Watermelon served to reintroduce him to his core audience and to a somewhat larger group of new initiates. Then came the messy dissolution of all that appeared noble about that Texas-based record label, complete with lawsuits and the like.
The next one, 1998's Resurrect (Koch), is an extraordinary collection of songs. "Louis Armstrong's Broken Heart" draws mid-set standing ovations. "Texas, Texas" is, like Guy Clark's "She Ain't Goin' Nowhere", a gut-sinking evocation of one moment in time. "Four Great White Fathers" is a portrait in evil, depicting Mount Rushmore as a desecration of one of North America's oldest churches.
"People worshiped at the Black Hills before Christ," he said. "We're talking about the annihilation of a culture, and in the middle of the biggest church in that culture we took are four of the men who were the commanders in chiefs of the armies that annihilated it. How would you like to live next door to the world's largest synagogue, walk out every morning and see a swastika sticking out of it?"
The new Scuffletown contains a similarly head-on bit of American tenet-bending called "Your God". It's a turning around of the old Footprints story, asking "Did your god ride the bullet to the old Lorraine Motel?/Is it the blood of the lamb, is it another man down/Did he catch him as he fell?" And, in a verse inspired by the beating and dragging death of James Byrd, "Did your god ride the backroads on a Texas summer night/Did he stand there in the pine grove as they drug him out of sight?"
That's either an intellectual browbeating or a window into uncommon humanity.
"Eric knows what he's doing," Lovett said. "I enjoy being around people who are clear about what they're doing, and decisive and forceful. Eric is a kind person, a thoughtful person, but he has a big personality. So does Guy Clark. So does Hunter Thompson.
"I'm just mindful," Lovett continued. "I think Eric's songs are examples of what songs ought to be. Why doesn't everyone get them? It's one of the great ironies of the business. It's just not fair, is it? It's not right."
Scuffletown, like Resurrect (both were produced by Taylor), has a production aesthetic wholly unto itself. It doesn't sound like other albums. Taylor's guitar is at the center of many of the mixes, with Gilmer's percussion seemingly breathing between the strings. Organs wheeze, and Taylor's bass lines rise and fall like sleepy trombones.
"The whole backup is mainly for texture and breath," said Franke, for whom Taylor has produced two albums. "And he'll go for the scratch more than the beautifully phrased, on-pitch line, because it's got skin. It's got a fingerprint."
More than anything, the instrumental settings accentuate the longing and loneliness that finds a way into most everything Taylor writes or records. Mike Sumler's piano on "All The Way To Heaven" is designed to evoke Charlie Rich, but it also evokes the same emotion Don Helms' steel parts offered Hank Williams' listeners, the same plaintive craving Lightnin's moans summoned during Houston club gigs.
"Loneliness is something that runs through me and always has," Taylor said. "I think there's always been some stream of it all the way through me."
Scuffletown ends with "Nothin'", the second of two Van Zandt covers (the other being "Where I Lead Me"). "Brothers our troubles are/Locked in each other's arms/And you better pray, you better pray, that they never find you/'Cause your back ain't strong enough/For burdens doublefold."
And that's torment, or it's not.
"That's a beautiful song," Taylor said, "And that's the verse that epitomizes his wish for people. Regardless of your loneliness, if you don't remember that we are connected to one another, that your problems are my problems, that we share the same hurt...those are lines about friendship in the world, no matter what your struggles.
"At least that's my mind and my way of thinking...which is troublesome to say the least."
A South Carolina native, Peter Cooper writes about music for the Tennessean in Nashville. He wishes to note that four of Lyle Lovett's premier "Texas" musical influences - Eric Taylor, Walter Hyatt, David Ball and Champ Hood - grew up in the Spartanburg-Greenville area.
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