The Hard Balance of Real Life Renders Jon Dee Graham’s Body of Work All The More Impressive

Editor's Note: Austin singer-songwriter Jon Dee Graham passed away on Friday, March 27 at age 67 after a fall. No Depression co-founder Grant Alden wrote this feature for issue #63, May-June 2006, of the original magazine and we're sharing it now in Graham's honor. Become a member of No Depression to access all print issues dating back to 1995 digitally here.

Truth is, I have been writing this same story for ten years or more. It has been about Tom House and Mike Ireland, Chris Knight and Mary Gauthier and, even, Gillian Welch and Steve Earle. Especially Billy Joe Shaver.

This is the story about not stopping.

It is the story about voices which must be listened to.

It is a balancing act, this story, written and thought about in the spare quiet when my wife and daughter are gone or asleep, or not yet awake.

“Here,” Jon Dee Graham asks softly: “Could you do something else?”

Yes, if I had to. To support my family.

“Yeah, but…” he says. “I’m so sick of people who presume to know God’s will. But I do believe that this is my work. This is not my job, this is my work. And just enough people agree with me that I’m allowed to do it. I’m never going to get rich, I’m never going to have the kind of teenage success that we all dream of.

“But I have a nice house. And my kids are happy. I’m pretty happy. I don’t know; I think that by doing my work it’s going to be all right. Foolish, maybe.”

Later, we will come to contemplate our mortality. Now we face our lives. Whatever they are, not what we dreamed they might be. And what they aren’t. These are years of bargains made and kept and broken. Of aches that heal slowly (or never), and of families.

Especially, for we who are lucky enough, of families. Unexpectedly rich and nuanced, these years in the middle, if one still attends to the process.

Jon Dee Graham attends. Not the best-known voice of my generation, but surely among of its most eloquent.

He attends with fierce devotion and takes precise notes, writing taut and incautious songs that lay out the whole joyous stumbling sprawling journey: love, children, demons, God, loss.

He and I were born a few months and several thousand miles apart in 1959. Our paths, naturally, have been quite different, but it is more than hopeful to spot another candle weaving down the road. He has attended to these matters for five albums since 1997 — not discounting his contributions to The Resentments — and it truly does not matter where the newest release, Full, falls within the body of his work, for this is not a game, not a tournament, not a contest. This is real life. It is his body of work that matters, all of it.