Sunbow
Entertainment Country music stars and musicians sometimes enjoy passing the time on the bus, in the plane, or in the hotel lobby trading stories about the great but little-known talents that reside back home. It's a source of pride to talk about that player or songwriter friend who hasn't really made it in the industry sweepstakes, but remains an inspiration and an influence to those who have. If one could listen in on such conversations in the buses, planes and vans of stars such as Garth Brooks, Michael Martin Murphey and Junior Brown, one might hear the name Mose McCormack come up more than once. Alabama-born McCormack, a writer and singer of Western music who has spent most of his adult life in New Mexico, does what precious few of the Nashville publishing house hacks are capable of: He writes songs that move the listener. And artists like Brooks, Murphey and Brown, who have shared stages, musicians and maybe a drink or two with McCormack over the years, know it. There are no cute, smirky, one-line hooks in a Mose McCormack song. Instead, the listener gets soul, tenderness and brutally real glimpses of Western reality. These qualities are mixed with a spirituality that draws on the emotional images of the Spanish world of the American Southwest. The McCormack-penned New Mexico Blues, heard in Santa Fe-area honky-tonks frequently in the past as it was picked up by local bands, is probably as fine and evocative an English-language picture of this land in the shade of the Sangre de Cristos as has yet been written. [McCormack's new CD,] Santa Fe Trail, ends a long recording hiatus for McCormack and reunites him as co-producer with long-time associate John Wagner of Albuquerque. The players on Santa Fe Trail include some of Albuquerque's best: John Wagner and Mike Monteil on guitars, Bob Barron and Dick Orr on bass, Grechen Van Houten on fiddle, Augé Hays and Rick McGrath on pedal steel, Andy Poling on drums, Jimmy Kennedy on piano and Joseph Santiago on violin. "The biggest influence I had," McCormack said, "was the Baptist Church and my mother singing folk songs. My big brother was an influence too, bringing home early rock records; and then he went to college and started coming back with folk - Ian and Sylvia. I was into Ian Tyson 25 or 30 years ago. "I taught myself how to play guitar by buying guitar books. I realized after learning all these songs out of these books, like Where Have All the Flowers Gone? - I realized I could have written one. So I was writing since I was 18." For more than 25 years, McCormack has been writing and recording tunes, signing record deals and watching the support for his product melt away, blowing the competition away at Nashville songwriter nights ("I don't compete, I just do," he said). With Santa Fe Trail, he continues his career with a persistence that has been fed by the respect he gets from his peers. "The biggest compliment I ever got from a bar-owner was from the manager of The Big Valley Ranch in Albuquerque. When I was working there, she said she had never seen so many musicians filling the place and she guessed that they must really like me. "Musicians have been my saving grace. If it wasn't for my musician friends I wouldn't be half as good as I am. One night in a bar, after I'd finished playing, Townes Van Zant grabbed me just to tell me how much he'd liked what I'd sung. Things like that are what's kept me going all these years." Call (505) 296-2766 for more information or to place an order. |
