Remembering the songs of Ted Hawkins

Ted Hawkins was the perfect college radio artist: articulate, soulful, emotionally powerful and most importantly, an outsider. His hardscrabble life simultaneously limited the commercial growth of his career and defined the authenticity upon which his art rested. What made him a particularly interesting fit for college radio was that his music wasn’t outwardly challenging. It wasn’t discordant noise or expletive-filled speedcore; it was soulful folk music, made with guitars and keyboards, and sung in a style that threaded easily with more commercially popular blues and soul. But that was just the musical surface, and beneath the performance were songs unlike those written in Memphis or Detroit or New York, or even Hawkins’ adopted home of Los Angeles.

With his passing in 1995, his singing voice was silenced, but in the tradition of folk music, the songs he left behind continue to speak his truth. This first ever tribute to Hawkins gathers fifteen performers to sing Hawkins originals, and adds a bonus demo of Hawkins singing an a cappella demo of the otherwise unrecorded “Great New Year.” The performers include many well-known names, including James McMurtry, Kacey Chambers and Mary Gauthier, and like all tribute albums, the magic is in selecting the material, matching it to the right performers and finding interpretations that honor the original while adding the covering artist’s stamp. Co-producers Kevin “Shinyribs” Russell, Jenni Finlay and Brian T. Atkinson have done an admirable job on all three counts.

The collection’s most well-known title, “Sorry You’re Sick,” found a sympathetic voice in Gauthier, whose own battle with addiction conjures a first-hand understanding of the song’s protagonists. Kasey and Bill Chambers give the title track a Hank Williams-sized helpings of anguish and loneliness, and McMurtry’s leadoff “Big Things” is more resolute in its melancholy than Hawkins’ original. The latter includes the lyric “Now I’ve got a song here to write, I stay up most every night, creating with hope they’ll live on forever,” a dream that comes true exactly as McMurtry sings it. While Hawkins’ original performances hinted at twang, his lyrics of longing and loneliness are easily fit to full-blown country arrangements, such as the two-stepping barroom infidelity of Sunny Sweeney’s “Happy Hour.”

Hawkins’ songs were surprisingly hopeful and good humored in the face of loss and unfulfilled desire. Tim Easton chases an end to loneliness in “One Hundred Miles,” Evan Felker seeks “Peace and Happiness,” and facing the greatest loss imaginable, Shinyribs remains funky fresh as he asks “Who Got My Natural Comb?” Hawkins’ widow, Elizabeth, and daughter Tina-Marie reach back to the songwriter’s earliest commercial release for a soulful rendition of the 1966 single “Baby,” expanding the musical essay to a time before Hawkins was “discovered” busking at Venice Beach. As with all tribute albums, these covers don’t substitute for Hawkins’ originals, but highlight his songwriter’s pen, and weave his memory into the folk tradition. [©2015 Hyperbolium]