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All Music Guide:
Along with fellow songwriters such as Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Tom T. Hall, Mickey Newbury helped revolutionize country music in the 1960s and '70s by bringing new, broader musical influences as well as a frank, emotional depth to the music -- while at the same time never losing respect for tradition. Newbury infused his country music with haunting beauty and spiritual melancholy, creating an impressive collection of introspective, emotionally complex songs that are more spiritual cousins of the work of Leonard Cohen than that of Roy Acuff. (Newbury, in fact, calls himself a folksinger and has never toured with a band, preferring the ambience of a quiet coffeehouse.) The fact that many of his songs became hits for singers from Don Gibson to Elvis Presley was proof that the industry and the public were hungry for a change. Like many of his generation, however -- such as his friend Townes Van Zandt -- Newbury was better known as a songwriter than as a singer. Newbury recorded 15 albums over a nearly 30-year period -- right up to 1996's Lulled by the Moonlight, a limited-edition release sold by mail order -- but his soft, beautiful tenor voice rarely reached the charts.
Newbury spent his teens in Houston absorbing a wide range of music, learning to play guitar, and writing poetry, which he began reading in local coffeehouses. Folk music was on the rise at the time, and he soon turned to writing songs. He sang in a vocal group called the Embers during this time (they were briefly on Mercury) and played and hung out in Houston's black R&B and blues clubs, where he was nicknamed "the Little White Wolf" by Gatemouth Brown. Newbury joined the Air Force and was stationed in England. After his discharge, he turned back to music. In 1963, a friend of his landed him a writing job with Acuff-Rose, and Newbury moved to Nashville. During the next several years, he became friends with such singers as Roy Orbison, Roger Miller, Kris Kristofferson, and Townes Van Zandt. He was also instrumental in getting both Kristofferson and Van Zandt, among others, noticed in Nashville.
In 1966 Don Gibson had a Top Ten hit with Newbury's "Funny Familiar Forgotten Feelings," and Newbury's writing career was off and running. A long string of hit songs followed, recorded by such artists as Kenny Rogers & the First Edition ("Just Dropped In"), Eddy Arnold ("Here Comes the Rain, Baby"), and Andy Williams ("Sweet Memories"). Newbury's first album of his own was Harlequin Melodies for RCA in 1968, recorded in RCA's big Nashville studio (it's an album he later detested). He quickly got out of his RCA contract and instead turned to a small four-track studio run by engineer Wayne Moss in a converted garage (becoming, before the word "outlaw" ever became fashionable, one of the first Nashville artists to work outside the studio system). It was here that he recorded some of his best solo albums, starting with It Looks Like Rain for Mercury; this contained initial versions of two of his most enduring songs, "San Francisco Mabel Joy" (which he's recorded several times more) and "33rd of August."
But Mercury didn't support the album, and so Newbury switched to Elektra in 1970. With this label, he released a string of superb albums, including 'Frisco Mabel Joy, Heaven Help the Child, and the acoustic Live at Montezuma Hall; the latter was paired with a re-release of It Looks Like Rain. These contained such songs as "Cortelia Clark" (about a blind street singer), the almost painfully lonely "Frisco Depot," and "Heaven Help the Child," a sweeping mini-epic of a song that makes references to Fitzgerald and Paris in the 1920s. In 1972 Newbury had a Top 30 hit with "American Trilogy," a suite-like arrangement of "Dixie," "Battle Hymn of the Republic," and "All My Trials." The song later became a major hit for Elvis Presley and a standard in his repertoire.
Newbury recorded three albums for ABC/Hickory in the late '70s and was inducted into the Nashville Songwriter's Hall of Fame in 1980, but he was more and more becoming something of a recluse. He had given up concert touring some years before and also had moved to Oregon. In the 1980s, he only released two albums. In 1994 he resurfaced with Nights When I Am Sane, an acoustic album recorded live with guitarist Jack Williams. Since he was out of the spotlight for more than a decade, though, he wasn't well known in contemporary country circles. People familiar with his work, however, recognized Newbury as one of country music's most inspired and moving artists. After fighting respiratory illness for several years, Newbury passed away in the fall of 2002 at age 62.
Wikipedia:
Mickey Newbury (May 19, 1940 - September 29, 2002) was an American songwriter, a critically acclaimed recording artist, and a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Biography
Born Milton Sims Newbury, Jr. in Houston, Texas. As a teenager, Mickey Newbury sang tenor in a moderately successful vocal group called The Embers. The group opened for several famous performers, such as Sam Cooke and Johnny Cash. Although Newbury tried to make a living from his music by singing in clubs, he put his musical career on hold at age 19 when he joined the Air Force. After four years in the military, Newbury again set his sights on making a living as a songwriter. Before long, he moved to Nashville and signed to the prestigious publishing company Acuff-Rose Music.
For a time, he was one of the most influential creative minds in Nashville and it's arguable that he was the first real "outlaw" of the outlaw country movement of the 1970s. Ralph Emery referred to him as the first "hippie-cowboy" and along with Johnny Cash and Roger Miller, he was one of the first to rebel against the conventions of the Nashville music society. After being disappointed by the production methods used by Felton Jarvis on his debut album, Newbury got himself released from his contract with RCA and signed the first offer he received to comply with his condition that he could either produce his own albums or choose the producer.
He went on to record three musically revolutionary albums in Wayne Moss's garage-turned-studio just outside Nashville. The influence of the production methods can be heard in the albums Waylon Jennings went on to record in the 1970s (with instrumentation highly unconventional for country music) and his poetically sophisticated style of songwriting was highly influential on Kris Kristofferson. It was Newbury who convinced Roger Miller to record Kristofferson's "Me & Bobby McGee", which went on to launch Kristofferson as country music's top songwriter. Newbury is also responsible for getting Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark to move to Nashville and pursue careers as songwriters. However, he had no desire to cash-in on the Outlaw movement.
In 1974, he moved to a house on the McKenzie River in Oregon with his wife, Susan, and new born son, Chris, where they welcomed three more children over the years. He recorded several albums throughout the 1970s for Elektra and ABC/Hickory, all of them critically praised, but financially unsuccessful. In 1980, he was given the distinction of being the youngest songwriter ever inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Although he spent much of the 1980s retired from performing and recording music, he returned both to recording and touring in the late 1980s before he died, in Springfield, Oregon, following a prolonged battle with pulmonary fibrosis on September 29, 2002, aged 62.
Legacy
Newbury wrote many songs that would be recorded by singers and songwriters such as Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Bill Monroe, Johnny Rodriguez, Hank Snow, Ray Charles, Tony Rice, Jerry Lee Lewis, Tammy Wynette, Ray Price, Don Gibson, Brenda Lee, Charlie Rich, David Allan Coe, Sammi Smith, Joan Baez, Tom Jones, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, John Denver, Kenny Rogers, Steve Von Till, B.B. King, Linda Ronstadt, Dax Riggs and Bobby "Blue" Bland, among many others.
Although his songs have been recorded by hundreds of performers from a wide variety of musical genres, he is most remembered for his creation of "An American Trilogy", a medley that was recorded by many, including symphony orchestras, and Elvis Presley.
He is also often praised for simultaneously having four Top 10 singles on four different charts in the late 60s. Eddy Arnold had a #1 Country hit with "Here Comes the Rain, Baby", Andy Williams had a #4 Easy Listening hit with "Sweet Memories", and Kenny Rogers and the First Edition had a #5 Pop/Rock hit with "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)".
Shortly before his death, Newbury was interviewed by John Kruth, who was writing a biography on Townes Van Zandt, where he stated "How many people have listened to my songs and thought, 'He must have a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a pistol in the other'. Well, I don't. I write my sadness."
Many of Newbury's songs, such as "The Thirty-Third Of August", "The Future Is Not What It Used To Be", and "Just Dropped In", delve into the dark recesses of the human psyche. “You’ve Always Got The Blues” was used as the soundtrack for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s 8-part TV series, Stringer.
