Passing Of A Legend

I knew it was coming. I guess everyone did. But, distracted as I am, I almost missed it. And I was shocked at how quickly reports of it passed.

Charlie Louvin was 83 when he died at the end of January. He had been suffering from pancreatic cancer for the last couple of years. It’s shocking to consider his death attracted so little comment.
If you think back to the almost messianic fervour that attended the passing of Johnny Cash it really comes home how arbitrary musical fashions are. Cash, in fact, would openly admit to having been a huge fan of Charlie Louvin and his brother Ira. The Louvin Brothers were possibly the biggest thing in country music at one point in the late 1950s, in the era just before Nashville took full grip of the genre.
Born in rural Alabama in 1927, Charlie and Ira (his older brother) worked as farm hands in their teens. They got their break on a small radio station in Chatanooga after winning a local talent competition. In 1947 the pair signed a record deal and changed their name from Loudermilk, which they deemed too long, to Louvin. Their first recordings were chiefly country gospel. Their career was interrupted when Charlie was drafted to serve in the Korean war. In 1955 they were invited to perform at the Grand Ole Opry but the sponsor of their slot, a tobacco company, insisted they drop the gospel songs. They started writing their own secular material and their song ‘When I Stop Dreaming’ became a crossover pop hit. From there, they set off on tour with a little known young upstart by the name of Elvis Presley as support. A string of other self-penned hits followed, although they would always find a space for a few gospel numbers live.
Younger groups like the Everly Brothers adapted their style to fit with the emergant rock ‘n roll genre. As the hits dried up, the band fell apart. Always a god-fearing temperate man, Charlie couldn’t handle Ira’s drinking and violent behaviour. He broke up the partnership in 1963 as Ira spiralled out of control. He was shot in the back by his own wife before eventually dying at the hands of a drunk driver, ironically while he was waiting trial on a drunk driving charge himself.
Charlie continued to chart as a solo act. For the rest of the decade he had hit single after hit single. His influence on other musicians, however, is as significant as his own recorded output. The Byrds covered ‘The Christian Life’ while Emmylou Harris had her first hit with ‘If I Could Only Win Your Love’. Gram Parsons was a huge fan, as was Cash. Indeed the albums he had made with Ira in the ’50s, including Tragic Songs of Life, and Satan Is Real, with its southern gothic cover featuring a 12 foot tall plywood Satan burning atop a pile of flaming car tyres, influenced country and bluegrass players and the emergent country-rock musicians of the early ‘70s.
Charlie kept performing too, right up until the end. With his career revitalised over the past few years in the aftermath of 2007’s Charlie Louvin which saw him duet with the likes of Elvis Costello, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and George Jones, he continued to make live appearances even though he sang less and less and talked more and more, relying on his band to carry the momentum of the show. It wasn’t so much that he required the money – he simply needed to perform, as he had been doing more or less non-stop for the previous seven decades.
His death leaves only his near contemporary Ralph Stanley as the only living link to that high point in country music before its roots became submerged by the clinical commercialism of Nashville. We should remember him as a true great.
One modern singer cut from the same cloth is Malcolm Holcombe. Variously claimed by the folk, country and blues communities, his songs are rooted in a true backwoods mentality. He’s had his tussles with his demons and lived to tell the tale. On record, he feels like a guttsier, rootsier Townes Van Zandt, but live he really comes into his own. Hard enough to understand at times – he has some of his own teeth, some false, which he seems to hate wearing – he connects his songs with rambling, often hilarious tales of their gestation, often treading a line close to self-parody, which I guess he intends as a sort of cloak of invisibility, because when the songs do come they have a visceral intensity which can’t be denied.
I caught him last year at Belfast’s Out To Lunch festival. It was one of the best gigs I’ve been to. Now he’s back in support of his new album To Drink The Rain. At the tail end of a fairly extensive jaunt through the United Kingdom, he pops over to Belfast to play the Errigle Inn on Wednesday March 16. Taking a break for a few green pints the next night he plays in Clonmel on Friday March 18, and at the Seamus Ennis Cultural Centre in The Naul on Saturday March 19 before heading to Clare where he plays in the Highway in Crusheen on Sunday March 20. The following evening finds him in the Old Oak in Cork for the last gig of his Irish excursion.