A Deeper Dive Into The Highwomen

When country supergroup The Highwomen’s self-titled debut album dropped last September my wife and I picked it up and enjoyed it. We have followed Brandi Carlile’s career and have seen her multiple times at Austin City Limits Festival. We’re big fans of Amanda Shires and have seen her several times, both as a solo act and as part of husband Jason Isbell’s 400 Unit band. We love Maren Morris’s My Church but at the time didn’t know much more about her, and we weren’t familiar with Natalie Hemby.

Left to right: Natalie Hemby, Maren Morris, Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires

However, I never took the time to catch all the lyrics, understand who had written and sang lead on which songs, and figure out some things about the album that puzzled me.

So in the last month, with the help of Marissa R. Moss’s Rolling Stone article I went back through the album and ended up even more impressed by the work. Here are my thoughts on a few of the songs.

Let’s start with the opening track, Highwomen, their take on the Jimmy Webb song, Highwayman, most famously recorded in 1985 by The Highwaymen consisting of Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash. The four immortal characters in the song are a bandit (the bastards hung me in the Spring of ’25, but I am still alive!), a doomed sailor, a builder of Boulder Dam who slips and is buried in the concrete, and starship pilot on a never-ending trip across the universe, sung by Nelson, Kristofferson, Jennings and Cash, respectively. 

Carlile and Shires, with Jimmy Webb’s blessing, rewrote the lyrics including adding a closing chorus and changing the refrain from “I will still remain” to “we will still remain”. The four characters became an immigrant mother from Honduras who perishes while safely delivering her children to America, a healer seen as a witch (“the bastards hung me at the Salem gallows hill”), a murdered freedom rider in 1961, and a preacher whose “teaching was unrighteous for a girl”.

What puzzled me was that the freedom rider stanza was sung in the first person by someone who sounded Black, and I couldn’t figure out which verse Morris had sung. It turns out that Yola, the British pop/country singer, had joined them for the recording session to do that verse. (Sheryl Crow is also on the track singing backup). Carlile is the immigrant, Shires the healer and Hemby is the preacher. In the closing chorus the women have fashioned an incredible statement of fortitude and persistence:

We are The Highwomen

Singing stories still untold

We carry the sons you can only hold

We are the daughters of the silent generations

You sent our hearts to die alone in foreign nations

It may return to us as tiny drops of rain

But we will still remain

It’s amazing what you can find on YouTube! Here’s a live recording for Sirius XM in which Morris does the freedom rider part, but in the third person. That’s Jason Isbell on guitar.  

Here’s one at Newport with Yola and Sheryl Crow.

And here’s one with Mavis Staples doing the Yola part!

The Rolling Stone article calls Crowded Table the band’s “mission statement” and I totally agree. Written by Hemby with Carlile and Lori McKenna, it’s a song about inclusion, support and love:

Yeah I want a house with a crowded table

And a place by the fire for everyone

Let us take on the world while we're young and able

And bring us back together when the day is done

In a Variety interview Carlile describes how Hemby, an accomplished but not well-known outside of Nashville songwriter, joined the band. The then-trio invited her to come down and sing Crowded Table with them and they liked how she sounded with the band so much they asked her to join!

Here’s them singing it recently on Jimmy Fallon.

My Name Can’t Be Mama is a funny and powerful song by Carlile, Shires and Morris in which they, successively, explain why their “name can’t be Mama today.” 

For Carlile it’s because the “ceiling still is spinning from a night that went too late”:

I used to sleep this off and let the shame just melt away

But not for tiny feet in hallways calling out my name

It's not that I don't love you, I wouldn't touch the hands of time

It's not that I don't long to feel your tiny hand in mine

I'm not a perfect woman, Lord, I don't wish it all away

My name can't be Mama today

For Shires it’s because the road beckons:

Know it wouldn't be easier to just quit the road and stay home

I'd lose myself inside the halls, unsatisfied and alone

Sometimes all I want is to run back to you at night

To rock you to sleep, to keep the blues out of your eyes

I'm not the kind of woman that would throw it all away

But my name can't be Mama today

And for Morris, she’s just not ready (that has recently changed!):

I drive my mother crazy out here traveling the world

Free-wheeling in the city, I'm a solitary girl

I'm living in the moment, knowing there might come a day

But my name can't be Mama today, uh-uh

It's not that I don't want to, I just don't want to today

I'm not a fan of mornings and I love my chardonnay

No, I'm not saying never, I won't wish it all away

But my name can't be Mama today

Another surprise came in If She Ever Leaves Me. It’s Carlile singing to a cowboy in a bar,

I see you watch her from across the room

Dancing her home in your mind

Well, it takes more than whiskey to make that flower bloom

By the third drink you'll find out she's mine

 

I've loved her in secret

I've loved her out loud

The sky hasn't always been blue

It might last forever

Or it might not work out

If she ever leaves me, it won't be for you

This is a tremendous new country song (and isn’t it great to hear Brandi’s voice singing country again!). The surprise here is that she didn’t write it. Isbell and Shires did (with Chris Thompkins), based on Isbell’s idea!

Cocktail and a Song is a devastatingly beautiful song written by Shires in dealing with her father’s passing:

Daddy passed me his bottle of tequila

Said, "Time's running out

We're gonna have to pretend it's a margarita

It's the order of things, it's the way it goes

Don't you look at me, girl, like I'm already gone"

 

The day is close, it won't be long

Couple of cocktails and a song

And don't you let me see you cry

Don't you go grieving

Not before I'm gone

My Only Child is Hemby’s love song to her daughter, dealing with her inability to have more children, written with Shires and Miranda Lambert, and accompanied by Shires’ haunting fiddle:

I know you wish

You had a brother who had blue eyes just like you

I know you wish

You had a sister you could tell your secrets to

Maybe we'll miss

Having four sets of china on the table

But I guarantee you this

You mean more to me than branches to a maple 

 

Pink painted walls 

Your face in my locket

Your daddy and me

Your tiny back pocket

Mama's first love

Last of my kind

You'll always be my only child

Wheels of Laredo is a powerful song about love in a time when people are separated by artificial barriers, sung by Carlile, who wrote it along with her musical partners, Tim and Phil Hanseroth, who also play throughout the album:

On a winter night in Webb County, Texas

On the North Bank of the mighty Rio Grande

I was watching the jungle fires a-burnin'

Across the border of a not-so-distant land

And the echoes of the church bells that were swingin'

Could be heard from Guadalupe Market Square

There was a girl down there in the south side of the river

She had feathers tied into her long black hair 

 

Said if I was a White-Crowned Sparrow

I would float upon the southern skies of blue

But I'm stuck inside the wheels of Laredo

Wishing I was rolling back to you

I’m looking forward to when the band can tour again but in the meantime Morris and Shires have both released very compelling songs of songs of social justice, which I have covered in another blog post, Southern Artists Speak Up.

Stories From My Hitchhiking Trip Through the South When I Was 17

In the spring of 1972, as a longhaired 17-year old, I left my home in Ossining, New York, to hitchhike south. Spending some of the time with my traveling companion, Ray Gildea of Columbus, Mississippi, I traveled throughout the South, hitting Mississippi, New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis and Macon, Georgia. For me it was an incredible experience, to see the places where the great music of the South –rock ‘n’ roll, country, R&B – came from, to experience a region just a few years into integration, and to meet a lot of good folks. In a second trip a few months later, I went back to Mississippi and New Orleans, and added Muscle Shoals, Alabama and then spent a week backpacking in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. I came away from these trips with increased self-confidence, a much better understanding of our country, and a lifetime’s worth of stories. These are the stories from those trips.

Southern Artists Speak Up

 

Three popular Texan and Appalachian country/Americana artists have recently put out passionate songs addressing current issues of racism, police violence and reproductive choice.

Texan Maren Morris, who recently had a #1 hit on the country charts in The Bones, has just released Better Than We Found It:

Over and under and above the law

My neighbor's in danger, who does he call?

When thе wolf's at the door all covered in bluе

Shouldn't we try somethin' new?

We're over a barrel, and at the end of one too

 

When time turns this moment to dust

I just hope that I'm proud of the woman I was

When lines of tomorrow are drawn

Can I live with the side that I chose to be on?

Will we sit on our hands, do nothin' about it?

Or will we leave this world better than we found it?

 

In the accompanying video are are clips of real people – Dreamers, Black Lives Matter protestors, families of police violence victims seeking justice. After the song is a beautiful scene with her newborn son. “Negativity, fear and bitterness haven’t yet touched you. You are kind and curious. I want to rekindle that in me”.

 

 

Another Texan, Amanda Shires (Morris’s Highwomen bandmate), has released The Problem, a duet with her husband, singer/songwriter Jason Isbell. Isbell and Shires have been very active this fall supporting Democratic fundraisers for the presidential race as well as many senatorial races. The Problem, a beautiful ballad, is a dialog between a man and a woman concerning the decision to have an abortion:

Jason: What do you wanna do?

Amanda:

I'm scared to even say the truth

This has been the hardest year

Jason: Is it even legal here?

Amanda:

I'm trying not to think of names

And will you look at me the same?

Do you need the reasons why?

Is a chrysalis a butterfly?

Jason:

And all I could think to say

Was, "Everything's going to be okay

It's going to be alright

I'm on your side"

I'm on your side

Shires recently explained that she had written the song a while ago but was reluctant to put it out for fear of controversy. After the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the apparent direction of Republicans to deny abortion rights, she felt compelled to release it. All proceeds go to the Yellowhammer Fund, a reproductive justice organization serving Alabama and the Deep South.

 

Perhaps the most in-your-face song and video is the new one from Tyler Childers, Long Violent History. Childers, from Hickman Hollow outside of Paintsville in eastern Kentucky, received a Grammy Best Country Solo Performance nomination last year for All Your’n. A few weeks ago he dropped a new album of fiddle instrumentals, concluding with the song Long Violent History:

Now, what would you get if you heard my opinion

Conjecturin' on matters that I ain't never dreamed

In all my born days as a white boy from Hickman

Based on the way that the world's been to me?

 

It's called me belligerent, it's took me for ignorant

But it ain't never once made me scared just to be

Could you imagine just constantly worryin'

Kickin' and fightin', beggin' to breathe?

 

How many boys could they haul off this mountain

Shoot full of holes, cuffed and layin' in the streets

'Til we come into town in a stark ravin' anger

Looking for answers and armed to the teeth?

Just in case anyone misinterpreted his support for Black Lives Matter he recorded a 6 minute "Message from Tyler” video in which he goes through imagined examples of police violence aimed at white rural people and ponders how people like him would respond:

I venture to say if we were met with this type of daily attack on our own people we would take action in a way that hasn’t been seen since the Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia [a 1921 battle in which 10,000 armed coal miners fought lawmen and strikebreakers in an attempt to unionize the coal mines]. And If we wouldn't stand for it, why would we expect another group of Americans to stand for it? Why would we stand silent while it happened, or worse, get in the way of it being rectified?

The net proceeds from this record will support underserved communities in the Appalachian region through the newly created Hickman Holler Appalachian Relief Fund.

It is so gratifying to hear these powerful white voices, from a region and in a musical tradition deemed by many to be hopelessly reactionary, speak up for what they believe in and actively support their local communities.