THE INTERPRETER:Willie Nelson treats Cindy Walker’s songs as living music, not museum pieces. |
“To become immortal, and then die.” That’s how the great French director Jean-Pierre Melville answers in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless when asked about his grand ambition.Immortality is stretching it, but country songwriter Cindy Walker’s passing on March 23 at age 87, weeks after fellow Texan Willie Nelson released a new CD of her songs, was a moment of exquisite timing. The CD, You Don’t Know Me: The Songs of Cindy Walker (Lost Highway), takes its title from her most famous song, one that was a hit for Eddy Arnold and Ray Charles. And that title speaks to how someone as successful as Walker — a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame with a series of hits for the likes of Bob Wills, Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce, Red Foley, and Roy Orbison to her credit — can be so little known outside of the performers who have revered her compositions for years.
Maybe the answer to that has something to do with the way the self-effacement of the craftsman is often mistaken for anonymity. In pop music, the rise of the singer-songwriter at the end of the ’60s gave shape to assumptions that the most personal music had to be written by the performer (tell that to Billie Holiday, Elvis, Sinatra, or Reneé Fleming), and that songwriters for hire were mere cogs in the pop machine. It’s a notion that leaves no room for the idea of singing as an interpretive art.
In addition to being just about the most companionable new music I’ve heard this year, You Don’t Know Me is both a triumph of interpretive singing and a warm example of the trust that can exist between composers and the singers who essay their songs. Nelson, who plays Bank of America Pavilion on May 27, has called the CD a country version of his 1978 collection of standards, Stardust. If Stardust sounded like music for a night-owls radio show out of the ’40s, You Don’t Know is the perfect Saturday-night dance party, ranging from numbers designed to get everyone moving (“Cherokee Maiden,” “Bubbles in My Beer”) to the ones aimed to send them slow-dancing off into dark corners (“You Don’t Know Me,” “Not That I Care”). The 13 songs — casual and observed without seeming “written” — provide Nelson near-perfect vehicles for his unforced, almost conversational style. He doesn’t push a thing, neither the heartache nor the joy, and he certainly doesn’t put quotation marks around the period flavor. And though you can hear his love for material he’s been listening to most of his life, You Don’t Know Me, like Stardust, is no exercise in nostalgia. He treats the songs as living music, not museum pieces.
Walker periodically tried her hand at performing. The photos in the CD booklet reveal a woman gorgeous enough to command an audience’s attention, but she preferred songwriting. And at times you have to wonder whether that was because songwriting allowed her to put things in the mouths of male performers a woman couldn’t get away with. Maybe in 1951, a woman could have sung the weeper “I Was Just Walkin’ Out the Door” — about a woman who sees the true love who jilted her on the eve of her wedding to another. But could she have gotten away with this verse: “Well, it’s almost quarter to four/Sorry, I can’t stay any more/I must be on my way, it’s my wedding day/And I was just walkin’ out of the door.” It diminishes Nelson’s beautiful singing here to say he acts as Cindy Walker’s beard, but it says much about his self-confidence and generosity that on You Don’t Know Me he is a graceful vessel for her songs.
