“I like dark songs. I don't know why,” says Grayson Capps early on in Episode 303 of The String. “Cheerful songs don't do much for me.” The Lower Alabama bluesman and songwriter is talking about both his career in general and his seventh album in particular, with the un-cheerful title Heartbreak, Misery & Death. It’s a covers collection featuring songs that shaped him as a young guy coming of age in Brewton, AL and New Orleans, where he went to school and launched his music career. It couldn’t have been a better springboard for an hour with an artist who’s even more fascinating for his distance from Music City and its business apparatus.
Capps told me it was good and a little surprising to be back in Nashville. “Sometimes I feel estranged from the Americana community,” he said soon after we sat down on the final day of Americanafest 2024. “But yesterday was really a breath of fresh air. I felt like this is my community. Everywhere I went, I knew just about all the performers, and they knew me. And it was just like, wow, I'm part of this.”
No doubt about it. While he did spend a brief time living near Nashville after Hurricane Katrina uprooted him from New Orleans, he’s been a genuine Gulf Coast songster for three decades - a weathered and chiseled 57-year-old with a beautiful drawl who inhabits the soul of the characters in his songs. AllMusic.com calls him “a deep, accomplished musician who knows his music history inside-out and has the poetic songwriting chops to work from that knowledge.” His catalog of albums is consistently transporting and authentic. Wail & Ride from 2006 is a particularly good example of his blues based tales of uncommonly interesting common people. But this conversation focuses on a new album that takes him back to his early memories.
“My dad was different than most people in Alabama,” says Capps. “He went in the Army, but he discovered classical music and literature. And he had friends who were very literate, and they loved, you know, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Steinbeck and Faulkner. And so on the weekends, they would get together and just read poetry and play music.”
One of the friends was Fred Stokes, a local musician and a riverboat captain who ran a fish house, recalls Capps. Another was a good old boy (of letters) named Bobby Long, whom Ronnie Capps, Grayson’s Dad, would later immortalize in a novel that became a feature film (A Love Song For Bobby Long, 2004) starring John Travolta, with music by Grayson Capps (we get into this amazing story in some detail). They’d drink, read aloud, recite, sing, and play good records on the stereo.
“I chose to stay around the house when all this was going on. And I'd bring friends by, because it was so much fun,” says Capps. “And I know that's why I found joy in music, you know? It was a big part of my childhood.”
Inspired in part by the theatricality of his dad’s posse, Capps studied acting at Tulane University in New Orleans, and as you’ll hear, that town kept him for 20 years. He got involved with a few bands before taking his music solo in the early 2000s, which was also about the time the drama with his father’s novel and the movie played out. He also met and married Trina Shoemaker, a recording engineer and producer whose work with Sheryl Crow and others earned her Grammy Awards and a lifetime Achievement Award from the AMA. They’re quite an understated power couple.
Heartbreak, Misery & Death features songs Capps learned from records by Doc Watson (“Columbus Stockade Blues), Gordon Lightfoot (“Early Morning Rain”), Randy Newman (“Guilty”), and even an album closing cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which is the one song Capps says he taught to his dad instead of the other way around. It’s a spare album of voice, guitar and selective extra parts. The focus is on Grayson’s way of penetrating to the core of a song and extracting its timeless profundity.
“These are the first songs I ever learned and songs I go back to all the time,” he says. “I mean, there's not many songs I like to play when I'm sitting by myself, other than these, you know? These are ones that, oddly, make me feel good, even though they're about heartbreak, misery and death.”
