Nashville songwriters are most commonly ranked in stature according to how many hit songs they’ve landed on country radio. To understand the legacy of Gary Nicholson, inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2022, that metric misses a lot. He’s certainly had country hits - a breakout No. 1 for Vince Gill, a career-best album title track by Patty Loveless, and more. But burrow into his discography of more than 700 cuts, and a picture emerges of a writer who’s been validated by more superstars across more genres and more time than anybody else I can come up with in Music City’s history. In Episode 310 of The String, I call him a one-man Americana Brill Building.
I try not to reduce songwriters to a resume of who cut what songs, but in Nicholson’s case, the names tell the story, and there are a lot of them, so buckle up. In his four and a half decades of writing in Nashville, his work has been recorded by (and often co-written with) Charley Pride, George Strait, Willie Nelson, John Prine, Billy Joe Shaver, Tanya Tucker, and Waylon Jennings, but also BB King, Etta James, Joe Bonamasa, Bonnie Raitt, Marcia Ball, David Bromberg, Keb Mo, Del McCoury, Tracy Nelson, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, and even Ringo Starr. Nicholson has been practically a muse for some artists - 15 cuts by Buddy Guy, more than 30 by T. Graham Brown (including duets with George Jones and Leon Russell). And since 1973, he’s been in cahoots with his old friend Delbert McClinton, who’s released about 35 songs by or with Nicholson, while Nicholson has produced five of Delbert’s albums.
I struggle to think of any modern era writer who’s reached so far and wide into country, blues, and R&B as Gary Nicholson, and he tells us it’s just how he was wired growing up in the roadhouse culture of Texas.
“You know, it's like the bones of a song are kind of the same, but I guess early on, I tried to consider myself a bit of a musical chameleon,” he says in our interview. “I got to Tennessee and realized, oh, there was a regional sound of North Texas, and the whole Texas tradition you don't think about before you leave there. Then you look back and say, Oh, I get it.” Thus in Nashville, he gravitated to singers like T. Graham Brown, with his sand and syrup voice, and he connected with the musicians and artists who were traveling between Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. “So I think it was a natural thing to make bluesy country music,” he adds. “It was what we all loved, you know? And once again, Delbert's influence was leading us all down that trail, because Delbert kind of blazed that trail himself. And his influence on my approach was pretty evident.”
Nicholson grew up in Garland, a suburb of Dallas, fascinated by the country and rock and roll he heard locally and the R&B he heard at nights over stations like WLAC from Nashville. He took up guitar and got involved with various bands in the city’s bustling nightlife. Then, a fortuitous meeting. Through a steel guitar player he knew, he got to meet Gram Parsons after a Flying Burrito Brothers show, and Gary shared his situation with the Los Angeles country rock pioneer.
“We were telling him, you know, we're not able to play country bars because we're long hairs and we're not playing rock bars because they don't want to hear country music,” Nicolson relates. “So (Gram) encouraged us to move to LA, and we actually took him up on it after a couple weeks. We got in the car and we drove out there, and Gram got us in the talent show at the Palomino. We won and got a check for 50 bucks and bought a couple of cases of beer and a motel room, and we were ready to go.”
After a bluegrass/country rock band that Nicholson started landed a deal on a division of MCA but failed to take off, he returned to Texas in 1973 to start a family and play the bars and write songs. One of his LA bandmates, Jim Ed Norman, had gone on to Nashville where he made a quick name for himself as a publishing executive, and he coaxed Nicholson and family to Music City in 1980. Nicholson’s first successful cuts included a hit in the Urban Cowboy movement and his first No. 1 country song with Don Williams.
We talk a good bit about Nicholson’s tenure in Nashville running around with Guy Clark, Waylon Jennings and many others. But eventually we got around to the proximate cause of our interview, which was Nicholson’s recent action as a recording artist, specifically two albums of socially aware folk rock that pull no punches about what he sees as America’s dark trajectory. On 2019’s The Great Divide, he sings “God Help America” with Ruthie Foster about his “sweet, troubled home” and “Trickle Down,” a takedown of plutocracy.
Then last year, he released Common Sense, a collection of songs from the angry to the sardonic, including the inspiring and upbeat “Make Good Trouble,” sparked of course by the late Rep. John Lewis, and the unsparing title cut, which goes hard at the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill. He evokes the power of song to energize and galvanize citizens in times of strife in “Bob Dylan Whiskey.” If there’s a centering song in the collection though, it’s “The Truth About A Lie,” one of the most trenchant songs about propaganda I’ve heard, certainly from a guy with so much history on Music Row.
As we close out, Nicholson talks about what he’s committed to as an artist these days. “Truth is truth. There's no way around it,” he says. “And to see obvious denial of truth and acceptance of things that you just know intuitively are wrong, one time after another, and to see lies pervade our world, it's discouraging. I mean, it's not like I have a huge audience that's waiting to hear my opinions on things, but as long as my artistry is reflecting what is really true, then I'm okay.”
