I love Guy Clark’s less-sentimental-than-it-sounds song “Old Friends” as much as anyone, and Tamara Saviano (who literally wrote the book about the career of the Texas songwriter) is my old friend. I met her in 1999 when I was new on the scene as a freelancing music writer, and she was editor at the late, great Country Music magazine. She gave me a coveted opportunity, supported me when I absolutely torched a bad Alabama album, and turned out to be a super person. She even counseled me as I courted my wife, who was also an editor of mine, but let’s not analyze this too much. They became dear friends as well.
Anyway, while I stayed relatively close to my writerly roots, Tamara Saviano branched out. Over the years, she’s been a Grammy-winning record producer, a television producer, a live event producer, a publicist, an artist manager, book publisher, and an author herself. After releasing a memoir of her early life, she wrote the definitive and badly needed biography Without Getting Killed Or Caught: The Life And Music Of Guy Clark from Texas A&M Press. She followed that by writing and directing the acclaimed film documentary of the same story. She also spent twenty years as a tour and publicity manager for Kris Kristofferson. Personal accounts of her close relationships with Clark and Kristofferson dominate the second half of her newest, Poets & Dreamers: My Life In Americana Music. The first half meshes her professional trajectory with an affectionate, people-driven account of the Americana movement and trade association.
“This was a really personal thing, and I wrote it for myself, but also for our community,” she says in Episode 323 of The String. “I wrote this book for a very specific audience, and that's us. It's nostalgic and it's sentimental, and it's celebrating this amazing thing that this community built.”
Tamara became a music fanatic growing up in St. Francis, WI, just south of Milwaukee on the shores of Lake Michigan. She studied communications and journalism and took an internship at a radio group in Milwaukee, her first step toward a rich life promoting and producing good country music. Interwoven with her journey, finding mentorship and satisfaction in the music-delivery business, Tamara recounts the broad history of progressive roots music that set the table for Americana. Then she goes deep on the people who launched the first “Americana” chart, thirty years ago. After moving to Nashville in 1995, Tamara would get deeply involved in that network, serving stints as both president of the Americana Music Association and producer of the Honors & Awards as it moved from a hotel ballroom to the Ryman Auditorium.
It’s a scene in a hotel ballroom - the downtown Nashville Hilton - that opens Chapter 1, and it took me straight back to the first Americana Honors & Awards, held Sept. 13, 2002. I was reporting for The Tennessean newspaper, and my date was my soon-to-be fiancee. Tamara was reporting for the cable channel Great American Country. What happened was extraordinary. Jason Ringenberg hosted. Emmylou Harris and Jerry Douglas won Lifetime Achievement Awards. Buddy and Julie Miller won Album of the Year. But the whole thing really made history and earned its imprimatur from not just the presence of Johnny and June Carter Cash (he was given the first of the Association's Spirit of Americana Free Speech Awards), but their music. John and June sang together with more Carter/Cash clan in support. It would be their last public performance. And Tamara does a fine job presenting this as a moment of transformation, torch-passing, and symbolic power.
“Of course, we didn't know that was going to be their last performance,” Saviano says in our conversation. “When you look back on it, it's like, what? Wow. You know? And I remember so clearly that George Strait was across the street at a Bridgestone (Arena) sold out show, and here we were, you know, a few hundred people in that little ballroom at the Hilton.”
Details of the AMA’s evolution peter out in the book in exchange for a close-up account of Tamara’s relationships with Kristofferson and Clark, arguably the two most influential songwriters to emerge from Texas. We ride along as these eminences play out the final two decades of their lives, finding new audiences and new identities as Americana stars, when both, amazingly, were on the verge of being forgotten by American culture. Kristofferson pivots to playing solo acoustic shows, which he’d never really done before, even as he continues acting in small movie roles. Clark stays busy as a recording songwriter and soaks up late career accolades as he battles cancer. Tamara co-produces acclaimed tribute albums on them both. The book winds down with an insider’s account of Clark’s demise in 2016 and Kristofferson’s struggles with dementia and his death in 2024. Both artists became close friends if not father figures to Tamara, and she has the grace to balance their complex life stories with her affection for them.
Now, Tamara Saviano is president and creative director of Guy Clark LLC and the Guy Clark Family Trust, which take care of his legacy and intellectual property. Part of that endeavor is Truly Handmade Records, a boutique label that’s already in its short life released albums by Sam Baker, Jedd Hughes, Lindi Ortega, Jack Barksdale, and Mike Delevante. A new album by Shawn Camp, co-written with Clark, is coming Sept. 12.
Saviano will read from and sign her book with special guest Laurel Lewis at Grimey’s New And Preloved Music in East Nashville at 4:30 pm on Tues., Sept. 9, day one of Americanafest.
