James Talley

Genre: Alt Country Hometown: Tulsa OK
www.jamestalley.com

Friday, March 18   12:00 a.m.
Cactus Cafe   (TX Union 24th@Guadalupe)

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  James Talley - The Song of Chief Joseph
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SHORT BIO – JAMES TALLEY

James Talley is an Oklahoma born folk-country-blues singer/songwriter, whose vision of the American experience, as author David McGee once said is “startlingly original.” His name has been mentioned alongside Woody Guthrie, Merle Haggard and Bob Dylan, and praised for the quality of his songwriting and wise, expressive voice. As a youth, his family moved from their home state of Oklahoma to the state of Washington, where his father worked as a chemical operator in the now infamous Hanford plutonium factory. After five years in Richland, Washington, and realizing the hazards his father’s employment presented, the family relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the rich tri-cultured environment of the Southwest. After graduating from the University of New Mexico with a degree in fine arts, James, after encouragement from Pete Seeger, began to write songs that drew upon the culture of the Southwest he had experienced growing up. These early songs eventually became The Road To Torreón, a saga of life and death in the Chicano villages of northern New Mexico. (This work sat on the shelf in Nashville, until Bear Family finally released it, over twenty years later, in 1992, and distributed in the United States by the UNM Press. It is a powerful collaboration of photography and music, with a photographic essay by James’ friend, photographer Cavalliere Ketchum.)

In 1968 James moved from New Mexico to Nashville, Tennessee to try and get his songs recorded. He soon discovered, however, that the commercial music business was not attuned to that kind of honesty.

During the mid to late 1970s, James was an artist for Capitol Records, and during that period he recorded four albums of music: Got No Bread, No Milk, No Money, But We Sure Got a Lot of Love (1975); Tryin’ Like The Devil (1976); Blackjack Choir (1977) and Ain’t It Somthin’ (1977). ROLLING STONE, and other music publications, have declared these albums American classics. During the 1980s, James recorded two albums, which were released by the German Bear Family Records, American Originals (1985); and Love Songs and The Blues (1989). During the 1990s, James finally released The Road To Torreòn (1992); James Talley:Live (1994); and Woody Guthrie and Songs of My Oklahoma Home (2000). He released Nashville City Blues, in July 2000, and was named Amazon.com’s Folk Artist of the Year in 2000. Touchstones was released in 2002 and his most recent release, Journey was released in June 2004.

James performed twice at The White House for President Jimmie Carter, and at the Smithsonian Institution, and other concert venues around the United States and in Europe. B.B. King played guitar on James’ third album, Blackjack Choir, in 1976, marking the first time the legendary bluesman had ever recorded in Nashville. Johnny Cash, Johnny Paycheck, Alan Jackson, Gene Clark, Hazel Dickens, and and Moby, among others, have recorded his songs.