Acclaimed songwriter Larry Jon Wilson, whose flannel-warm baritone voice and deeply lyrical storytelling made him a worthy and intriguing musical contemporary of Kris Kristofferson, Steve Earle, Townes Van Zandt and others, died Monday afternoon in Roanoke, Va. Mr. Wilson suffered a stroke while visiting family. He was 69. “The South will never be the same,” said Jerry DeCicca, who co-produced Wilson’s intimate, self-titled “comeback” album that came out in 2009 on Drag City Records. It was Wilson’s first album in nearly 30 years. DeCicca, who called Wilson “My hero and friend,” said, “He never stopped giving himself to his art.”
Raised in Georgia, Mr. Wilson began writing songs when he was 30, after he’d celebrated a birthday, mourned the passing of his father, accepted the delivery of a Martin guitar and learned that his then-wife was pregnant, all within the same 24-hour period. He developed a distinct and unusual guitar style that served the songs he wrote about churchyards, poets and bucolic Georgia bottomland.
“People who’ve called me a great guitar player . . . I think they haven’t studied my guitar playing,” he said in a 2009 Tennessean interview. “It’s very limited, and I’m aware of that. But it properly accompanies what I play. Anything more would obscure it, and anything less wouldn’t hold it up.”
Jim McGuire, who has photographed many of Nashville’s greatest musicians, said of Mr. Wilson, “He was an artist of the highest order.”
That artistry was depicted on four albums Mr. Wilson made for Monument Records in the 1970s, in a documentary film called Heartworn Highways and in the recent, self-titled album that was recorded while he played guitar and sang in a 15th floor hotel room in Perdido Key, Fla.
Those recordings, along with the still-talked-about concerts he played at small venues such as Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe and Decatur, Ga.’s Eddie’s Attic, established for Mr. Wilson a legend and reputation more significant than his modest commercial successes. Mr. Wilson didn’t so much refuse industry ladder climbing so much as he never got around to it.
“He was pretty different,” said famed publisher Bob Beckham, who signed Wilson to a deal with Combine Music in 1975. “He doesn’t fit the image, whatever the image is. . . . Back then, unique characters came along with the song.”
For his part, Mr. Wilson did not regret his decisions to step aside from mainstream motivations.
“Some people have used the ‘Outlaw’ tag effectively for a career move, but I don’t think ‘career move’ has ever entered my thinking,” he said. “When I was in Nashville, we did the streets an awful long time, and we weren’t exactly holding prayer meetings. I loved my drinking days. I stopped in the 1980s, but they were good. I’m not ashamed of any of it.”
After 29 years without a release, the Larry Jon Wilson album caused fans and critics to reexamine Mr. Wilson’s art and impact. The album wasn’t a chart hit, but it reintroduced the singer-songwriter to an international audience, some members of which weren’t even born when Mr. Wilson released his other albums. He toured in the United Kingdom, hung out with indie rockers and told his stories to fans and journalists. Mr. Wilson’s stories were less, and more, than linear. Presented with a question, he’d offer up elliptical poetry that might have something to do with the line of inquiry. And then he might offer up a song to illustrate his ever-shifting line of thought.
“Thank God I touched a few forsaken lives,” he once sang, by way of a modest thank you.
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