I have been greatly influenced simply by life, by looking at the world around me, at people and their stories - listening to their conversations, what they say. My songs are about people and what they go through in this earthly experience we call life. My music will always be rooted, however, in the images of rural Oklahoma from my youth, and the stories told to me, and wittnessed by me, of my family and that region.
My father was proud to be and 'Okie' and was a big country music fan. He knew many of Jimmie Rodgers' songs, which he could sing and play on the guitar. He had a beautiful tenor voice. He adored Bob Wills, whose dances he and my mother attended in their youth at Cain's Ballroom in Tulsa, OK.
As a boy, when we lived in Washington state, we listened to the country stations on the car radio; to Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Patsy Cline and the other artists of that era. Of course, as a youth, I listened to the popular music of the day as well; Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and of course, Elvis. I also loved the music of The Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Mississippi John Hurt, Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry, Lightnin' Hopkins, Ledbelly, and the other folk performers of those days.
When I was in college at the University of New Mexico, I discovered the Depression Era photographs of Roy Stryker's Farm Security Administration photographc team; Dorothea Lange, John Collier, Jr., Ben Shan, Russell Lee, and Walker Evans, it brought into focus the stories my mother and father had told me as a boy of Oklahoma and the Great Depression. These photographs were the perfect compliment to the music of Woody Guthrie, which I had discovered in high school. These were the stories my parents had lived with in their youth.
When I moved to Nashville, my wife, Jan, introduced me to bluegrass and Bill Monroe; and my African American co-workers introduced me to B.B. King, Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, Tyrone Davis, Al Green, and a whole genre of rhythm and blues artists. I learned how to write better songs from Mickey Newbury and Merle Haggard. I learned to reduce complex thoughts down to a single line, which is the essence of songwriting.
The list goes on, but my musical influences are those who wrote and performed from their hearts, not for the charts.
Oklahoma born singer/songwriter, James Talley, is an artist whose vision of the American experience, as author David McGee has said is “startlingly original.” As a youth, James’ family moved from 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. James grew up in the rich tri-cultured environment of the Southwest, and graduated from the University of New Mexico with a degree in fine arts.
After college, encouraged by Pete Seeger while on a trip to New Mexico, James began to write songs that drew upon the culture of the Southwest he had experienced. These early songs eventually became The Road to Torreón, a saga of life and death in the Chicano villages of northern New Mexico. Released in a boxed edition by Bear Family Records in 1992, it is a powerful collaboration of photography and music, with a photographic essay contributed by James’ lifelong friend, photographer Cavalliere Ketchum.
In 1968 James moved from New Mexico to Nashville to try and get his songs released. Over the years Johnny Cash, Johnny Paycheck, Gene Clark, Alan Jackson, Hazel Dickens, and most recently Moby, and others, have appreciated the honesty revealed in his songs and have recorded them. Joining country music and the blues, B.B. King, played his first Nashville session with James in 1976, as his lead guitar player.
James’ distinguished recording career now spans thirty plus years. The late John Hammond, Sr. at Columbia Records in New York was his first mentor, and championed his writing in the early 1970s, as he had the careers of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen. When Hammond could not get James’s more country-flavored sound signed at Columbia in New York, he sent him to Jerry Wexler, who was starting a new Nashville operation with his Atlantic label at the time. Wexler signed James to his first recording contract at Atlantic Records at the same time he signed Willie Nelson. Atlantic’s Nashville operation, however, did not do well at the time and Atlantic closed its Nashville office.
James then moved to Capitol Records where he released four now legendary albums during the mid-1970s and was one of the originators and godfathers of Americana 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 for their time.
During the 1980s and 1990s, James recorded four albums, which were released in Europe by the German Bear Family Records, American Originals (1985); and Love Songs and The Blues (1989); The Road To Torreón (1992) and James Talley: Live, (1994).
In 1999 James started his own artist’s label, Cimarron Records, and released Woody Guthrie and Songs of My Oklahoma Home (2000), his only album covering someone else's songs; and Nashville City Blues, (2000), and was named Amazon.com’s Folk Artist of the Year 2000. In 2002 Touchstones was released – a fresh retrospective of the songs from his early career. It was recorded in Texas with the help of James’ old friends, Joe Ely and Ponty Bone at Tommy Detamore's Cherry Ridge Studio south of San Antonio. In 2004 Journey was release, a live, in-concert recording made on his recent tour of Italy. It displays some of his classics as well as five powerful new compositions. In February 2006, James’ acclaimed first album, Got No Bread, No Milk, No Money, But We Sure Got a Lot of Love was reissued in a special 30th Anniversary Edition.
In July 2008 James simultaneously issed two CDs in digital download, Journey: The Second Voyage, the remaining songs from the original live Journey recordings, supplemented with five new songs, and Heartsong, an album of fifteen new songs and a re-recording of "She's The One," which was covered as "Evening Rain" by Moby.
James’s music continues to inspire listeners worldwide. It is available at your favorite music stores, or by visiting www.cimarronrecords.com or www.jamestalley.com, where you will find MP3 sound-samples, biography, recording history, and a voluminous press file.
RADIO PROGRAMMERS: Please visit the "Radio & Media" page at James' website for free dowloads in either WAV or 256 kbps Mp3 formates of James' entire catalog of recordings for airplay.
Hi there in Nashville, and thanks for the add belatedly! Just in case you're interested: Singer-songwriter and County-Soul-Blues Legend Larry Jon Wilson (I'm sure you know him.) put out a self-titled album on British 1965 Records. I think you'd enjoy it. I hope you will come over here to Europe again one of these days! Good on you, Olaf PS: fan page: www. larry-jon-wilson. com
Thanks for adding me! I am a songwriter and the songs on my page are songs that I have written or co-written that I/we are shopping to country singers who are looking for fresh songs for their next CD. I recently put up a new track called ‘Country Kisses’. So if you, or someone you know may be interested in recording any of the songs on my page, please contact me to discuss!
Doug doesn't have it yet, I didn't want to chance mailing, but when he returns to play Hillbilly Haiku this summer I will give him the poster you signed to him last November, "thank you for the kind words."
Maybe that time when a good writer could find his crafting redeemed by radio play and record sales has passed.
Maybe it is time now for the listeners to tell the artist directly in places like this how much the music means to their lives to their hearts and minds.
James, I only learned of you through Denise in Lebanon where you played a show and in the time since I have come to love your songs and the Guthrie songs you sing.
As a writer myself, I know how easily embittered I get watching the scene go down without me, seeing aesthetics vanish like slow Irish airs behind the din of cicadas.
But I hear you in a place where the only sound is your voice and guitar in the low glow of a candle on a spring evening on the west coast of Canada.
Here the time disappears and the wounds speak and say they are blessings. Here the work has meaning beyond the whir of days, and will endure.
I offer this as honey to the lemon of experience, a way of saying thanks for the work you have done in constructing your music these hard-scrabble years, a promise kept.
hi James...just wanted to drop you a note to mention that as always you're sounding great and setting the bar too high for the rest of us...keep on keepin' on brother, studio booked for January up here...stay well always, TH
Need to book a gig down this way. You'd be surprised how many James Talley fans there are down our way. btw, tommy dettamore was on my second album. good to see him in your friend list.
Hi there James! Was in Ojo Caliente the weekend you performed, on an invitation from our friends at Black Mesa B&B! Understand from Eileen that folks enjoyed the show! Sorry to miss you all.
Hi James, Thanks for friendship. Nice to meet you as a friend here at Myspace. Have my best wishes on the way and happy Holiday! You Russian friend from Kazakh land Eduard
