The Follow-Up
He walked into the restaurant with the pronounced limp of an old warrior, which he attributed to a bad back, and mentioned a history of self–medication with alcohol. A friend had given him a blister pack of steroids and a prescriptive anti-inflammatory that he examined as he slid into a booth at Threadgill's in south Austin, Texas. The thick head of hair had turned gray and the sloe-eyes drooped a little more. But that infectious smile remained, same as ever.
It had been a while — 20, 30 years? I had asked him to let me know whenever his second album was coming out, because I wanted to write about it. So I perked up when he reached out last October, saying he was coming to Austin from his home in Colorado for a couple gigs and that he'd be up for talking while he looked at studios and did some business.
The second Willis Alan Ramsey album was coming out. Finally. In March — or May, he hedged shortly after. Shelter Records had released Ramsey's eponymous first album 46 years ago this coming May. That's the real anniversary, he said.
Not long after his album's release, Willis Alan Ramsey was the Big Dog in Austin, bigger than his Dallas folk music pals Michael Murphey or B.W. Stevenson, bigger than that crazy-ass Jerry Jeff Walker or the songwriters Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark and Steven Fromholz, bigger than the older Austin newcomers Willie Nelson and Doug Sahm.
At the time, his album was everywhere, ginning up airplay on the Top 40 AM station, the underground FM rock station, the straight-up country music station, and KOKE-FM, the only progressive country radio station in the world. He was the University of Texas sorority girls' heartthrob, and cool enough to be one of the only acts signed to the boutique record label started by one of the biggest acts in rock at the time, Leon Russell, the self-proclaimed "Master of Space and Time."
Willis Alan Ramsey was a stunner. The songs were precisely crafted, told in a full-bodied, very-Southern storyteller's voice that suggested a world-wise old man with deep, self-aware rural roots — not the earnest, studied and very determined kid from north Dallas that he was.
On the whole, Willis Alan Ramsey was the antithesis of the loose, wild-ass cowboy kind of country rock that was being dreamed up around Austin. This was an album of songs.
Others noticed. The Bellamy Brothers country duo, Waylon Jennings and Shawn
