Joe Henry's Next Second Chance
For the first 57 years of his life, Joe Henry rarely worried about his health. As an early teen, he'd suffered the fatigue of mononucleosis and once been in a car crash. A decade or so later, after he hoisted a heavy amplifier the wrong way, he'd required surgery to patch a hernia. Otherwise, for Henry, even common colds tended to be uncommonly brief.
That vigor allowed Henry to focus on the obsession he innately understood would become his profession, even as a small child listening to his older brother Dave's Bakelite radio in their shared Atlanta bedroom — music. When he heard Ray Charles sing "Yesterday" inside that tinny speaker, he was terrified, electrified, hooked and thrilled. "I accepted music in my atmosphere the way I accepted salt on the table," Henry remembers. "I didn't know where it came from, but I used it liberally." He mowed the large suburban lawns of his neighborhood to buy records. He devoured Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy. He listened to Motown and tried to pick out the chords from Woody Guthrie's Library of Congress Recordings and The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.
Henry was right about his future, too: For the last four decades, what he didn't give to his growing family he gave to music. In the mid-'80s in New York, he emerged as a budding singer-songwriter, working odd jobs to survive as he pressed the fingertips of jazz against elliptical acoustic songs. Somewhere between Tom Waits and John Hiatt (and, somehow, entirely apart from them, too), he has pursued that Platonic ideal through twists and turns for more than 30 years of recordings, making a series of wondrously idiosyncratic albums that hovered at the periphery of the turn-of-the-millennium mainstream. In the '90s, he began working as a record producer, too, a side-hustle of financial exigency that steadily put him in the company of his heroes — Allen Toussaint, Joan Baez, and Mavis Staples, just to sample — and earned him three Grammys. He remains dumbstruck by experiences that he says must involve at least a little luck.
"There is part of every single session where I'd take myself out of the room, go into the bathroom, look myself in the mirror, and muse very consciously about how I got there,"
