Tom Russell’s Last Stand Songsmith, painter, writer: A triple-threat master of Southwestern culture homes in on Santa Fe. by DAVE HERNDON portraits by KURT MARKUS n the summer of 2015, I received an email from the do some portraits of him for you. Nurture this man, Dave, musician Tom Russell saying he’d gotten my address he’s a star.” from a mutual friend in New York who’s an influential Given that I used to be the music editor of a big-city radio guy and that he’d recently moved to Santa Fe, newspaper and listen to more Americana than most other had just played a sold-out gig in town, and would styles of music, I’m mildly embarrassed to admit that I be happy to send me a new album he was promoting. He knew Russell more by the company he kept than for his Iwas politely fishing for coverage in New Mexico Magazine. own accomplishments. He first came to my attention as I nibbled. “So what brought you to Santa Fe?” I asked. the singer of the first track on Tulare Dust: A Songwriters’ He replied that his “hacienda” in El Paso was getting Tribute to Merle Haggard, which came out in 1994 and is surrounded by “too much suburbia” and that he and his considered a landmark album of the Americana genre for wife wanted “some breathing space on the high desert.” the way it linked a trad-country workingman’s hero like Furthermore, he wrote, “I’ve totally written up the border the Hag to a generation of singer-songwriters from the in song and story and paint—so time to move on.” eighties roots revival. Russell co-produced it with Dave He also mentioned that he knew some local notables Alvin, originally of the Blasters, and it featured the likes like the venerable honky-tonk crooner Bill Hearne, art- of Dwight Yoakam, Lucinda Williams, and Joe Ely, of the ist/musician Terry Allen, and Kurt Markus, “the famed Flatlanders. Immedi ately after connecting with Russell, photographer.” it clicked that he’d written a standout track on my favorite “We’re knee deep in new friends and prospects,” he Ely album. “Gallo del Cielo” is a rollicking seven-minute wrote. “I really feel a part of a new surge in art and music ballad (corrido, more precisely) about a fighting rooster, here … or maybe I’m just a Dennis Hopper–DH Lawrence which has earned admiration from Bob Dylan and type aching to stir up a good art mess … inviting me to Bruce Springsteen. the table might be like inviting Crazy Horse over for Russell’s record label sent me the new CD, and it Thanksgiving!” wasn’t just album number 30-something and rising. A This new guy in town was starting to sound promising. two-disc folk opera called The Rose of Roscrae, it came There’s nothing like a good art mess, and the town’s off- complete with an 80-page program guide and libretto. the-beaten-track music scene could use a boost from a I set aside the meat of a Saturday morning to listen to prestige artist with great connections. it all the way through—two hours and change—and by Caption TK goes hereUptumet fu- As it happens, Markus is anothergitas quunt mutual quissumquo acquaintance vendus the end I knew Markus was right: I’d never heard a who had moved to town not sodoluptam long ago, solupti so I emailed occabo. him Et qui recording like it in terms of scope and ambition. Roscrae about Russell. “Tom is a fullyommolesse loaded, and vento cocked, inci ipid super quam tells a heartbreaking immigrant story that stretches eri niae. Niscimene pedi quo. artist,” he wrote. “Don’t know anyone like him. I’d love to from Ireland to Molokai, with most of the action on the 40 NEW MEXICO // OCTOBER 2017 nmmagazine.com // OCTOBER 2017 41 blood-soaked Western frontier. Annie Get Your Gun it represented at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary incorporated a lifetime of ideas and influences. I went Russell’s mythic-sounding life, questions about how ain’t—more like “Les Misérables with cowboy hats,” Native Arts, down the street from the Rainbow Man). to school on those Ranch & Reata essays. (The Western his decades-long ramble from the Beat underbelly of according to its author. A British folk magazine called Russell appeared more prime middle-aged than lifestyle magazine is now defunct, but Russell’s articles Los Angeles through Western history and culture and it “maybe the most important Americana album of all senior, though he certainly qualified for the discount, are compiled in a delightful book called Confessions ranches and concert halls and lots of bars (with stops time,” and if it’s not, well, it’s hard to imagine one that having been hatched in “the late 1940s.” He was wear- of the Horsemen.) This sent me back into Russell’s in Nigeria, Austin, New York City, and Vancouver, BC) covers more ground. Ten new original songs mingle ing a plain pullover and black jeans, a cowboy hat over “bedrock” territory: Tex Ritter (“Blood on the Saddle,” had landed him on the outskirts of Santa Fe. And, of with found recordings by a cast of defining voices that close-cropped hair, rimless glasses of an interesting the goriest cowboy song of all time) and Marty Robbins course, how the change of scenery was reflected in the include Lead Belly, Johnny Cash, and even Walt friggin’ shape, a bandanna tied around his neck, and a guitar (“El Paso,” the greatest cowboy song ever written). I new art and music he was cranking out at a stagger- Whitman himself, with contributions from a host of strap slung over his shoulder. The look: Saturday night started following him on Facebook, where he posts a ingly prolific rate. I wanted to get into that art studio A-list Texas troubadours, cowboy poets, Native coffeehouse with the hip chairman of the Western song a day and tells 20,000 followers what he’s up to. I and look at the telltale photos on the walls of the bar American folksingers, Irish songbirds, and, naturally, Studies Department. He engaged in some welcome– listened to so much Tom Russell music that my family where he conducts what he calls his “tequila studies.” the Norwegian Wind Ensemble. Russell called it “a to–Santa Fe banter with maybe 20 assembled fans and came to think of him as this voice that comes to visit How does a guy wind up in one snapshot with both friends. His big voice—“dark and low,” he calls it—nar- around five o’clock every Saturday and Sunday when Andy Warhol and George Jones? Where does he fit on rated a handful of story songs, some of which shared I crank the stereo and start making dinner. Thanks to the continuum between the masters of pure country their titles with albums. In “Tonight We Ride,” Pancho Markus, I even got an interview with Ian Tyson (of six- heartache and pop art? Villa raided Columbus, and Black Jack Pershing’s ties folkie fame, and later the king of cowboy singers), Some high-quality groveling ensued in the form of army took off after him for three futile years. Deserters whom Russell collaborates with and idolizes to the a lengthy last-call email sent to both Mr. and Mrs. became outlaws who just might drink themselves to extent that one of his new albums this year is an Ian Russell, ensuring them of my earnest good intentions. death on Juárez tequila and wind up with their bones & Sylvia tribute. All I could do then was hope for the best. bleached in the desert sun—ain’t that the cowboy way This past January, I felt sufficiently well informed to go? A, shall we say, free-spirited older woman from to conduct a mano-a-mano interview with a subject ot only is most of Russell’s work about Las Cruces, who was making herself extra comfortable who’s not the type to suffer a fool gladly. I reached out the West, but the man himself is a by sprawling right there on the gallery floor, requested to Russell to see what he had cooking this year. Turns product of its geography, history, a song about life near the border called “Who’s Gonna out he was working on two new albums and writing his legend, and lore. And while he’s more Build Your Wall?” Russell hemmed a little. He’d written memoir, and would be playing a couple of concerts in the storytelling songsmith than the the thing a decade before, even played it on the Late September in Las Cruces and Santa Fe. Perfect timing! confessional singer-songwriter, his body of work is Show with David Letterman, and said he had no inter- I started trying to make an appointment, but he was Nloaded with autobiography and grounded in a con- est in partisanship or political correctness, was just always slipping out of town to record in Austin or to noisseur’s version of scholarship and journalism. The calling it like he saw it from the front line, where even play gigs in Arizona or England or Norway or some- first part of his life is a full-blown Western noir, loaded his conservative rancher neighbors were against place—he’s more popular in parts of Europe than in with outsize, colorful characters from his own family building a wall that would block access of man and the States, and his wife is Swiss.