Guy Clark

Guy Clark was born November 6, 1941, in Monahans, Texas, and grew up in a household where poetry was read aloud rather than played on records. He later credited storytelling poets like Vachel Lindsay and Stephen Vincent Benét as early influences on how he thought a piece of writing should move^[1]. He got his first guitar in 1958 after his family relocated to south Texas, starting out on Spanish-language songs he learned from his father's law partner, and by his own account he was “eaten up with it” from the start^[1].

After high school, Clark spent much of the 1960s in Houston during the city's folk revival, repairing guitars for a living while he played and wrote. He moved on to Los Angeles, where factory work fed into his songwriting, before relocating to Nashville in 1971 with his wife Susanna to take a staff job with RCA's publishing division^[1]. Susanna was an accomplished painter as well as a songwriter, and her work graced the covers of Guy's Old No. 1, Willie Nelson's Stardust, and Emmylou Harris's Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town, among others; she also wrote “Come from the Heart,” a number one country hit for Kathy Mattea, though she never released a record or performed publicly herself^[2]. She became the emotional center of the songwriting community that formed around the couple, which eventually included Townes Van Zandt, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Steve Young, Jerry Jeff Walker, and Carlene Carter. Rodney Crowell later said of her influence, “She was such a good painter that she taught us how to carry ourselves as artists”^[2].

Clark's commercial breakthrough came through other people's voices before his own. Jerry Jeff Walker, Ricky Skaggs, and George Strait all recorded his songs, and by the time his 1975 debut Old No. 1 arrived, he was already established inside the industry as a songwriter's songwriter^[1]. He went on to mentor a generation of writers, including Rodney Crowell, Lyle Lovett, Rosanne Cash, and Steve Earle, and is widely credited with helping shape what would become the Americana genre^[2].

Clark's honors included the Americana Music Association's Lifetime Achievement Award for Songwriting in 2005 and the Academy of Country Music's Poet's Award in 2013. He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2004, and his final album, My Favorite Picture of You, won the Grammy Award for Best Folk Album in 2014. He died in Nashville on May 17, 2016, at age 74^[2].